Seeing the forest fire for the trees
I am still trying to catch up with the classics. The other day, I gave The Wire a go for the first time, having never watched it before. While I appreciated the detective story set-up of intrigue and bluster, what really struck me about The Wire was how the police officers on the upper floors were willingly using typewriters to do their work. The first series of The Wire was released in 2002; computers were commonplace but it wasn’t yet kitsch to use a typewriter with added irony or absurd to use one without; the typewriter was on the turn. Now, a standard office not populated with ubiquitous screens – be they desktops or the laptops of the employees themselves – sounds truly ridiculous. Personal computers and the World Wide Web are integral parts of our waking days, they’re how we store information, how we access it, and how we process it. Even books, the standout stalwart in the face of a digital onslaught, are today drafted on computers. This is the sort of truth that we all kn