Come And See The Wheel Thing

The Age

Saturday March 22, 2008

David Morley

THE rot first set in, I reckon, with the invention of the telephone. Before it came along, to bother someone you had to jump on a horse, ride through choking dust and ford swollen rivers to bash on their door.

Imagine telemarketers having to do that?

Nowadays, just about anybody who can remember, guess or buy my phone number can talk to me, whether I want to talk with them or not.

Then we got television. Oh boy!

It is now possible to "visit" faraway places and "meet" interesting people

without leaving the safety and convenience of one's triple-fronted brick veneer.

But it gets worse. Pretty soon, we had the internet, which allows a whole other breed of people to, er, breed.

Thanks to chat rooms and online dating services, members of our society can, without even changing out of their pyjamas, meet, court and even propose marriage to folk half a world away.

I've seen it happen. Some of these cyber-nookies have even resulted in offspring.

"Congratulations, Mrs Schnedd, it's a boy. Mr Schnedd, would you like to cut the umbilical?"

"Nah, just unplug him at the USB."

Anyway, the point of all this is that I've never really been one for the pseudo experience. When I kick somebody's door down to flatten them, I like to do it with my own limbs. When I gaze out at the white cliffs of Dover, I prefer to do it standing on the deck of a boat in the English Channel. Yes, drinking warm beer, if you must know.

And when I attempt to form a relationship with another person, I like to do so over a couple of drinks, and be able to look them in the eye (it's the best way of figuring out whether they're just after my Kombi or not).

It's why, therefore, I like cars. And driving them.

Unlike all those inventions that attempt to bring the world to us, the car is the odd one out. It's the one that offers to take us to the rest of the world.

What's the difference? Well, it's simple.

The world delivered via a telephone line, a fibre-optic cable or a stream of electrons via a satellite will always be just a digitised copy of the world.

You might be able to talk to somebody in Dubbo, but you won't be able to smell their aftershave or taunt them for wearing a Hawaiian shirt despite them being hundreds of kilometres from the beach.

The same goes for the internet and the relationships it fosters. Not only are you shielded from the physical acts of shaking hands and shouting a beer, there's a risk that the 25-year-old pole dancer you think you're chatting with is, in reality, a 200-kilogram, 45-year-old truckie.

But hang up the phone, switch off the telly, throw the computer in the nearest skip and drive to Dubbo, and the world you'll see and the people you'll meet will be the real deal.

You can try the food, swim in the rivers, hang out with the locals, and even if they do turn out to be fat, middle-aged truck drivers with cheap aftershave and crook shirts, at least you'll know as much.

And - if your road trips wind up anything like mine - by the time you get home, you'll have had an adventure.

More than that, you'll have had a life. Go out and hug your car immediately.

My fear, meanwhile, is that these various forms of technology are only preparing us for the day when nobody will drive to Dubbo - or anywhere else.

Are we just being softened up for a time when driving cars is either banned or so culturally unacceptable that you'd be the social equivalent of a peddler of pornography?

Because you'd never see anything like that on the internet.

© 2008 The Age

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