It's that time of year when metropolitan media/tech commentators wend our way back from a few days in the provincial towns where we grew up, and on getting back home sit down to write with the incredulous tone of anthropologists about the technology that's still used there and the childlike wonder our parents and our friends from school expressed at our iPads, Kindles and 3G-enabled phones. (Did you know they still have video recorders out there? Some of them still even have landlines! And, bless, you should have seen their faces when I cheated in the pub quiz by changing the entry on Wikipedia using my phone...)
Like any tradition it has its pros and cons. It lets us end the year with a happy bit of technophile self-congratulation at time when there's no substantial news, but it leaves us starting the new year under a vague misapprehension about the level of consumer technology that's being used once you get outside London, New York and San Francisco. Having seen our parents' faltering attempts to use the Internet on clunky desktop PCs and having watched them recording soap operas on antique VCRs to watch on tiny pre-HD TVs we return home from xmas with the impression that the digital divide is alive and well (it isn't) and that out in the sticks technology has stood still for another year (it hasn't - it just moves a little bit slower than we're used to).
Anecdotes about elderly relatives who still don't trust mobile phones are fun, but they're just that - anecdotes. As we meander slowly back towards civilisation and 2011, let's remember that there's reliable data available about technology use all over the country, and not get too hung up on the reminiscence that Great-Auntie Betty still doesn't really know what Google is.
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