Newspad

With remarkable prescience Arthur C Clarke gave his character Dr. Heywood R. Floyd a Newspad in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It collected a constantly refreshing stream of all the world’s news. But he also noticed (with even more impressive prescience) that one could live entirely immersed in that stream of information and never exhaust it – or have time for anything else. 

A study I saw a few years back said the combined broadcast news output in the UK created four hours of rolling news for every hour of real time elapsed. Who is watching? I guess only the advertisers know.

Last night I watched a documentary on the comic and gameshow host Bob Monkhouse. Undoubtedly a funny man, but publicly too ‘slick’ and as a ‘stand-up’ a little cruel I felt. There was more to him than that though. He struck me as a rather brilliant polymath trapped in a sharp suit and perma-tan. He was a talented illustrator, wit and observational comic as well as a consummate professional. He didn’t strike me as very happy. 

It transpires Monkhouse was also an avid, perhaps manic, collector. He collected films. I’m sure 2001 was one. He collected so many that he was dragged through the courts for sharing them with the odd celebrity friend, causing allegations of fraud and copyright abuse. At one time he had the world’s 3rd largest collection of films in private hands. In the end the courts didn’t take his precious films from him, but substantially drove his collecting underground. Come the advent of the VCR his obsessive collecting found a new outlet in simultaneously taping multiple channels worth of TV. His collection is now a unique archive – a veritable Noah’s ark – of British TV from the 1970s and 80s before the advent of ubiquitous digital recording.

Back to Clarke. I myself live in a constant stream of news collected by RSS and delivered to my 3 connected devices – my own ‘Newspads’. On holiday in France this year, the lack of mobile coverage meant I was pulled unwillingly from the flow of news and forced to adapt to the stiller waters of the swimming pool and the lapping waves of the Mediterranean. I suffered withdrawal for several days before escaping my addiction.

Three thoughts strike me from this. First the prescience or ‘pre-the-science’ of Arthur C Clarke is remarkable. Second, that the hundreds of hours of Bob Monkhouse performing as a mid-market game show host, might, just be transcended by the thousands he collected, to become his more remembered legacy to human-kind. But that he enjoyed but a small fraction of the hours of either during his life. 

And finally, that I should take care to avoid the danger of the Newspad which Clarke predicted in the year of my birth: “Even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever changing flow of information from the news satellites.” Surfing means just that, riding the crest of the information wave, not swimming or drowning in it.