The first thing I do in the morning, before my eyes are completely open, before I grumpily get out of bed sighing and moaning to myself –I’m most definitely not an early person- before I do anything else, is check Facebook on my phone.

 

It’s quite embarrassing to admit to this as I sort of pride myself in being quite thick when it comes to new technologies. If the TV doesn’t work, I whack it on the side a few times or press as many buttons as I can in the hope that I will come up with a magic combination that will bring Come Dine With Me back to the magic box; if my phone starts acting weird, I take the battery out and stick it back in after counting to ten, as if, in those ten seconds, the evil that was making the screen freeze will disappear; if my laptop decides the day before a deadline it is time to install a million updates, I shout at the screen angrily, trying to scare the annoying brain that lives inside it, and, when that fails, I turn to reasoning, hoping that it might take pity on me and do as I tell it to.

 

I say I take pride in this because I foolishly believe that, by not understanding how the insides of my computer work, I’m not one of those people who can’t live without their iPhones or who think that a day without the Internet is worse than a week without drinking water. And yet, every morning I flick through my newsfeed while I lay in bed, as if it were the newspaper I don’t read while eating my breakfast or on the bus.

 

Which means that, even though I don’t have an iPhone or a Mac, my mp3 player doesn’t have a screen and I still don’t get what Instagram actually is, I am no different from those who do. I don’t intend to moan about how our generation is so concerned with social media and taking selfies that everybody has forgotten about ‘the great outdoors’ and ‘living the moment.’ For one, I live in Scotland where the great outdoors tends to involve rain, mud and cold, three things I’m not particularly fond of. I also love to look at pictures and talk to friends and family who live abroad for free. So I’m certainly not complaining.

 

But I am scared. People don’t really read books anymore; they have kindles –I really don’t believe in kindles. It might be old fashioned but I like to feel the pages when I turn them, even if my fingers are sore after playing Fun Ways to Die on my phone for way too long for it to be healthy.  I read somewhere that, in the future, taxi drivers will be robots. Robots?! I mean, how are you going to have an extremely drunken conversation on your way home with an amused, possibly annoyed, taxi driver if he is made of steel and sounds like Terminator? It does seem like a huge step to go from a kindle to a robot taxi driver but, who knows?

 

My granddad still talks about the days in which you had to make sure you were at a certain place at a certain time if you wanted to meet somebody because you couldn’t just send them a text to tell them you were going to be late. And that wasn’t that long ago.

 

My concerns just mean one thing. I am inevitably going to become a bitter old grandma who doesn’t trust machines and who will most definitely have back problems after carrying heavy books in her bag for so long. Meanwhile, I’ll make sure I give my granddad’s Windows for Dummies a read. I’m sure my laptop will appreciate it.