A funeral is a reality check
David Slack farewells a largerthan-life sailor and ponders how we connect in the age of Pokemon Go.
The 1990s, man! Such fun we had! Seinfeld! Jenny Shipley! Spot the Dog! Telecom the dog! The Pokemon thing! Gotta catch ‘em all. Or something. I don’t know. I was in my 30s.
The new Internet thing! In return for demonstrating it to other grownups, I got free internet. At the Michael Fowler Centre in 1995 I stood up to demonstrate it on the giant screen and it went blank. I had to tell them stories instead. ‘‘It’s the new reality,’’ I told them. Why, you can book a hotel and a flight and a rental car just by tapping things into your computer! It has the Louvre!
People were getting up to leave. On I went, talking in front of a giant empty screen. Afterwards an angry man shoved a business card in my hand and told me I had no business doing that. The card told me he was a travel agent.
I demonstrated the internet to Kim Hill and her producer. We went online and visited the Louvre. Over lunch I described how even though the screen would keep freezing up, you could become utterly absorbed in this new world and end up feeling more at home there. Why, just the other day, I had been out driving, looking through the car windscreen and thinking how weird it felt that the view never froze up.
Kim Hill arched her eyebrow at the producer. Tell me again why we’re sitting in the Ministry of Food with this man.
Today no one needs to have the internet demonstrated to them and in a single week a company can make billions by getting people to look at the world through their windscreen and collect Pokemon stuff.
People who love it say Pokemon Go is doing an amazing job of augmenting reality and it’s very, very exciting. Here comes The Singularity, maybe. The Singularity? Why, it’s on the internet if you haven’t heard of it. You may or may not find it chilling.
Does our reality need augmenting? Maybe.
The best tweet of the year imagines a pub quiz in 2025. Quizmaster: ‘‘In what year did...’’ Quiz participant: ‘‘2016. It’s always 2016.’’ Such a time this is.
When things get truly bad, we tend to euphemise, because why wouldn’t you? I’m full of admiration for the sisters of Stephen Forno, lost at sea last month and memorialised last Sunday at the rugby club in Devonport, who wrote this on the order of service: ‘‘Stevie we
Storytelling is my favourite kind of augmented reality.
are trying to get past the horror of losing you, your horror, ours too of not knowing what you went through.’’
People held their words a little bit, because the man everyone was remembering had his bawdy side and you hesitate to tell those stories at a solemn occasion.
So they described him, the kind of guy he was: someone who could fix anything, anything at all. If you could make it out of steel he was your man.
He loved the Stones, a drink, Trade Me. He was thrifty, he loved the sea. He could have his difficult moments, who doesn’t, but he was great. He was. You say those things, and everyone says yes, that’s what he was like. But it only really comes alive when you tell the stories.
Someone remembered being on the way home with him in a strong wind, full sails, going hard, because he always liked to be the fastest, when suddenly he said ‘‘Did you see that?’’ ‘‘See what?’’ they asked. ‘‘That,’’ he said, turning the boat and heading back the way they’d come. ‘‘There!’’ he yelled, as he slowed down the boat and fished out a $20 note.
Storytelling is my favourite kind of augmented reality. A friend says she loves a good funeral. She means, this is where we put all the elements together and make a picture in our minds of a life, and there’s always more there than you ever imagined.
Can an augmented reality on a screen be as rewarding? I suppose if the reality for kids born in the time of Pokemon is that every single house in Auckland is earning more money per day than you are, you might want to augment your reality a bit.
If I were them I’d be wanting to pretend it was 1996 again and the price of houses was a whole lot nearer to real.
@DavidSlack