Ordinary Magic page 3

Cash machines were first introduced into the high street only 10 years ago. Prior to this, not only was the relevant technology simply unavailable, but the potential benefits of ATM banking - in terms of the prevailing business, political and social structures of the day (low costs, fewer customers, low wages, conservatism to change, the need for the `human touch' etc.) - would have made the prospect of a global network of ATM Machines seem as likely as the fall of the iron curtain.

Technology also has a habit of being used in ways different from those originally intended. The telephone - first marketed as a means to listen to live opera remotely via private telephone networks - was never conceived to be the instrument of personal communication we know today. In the same way that the phone has become something other than a channel for squeezing opera singers down telephone wires, so the idea that computers are principally about computing - as in the processing of mathematical data, per se - may turn out to be a somewhat limited view.

One of the arguments of this book is that we should simply be looking for new ways to use computers. If we do not turn digital technology into what we want, we will get what we are given. The Living Garden may not turn out to be one of the ultimate destinations which computers are able to take us, but we can still learn a great deal along the journey.

There are, of course, alternative views to those of number crunchers or money-men. At the other end of the spectrum, digital media tends to be championed as a kind of totem by supporters of fashionable philosophies who argue that the computer's form and function `proves' aspects of a theory. Swapping my bank manager's bowler hat for a French beret, for a moment, I would argue that, for example, postmodernism - by focusing on the ability of computers to reduce the continuity of experience into bitty binary opposites which can be morphed into symbols then signs (and back again) - has seized on the technology in an attempt to prove a thesis which sees meaning-upon-meaning in everything, and therefore loftily concludes that `nothing means very much'.

Not only does it seem odd that postmodernism sees computers as some kind of `proof' of its arguments (strange that any postmodernist argument can be said to be `provable'), but its conclusions, for those of us outside the groves of academe, are far from encouraging. Are our digital futures consigned either on the one hand to a hard-headed world of automated commerce, or on the other to a meaningless existential plane, relieved only by the occasional whiff of garlic?

The answer is no. Like Nature herself, the Living Garden abhors a vacuum, and over the following pages I hope that by taking a clipping of an idea here, or cutting back on the wilder growths of another thought elsewhere, by taking a leaf from various books, to illustrate how it might be possible to create a place which - whilst remaining firmly anchored in a reality which includes the high street bank - establishes landscapes which can be filled with memories and messages which you, I, or anyone may care to mint.