Life in the slow lane

We are the instant generation. We want it all and we want it now. Please.

A friend and fellow solicitor, was bemoaning her failure to fall pregnant over lunch (the bemoaning, that is) a couple of years back. On sensitive further enquiry it transpired that she'd been trying for just three months.

Statistically couples take an average of 12 months to conceive, meaning that for every Boris Becker-style broom cupboard tryst that results in a new life there is someone else taking two years '“ and probably becoming most despondent in the process.

My friend said at the time that she knew she was being unreasonably impatient, but that to date she had controlled all important events in her life and had scheduled them all to suit herself. This new experience was not to her liking. I'm pleased to report that said friend now has two happy and healthy children, the second of whom was in fact pretty instant.

The instant generation

So, why the urgency? I believe it is driven by technology. A colleague said recently that she'd had to turn off email alerts when working on a large project, as the temptation is otherwise to interrupt what you're doing and immediately respond to all incoming messages. I, not a tecchie by any means, confess to feeling somewhat snubbed if 24 hours pass without a reply to an email. I do not, however, expect replies by return to all letters and faxes, so why should emails be any different?

Then there are mobile telephones. They were quite a new phenomenon when I was at university, which is showing my age, and the one I had was far from pocket-sized, being a parental issue which was for emergency use only. I used to spend half an hour at a time feeding small change into a red phone box at the end of my road on dark winter evenings'¦ in Sheffield.

When I first met my husband, he ran his own business and seemed to have his mobile phone permanently attached to his left ear. It was always on and he always answered it. Fairly irritating '“ unless of course you are the person on the other end of the line.

The next step as far as mobiles go is the extremely funky iPhone '“ two colleagues were showcasing theirs on a trip to London last month and most onlookers were impressed. They have an in-built GPS and can thus walk you into an unfamiliar location without clumsy map fumblings or harassment of busy passers-by; most appealing for someone of my limited spatial ability, but also quite scary to think of the Orwellian, Big Brother-esque level of personal movement tracking this entails.

In my childhood, if you were called for dinner while watching telly it meant you had to turn it off and head for the table immediately, missing the remainder of whatever you were watching. Tough luck. I now expect the same dinner-time manners of my children, but the wonders of Sky+ mean that the TV can be paused rather than turned off, so the end of the programme can later be taken in before bath, books and bedtime complete the day's routine. If only they appreciated what a revolution this is '“ no missing the unmasking of the bad guy in Scooby Doo for them.

Computer love

If I needed a further demonstration of the level to which the next generation's lives embrace technology, it came from our first family trip to a ten-pin bowling alley last month. My then three-year-old said: 'Wow '“ it looks just like bowling on the Wii!' I was mortified by this innocent concept that real life may be imitating computer-generated art, and resolved to ensure that no new Wii games are played at her uncle's home before she's experienced a particular sport in the flesh '“ must take her into a boxing ring sometime soon'¦

The latest internet advance to cause a media kerfuffle has been Google's Street View service, which was launched in the UK last month. It enables users to 'take virtual walks' in an ever-growing number of UK towns and cities. People are outraged at the invasion of their privacy, as some faces and car number plates have not been sufficiently blurred out.

The site's repercussions have of course made the headlines '“ one lady started divorce proceedings having spotted her husband's car outside his lover's house while she was surfing Street View, although he'd told her that he was away on business. Most recently, residents in Milton Keynes formed an impromptu roadblock to prevent a Google car filming their area, making it the first reported UK incident of Street View rage.

So, how far can and should technology go? It seems at the moment to have no limits. I personally have a line in the sand and some modern advances are starting to lap at it uncomfortably.

My overall feelings can be summed up by my reaction to a billboard advert I saw at London Euston station about three years ago. It was promoting some wondrous invention which enabled the user to pick up emails remotely, and was illustrated by a photo of a man on a beach with a cool drink and this generic mobile device. Its tagline was something like: 'Now you can be in the office even when you're out of it.' Yikes!