I've been using Twitter for about three years now and have never, in that time, been approached by anyone urging me to 'tweet'. In fact, I think the only conversations I've had on the topic have been with sceptics, urging me to stop. So, where this fear comes from - that one day soon 'Tweeps' all over the world will rise up and force us to open accounts and update them with the oft and ill quoted "I'm having a sandwich" line - is something of a mystery to me.
And, I think, there are two ways of dealing with mysteries; that is, dealing with that which we don't understand. You can, like the great mystery solvers - Holmes, Marple, Fletcher, Creek - attempt to unravel them. Or you can fear them, run and hide. Or really go for it - galvanise your fear into a pitchfork and torch-waving angry mob. Well, I don't much like crowds, so I'm going up the Jonathan Creek route with this one. And I'm taking a paddle.
I spent the early part of this weekend politely batting comments from a techno-sceptic on a number of topics, from records versus MP3s to e-book readers versus paperbacks. And I'll discuss them here, even though I don't think they're really versus debates.
But I think there's a word for the kind of person with whom I was debating and that's a prosophobe - someone who is afraid of progress. You could say that she was a luddite, a term that has come to mean an opponent of technological progress. It comes from the social movement of 19th century workmen, who destroyed laboursaving machinery and stood against the Industrial Revolution. But since the debate ended with her gently pulling out her iPod nano and not by flinging it across the floor in protest, I don't think that would be quite fair.
To be fair would be to say that even the luddites would find it difficult to stick to their principles in the 21st century. My prosophobic friend mourned the death of vinyl, but pulled an iPod out of her bag; she derided the Twittersphere in a Facebook status update; and I imagine she wants to take London off the Google Map over this Street View controversy.
As a luddite might realise, that's a lot to smash up. But a cure for what scares you, as a prosophobe, is to realise not that the new replaces the old but that it lives alongside it. Take, for example, the e-book reader versus the paperback debate.
"It's just ridiculous," she said. "What will people put on their shelves?"
"Well, books." I said. "You can have both."
Books are, as Stephen Fry reminds us, themselves a technology and one that many called, at their advent, the work of the devil. "They only went and taught people how to make e-book readers, didn't they?" I said.
As Fry puts it, "You don't throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don't abandon the past. The past co-exists."
And the future is forged by the curious, not by the fearful. The greatest mystery solvers weren't Holmes, Marple, Fletcher or even Creek. They were Darwin, Edison, Curie, Obama. And, if they were around today, I reckon, they'd be on Twitter. Obama is.
And, I shouldn't say this in the same breath, so am I! Follow me at: twitter.com/sansharma
