Fergus Cassidy

Depending on IT

How many Foxrockers does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to mix the drinks and the other to ring an electrician.

So went the Dublin northside retaliation to various southsider sticks and stones. If you can"t beat them, mock them. The well off may have had education, power and money but in the land of technological savvy they were one-eyed giants.

Unable to fix anything themselves and complaining about those who could. A decent carpenter, bricky, plumber or spark was reckoned to be as hard to find as a Trabant in a golf club car park.

The lightbulb joke is now as dated as the era it sprang from. This was a more cosy landscape where everyday technologies hadn"t changed all that much over the generations. Employment schismed neatly into two - those who worked by brain and those who worked by hand.

The latter were the technology experts of that time, especially trained from a young age to spend their careers making or fixing things. It was a system handed down from hundreds of years before where artisans, craftsmen and tradesmen were sought for their skills. (Like the golf clubs it was mostly a male preserve).

This trend toward specialisation or expertise in one area, was reflective of urbanisation in Ireland. A rural culture tended to more self-contained, more self-reliant. People knew a lot about a small number of things. In cities, they had to know a little about a lot.

I saw specialisation in action in the area where I grew up. A condition of buying one of the houses in the new suburban estate was that each prospective buyer was obliged to help build the houses. It was a smart way of making what were known as "purchase houses" more affordable.

No one was allocated a house until the block had been completed. This clever ploy was designed to ensure that nobody tolerated shoddy work, lest they get lumbered with the consequences. When the block was finished the numbers were drawn from a hat and allocated.

But what stands out the most for me is that this small community was largely self-contained, which reflected its predominantly rural roots. If there was a problem with the plumbing, the person who installed it lived nearby and the carpenter lived around the corner in number 20.

I had the best of all summers there when cable television arrived. New television stations needed to be tuned in and I needed a new bicycle. I even had a motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop handlebars".

The houses relentlessly merged with other suburbs and the line between city and country stretched, snapped and disappeared. The electrician was then found by opening the Golden Pages, not the gates of number 43.

The rise of yellow-paged directories couldn"t have happened without the telephone and the combined effect was the removal of expertise from place. Answering machines took care of time.

Now this is not an idyllic look back at so-called "better" times but merely a reflection on how technology and society have always been intrinsically interlinked. A two-way street.

When it arrives every technology is 'new'. For a while. Running water and electricity have been around now for almost half a century. They are no longer considered even to be technologys, along with the car and a fat catalogue of domestic appliances.

These things either work or they don't and its the don't bit that always raises the temperature. Becoming dependent on something which then goes awry has the same effect as a rug being pulled from underfoot.

It has been said that the new technologies of today differ greatly from those of the past. The implication is that it's harder today to understand how certain things work. That technologies like computers or mobile phones are shrouded in mystery in a way previously unknown.

I don't subscribe to this view. Did people really understand how electricity kept the milk fresh? Or how water got from the Poulaphuca reservoir into the garden hose? Or Gay Byrne and Michael O'Hehir into the living room?

Being dependent on other people who know how something works is not new or unprecedented. It has been like that for over a century and led to the rise of trades and specialised skills.

The contradictions in attitude have also survived. When in trouble, those who have little or no knowledge on tech matters seek out those who do. Yet they are disparaged regularly as geeks or nerds. Plus ca change... .

All is not lost though. Increasing specialisation and expertise has its balance in the growth and spread of communications, especially the internet. Because of it, information flows more freely and quickly now than in the past. Knowledge is not the exclusive club it once was.

There's an old saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. From here on in, a little knowledge might make all the difference.