JUST WILLIAMS
‘It’s nice ... but I really just miss seeing people’ The wine trade has found digital ways of adapting to lockdown. Some have been pretty successful. But in the longer term, the “generous rectangle” of a screen is no substitute for real human contact
E
ven for an author with a
reputation for writing about the more grotesquely surreal and
alienating features of modern life years before they have actually come to pass
in the real world, JG Ballard’s short story The Intensive Care Unit is disturbingly prescient.
Written in 1977, it depicts a society
where everyone lives alone in splendid, luxuriously comfortable isolation, and
where all social contact (including school, work, and time spent with families)
is experienced through “the generous rectangle of the TV screen”.
What makes the story all the more
uncanny is the way Ballard builds the sense of unease even as the characters describe their collusion with the situation – they
don’t want social interaction, they willingly comply with their isolation. Contact with
other humans feels to them archaic, dirty, something to be looked back on in horror
and disgust in much the same way that we
look back on medieval hygiene.
– barking and grunting you through your
of us have long had the creeping feeling
killjoy here, the patronising digital
Reading the story at any time would have
been an uncomfortable experience. Most
that we are spending too much of our lives online, willingly (blindly) reducing human contact for something mediated by more or less sinister organisations and their algorithms.
But reading the story (on real paper
pages, imagine that!) during a rare break
from the flickering screen during a global pandemic was something else altogether. This is a time when, for many of us, the
virtual world’s victory over real life has seemed to be almost complete, a time
when the screen has annexed more and more parts of our existence.
Screens haven’t just replaced the
newspaper and the cinema during
Covid-19. They’ve filled in for the dinner party, the pub, even the gym (up to
and including providing the annoying
motivating instructors – hello Gregg, hi Joe
This is a time when, for many of us, the virtual world’s victory over real life has seemed to be almost complete THE WINE MERCHANT june 2020 32
workout).
I don’t want to be the condescending
refusenik going on about his “amazing
concentration app” that blackmails you
out of looking at social media by growing a virtual tree or sending links to articles about 11 ways to digitally detox in a pandemic.
Online, after all, has provided a lifeline
for those of us lucky enough to have
stable broadband connections. And just as I’ve had to accept that my teenage
son’s ballooning online gaming habit is actually a perfectly reasonable way for
him to maintain his social relationships
when he’s basically not allowed to leave
the house, so I’m never going to decry the
compensations offered by online sales (and those via phone and email) to retailers.
The internet has made a kind of facsimile
of normal life possible for wine journalists, too, with Zoom tastings and winemaker webinars providing some sort of
replacement for the content we’d normally find at tastings and on travels to vineyard areas.
It’s also allowed The Wine Merchant to
hold the judging of our eighth annual Top 100 competition, a logistically complex