Dave Kitson

Dave Kitson is a frustrated man. His 5.5 million pound move to Stoke City two years ago should have been his platform into the England team, but he has struggled to score: his total of five goals in two seasons mean he has cost £1.1 million a goal discounting his wages. He now finds himself on the edge of the squad and hasn't even made the Stoke bench in the opening two games of this season, but it is not this that frustrates him - it is the iPod, or rather the effect it has on a dressing room. Of the smooth, curvy white music machines he says, "I find iPods one of the most anti-social things to have come into the changing room. Changing rooms should be buzzing with anticipation and energy before a game. But more and more I see players slumped around in their own world, generally looking miserable". It must be galling that these misery-guts trapped in a looping Radiohead (I doubt it's Radiohead) soundtrack are taking his place in the team.

It is Kitson's views that I wish to discuss rather than his football ability, for what he says perhaps shines a light on the effect of technology on culture in general. Many technologies encourage isolation rather than community: games consoles, computers and television in some ways. However, whilst some argue that they erode community, they also create a platform for a different kind of community. People play computer games across networks against each other, discuss the previous evening's television and the computer gives us chat-rooms, discussion forums and Facebook. Whilst Bookface has been accused of creating a place for unreal and inane communication rather than real and beautiful face to face stuff, it does provide people who can't get out and about with a view of the world, allows old friends to reconnect and lets me play Scrabble against people. Through Bookface I have gone to football games with two old school friends, won 60 games of Scrabble (lost 72) and been informed of various minutiae of people's lives. This weekend I met someone who I knew had spent the previous week with a sore throat that I felt far too acquainted with and this meant I didn't have to start the conversation with, "How's your week been?", but could leap straight to, "Are you feeling better?", squeezing valuable extra space for us to choose a matter to converse upon; I used it to inform him that I didn't want to see him using Bookface for any more of this self-pitying nonsense again.

I'm wandering away from the original argument I feel and straying into personal anecdotes from my weekend, so I'll stop and lurch to an inconclusive conclusion. Kitson is right, probably about the Stoke dressing room; I don't really know, but also about the wider world in many ways. Technology is crushing human interaction. Perhaps even my tapping away at the keyboard is part of this - aaaarrgghhh. However, technology gives us avenues for a new and worthwhile kind of interaction. Perhaps even my tapping away at the keyboard is part of this - oooooh. I shall leave it on that meaningful verbal ejaculation.