Shades of grey and the Mozart of the MTV generation

Michael Jackson's death sinks in slowly.

I remember where I was when John Lennon died. The remembering of people who strive to excel - who infuse excellence into the world around them by their example and their endeavour - is easy. Appreciating them justly is rather more complex. It takes time.

It seems to me that the time we need as blogging aficionados to justly appreciate what happens around us is being lost in the helter skelter desire to be the first with the comment, the first with the news. I am aware of how easily the blogosphere can be manipulated - or if not manipulated, then herded in one direction or another - and it does not remind me of excellence. It does not remind me of people who strive to make something lasting and memorable.

Both John Lennon and Michael Jackson do.

Michael Jackson seems, in a way, like the Mozart of the MTV generation.

And so it is that I revert to my technological bunker.

But technology and its implementation is political. Software is code. Code is law. Laws are being made by software engineers. Lawmakers are becoming more and more irrelevant.

If the personal was political in the 60s and 70s, perhaps the technological is political in the early part of the 21st century.

Or perhaps I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not degenerating into irrelevancies.

I've spent the last week fiddling around with Skype Lite and fring on my Nokia E63. I've also installed a DivX player for mobile phones which works like a dream. Even iPlayer runs - though currently unpredictably and more often than not only after a fashion - if you access it via the Skyfire browser.

Today, I managed to install Last.fm - or, at least, the web version of Last.fm - by adding my logon to fring.

There's a lot more you can do with a phone than the operators would have you believe.

This is what makes the subject of communication so very political.

Communication is the key to us understanding and conceptualising the future properly and fairly. It is becoming a utility. This is as it should have been all along. Education used to be the preserve of the wealthy - mainly because education makes us better and more effective communicators; now it - and the ability to make our voices heard, to impact on the degrees of power we enjoy - is a right of the majority.

That is the achievement of our generation.

When all I need to make my telephone calls, listen to my music, post my blogs and watch TV is a mobile Internet connection, so the Internet becomes as basic a right as water, food, gas, electricity and housing. If we are to create a better world, a world which goes beyond the oppressions of menial work, the oppressions that demand of our societies a terrible professionalisation of politics because the rest of us simply do not have the energy to participate, then we must focus on the infrastructure of communication as we have never done so before. We must protect it. We must nurture it. We must battle to keep it free. We must understand its potential to release us.

And we must use it - above all - to deprofessionalise political activity.

They are right. Well before Obama and Oprah, Michael Jackson showed how the world is not black and white but shades of grey.

We should learn how to keep it that way. We should fight to do so. The key is how we talk to each other. In the future, the key will be whether we choose to reproduce the essential stupidities of 24-hour rolling news or whether we decide to use the tools we have to hand to create a reflective environment of healthy engagement.

Only time will tell.

As always.