Earth-shattering news: you may have to read a book again

I was just so current, so very current, that it was natural to feel powerful and invincible. I am sure you were feeling it as well because if information is indeed power then we were all living the most Herculean of lives.

Anything you needed to know was there at your fingertips in a matter of seconds. Anything you needed to see was not far behind either. These modern times were so intoxicating that they rapidly redefined the way we lived and worked.

Newspapers were not about news any more. Before the ink was even dry on the print run, the news was old. The print media had to move in different directions in an effort to facilitate and satiate the masses for those rare moments when electronic technology was inaccessible. They tried to sell us on a link to the past, the romantic and seemingly dated notion of sitting down over a cup of coffee, opening a newspaper and letting the events of the world unfold before your eyes in still words and pictures. Some folks bought into it.

But a new and swelling class in the techno-vanguard dismissed print media and those that supported it as heartless 'tree killers'. Those employed in the tree-killing profession had to obviously readjust as well. Columnists could drop an obscure reference here and there, but by and large their job was not so much to inform as to regurgitate. Here is the news, what do you think? Spin doctors ruled the world and dominated the media. Some made vast fortunes while others wrote a Sunday sports column and lived their days in an impoverished stupor.

And then in an instant, in a rumbling on the sea bed, our world changed. Before we knew it, the techno-apocalypse was upon us. We had no access to the US and parts of Europe. Telephone lines were down and so were e-mails initially. Post-apocalyptic cyberpunks were aghast and disoriented. They were looking for alternative methods to pass their time but some had never opened a book before and many did not even know how.

Does page 12 come after page 11? Yes it does, grasshopper. Keep turning the page on the right side and eventually you will get to the end of the book. Perhaps no sector was as hard hit by the techno-apocalypse as the world of sport. The impact was immediate. All over Asia people went to bed without knowing how their favourite basketball or soccer team did that night. Imagine that?