Lost in a blizzard
It seems to be the peculiar taste of our society to enjoy pretending to be a lot younger than we really are. I myself, by shaving off all the grey hairs and standing with a bright light behind me to blind the viewer, have fooled people into believing I’m at least a month younger than I really am.
But the truth is, when Mum finally pushed me into ‘getting a real job’, I was fixing manual type writers. Electricity had, of course, only just been invented and only the very important people had a telephone on their desk. Accounting at the Post Office was done by entire floors of ladies with enormous electro mechanical adding machines.
In spite of the dinosaur nature of all this, equipment envy already existed. I know this because the service vehicles I got to use were equipped with two way radios. So if the very important people had some very important problem Kimberley on the service desk could arrange for some very important service on their very important equipment.
Ever since those heady days the need to keep technology moving has been very clear. Anybody who used MS-DOS knew there had to be something more. Everybody who tried to use Windows v3.1 knew we couldn’t stop there. And this trend has been the guiding light of the industry ever since. When you sit down and think about it, my generation may have lived through some of the greatest technological change ever witnessed. It’s been an amazing roller coaster ride, and up until now I’ve been all in favour of it. It’s given me a job for couple of decades now, kept me off the streets as my old Dad used to say, and given me a chance to appear much more intelligent than I really am.
Lately however, I’m getting the feeling we’ve lost our way in a kind of technical blizzard and run our bus of progress into a massive snow drift at the side of the road.
All we seem able to invent now are endless new ways to communicate.
With the click of a mouse I can watch someone in Washington make weird and disgusting noises with his mouth whilst peering wildly into his camera. For reasons I can’t explain thousands of people tune in to Britney Spears every day to find out what she had for breakfast. I won’t be surprised if they try to stream parliamentary debates onto the internet.
I knew I was onto something when, talking to one of our customers, he dropped into the conversation a phrase so incomprehensible it took me several weeks of thinking to clear my head. He said “We’ve found a business use for facebook”. I mean have you ever heard anything so unlikely?
Did we make some collective decision in the recent past, that what we all needed was ten new ways to say meaningless things to one another? Was I away sick that day? I suspect this may be one of those times when someone tries to tell us what we want, like those television adverts suggesting the major challenges in life are body odor and bad breath. But is there really an endless need to ‘communicate’ above every other priority?
Don’t get me wrong, communication can be very good and has it’s place, like when the Kremlin loses a nuclear submarine and needs some help finding it. Or when they ring you up to tell you you’ve got sixty minutes to get your stuff and drive to higher ground before the tsunami arrives.
All great in itself, but the best communication has always been one to one and I don’t see that will ever change.
“Luke I am your father”.
See how he didn’t feel the need to text it, ping it, facebook or twitter it.
By contrast, this headlong rush into new ways to instantly communicate any stupid thing that comes into your head. It’s just creating an ever growing wall of background noise. There has to be some better use for technology than that. Because in the end, background noise just becomes annoying, irritating and finally boring.
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