Too Much Progress Does Not Compute
Sun Herald
Sunday October 22, 2000
SITTING in a cafe the other day, I watched as a young guy moved around the tables, offering customers a free trial run on one of half a dozen laptop computers connected by some invisible thread (OK, it was a cell phone card thingy) to the internet.
The friend I was with watched eagerly, hoping the computer guy would come our way. I watched anxiously, sending out telepathic messages of ``keep that damned thing away from me".
But why? Computers have made all our lives immeasurably easier in a very direct way.
When I started out in journalism, I used to have to dictate my stories over the phone to a typist who, depending on how she felt that day, would deliberately misunderstand every second word.
She cared little for the fact I was in a freezing phone box, trying to read my shorthand under a flickering light bulb as the last bus home sailed off behind me and the lights were switched off in the chip shop across the road.
Those were, I think, what journalists with rose-tinted memories now refer to as the ``good old days".
Today, I can go to a press conference or interview, then write the story and send it via my laptop the size of a large paperback and mobile from the back of a cab on the way home. Or I could in theory.
For, with technology, too much is frequently not enough.
My laptop's too modern for my mobile phone, which is positively geriatric at just over two years old.
My computer at home keeps freezing, despite having more than 60 times the memory of the first one I bought way back in the last century, because ``essential" programs seem to keep breeding on the hard-drive.
And my up-to-the-minute fax-cum-printer keeps screwing up because I never use the colour cartridge why would you? and every two weeks it throws a tantrum over its neglect.
Anyway, I've got my mobile phone, my mini computer, my doo-dad that tells me who's calling me and my hands-free portable that allows me to wander around doing stuff with my hands (cooking, knitting, semaphore ... I dunno) and talk to the chosen few who don't get flicked on to the answering machine.
But we have to summon the courage to say, ``Enough is enough!"
I get the same feeling when I come across new technologies as I do when I see a cockroach crawling over a pillow or remember I must do my Business Activity Statement for GST in the next two weeks.
It's a mixture of panic, disgust and an urge to jump on a table and scream.
A friend of mine has a scriptwriting program which contains several voices which read back to him what he's typed.
OK, the voices have the emotional range of a computerised Sylvester Stallone on Mogadon but it's kind of exciting and terrifying at the same time.
So here's a plea to all you programmers and inventors out there: Can we stop now? Just give us a decade or two to get used to the gizmos and gadgets we've already got. Thirty years tops and I'll be out of this game, then you can go nuts.
Newspapers that read themselves now there's a project worth developing.
Just leave a message on my voicemail when you're done.
© 2000 Sun Herald