I’m not exactly sure who “they” are but I seem to remember that they told us technology would make our lives easier and more efficient. I’m not so sure. Let’s start with our TVs. I’m old enough to remember when TV had two dials – a volume control and a channel changer that let you go from channel 2 to 13. The high-definition TV in my living room is connected to a satellite receiver/personal video recorder with hundreds of channels and several levels of menus. The TV itself has infinitely more controls than the old ones and scores of optional inputs. But there’s more. To hear the TV you have to turn on the audio system, and because I also have a DVD player and an Apple TV but only one optical audio input, I sometimes have to unplug one device and plug in another.
Then there is the gaggle of remote controls. In theory, I could consolidate them with a universal remote. But with new types of equipment coming out all the time from companies that barely existed a couple of years ago, it’s hard for universal remote makers to keep up. Of course there are always the super-universal programmable remotes like Logitech’s Harmony 1000 but do I really want to spend $499 on a remote and invest the time to program it from a PC or a Mac?
Several years ago I conducted a family training session to teach everyone how to use our new AV system, to which my daughter complained, “Daddy, all I want to do is watch TV.”
Then there is the telephone. When I grew up, most families had one phone line and maybe a couple of extensions and paid about $12 a month for local service. Now it’s not uncommon for a family of four to have four cell phones that collectively cost more than $200 a month. And back when I was a kid, you could actually hear each other nearly 100 percent of the time. We didn’t have to worry whether we had enough “bars” for a decent signal.
My college-age kids don’t even have landlines, and cell phone service at my son’s apartment is totally unreliable. Of course, back when I was a kid there was only one phone company, called AT&T. It was broken up never to raise its monopolistic head again. Or so we were told.
I love computers and, yes, I think they’ve made me more productive. But I don’t think they’ve made life easier. When I went off to college, I had a Smith Corona typewriter. Sure, I had to buy Wite-Out by the gallon to correct my mistakes. But I didn’t have to read a manual to figure it out, it never broke and it never bogged down because of spyware or viruses. I remember the frustration of crumpling up sheets of paper and starting again if I made too many mistakes but we typewriter users didn’t kill nearly as many trees as PC users do today.
What happened to the “paperless office?” The authors of “The Myth of the Paperless Office,” published on paper by MIT Press in 2003, found the use of e-mail increases paper consumption by 40 percent. Go figure. And typewriter ribbons were a lot cheaper than printer ink which – I did the math – can cost as much as $13,000 a gallon.
My first camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, was primitive and expensive to use with the cost of film, developing and flash bulbs. But it took good pictures and was easy to use. When you got back from vacation, you dropped your film at the store and picked up your prints a few days later. You didn’t have to connect the camera to a PC to transfer photos, use complicated software and worry about whether the printer is going to jam on you. And if you went on a long vacation, you could always bring or buy lots of film.
Today if you fill up your camera’s memory card, you’re “out of film” until you can offload the pictures to a PC.
Video is also a bit more complicated. I still marvel at the films my dad took with his 8mm movie camera. They were expensive to process, and it was a major project when we would break out the projector, set up the screen, dim the lights and start the show. But at least he didn’t have to master Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. And somehow the experience felt more fulfilling than just watching a few minutes of video on a PC screen.
I could go on by comparing glorious albeit sometimes scratchy sound from vinyl records and large speakers to that of highly compressed MP3s coming out of tiny earbuds. But enough already – I’m starting to sound like a Luddite.
Besides, this column is due in a matter of minutes so it’s time to save my file, crank up my e-mail program and zap it to my editor via high-speed broadband. Or maybe I should get out that Smith Corona, type it up, drive it over there and have it typeset so they can burn it to a plate.
I guess progress isn’t so bad after all.
Be the first to comment