TECHNOLOGY: A PLAGUE ON OUR HOUSES

Now here’s an interesting article;

"It's time for 'the next big thing'" [Aardvark, 15 January 2013]

 

I read the article again, and it took me back to the early days of my career at NCR and British Telecom.  Then and there, I loved working with pioneering technology.  In the nineties, I was selling 802.11 (now called wi-fi) as early as 1991, I worked with PC-based video conferencing (pre-Skype) and even tablet PCs.  Email was being touted around London-based Head Offices as “The Next Big Thing.” 

And it’s one of the reasons I’ve virtually stuck two fingers up at my former profession. In those early nineties, when we were flogging email around the financial institutions in London, we told them that it would increase productivity and information flow.  We described how it would usher in the paperless office.  We added that it would save money and give companies a competitive edge.

Well, wharalorrabollox that turned out to be. Now that every major organisation in the world has email, how has it worked out? 

• Productivity has plummeted as staff spend more time reading joke emails than actually working.
• Information flow has ground to a halt as staff are flooded with more emails than they can realistically answer in any single day.
• The paperless office has been revealed as a myth, when staff actually print out multiple copies of their emails.
• Businesses and other organisations are forced to spend more money on network bandwidth as LANs are swamped by emails with unnecessarily large attachments.
• The competitive edge is a fallacy, because now every company has adopted email and is wallowing in the same quagmire.

      My wife spits disgust at the latest fad technologies, and I don't blame her.  She marvels with cynicism at the revolution of Smartphones, Facebook, Google Glass, tablets and more.  But has it solved world peace?  Has it solved world poverty?  Has it solved starvation in Africa?  Of course it hasn’t.  The technology industry now produces frivolous toys; gadgets and gimmicks.  Indeed, the once-proud, high-status technology industry is now at risk of lowering itself to that of a ridiculous, joke, farce industry - like fashion:

• Kids now confine themselves – even more – to their bedrooms, sending thousands of text messages, when they could actually talk to their friends.
• Teenagers become further reclusive.  How many people think THIS is a serious news article?
• Families spend less quality time together as members sit in different rooms with their own, individual internet devices.
• Couples go out and play on their Smartphones, instead of enjoying intimacy.
• Kids discover violence and porn earlier, as technology makes such objectionable material more accessible. 
• Technology companies find even more ways to tie us to our de-sensitising screens, with glasses, more games, and newer, irrelevant operating systems.
• Employees stop talking to each other, as trust goes out the window in an email-blame exchange.

It is with a little shame and guilt that I look back at what we sold back then, and how we sold it.  However, the failings of what we in the IT industry sold didn’t become apparent for many years.  In contrast, the failings of today’s technology are staring us in the face right now.  The question is, what are we going to do about it?