Are You Being Served?

Technological advances meant to raise efficiency and decrease stress don’t necessarily turn out the way we planned

I wanted the newspaper where I worked to come up with a more dramatic way of announcing the computer crashes that so bedeviled us. “Ah-ooga! Ah-ooga! Ah-ooga!” would have done perfectly, accompanied perhaps by recorded voices crying out, “We’re going down! We’re all going to die!” Instead we depended upon a buzzer, harsh and aggravating, and a red light that revolved in the ceiling. The buzzer sounded like a high-school bell. The red light, well, it looked as though Officer Curley had managed to flip his patrol car so spectacularly that it had crashed through our roof and was now hung up in the rafters with only its flashing red light protruding into the newsroom. Were we experiencing an actual computer crash or was this a preamble to a speeding ticket?

The buzzer was intended to give everyone 30 seconds to save their computer files before the red light began to flash, signalling the bitter end of everything that hadn’t been saved. The 30-second warning was a myth though. Sometimes it was 10 seconds. Sometimes the light began to revolve before the buzzer sounded. Reporters watched in horror as their stories froze and died, never to be recovered. Copy editors aged visibly in the space of a single workweek. Once, twice, three times a night the system crashed, and I am sure the cries and shrieks from those times can still be faintly heard if you walk by the office towards midnight.

When the last page had been wrestled to bed, the technicians of the night would take the system down and begin purging the day’s files. The red light would flash slowly and, so it seemed to me, mockingly. I would recall the night’s struggles as I watched the revolving light, and asked myself: “Is it serving us, or are we serving it?”

Those were the Model-T days of office computers. It was 1986, 1987, 1988, light years ago. Spam was a kind of meat that came in a tin can with a little key for opening it. Viruses were for people in lab coats to confront. Worms, ugh. Denial of service attacks were something your utility did to you. “Just in time” was when you got to work. The World Wide Web didn’t exist. Airmail was the mode of choice if you didn’t have a fax machine and wanted to guard your privacy. Privacy was still something to be guarded. E-mail? E-trading? E-commerce? eBay? Didn’t exist. They were all in the wondrous future.

As I write this, the wondrous future is here. It arrived in bits and bytes in the middle 1990s on a billowing and exhilarating wind that bore such delights as a PC in every pot, the Web, and Windows 95. People marveled, “Look, I can call up a federal government website, right here in the den! I can e-mail Herbie in the Toronto office! I can send an entire report by e-mail!” Some-day we’ll pay our taxes by computer! Now, let’s make everything stop for a moment until we’ve had time to absorb all of this.

The revolution didn’t stop. Instead it gathered speed, and is still speeding up, sweeping people, companies, countries along, making some and breaking others. Speed has become one of the basic conditions of life, a medium that is shaping us even as it flings us forward. In the space of a few years, sometimes months, consumers and workers alike learned to accustom themselves to voice mail, e-mail, mobile phones, advanced word processors, and electronic time-managers to keep track of it all. Then the pace quickened. In its first five years, RIM sold a million wireless Blackberries, and then sold the second million in 10 months.

Another new condition was volume. The number of Web pages quickly surpassed Macdonald’s burger output and domains grew exponentially. The amount of information suddenly available, usually for free, was staggering. Dazed workers moved about in what one watcher dubbed “data smog.” That vital piece of data was out there, somewhere, just one more click away, just one more click.

The third element in the new way of life was the mobile office. People could work from home. What freedom! In all the excitement, we missed the main point. If you could take your office home, then your office was always with you. The workday, which once ended at five for most people, now no longer ended. Managers often led the way here. It became commonplace to receive e-mails from a boss that bore a 2 a.m. time-stamp. Welcome to 24/7 and to perhaps the strangest disease of all – stress envy, the condition of emulating someone else who is so obviously valuable that he or she has to be up at two in the morning writing e-mails to demonstrate it. Surveying the overloaded world in 2001,

Norwegian author Thomas Hylland Eriksen wrote an engrossing book entitled Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age. The new technology, he concluded, was destroying coherent thought. “There are strong indications that we are about to create a kind of society where it becomes nearly impossible to think a thought that is more than a couple of inches long,” he wrote mordantly.

He saw that new efficiency devices made us less efficient. More information made us less knowledgeable. When everything happens at once, he asked, “does anything happen at all?” Most significantly, he said, “we are unwittingly being enslaved by the very technology that promised liberation.” Is it serving us or are we serving it?

Eriksen’s conclusions are four years old now, a long time ago by present-day standards, but his themes stand up. They are reflected in titles like Richard DeGrandpre’s Digitopia and in the works of Canadian writer, Heather Menzies, whose current book, No Time, raises serious questions about the world we’ve created.

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