Mastering (or Failing to Master) Technology

In 1990, a member of the Brookings computer staff proudly arrived at my office and asked, “Where would you like your new computer?” He was beaming and generally exuded goodwill and friendly collegiality. I’m afraid I failed rather miserably the test of being a member of the team, an employee willing to change his ways and innovate. I said, pointing down the hallway, “Down the elevator and into the warehouse.” He was in such a state of shock he could only murmur a mild protest. This made me feel guilty and I felt obliged to make excuses, notably having to do with how busy I was with bringing democracy to the former Soviet Union.  I did  not have time to take the training and learn to use the machine.


     My secretary, or personal assistant as we had begun to call our secretaries, had a computer, and I explained that I wrote out letters, etc. in longhand and gave them to my assistant who typed them. This worked fine. I could get through my correspondence very quickly and get on with my other work. I added that I’d recently visited the Digital Equipment Company, (remember that giant of the minicomputer world, having since collapsed and been folded into Compaq, which was later to be bought my Hewlett-Packard in a controversial acquisition). During the visit, I learned from his marketing team that Ken Olson, the CEO, did not have a computer in his office, which his staff considered to be bad for marketing. He should at least have one on his desk and be photographed with his sleeves rolled up and his computer sitting there in the background. He told them that he didn’t need the computer for his job, which consisted of talking to people, negotiating, reading reports, and he could dictate memos or letters to his secretary.


      I said my job was something like that, not as filled with weighty management decisions as Ken’s job was but quite taken up with reading, writing, discussing issues, and arranging meetings and trips to Russia and Ukraine.

    

     I was able to put off the inevitable for a while, but I knew time wasn’t on my side. I did not make the argument which I wanted to because my assistant was sitting right there, namely, that it didn’t seem like a great advance in productivity to make professionals become their own secretaries. I didn’t want as well to let on that I couldn’t see most of the symbols, print, and settings on the computer. Despite the passage of the Americans for Disability Act in the first Bush presidency I knew or felt, as disabled people generally, that it is prudent to avoid acknowledging one’s disability if at all possible. Even good employers, and Brookings was a good employer, would just as soon not have to cope with disabled employees.

    
     Meanwhile the computer was transforming the workplace. Lawyers were becoming their own secretaries, learning how to use Lexus, etc., government agencies were training everybody in computer use, and private business invested heavily in technology and management information systems. I will discuss in another blog whether the Internet and Web are changing the way we think and changing the wiring of the brain. For the present, I want to focus on how computers were transforming the workplace (and workforce).

So it came to pass that I got my computer and was forced to take training on how to use it. Things did not go too well. I got the hang of email to a degree, but I did an informal content analysis of the emails I received (or was copied on). The overwhelming majority of the messages were in the nature of “Janie’s cat is sick…”, “I had lemon tea this morning…”, “did you notice Annie’s dress…check it out!” etc., etc. Why would one email one’s office mate next door?


     Anyway I was forced to confess that I couldn’t see much and that was one reason I was having trouble. It was decided that I should work with WordPerfect since using the mouse and clicking on symbols was going to be difficult. The Brookings team eventually designed whole new software for me. They were indefatigable. They were kind. I felt guilty that I was taking so much of their valuable time. And nothing could be made to quite work in that my software didn’t exactly match what my colleagues were using -- that is, we couldn’t readily interchange documents. I still have on my computer some of those old WordPerfect files, which of course can’t be downloaded into any of the modern formats.

     Gradually, however, I noticed that my colleagues were used to the computer, functioned pretty well, went through extra drafts effortlessly (perhaps too many drafts – you could now fiddle forever with any draft), could look up things on the Web, and all the other advantages. Once we had to bring back one of our very fine ladies who had retired because of a work overflow, and I noticed that she was helpless now because she lacked the computer skills. Meanwhile, I got by, in a sort of fashion. I had begun to use a fine outside typist who was uncannily accurate and welcomed doing assignments outside of her main job at an international organization headquartered in town. I wrote all of my drafts in longhand, mailed them or brought them to her, and got back hard copy which would edit and send back to her. She also sent an email attachment, and sometimes I managed to edit from what she sent by email. I paid for this since I didn’t want it known that my assistants were unable to do this and since my teaching responsibilities (e.g., democracy training for Russian parliamentarians, organizing seminars on science policy for senior executives, etc.) took up most of their time.

When I wanted help, I was increasingly being told that I had to learn this or that new computer technique or to take new “training.”


     Meanwhile we were becoming increasingly democratic internally with the introduction of TQM, or Total Quality Management, to improve our functioning and raise our productivity. And I was the one who had started running seminars for senior government executives on that subject to raise government productivity! My assistant decided it would be just great for our little division of Brookings (mercifully, the contagion did not spread to the rest of Brookings). And like other buzzwords from the business schools and management gurus TQM eventually disappeared, to be replaced by the next generation of management clichés. If there was ever a clear instance of “product obsolescence” or of short product cycles, this took place with the management theories of the business school professors. Anyway I began to chafe under the regimen of enforced training, learning new software as the old version came up, and mastering technologies that required normal eyesight. My normal sweet disposition (tell that to my wife or children!!) began to crumble. I became curmudgeonly, if the truth be told, and more than a trifle irascible. I began to entertain thoughts of early retirement. I would not have to contend with computer training, and could do my own things (that is, write longhand and send the drafts off to my friend Marjorie who had in the meantime moved to New Mexico). She was still the only person who could actually read my handwriting.

     Moreover, I could pursue my other interests, the most important of which was writing fiction. I had written two novels, countless short stories, and improvisations while an undergraduate. None of them were any good, were absolute rot, and were thankfully reduced to a sodden mass when we had a basement flood and I could throw them out. I had concluded that my gifts, if in fact I had any, were more in the scholarly direction. So against the advice of wise friends I took early retirement. I would have an office and stay on as a visiting scholar at Brookings, but would be freed from having to learn new information systems. I had heard a lecture by a Norwegian colleague who was visiting Brookings explaining his theory, developed in a book recently published which I will review in this blog on another occasion. The colleague postulated the theory of three cycles of life: one –third devoted to education, another third to work, and the last third to post-work. He stated that our great challenge was to reorient society to give people more satisfaction in the post-work phase.

     This sounded good, but he was forced to concede in the Q&A that the whole scheme depended on people being able to save enough money in phase two to last them through phase three. The surge in the stock market in the 90s seemed to ensure that the problem could be handled. No one, including this unfortunate blogger, quite foresaw the market crash of March 2000 or the economic trials of the first decade of the 21st century. I was about to test the proposition, and to find out that the obstacles were insuperable as my investments dwindled away. Fortunately for me, my wife kept working, keeping our household afloat and I benefitted from the real estate bubble, through no wisdom or insight on my part, by buying and selling five years later a Manhattan apartment for a handsome profit.

     But let us return to the main story line. At the start of 1996, there I was, free at last, sitting in my office and staring at the computer. Now what? I knew instinctively that, for this idea of retirement to work, some sort of accommodation with the computer would be necessary. I would be on my own without the supporting infrastructure of an institution. In some inescapable measure I was locked in combat with this monster that embodied the spirit of the modern world. I let certain images drift through my mind. Was the computer like the monster hulking its way across the plain that scared the crap out of all schoolboys, whoever read Pilgrim’s Progress? Or maybe the more apt scene was the bit from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave finally pulled the plug on Hal?

     Now this was a memorable scene from the movie and no doubt Dave could be forgiven for giving Hal his comeuppance. There is something quite wrong here nonetheless, for it’s clear that Dave can’t run his spaceship without Hal’s help. So unless you are willing to hurtle through space forever or starve when your food supply runs out, the act of pulling the plug on Hal makes no sense. You are condemned to live with Hal and find a way to hold your own without the ultimate retaliation. Something more in the nature of peaceful co-existence, the diplomacy practiced with the old Soviet Union, is necessary, or failing that, one might prefer the Middle Eastern confidence-building process as the proper metaphor for how you should approach technology. In the Middle East it is sometimes more practicable to jump to a Final Settlement than to attempt confidence-building measures because this is the place where small steps are impossible and miracles have been known to happen.

     But sitting and staring at Hal,  I knew, was not a good  solutione. It would be like being in the State Department. We never “solved” any problems in State – we merely “managed” them. We manage the problems of life until we are called by Higher Authority to new duties or suffer the natural degeneration of our bodies. So somehow, almost imperceptibly and without drama or conscious choice, my computer and I fell in love – no, that’s too strong. We began to coexist peacefully and even on occasion fruitfully. Around this time new software came along, notably the wonderful Kurzweil 3000 series (they also make a 1000 for the completely blind), which enabled me to download books from Bookshare.org and Project Gutenberg and other sites. Kurzweil would then read the books to me –to be sure, in a digitized but understandable voice. I read more and more. I was born again! This wasn’t the end of my life. It was the beginning.

    
     When I moved back to New York City (and to Columbia again) in 2000, I was even more on my own. I got a Columbia library card and learned how to access the library, even occasionally to download articles via the JSTOR in my own study. I learned more about the computer by having to. I have never believed in the John Dewey School of learning – too instrumental, experimental, learning by doing, etc. Alas, I could keep nothing in my head as to computer use, unless I did it regularly. Mere reading about doing this or that never worked unless I could do it on the computer. How would I describe my relationship with the computer and associated software (even wetware in a phrase of Dick Nelson’s and Dan Sarowitz's). Esteem, on my part at least but combined with wariness. Trust but verify -- another of the Reaganisms that have crept in to this posting. The 20th century dystopian literature saw technology as yoked to, and enabling, centralized dictatorships – say, Koestler, Orwell, and Golding. The dystopias of today, such as Love amid the Ruins by the gifted young novelist Gary S______ (Russian name I can’t remember or spell) captures a different grim reality. Anomie, chaos, the breakdown of all order, the scenes of that horrible movie Water World (typical of modern movies in being all technological effect and no story). In Love Amid the Ruins nobody actual talks. Characters communicate by a hand device and they texted or “verbaled.” No word for talk. There is a college seminar in which the novel concept is tried out of placing two students together and having them attempt to talk to each directly, forgetting their texting devices. Astonishingly, communication is seen to be possible directly via speech. Is there a path out of the Hobbsian War of all against all?

     I view my newfound admiration for my computer a bit in terms of the pod people in another movie from the 1970’s (when movies still had stories). The pod people came from outer space, were planted in the earth, and grew up to inhabit the bodies of neighbors. They looked very innocent, but they were all technique and no purpose. They mechanically went through processes that aped real life, but they had no self-consciousness, no sense of morality, no individuality. The computer can lure you that way, you can spend four hours in front of the machine and suddenly realize that you haven’t done anything. Not written a word, just “surfed” or mastered some new application (an endless stream). I know that the computer has to live through me by burrowing into my consciousness. I know I need him, and I have to learn the new applications. Techniques evolve, and you have to be on top of the new, no doubt. But watch out for that verbaling! I was visiting my boyhood home of Minnesota last week and went to a high school football game. A young player was seriously hurt, and lay on the ground for twenty minutes before the ambulance came to pick him up. Surrounded by the young high school students, I watched their reactions. They didn’t hug one another, huddle in groups, or rush to the sidelines. They were all texting, their faces fixed on their devices, furiously scribbling to their friends sitting one row away.