DO YOU remember the dreamy days when we were promised that new technology would liberate us all? Here’s the story we were told.
Computers would make life so much easier for us and would create so much wealth that we would all work for only half a week. The big growth industry in Britain, we were solemnly told, would be the leisure industry, as we tried to work out how on Earth to fill the rest of the week.
It was a nice dream while it lasted: but it was complete tosh.
Britain now works the longest hours in Europe and people complain that they don’t have enough time. Many households have both parents working to pay the mortgage. They don’t have enough time with the children. And they have to pay quite a bit for childcare.
The other load of complete rubbish was the stuff about the “paperless office”. Everything would be on computer and we wouldn’t have to chop down nearly so many trees. The only flaw in that argument is that fear of losing data on the computer has led us to print everything off and put it into . . . an old-fashioned filing cabinet.
Yet new myths abound. Recently, an organisation by the mysterious name of OTX announced that the current level of high-tech multi-tasking has effectively allowed a person living a normal busy life in 2008 to gain seven hours of daily activity over the last decade. What they are saying is that most of the 3,000 people interviewed for the survey come home from work and spend their evenings watching TV, texting, social networking on their laptops and talking – sometimes all at the same time.
As a result, says the report, they are more effective than they would have been 10 years ago.
In fact, the report goes on, in order to complete the same number of tasks before the dawning of the new age of technology, a 31-hour day would be needed.
Patrick Moriarty, the author of the survey, said: “People will be pushing the television remote while surfing on the wireless laptop computer on their knee, e-mail and texting a friend on a mobile phone and holding a conversation with friends or spouse. These people may be more mentally engaged than they are in the office.”
Aye, right.
The assumption underlying all this is that those who are doing all these manic things at the same time have an improved quality of life. It sounds more like hell on Earth to me.
What all this has actually created is a frantic and restless way of living that is anything but peaceable.
The dream was that time-saving devices would enable us to have more time to talk with each other, to pursue things we really love, things that have the potential to enrich our lives. What we have instead is society in which everything happens at a terrific speed and there is time for neither thought nor silence. In fact, with all the gadgets, silence is seen as threatening. The new technology has created more addictions. We seem to need more and more buzz, zing and noise.
For some of us, the mobile phone is like an umbilical cord which must not under circumstances be cut. The discovery that you’ve left the house without your mobile can induce panic attacks. You may not have much to say to the wider world, but the thought of being deprived of an immediate means of communication can trigger deep-floating anxiety. How can one live without phoning someone to impart the earth-shattering news “I’m on the train”?
Recently, on the Scrabster to Inverness bus, I was seated behind a girl who texted back and forward the whole way to Inverness. Maybe she was in love, and that was fine.
But the vast majority of texts seem to be fairly inconsequential, a way of passing the time. It struck me forcibly that the bus was passing through some gorgeous scenery on a beautiful day but it had all passed the lass by. I’m sad about that.
Ah, but you may want to say to me, you’re simply a Presbyterian curmudgeon, that’s your trouble. That, of course, is true. But even Presbyterian curmudgeons – an endangered species – have their rights.
Because on that same bus journey phones seemed to be going all the time, with people shouting out banalities like “I’m just passing through Golspie”. Now the last thing you need when you’re reading a good book with a tricky story line is some eejit shouting about Golspie. I really don’t want to be travelling in a call centre on wheels.
If we have gained several extra hours a week, these hours seem to be filled up with babble and racket.
Yet this OTX lot think that this is life-enhancing. Give me a break.
My definition of hell would be to be banged up for eternity in a room full of people with mobile phones going off, people shouting “I’m in hell” every five minutes – certainly makes a change from Golspie – beeping digital diaries, television sets being switched from channel to channel and music blaring at volumes that would damage the hearing of a budgie with ear plugs in. But then, as I’ve already conceded, I’m a Presbyterian curmudgeon.
To equate happiness with being plugged into a whole series of electronic gadgets is itself a form of insanity.
Here’s a proposition: all this frantic multitasking rollercoaster may be a way of avoiding real life, genuine encounter. Restless buzz may be rotting our brains rather than enhancing our lives.
Now, I have to be honest here. A mobile phone is essential to my life as a journalist. A computer helps me to work for national newspapers from an island. And I am grateful for these things.
It’s the tyranny of technology that I object to. And the assumption that more and more technology will make us more and more contented. It won’t. It will gobble up our leisure time – even our holidays - and quicken the mad pace of our lives. Liberation? Don’t make me laugh.