21st Century Technobetics: Cut them some slack? No way!

My father was born at the beginning of the 20^th Century when the telephone was still in its infancy. The technological strides driven by the communications needs of two world wars took a while to filter down to the general public, and during my childhood in the ‘60s, I’d often hear my mother ask a friend she’d met “do you have a telephone?” and even giving her number to the many who still didn’t. It was well into the ‘70s before I first encountered two telephones in one house. My Grandpa was a doctor, so a black Bakelite crank-handle “cheese dish” stood in the surgery and another (stylishly edged by Ericsson in shiny brass) on the mantelpiece of the drawing room upstairs. Even then, a call had to be “reserved” with an operator.

By my teens, chirruping “cricket” telephones had replaced most of the Bakelite monoliths and direct international dialling was an (expensive) reality but my father was nearing retirement before there was a telephone on every desk in the office and push-button “tone” phones were still 10 years away.

However, by the time I was attending university in a neighbouring town and the technological revolution had produced the first ATMs and debit cards, Dad still rather entrusted my pocket money to a registered envelope and the Post Office than to a computerised system he had no comprehension of.

As a tech-hungry (and relatively savvy) gadget freak, I found it amusing but cut him some slack. As much slack as I had cut my Mom (18 years Dad’s junior) when she failed to understand how when a friend brought a telephone from England and plugged it in in South Africa, he didn’t get a telephone bill from England. I had to. This was someone who was 25 by the time she saw her first TV set. And besides, where do you start explaining inputs and outputs to someone who thinks the TV set must be turned on before the VCR can record a programme?

The 20^th Century’s whirlwind of technological change introduced consumers to the concept of obsolescence, saw our society become the first one to live amidst the ruins of its own construction, and demanded that we re-think protocols and attitudes that had not needed revision since Guttenberg printed his Bible.

The Ancients had simply never had to deal with the subtle “problems” instant international communication brought with it. In a world where for more than a century, the most concrete clue to a letter’s origin was a postmark, the question “where are you calling from, dear?” had never been asked before.

Suddenly, the person who could think on his feet and come up with a ready real-time solution had the edge over the deep thinker who previous millennia had afforded a few days to reply to a letter. This was a massive step; far greater than the more recent one to caller recognition - and just think of the social dynamics that small detail has brought into play.

When a friend recently asked me why I refuse to answer telephone calls where the caller ID is withheld, I asked him whether he would open his front door to someone wearing a balaklava cap? “I hadn’t though about it like that,” was his predictable reply.

Human nature itself, however, has hardly changed, so it’s safe to assume that thousands of years ago, those who had invested lifetimes in learning things by heart must have scoffed at the new-fangled technology of writing. Saddlers and coachmen must have hated Karl Benz.

So, the development of the telephone and the telegraph before it were inevitably retarded by the attitudes of those who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The school system that regurgitated the likes of me was staffed by legions of educators who were convinced that TV (rather than what is broadcast) is baaaaad!

But in spite of self-appointed guardians of society dictating what the new technology (which they themselves fail to understand) is “meant for”, by the time my father died in the 1980s, the more liberal layers of society were accepting that a phone call to say “thank you” was by no means inferior to a written note.

Today, while we might have been socially conditioned into regarding a “thank you” note as quaint and old-fashioned, there are some who justifiably would ask the sender why he had to (albeit by proxy) cut down a tree and then belch carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to make a card,and then got Postman Pat to belch yet more greenhouse gasses to deliver it,when an e-mail (for which several billion electrons would be briefly inconvenienced) would have sufficed.

The realisation of the “human nature” element in the use and acceptance of technology is now widely acknowledged by the consumer electronics industry. When I approached one of the major players after recently discovering their top-line DVD/HDDR lacked important features, I was told unapologetically that they had “removed those features the average user does not need to keep the product competitive”. That’s corporate gobbledegook for “we’ve dumbed-down our products to keep them cheap”.

A few months later, I was talking to a senior manager of the firm who was forthright. “It is a calculated business decision. We make our products non-intimidating and user-friendly to gain share in the middle market. The downside is we lose the small percentage of techies who want the extra features but they are catered for by the specialist brands and are probably buying those anyway.”

It’s that unpredictable emotional human component that makes our interaction with technology so interesting. As a product of a generation that has grown up in the eye of the technological storm, no amount of technical understanding, chemical knowledge or logic made it easy for me the first time I put a cake into a 250 deg C oven in a silicone form. Putting “plastic” or “rubber” into an oven was just completely counterintuitive at a very basic level.

Take the old-fashioned telephone answering machine as an example. Not that we realised it at the time, but like the fax machine and palm-top PDAs, the answering machine was doomed to be an unloved interim technology. We all had a love-hate relationship with the contraptions.ut their very existence presented new social dilemmas.

They gave us the option of not answering the phone, but when we chose not to, the feeling was still somehow reminiscent of hiding behind the curtains and keeping quiet when Jehovah’s Witnesses or inopportune “poppers-in” ring the doorbell. Moreover, Kubrik’s 2001, A Space Odyssey was still far too hot off the press for people to enjoy “talking to a machine”.

So those of us who embraced these devices as efficiency boosters tolerated years of garbled mumbled messages from technobetics without the common sense to leave their telephone number. Voicemail, today’s incarnation of the answering machine, is the rule rather than the exception and anyone (under 80) saying “I don’t want to talk to a machine” would be looked at askance. The fax machine and palm-top PDAs just weren’t around for long enough before being eclipsed by e-mail and morphing into smartphones to produce a comparative sample.

Yet, every time we come up with a new means of communication – be it SMS, e-mail or social media, it takes only a few weeks before some old fart whose grandson set it up for him has to complain that “this type of discussion has no place on Facebook (or Twitter or whatever)” and we’re back to the telephone-versus-card argument. Problem is that as I fast approach my half-century, those “old farts” are getting alarmingly closer to my age! Get with the programme! But haven’t you heard? The Internet (rather than what is transmitted over it) is baaaaad!  – AMB