by Tom Kando
I have been retired for a few years, but I find myself hurrying more and having less time to do all the things I want to do. Maybe it’s my age. I am slowing down. I can obviously no longer work as hard as I used to. But judging from what I hear from others, even from some relatively young people, there is more to it than that:
It seems to me that life is getting increasingly time-consuming, not less so. Technology schmecknology! Many years ago I published a pretty successful book called Leisure and Popular Culture in Transition. Like many other utopian fools tainted by the sixties’ Counterculture, I predicted that technology would soon enable humankind to enter the Age of Aquarius. The workweek would decline to 20 hours. Machines would do the work. People would devote themselves to poetry and philosophy. The Maslowian hierarchy of needs would be fulfilled.
Ha! What happened? The Internet, social media, computers and bureaucracy. Do these things save time? Not mine. I sometimes find an hour or two to write, but more often I spend my time trying to fix a problem with my blog, my website, my e-mail, a virus, Google+. I try not to spend much time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media, but just weeding through my e-mail takes a large chunk of my daily time.
Are you planning a trip? Do you have to deal with doctors or hospitals? Do you want to order and buy something? Do you need help with Comcast, or with some other service provider? Do you need to deal with Social Security, Medicare, the IRS or another agency? Welcome to the age of do-it yourself.
You use the archaic tool called “telephone,” and you are politely invited by a machine to visit their website, where you can try to tough out your problem while spending countless hours navigating some labyrinthine system.
Where are the good old days when you could pay a travel agent to map out your entire European trip, when you got paper air tickets in the mail, when the TV repairman came to your house?
Next time you go to the dentist, to your family doctor or to a lab for some test, check out how many people are in the waiting room and how many are on the other side of the counter or reception window. You’ll probably be one of 2 or 3 patients waiting, while there will be half a dozen or more very busy workers on the other side.
After waiting half an hour or an hour, you’ll finally meet the first person whose job it is to actually help you medically. Not a nurse, mind you, but a nurse’s assistant. Eventually, someone will take your blood pressure.
But what about the eight or nine other people in that office? Are they chatting and drinking coffee? Absolutely not. They work quite hard. They are on the phone and at desktop computers, they are faxing things, they are working on voluminous paper files at their many work stations. But they are not doing anything medical. They are dealing with insurance, with bills, with paperwork.
It’s the same thing with Intel, with the Social Security office and with any other office you go to: A majority of the people are working on things OTHER than what the place is FOR, whatever that is. They are dealing with paperwork, with files, with privacy forms and whathaveyou.
Last time I went to a hospital, they shoved half a dozen pages of privacy regulations in my hands, some of which I had to peruse and sign. My wife works in the medical field. When she gets a new patient’s file which she has to work on, it is accompanied by 25 (!) pages of privacy regulations. I wish they printed those on soft Kleenex-quality paper, so they could at least be used as toilet paper. To me, it seems obvious that life is getting more complicated and in that regard more unpleasant.
Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which I reviewed on this blog and in professional journals, addresses this issue.
Another interesting book, somewhat to the point, is Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “The Googlization of Everything, and Why We Should Worry.”This book is more about the potential monopolization of information that Google could bring about. However, it also tangentially touches upon the fact that in the Age of Google and other similar technologies, it takes a lot of time and resources to participate in the competitive dissemination of knowledge (as an example, think of the frustrations of Search Engine Optimization). Every once in a while I come across a charlatan who tells me that technology is simple. It is not. I sometimes come across people who claim to know how to solve a technological problem with a few simple steps, but their claims often turn out to be noise, gibberish. Humility and the ability to admit ignorance are rare.
And as to whether technology saves time, my good friend Dr. Abram De Swaan, professor emeritus and former chair of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, has pointed out studies which question the facile assumption that computers are saving humankind time.
The computer revolution may save time (increase “efficiency” and “productivity”) for sellers, producers, service providers and managers, but it is robbing time from buyers, users, clients and the rank and file. This is the way of capitalism. leave comment here
© Tom Kando 2014
5 comments:
We do suffer from time famine, but I don't think we can all blame it on 'high tech' or bureaucracy.
The Internet gives us access to instant information with a click of a mouse, although it does take strong arms to swim through the polluted waters to get to the clean surf. But it took a lot longer to drive to a library, check out books, pay late fees etc. The democratization of information is a good thing and it's all thanks to high tech.
Doctors' offices are indeed like bloated cruise ships that sometimes veer off course because they don't know when to stop accepting new patients, requiring excessive administrative staff.
On the other hand technology and 'complexity' has made it possible to take your lives with us wherever we go; skype, laptops, cell phones, they are all tools that are in their infancy.
Give it a little time, and they will become a lot more user friendly and less hungry for our time.
I agree with Madeleine that it will take a while for the culture to catch up with a lot of developments. "Hi-tech", "bureaucracy," and "capitalism," were all seen as means to salvation and worshiped like gods because aspects of their application made life better for us. However, societies are complex and can't me made to revolve around one of these concepts pushed to the exclusion of things like civility and community. Your reaction seems like a natural human response, the type of which should cause service providers, newscasters, and sellers to adjust their tactics in order to keep your attention.
I think it's rather simply as partly already stated.
Time = money, therefore it makes business sense that anything that takes time is pushed back on the consumer. Long waits on phone trees, research for buying products, waiting lines in doctors' offices, etc.. etc...
This will only change when 2 fundamental things happen.
1) The consumer is willing to pay more for the services and products they receive vs. always looking for the best financial deal, and
2) The corporations' greedy mindsets change to be more consumer oriented and less on stockholders and leaders of these organizations who are making money far beyond the basics they need for a decent living.
Good luck with that.....
We do seem to be on-line addicts and the idea of having a traditional round table discussion is unthinking to anyone under the age of 30 years old.
I hope we get tired of technology and reinvest in quality time and support of one another,
Gail
I thank Madeleine, Gordon, anonymous and Gail for all making excellent points!
I suppose my diatribe is to some extent a cry of frustration - venting, if you will.
I am getting old, and the older one gets, the harder it is to keep up.
I understand that there is a Luddite element in what I am saying.
Had I been living a century ago, would I have reacted the same way when cars began to replace horses?
Madeleine’s optimism is a welcome tonic. She paraphrases other optimists such as David Deutsch and Karl Popper, who argue (convincingly) that we humans have an ace in the whole, namely further growth of (scientific) knowledge.
At the same time, pessimists have also presented compelling arguments: Tainter’s thesis of “collapse through unmanageable complexity” is one.
And there are those who, like Ken Wilber, argue that it is MODERNITY which is now irrevocably in crisis mode. This was also part of the awareness of the sixties counterculture - people like Theodore Roszak, who identified the problem as the “technocracy.”
A lot to think about!
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