Thread: The Machine marches on

I write for personal amusement in the same way as others do crosswords. Quite often I post an article on a public forum and in return I earn passing satisfaction when someone comes up to me, either in person or as a pen name on an internet forum and says: “I liked your piece“. The gratification lasts for a second or two but it is an important encouragement for me to continue to write. Few people care to talk to a brick wall and I am no exception. I have never been paid for writing and I am not expecting payment to start soon.

Over the decades I have written hundreds of reports and thousands of business letters. From those articles I invariably earned not so much for the writing itself but for occupying the job in which the writing was an essential part. Originally the letters had been spieled out to a secretary who took down the wording in shorthand and who then produced a draft copy on a manual typewriter. The draft was corrected and the secretary, almost invariably a woman, typed a fair copy for the boss to sign. Any mistakes were corrected with a white liquid paper called Typex. The finished letter was popped into an envelope, stamped and posted in a local pillar box. Copies produced with carbon paper were filed away in a cabinet.

Then came along manual typewriters fitted with a correction tape. These were in turn gradually superseded by electrically powered typewriters. They represented a great improvement on a manual Olympia typewriter. Copies were created with NCR (no carbon required) paper. Finally IBM brought out an electronic typewriter with a three line memory which could be corrected to eliminate typing mistakes. The next step was for IBM to invent a word processor which was a large cumbersome computer designed specifically for producing letters. All of the copy was printed in black and white. IBM’s Displaywriter computer utilised ten inch floppy disks on which to store data. Finally one day arrived the early PCs, the computers which most readers still might recognise. The operating systems of PCs varied as did the software since neither Microsoft nor Apple/Mac then held the monopolies they hold today. About the same era spreadsheets came into wider use and Lotus 123 was the brand leader for several years. Microsoft as usual were very clever and picked up on the trends. Msworks was one of the first integrated packages encompassing a word processor, a data base and a spreadsheet.

In the meantime the office had adjusted to cope with change. The female staff were no longer merely the secretaries, they had become junior managers. The women did not need to be nice to the boss and be sensitive enough to smooth his furrowed brow. In turn the Boss had to learn to type and to work the computer for himself. The plastic beaker had replaced the coffee cup. Many a manager was to be laid off in the coming decade because he lacked computing skills.

Then came the leap forward in telephone technology. No more did telephones have to be linked by cable to a socket in the wall. A client in China could be dialled up from the car and back in those days one could answer the phone whilst driving the car without having committed a driving offence.

Nowadays eleven years into the twenty first century, I can sit in my chair and use Skype to see and chat with my brother in far away France. Everything, absolutely everything, has changed in the office. My first boss, Mr Buckland would look on in utter amazement. How can I, whose first job back in the late 1950s was to post hand written entries into the customer accounts ledger of a branch of Westminster Bank, explain the way I think to a young person born in the 1990s used to the Internet, the key board and the mobile phone. Even now to me the term ‘3G’ represents $3000.

I suspect that most young female office staff look at the so called celebrity stars in the TV show Big Brother as heroes. Last night I watched a twenty something ‘celebrity‘, explain in an illiterate English drawl, how she spent three hours every day preparing and painting herself ready for her public. It was a preening exercise worthy of any cockatoo. Her description of the process was punctuated extensively by a mumbled “d’yer no what I mean?” From a distance, she looked pretty enough, although in truth not much of what one saw was real. The boobs were implants, the tan came from a bottle, the hair was thickened by a wig and the eye lashes lengthened by extensions. Could I ever have employed this example of modern female pulchritude in the office? - never. I would have absolutely no use for her talents, whatever they are said to be. Yet I am sure she represents a role model for many a young woman. There is no question that she is currently earning a fortune for being pretty but incoherent. I think back to my secretary of the 1970’s who could take down shorthand and type a grammatically correct business letter in any of three languages and all for a princely salary of about $6500 a year. (I wonder what Dorothy does with herself these days?)

The Internet, which displaced the fax machine, has crept upon us all. Mr Orwell’s TV - the connection with Big Brother himself, is figuratively speaking well established in our lives. Except perhaps that the box which was to be found in the corner of the room has shrunk into a petit mobile phone with a small pop up colour screen. Thereby our mind sets are being conditioned and our personal values are being distorted. Life will never ever be the same again, that is so long as electricity powers up the socket in the wall. If the power supply were ever to fail, then the lights really would go out.

My guess is that the current generation of teenagers will see the mobile phone - or “personalised communication device” as it will become known, become a fixture on the wrist in the same way as the Rolex has been on mine. Citizens will be micro chipped at birth in the nape of the neck so that they can be readily identified and, I fear, chastised. Technology will march on remorsely.

As yet we are watching Big Brother, soon Big Brother will be watching us - as was written in the 1950’s under the title of “1984”. A clever man with foresight was Mr A E Blair.

No, as an ageing man who in life has witnessed significant change, I am not hankering to morph into a modern teenager. I fear the more we humans come to rely upon the machines, the less we shall understand what the role in our lives the machine should have. The device should be the slave, the human the master. But do our masters see it that way?

I do relate to this. Progress is great, but sometimes I wonder just how far machines will go in taking over our lives. Especially when at a recent family gathering I sat with three other family members and as we talked they gradually pulled out their phones and went to facebook, texting messages or playing games. Conversation died out. I had traveled over eight hundred miles to get there, hadn't seen them for months. I went home the next day, days early. It seems like an obsession for people to be on a machine of some sort. What a waste. Maybe us slaves need to rise up, but against what entity?