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--> --> Feb. 28: High tech revolution doesn't set us free By David Morrill Most days when I come back to the office from lunch my computer screen is flush with new e-mails. There may be an advertisement for a home equity loan or a software upgrade. Occasionally there's a note from an out-of-town friend. Most of the messages, though, are from colleagues at the university where I work. There may be a couple reminders of meetings, some questions and suggestions about projects or papers, a few highlighted with a red exclamation mark and titled "please respond." Several are copies of e-mails sent to other people and duly noted "FYI." Some of these, too, require a response. On my way home I pick up my cell phone and call my wife, who is also in her car. Is Taylor's tennis match at Chiles High or Leon? Who's picking up Helen today? And was that rigatoni or fettuccini you wanted me to pick up? (I can never keep my noodles straight.) Ten years ago I would have found one or two handwritten phone messages on my desk when I returned from lunch and maybe a note from a co-worker asking that I stop by her office. I would have taped my son's tennis schedule to my desktop next to a note reminding me of the days I pick up my daughter and written down my wife's grocery order, or at least tried a little harder to remember it. So what is to be made of these changes? On the surface they seem rather trivial adjustments in operating procedure and routine. What I have come to believe, however, is that they are proof of what the cyber-age prophets have been saying for years and what I have, until recently, dismissed as high tech hallucination. We are in the midst of a revolution every bit as profound as the one that began when Guttenberg set up shop more than 500 years ago. Having accepted that fact, my question is whether, as the prophets claim, this revolution is improving our lives? Despite the enormous benefits and conveniences of instant communication and boundless information, I believe, much more is being lost than gained. By degrees, we are becoming overwhelmed by information and pummeled by its immediacy. Organizations and families are, increasingly, operating in a state of high agitation, reacting constantly to new information. Every situation demands immediate attention, every message an answer. A logical question: is the quality of my work any better because I have 15 messages instead of two? Was there, unbeknownst to me, a gaping hole in my life and work 10 years ago that is now filled? Does the immediate attention given to all the high priority messages make my institution a better place? Just as we are losing our privacy to technology, we are losing our ability to distill and edit our thoughts and impulses. When we had to walk across the building to discuss a point with a co-worker, or write a memo, or even make a phone call that might require a secretary taking a message, we had to pause to weigh the value of our idea or request against the effort required to transmit it. We are also losing the ability to tell good information from bad, which is to say, the ability to let things that are of little or no consequence pass into oblivion. Instant access and instant messaging mean that bad ideas and pointless information are simply passed to the next person. Think of all the jokes that, before the advent of e-mail, died under the weight of their own banality that are now given extended lives by legions of dunderheads who send them around the world on their listservs. I can imagine researchers 100,000 years from now, sorting through the digital debris of our civilization, trying to make sense of the one about the two nuns and a duck sitting at a bar. Marshall McLuhan got much of it right a quarter century ago: we are indeed constructing a global electronic nervous system. We have become synapses in an ever-expanding ganglion. McLuhan was right again: the medium has become the message. Technology has made us extensions of the medium, in fact. But McLuhan was wrong, I think, on the larger issue. Where he envisioned a global village with common images and shared knowledge, we find that people, when confronted with an infinite number of channels of communication and oceans of information, sequester themselves in narrow interest groups. The village breaks down and babbling ensues. Just as the 19th century rationalist view that scientific progress would make us free was overtaken in the 20th century by the "crisis of modernity," so too may we someday hear about the dark side of the technology revolution. The voice in the wilderness suggests that the message still counts. David Morrill is a Florida journalist and Northern California native. Email your... Technical questions & comments to: WebMaster Daily Tidings editorial comments & questions to: Editor Visit our other Oregon Newspapers... | Albany Democrat-Herald | Ashland Daily Tidings | Corvallis Gazette-Times | | Lebanon Express | Newport News-Times | Springfield News | Cottage Grove Sentinel | Ashland Daily Tidings 1661 Siskiyou Blvd. Ashland, OR 97520 Telephone 541-482-3456 © Copyright 2001 Lee Northwest Publishing