Wednesday, June 27, 2001
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Wednesday, June 27, 2001 |
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All tangled up in a technological web By DAVE HAMRICK I guess I'm going to have to break down and get a cell phone. No, I don't need one all that often, maybe once or twice a month. And it's easier and a lot cheaper just to use a pay phone. IF I could find a pay phone that works, that is. I went to two different service stations recently and tried all three pay phones at each store, to no avail. So I gave up on finding out whether my softball game was rained out, and just drove to the field. Technology is the quintessential blessing/curse one-two punch. Yes, it's great that we all have computers at the newspaper now so a piece of copy doesn't have to be typed on a typewriter, then typed again by a typesetter. We've eliminated $8-an-hour typesetters and replaced them with $90-an-hour techies to keep our computers running. And now we don't have anybody to type all those news releases that come over the fax machine. Of course, if everybody would e-mail news releases, we could eliminate that problem. But there are pockets of resistance to the technological revolution. Some folks won't even fax the danged releases ... they actually put stamps on them and give them to complete strangers in hopes we'll get the information eventually. Technology both frees us and enslaves us. The fax machine itself is a perfect example. It's great that we can get news releases, advertising copy and all sorts of other information in seconds without waiting for the mail, but once you have a fax machine, it's no good unless you publish the number. Then you're at the mercy of anybody and everybody. Not that it's that big of a hassle to throw away a hundred pages or so, per day, of unwanted releases from out-of-state PR companies. But now we have to provide the paper and the toner to receive all this flotsam. And people who don't trust the technology send the stuff two or three times. Others think they have a better chance of getting it printed if they send a copy to every person in the editorial department. And some not only fax a release several times, but also e-mail and snail-mail it to several people as well. If you see the same story show up in two different sections of the paper it has happened on rare occasions that's probably the reason why. Another way technology enslaves us is that once you have the latest model with all the fancy bells and whistles, three months later you have a dinosaur that computer nerds snicker at. You have to constantly upgrade. We started this paper on a computer with an 80-meg hard drive. When I got one with 250 megs of hard drive and 24 megs of RAM, I wondered how I would ever make use of all that power. Now I'm wondering if my 500 megs of RAM is enough. My son just bought a G-4 with a gig and a half, and I'm pretty jealous. For those of you who continue to eschew technology and haven't a clue what I'm talking about, the difference between that first computer and the one my son just bought is like the difference between a two-drawer file cabinet and the National Archives. I'm not one of those who stubbornly hold out and live the simple life. I embrace technology. Then I occasionally stop and try to figure out why I did. But unlike true techies, I don't really understand it. I can zap the PRAM because I have a program that does it for me, but after I've done it, I don't have the slightest idea what I did, exactly. I still think light bulbs are some kind of witchery, and when I called a phone number recently with a 404 area code and the person who answered said he couldn't come to the soccer game because he was in Chicago, it really freaked me out. Maybe we should take a step or two back. Like the story that keeps popping up in my e-mail about how NASA solved the problem of how to get a pen to write in zero gravity. It took a year of research and some millions of dollars, much of it recouped by turning the resulting engineering marvel into a curio purchased by techno-groupies. The Russians faced the same problem and came up with a different solution. They called their invention ... the pencil.
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