Although this is mainly continuing along the RSI & Ergonomics discussion, Elly‘s comments on the effect of playing too many games, or texting too much also touch on a wider issue. How much the communications revolution has changed everyday life. For years people have been telling us that technology will change everything, that the world will never be the same again. They’ve been talked about it like it would be this huge big bang that would suddenly transform everything around us. They were wrong .. it creeps up slowly and quietly.
I was reading Burman’s Shift! the other day and although I found it quite academic (read: boring) it did have an interesting core … the internet is a communications revolution that will change the whole paradigm of a range of sciences, from psychology to communications, in the style of the Copernican revolution. He follows the Kuhnian philosophy that paradigm shift is achieved by a creeping number of discrepancies forcing us to re-evaluate the way things are.
I wouldn’t have put it quite as drily (or taken as long to say it ::rolleyes::) but I agree. The changes, the discrepancies that will really change things have crept upon us. In the space of my lifetime things have changed a great deal. I have seen profound, abrupt, “big bang” change — the regime change in South Africa in 1994 — but this is much more subtle. Fundamental things have changed. Kids don’t play outside anymore. Your most important working implements are not your muscles, but your fingertips & your mind. You are probably just as likely to end up disabled, but not due to an accident at work … but due to work itself. Being able to type really is more important than being able to write (oh and how I wish the uni would realise that and let me type exams!!).
The list goes on and on and gets rather boring. But what really drove it home for me to day was that I found this article through the monthly newsletter I get from our home broadband supplier, Zen, and it didn’t surprise me. “That’s clever”, I thought, “turn pubs into internet cafes and just cover the keyboards in beerproof coating. Natural thing to do, pubs are the centre of rural communities anyway, right?” Then I remembered that the McDonalds in central Bath has done the same thing. And that those Centrino ads are really getting everywhere and soon the latest bad restaurant etiquette will not be talking loudly on your mobile phone, but hacking into the person checking their email at the next’s tables handheld device, tablet or maybe even laptop and playing porn loudly on it.
The dot coms may have gone bust, but the revolution has still happened … look around, it’s everywhere. My mom can use email. My grandparents have a cellphone and a phone capable of sending email. My dad keeps track of where his car is by marking it on his GPS when he parks. It’s happening all the time, all around … and I didn’t notice. Did you?
Follow Up: I found two interesting things today … one symptomatic of how things have changed :
We all need Knee Defenders these days, because we allow ourselves to be cramped like cattle on flights that take us thousands of miles in mere hours.
The other made me absolutely shudder as a biker, but seemed a wonderfully ingenious use of modern technology to the side of me that wasn’t screaming “No!! Not more chance of a slower more painful M4! And more points!!” — a completely refuted but still fascinating new speed camera scheme (Note: This is apparently a hoax. It’s still a cool (and at the same time horrifying) idea).
Comments (4) Permalink
November 4th, 2003 at 4:35 AM
I kind of did, but a lot of what you said I disaggree with.
“Kids don’t play outside…” Actually, they still do. Just less so.
“disability due to work itself…” If I lost a finger into a meat grinder, or had my leg crushed by a crate on the dock, surely that too is being disabled by the work itself.
“most important working implements are not your muscles…” Yeah, a healthy body is less important now than it might have been before, but its still bloody important. If only for getting a date.
I don’t mean to be argumentative. (Well, I do, but…) You just come accross like we’re now living in a land where the sky is pink and sapient marshmallows fight for supremacy. I don’t think that is fair, if it was what you intended.
I see things as having changed, but only in that new doors have opened without any of the “old” doors closing. A beutiful mind is appreciated now alongside a beautiful body. Kids DO play outside, but they don’t have to be bigger or stronger or better at football to be popular now.
So, through being well informed, I say the world has got bigger. People do still climb mountains, while other people watch the broadcast of it. Still I say the physical proficiency is more respected. David Beckham is world renouned. Ever heard of Unkind (http://www.gamer.tv/page/feature/3630717.htm)?
November 4th, 2003 at 1:27 PM
Yeah, kids sometimes do still play outside. But for many it’s too dangerous and for most they have too much to do inside to bother. Hence the average kid in the US being drastically overweight from an early age.
Disability due to work itself: your job wouldn’t be to grind your fingers, or crush your leg with crates. However, most of my day job (and many people’s) involves using a computer. Using a computer can lead to disablement without any accidents, is the point I was making.
As for looking good, what you are saying about bodies being important for aesthetic reasons reinforces my point. We are the dieting century, because previous centuries had no issue. They worked and used up all their energy working … we do not do physical work, so we have to try hard for a body not suited to our day-to-day life. What would be most suitable for an office worker’s everyday life would be extra hands to type and hold a phone with, an extra mouth to talk with and eyes on the sides of the head to look at multiple screens, papers, etc. None of this strong arms, legs, etc, malarkey.
Tony, my very point was that things have changed subtlely, quietly and that you have to stand up and take stock to really notice it. Not that there are rampaging pink marshmallows everywhere. Not that the “old ways” are forever lost and gone.
I am amazed, as always, at your ability to complete miss the message and get lost amongst the detail.
November 5th, 2003 at 5:57 AM
Hi,
Interesting comments here. I just wanted to point out that it’s only 1 out of every 6 folks (at best) for whom their mind is more important than their body. We in the first world are very, very lucky to have all these technological geegaws that make distance, muscle power and time so malleable.
Things have changed, but I’m not sure whether they’ve changed more in the past 10 years than they have in the previous 10, or the ten before that. I don’t have the perspective to judge, I guess, but it seems that if you read literature from the past, every decade in the modern era has voices who feel like ‘things are changing faster than they ever have before’.
Dan
November 5th, 2003 at 4:19 PM
Yes, and every generation has loads of people banging on about how the current changes are going to change our lives forever. What I think brought me to post in the first place, though, was the realisation that people are still talking on about what current technology will do for our lives in the future … very few people seem to be analysing whether the claims from 5, 10 years ago have come true. And that it really takes a bit of stocktake to realise how much things have changed.
I guess what you inferred there is true — it’s always the same in the current timespace. The past was so different and the future will be so much better. But we don’t tend to analyse the real changes as they go past … possibly because they slip into normality so quickly.
I remember having the same feeling just a few years after Apartheid had ended. There were lots of things still wrong, but when I sat down and remembered how drastically, massively different things had been pre-1994 it was a bit of a shock that so much had changed in such a small space of time. I got that same feeling the other day … and it intrigued me. I wondered if anyone else had noticed. And it even got Tony out from under his bridge in Japan to come troll again! 😉