February 24th, 2004
You know, unless you've been working with computers since the 1950s, you can't say you started at the beginning of the computer craze; you can only say that computers were harder to use and required more dedication and diligence to operate when you started out. And since computers have gotten easier and easier to use over the years, all computer users can or will soon be able to say that things were harder in their day.
I'm no different, of course, having begun my computer-using career in the late 1970s with an old HP 8000-series card-reader, dabbling with Apple II's and later Commodore PETs, Commodore VIC-20s and Commodore 64s. And when I finally made the jump to PCs in the DOS world in the early 1990s, I was more-or-less established as "a computer guy" despite my education in English, Music, Communications, and a few other subjects as well (such as Electronics, but that's another story).
So I've been in this field in some capacity for about 25 years and I could go on about the changes I've seen in the technologies ad nauseum, but--really--who cares? So they get faster and cheaper, smaller and more powerful. It's boring to continue talking about it.
What has fascinated and horrified me (in equal quantities) are the changes in the type of people using computers. In general, they are less and less "bookish" and "geeky" and more and more arrogant, opinionated, and vicious. One only has to look at Yahoo! message boards to read the sentiments (mostly, but certainly not exclusively, by Americans) betraying a xenophobic tribal chest-beating "culture." It's more than a little disconcerting to see how low public discourse has sunk to.
<Nostalgia>I remember when I was active in local computer-based Bulletin Board Services (BBS's) in the mid-1980s. The language was correctly spelled and punctuated, people wrote more than five words per message, and the ideas themselves were, if not mature, at least thoughtful and polite.</Nostalgia>
Well, those days are quite clearly gone and, as I recall, older participants regularly wept for the state of affairs that the BBS's had descended to. As a younger participant I just got defensive and embarrassed that my messages were only 200 words, and less sentient and polite than theirs.
But when I try to plot the free-fall to see where it leads us in 10 or 15 more years, I have some trouble. A new web-based language that bears little resemblance to the language we grew up speaking and learning in school? Or just a huge quantity of fragmented grotch filling hard-drives across the world? As for the content, the thoughtfulness and respect is sinking so rapidly, that I envision message boards full of nothing at all except invective (actually, we're nearly there now). Or perhaps the pendulum will swing back and some respectability creeps in. (It's not that far-fetched; it's happened before.)
Is this the result of the fact that as computers get easier and easier to use, less and less thoughtful people can use them? Does this mean that by the time computers can "read our minds" all the ugliest minds in the world will be able to spew their offal at the rest of the world with ease, and the few remaining people left who can string ideas together with some sentience and discipline to grammar and punctuation will retreat to their own secluded corners of the world to let the flying crud hit someone else?
I think that as computers become easier to use, their purpose and their role in our society becomes less pertinent and more trivial. What was once investigated with a sense of wonder is now a tool to insult your neighbour. The sense of satisfaction people felt when mastering something with a computer is gone, replaced by a complacency and a shallow carelessness about the human being on the other end ... and as we all grow calluses to the nastiness coming across our computer screens, we grow more bold with what we feel comfortable uttering to others. Is this, as I implied earlier, the result of the lower intelligence and discipline required to use computers? Were the former "newbies" really a better quality of person?
I must confess to a feeling about myself. I hope you'll appreciate the bravery it takes to admit this: I think the answer is "Yes." Computer users of the 80s were a better grade than those of the 90s. And users from the 70s were better still. Computers are attracting a larger cross-section of the population, but the new additions are not the same calibre of person as the old-timers.
They're certainly nastier.