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By Newsweek Editors
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We are learning new computer lore every day, it seems, in the office where I work: a different program, upgraded software, new keyboards, additional gizmos, better, faster everything. The technology, which has already transformed newspapering, doesn't sit still. There is about a three-year half-life to whatever we master, and then it's an all-points electronic bulletin suddenly appearing on everyone's screen at the same time--very Orwell, I suppose, but by now it is utterly familiar and has come to seem even oddly caring and cozy: "Classes will be held next week to teach you how to use the new Framis IV. Please sign up with Diane."
And so we do, and in no time at all we come to consider the junked Framis III an absolute antique--a tin lizzie, as my grandmother would have said, referring contemptuously to some outmoded car or other of her young womanhood. Remember, we will say of our newly displaced computers, when we had to write on that old thing? It is as if whatever has just been unceremoniously carted out of our offices hadn't itself been regarded by us only a short time before as a futuristic marvel.
The news in this is that we journalists, about as hidebound and unadventurous a group in our working habits and attitudes toward technological change as you will find, have ceased all that precious, affected grieving about how we were going to hang on to our old Royal typewriters and smudgy carbon paper forever and how this new stuff was simply barbaric, an affront to the very concept of the written word, a giant step on the road to hell, etc. That's gone, as everything we know about human history should have told us it soon would be: In all the current worry over dilemmas created by the advent of the computer age, one thing that should be exempted from worry is the capacity of human beings to adapt to it.
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I think of that same grandmother, in fact, and other elder relatives now dead, who easily traversed lifetimes that saw at least as much astonishing change as we have--from horse-drawn carriages to jet air travel, from stately paced, pre-telephone communication by written letter or personal call to communication by car phone, fax or modem. Just as people around the world have in recent times shown themselves remarkably able to accommodate this kind of rapid technological change, so it didn't ever seem to faze them. They absorbed the developing bounty without a peep and quickly came to depend on it, even though, much as computers do with us, it collapsed all their accustomed notions of time and distance and totally transformed their communal and personal lives. The human machine, in this infinite ability to adjust to radically changed environments, seems to me, if anything, considerably more wondrous than the invented machine, and I expect this to be true even when they get to the Framis 200.
But it is not the individual human ability to adapt that is the problem in the new age. Rather, the problem is the ability of our human handiwork to do so: our institutions and economies and societies. This, too, has been as true of us as it has been of those countries abroad that, for religious and cultural reasons, often collectively reject what their individual members have had no trouble at all embracing. Likewise, no matter how upbeat one is about all the blessings that flow to this country from the new technology in terms of teaching, medicine, scholarship, research, marketing, law enforcement and the rest, it is necessary to acknowledge that the blessing is mixed. You can accept the argument, as I do, for instance, that in the long run jobs will be created, not lost, as a result of the innovation, but in the short run there is bound to be economic displacement and loss; and this is something that those of us lucky enough to be getting the good of the computer age are obliged to pay attention to and seek to make less painful. You can also believe that, in time and with sustained effort, our fundamental constitutional and legal systems can withstand the challenge all this presents and still acknowledge that at least for the moment truly horrendous judicial problems have been created by it in the realms of privacy, competition, personal security, property rights and many others. And you can laugh, as practically everyone in America seemed to do, at Newt Gingrich's idea of some sort of program of dispensing laptop computers to the poor, but you need to recognize that it will be both a social injustice and a drag on the national economy if the computer literacy required to make the 21st century workplace productive and competitive is restricted to the better-off classes.
None of this is insoluble, in my opinion, so long as we bring the right attitude to it, and that is why, microscopic though it may be in the larger picture, the changed attitude of my buddies in journalism is heartening. It may speak of similar change elsewhere. After all, you don't hear nearly so much anymore of that complaint about computers rendering us a nation of isolated, unsociable loners, a couple hundred million selfishly engaged, dull faces each pointed toward his own glowing screen. Actually, a very similar critique could have been made (and sometimes was) by churchmen and secular rulers when the printed book became available and literacy more widespread in Europe many centuries ago. The fearful authorities were half right: control from on high was weakened; but imagination was fed and connection, one human being to another, was enlarged, as was, incidentally, the democratic impulse. In our time something analogous happened, thanks precisely to the intrusion of computer technology--and with it information and a new sense of possibility--in totalitarian Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Yes, we have to address the problems. But the worst way would be by resistance of the kind that has given us, in the past, nonproductive featherbedding in various industries and rigor mortis arrangements in places like the U.S. Congress, which still has a roster of jobs that makes it sound like a knockoff of Buckingham Palace, wanting only a patronage position called Keeper of the Silver Salver. Companies, professions, institutions that insiston clinging to obsolete techniques and habits look attractivelystable/traditional for a while--tweed and pipes and solid oak desks, that sort of thing; then they look charming; then quaint; then ridiculous; then dead. The question is not whether we adjust to the electronic miracles all around us, but whether, as a society, we do it enthusiastically and well.
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