Tools, Tasks

For most of human history the task – flaking a stone, stirring the soup, welding steel – has pre-dated and determined the shape of the tool.  Ever since they escaped from Xerox Park, computers and their applications – the net, web 2.0 – have been tools in search of tasks.

In 1978, when I was working for a large documentary film library, Xerox produced a series of 8 films to introduce word processing. Though I didn't appraise the whole series, which we did buy, I remember the films aimed at management emphasizing the money companies could save – fewer secretaries / administrative assistants, smaller typing pool – because the new technology was so much more productive. 

Saving costs through layoff or hiring fewer workers was, in fact, the only selling-point for this convoluted new way of creating business letters.

The films aimed at the prospective staff emphasized promotional openings: those lucky, snappy, serious administrative assistants! 

The typing pool, renamed I forget how, all male, in an open-plan office with floor-to-ceiling panels angling light from the building's glass wall, was supposed to be happy with its gadgets. The guy who wasn't being interviewed, the one out of focus, the one in the seat in the background, looked miserable, resentful and trapped. I knew then the scenario would produce a rich harvest of lawsuits, but thought the grounds would be sensory deprivation and mental cruelty. In 1978 nobody knew that salvation, such as it was, had lain in the trip to the filing-cabinet, the manual carriage-return, the interleaving of the carbons, the winding them around the platen.

Beyond word-processing, for which they had been invented, computers languished as a mass-consumer item until email. That was their killer app, the reason so many people decided they had to have one. Email and computers would strengthen community by improving communication.

Web 2.0 is a series of tools in search of tasks.

My local library has embedded Homeless / Mental Health / Food Resources information on the its website. It's a good idea. This information needs to be made available.

But it occurs to me that putting it on the Library website points to a basic problem: most of the homeless don't have access to computers. The homeless have to go to the library and ask for the info, if they think to do it or are told to; having the info on the website instead of in a filing cabinet behind the desk is a distinction without a difference when it comes to answering the question.

The fact that this information will be coming from a website instead of from neighbours / social workers / churches / the immediate community, doesn't mend our social divisions  It makes them crystal clear.