Progress always progress. Even when it's backwards

I’m really keen on the device on a new window in our place. It’s a sort of elongated round-bar at the top of the window. At first, I had no idea what it was for, except that it looked a little like a vent.

Curious device

It turns out that’s exactly what it is.

Why is this interesting?

Well, the history of window technology – there must be a PhD thesis or two out there on the subject – has, I humbly submit, been one of increasing impenetrability. The aim is to keep the weather out. Above all else, that means eliminating draughts.

But it seems that progress has gone too far. Or had unintended consequences. Proving that you really have to be careful what you wish for.

Because windows are so good these days, so airtight, that houses are simply not getting enough air. But the problem engineering created engineering can solve. So we now have a smart little vent to let air back in.

An artificial draught creator, in fact.

Having gone to great lengths to eliminate them, we have gone a little further to reintroduce them.

This all reminds me of A song of reproduction, made famous by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. It’s about the evolution of music reproduction, and starts:

I had a little gramophone, 
I'd wind it round and round. 
And with a sharpish needle, 
It made a cheerful sound.

And then they amplified it,
It was much louder then.
And used sharpened fibre needles, 
To make it soft again.

We make it loud, we make it soft again. We make it airtight, we make it draughty again. I love technology. 

Oh, and progress too, of course.

Time saved, more time to waste

It’s naïve, but I can’t help feeling impressed by the way technology is constantly being harnessed to save time.

Although it’s been around a while now, I’m still delighted with contactless payments in shops. You don’t even have to insert a card into a machine any more, or even enter a PIN, far less sign a piece of paper. Brilliant.

“I can’t get over how quick this system is,” I told the woman behind the till as I paid for some shopping I decided to do before seeing a GP this morning. I was a bit early for the GP, you see, so it made sense to get the purchases out of the way beforehand.

“Very quick,” she replied, “though unfortunately they haven’t speeded up the system that prints your receipt, and we have to wait until I can give it to you.”

It was a good point. We were able to have a brief chat about the weather, as one does, at least in England, while we were waiting for her system to make up its mind to spit out my receipt.

That left me a little thoughtful. The time gained by using the contactless service was as nothing compared to the time it took for the transaction to complete. The whole experience all seemed rather pointless, set in that context.

The thought was underlined still further when I headed off to my GP’s surgery, only to discover that he was running late (and how unusual is that when it comes to GPs?) So any time I might have saved in the shop would only have served to get me more quickly into the GP’s waiting room, killing time until he could see me. Saving time so I could get started on wasting time a little more quickly.

The whole experience put me in mind of a story I once heard about an American businessman in North Africa chatting with a Bedouin trader who regularly crosses the Sahara.

“I can get from one side of the desert to the other with a camel train in under a month,” he announces with pride.

“A month?” exclaims the businessman, “I can cross it in a couple of hours by plane.”

“Yes,” says the Bedouin, “but just what do you do with the time you save?”

Sure this isn’t the right way to go?

So technology continues to impress me. But I have to admit that the efficiency of one machine can be undermined by the inefficiency of another. And ultimately the whole thing depends on the efficiency of the human users of these exciting systems, and I’m not sure it’s progressed particularly over the centuries.

As the Bedouin said, it isn’t the time our machinery saves us that matters, it’s the use we find ourselves able to make of it…

Change and the perils of not keeping pace

Presumably back in the middle ages, a father could watch his son working in the fields and say ‘no, no, it’s a lot easier if you put your right hand there on the plough’, or an ageing master craftsman could tell a young apprentice ‘I think you’d find it easier with the tool at that angle’. Both generations used tools that had barely changed so they could share their expertise, and there must have been comfort in that.

Not much like that now, is it? Today we can see technology introduced and superseded within a few years. As a child I attended an exhibition which included a demonstration of fantastic new technology in the form of a teletype machine. I typed out a message to someone several hundred miles away and got an answer seconds later – it was awesome. But then we got faxes. And now we have e-mail. Who’d dream of using a teletype today?

Sometimes the potential of a new technology is quickly seen and soon fulfilled. Visionaries saw the life-changing possibilities of the internet, and they’ve been proved right. Sometimes, though, we get it completely wrong. For many years, there was a widespread sense that cinema and then TV would kill the book. Why would anyone read when they can watch the film instead? Exactly the opposite has happened: the release of the film boosts sales of the book on which it’s based (Jane Austen would be amazed if she came back). We seem to be publishing more books each year than ever before (over a million new titles a year around the world).

Back at the beginning of printing, there must have been people who got it just as badly wrong. There must have been those who said to Gutenberg ‘movable type? It’s a nice idea but it’ll never catch on. The people who buy books are connoisseurs who prize beauty. You don’t really believe that one of those mass-produced things of yours would displace a top-flight manuscript?’ I visited the Medici library in Florence some years ago and it was striking that they kept right on producing glorious illuminations twenty or thirty years after printing had become established. You can imagine the last illuminators, shutting up the workshop for the final time and saying ‘to us it’s bad enough, it’s the loss of a job, but to the world it’s the loss of something incredibly precious’.

The reaction of the individual to these transforming changes continues to be a problem to this day. One of the difficulties is that when you write a letter to someone (remember doing that?), you are engaging in an essentially private task: you are alone with your sheet of paper; the recipient is alone in reading it. There’s something intimate about the experience. That habit of thought has spilled over into the new media too. We sit at a computer and feel the same sense of privacy: there we are, and out there is the person we’re writing to, and the world shrinks to just the two of us.

This can develop into a real problem when we’re using a tool like Facebook. We may be writing for just one friend, but a lot of others can read what we write, and suddenly it can become frighteningly public. The experience feels private, but it’s anything but.

The situation can become extremely awkward, for instance if you’re an Israeli soldier who is feeling homesick and you make your Facebook status ‘On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, God willing, we come home’. Qatanah is a Palestinian village near Ramallah in the West Bank.

The Facebook message was seen as a breach of security, so the operation was cancelled, for a few days anyway. On the up-side, I suppose Qatanah at least won a few more days of peace before the tanks rolled in and young men were rolled up. As for the soldier, he was moved to ‘non-combat’ duties. At first I thought that he would probably have welcomed the move, but then I thought how the military works: if anyone can find something so unpleasant that it can make you regret being transferred to it from combat duties, it’s surely the army.

The whole incident just underlines how careful we need to be with new technology. That’s not new, of course. That new-fangled stuff with movable type was just as bad – people took to writing whatever they felt like and distributing it to hundreds of others, and sometimes they paid for it with their lives, in some cases at the stake.

Life may have been duller, but at least it was safer, when sons could learn from their fathers to use technology that had barely changed in a generation.