Making things easy

New technology often makes a task much easier to do.  That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s done better.

One of our consultants is a member of an airline frequent-flyer program.  There are benefits to that, though he doesn’t fly often enough to enjoy most of them.  One drawback arrives in the mail every month: an invitation to apply for a credit card sponsored by the airline.  He has never accepted the invitation.  Yet it has arrived monthly for decades.  The chance of a customer suddenly deciding to take up the invitation after so long a time must be vanishingly small, certainly not worth the paper and postage involved.  But the junk mail arrives nonetheless.

We conclude that the letter keeps coming because it’s an automated process.  Somewhere there is a computer that has been programmed to send these things out, and it duly complies.  No one has to stuff the envelope and lick the stamp, as might have been the case a century ago.  No one even has to think about whether the process is cost-effective; no one is involved at all, because adding a human would increase the cost.  It is easy to do, so it’s done.

Some of us can remember when word processors first replaced typewriters.  Suddenly the intense emphasis on getting the sentence right on the first try went away; you can correct your work infinitely, without having even to insert a new piece of paper.  (You may not believe it, but there was a whole class of workers who did nothing but operate typewriters!  All gone now.)  Initial visions of a “paperless office” were buried in piles of paper, now much easier to produce.  And initial claims that writing would be of higher quality gave way to the realization that much of the stuff was actually worse.  Making something easier to do just meant that more was done.

There are many similar examples.  Cell phones allow more conversations than land-lines; the quality of conversation, from our extended observations, has not improved.  People write far more emails than they ever did paper letters, but (leaving aside the fact that the two are different literary genres) communication has not improved.  Far more pictures are taken with phone cameras than could be produced with film cameras, but it would be hard to argue that their overall quality is better.  Anyone can produce a blog page, communicating with (potentially) millions of other people around the world, something impossible in the days of radio sets and paper letters; but most blogs are hardly worth the trouble of loading the page.

There are a few counterexamples.  Digital cameras can now capture scenes that would be impossible, or nearly so, for film.  Cell phones allow calling the emergency services much faster and from places where there are no other means of communication.  Modern technology is not all useless!

But making something easier to do still means, for the most part, making more of it, not improving it.