HEADLINE: ITC ANNA TEXT/CAPTIONS: ITC FRANKLIN GOTHIC DEMI/BOOK KENNETH HARRISON © 1992
Ruled By Tools New York Times columnist Russell Baker ponders computers, junk mail, and the "silliness of progress" fter using my powerful word processor to write a letter to a friend, I printed it on my state-of-the-art laser printer. What a professional look it had! It didn't look like a letter at all. It looked like a piece of junk mail. Every day brings a dozen documents that look exactly like this letter. Every day they flutter into my trash can unread. One knows their messages too well: An astounding new shampoo is available. An officeholder praises his own achievements. A sales pitch disguised as a lottery advises recipient to steel himself for the arrival of an armored truck full of dollars. A friend of the President says a contribution of $10,000 is imperative though $25 will not be sneered at. My beautifully printed letter showed me caught in the American comedy about the silliness of progress. Just look at this letter: Writing it required several thousand dollars' worth of electronic machinery, not to mention a supply of electricity provided by vast corporations whose hot wiry tentacles stretched across thousands of miles. With all these resources, what emerged? A letter that looked so like junk mail that my friend would probably toss it away unread. What's more, it was a poorly written letter—not a graceful phrase in it, too much stiffness in the prose joints, and twice as long as it needed to be. Such gassiness is characteristic of writing done on computers. Computers make the physical toil of writing so negligible that the writer can write on forever, and often does, as I am currently doing at this very particular and precious point in time, a.k.a. now. Many books only 290 pages routinely wheeze on nowadays to 800, 900, 999. My second-rate letter with the junk-mail look is a typical child of progress. With a goose quill, Thomas Jefferson could have written a letter at a fraction of the cost. It would have looked like the work of a human being, and it would have been a better letter than mine. It would have been better not only because Jefferson had the more interesting mind, but also because writing with goose-feathers is such messy work that a writer has to put his mind in order before starting. With a computer, he merely flips a switch, then lets his brain mosey around in the fog on the chance it may bump into an idea. My second-rate letter produced at great expense reminds me of those silly men who drive around with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding a telephone. Don't they realize the horror of living in a world where there is no haven anywhere, even in the sweet, sensuous privacy of your automobile, from the accursed telephone? Apparently not. The high cost of car telephones suggests that people who have them will pay big money to avoid being alone with themselves. Often they are so desperate to experience communication that they call talk-radio shows, phoning in from the highway to abuse Congressmen or explain what's wrong with the hometown baseball team. The plight of the modern American is comic, not tragic as the overwrought quality of the daily news report would have us believe. The guy using $3000 worth of machinery to write a pal a letter that will look like a piece of junk mail is part of the national comedy. So is the man driving down the highway, phone in hand, telling Radio World what's on his mind. Both these people have the same problem. Technological genius has provided them with wonderful machinery which, used discretely, will bless their lives. -Yet they let the machinery use them, and so become its victims, one depriving himself of peace of mind by letting the telephone get out of control, the other turning friendly letters into junk-mail facsimiles simply because electronics makes it possible. The criticism often made of progress is that it makes life ever more complicated, ever more stressful and ever more demanding. All true, but its blessings are also considerable, or would be if we could stop being progress' servants and make progress start serving us. At present, alas, we are in the comic position of being tools. And we yearn to be tragic, not comic. Prince Hamlet, not Falstaff. Copyright 1992 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. (TECH TALK BEGINS ON PAGE 40) Alphabets, Inc. offers a new look at an old friend, original faces inspired by the lettering of Oz Cooper. 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