THE COMPUTER SAYS NO,...AND SO MIGHT I

In what must have been the 1970s when there was an early shortage of computer programmers, I was invited to do an aptitude test to train in a computer language called Cobol.  The test only seemed to require my completing picture sequences (an easy win) after which I was pronounced suitable for the training.  I didn’t take up the offer.  Perhaps some basic training back then might have left me better equipped to deal with the digital age now. 

I was at a London railway station recently when I heard a woman shouting, no screaming, into her phone that she couldn’t get through the ticket barrier with her Oyster card.  I watched her search around the station for help but I, barely aware of what an Oyster card was, couldn’t help her either.  No sign of station staff, and the other passengers surged past with barely a glance.  The woman’s hysteria made for an unpleasant moment, a bit frightening because she was so out of control, but also dispiriting that there was so little help available. 

I do understand that level of frustration and panic.  I think it comes from being deprived of an agency you thought was yours, deprived not by a person but by a machine, a machine that you can’t talk to and which is barring your way.  I have just had a meal with a friend in a café where we were required to order our food via a QR code.   The technology was an unnecessary barrier to an otherwise enjoyable experience.  I may not get to screaming point all the time, but moderate frustration is about normal for my interaction with technology at the moment, and I wish that were not so.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am enthralled by mobile phones, emails, texting, photos and videos, GPS tracking, YouTube skill-sharing, card tapping, virtual calls abroad, online banking and shopping, TED talks, online entertainment, researching anything and everything.  No more waiting for letters to arrive, or going to the library to check facts; no more studying maps whilst driving, or waiting for cheques to clear.  Right now I am sitting on a train using my laptop to draft this blog.   

Yet there is a But and it’s a pretty big BUT.  It’s to do with the demands of technology – the registering, logins, passwords, usernames, PINs; the personal data given at every online sale; the keyboard skills needed for every document or form; the endless security demands; the downloads, the uploads… the sheer hard work of it all whilst, at the same time, trying to avoid errors that make the Computer Say No or, worse still, ending up with my being duped by scammers.

Young people smile and tell me that technology is easy, that there will be a Help Desk, Chat Function or Call Centre if needed.   What this older self wants is a warm, patient person by my side who will talk to me in a language that I understand, take things really slowly and even do some inputting of data on my behalf.  Unfortunately, they would have to live in my pocket and be available day and night to be of real help.

Older friends who don’t use computers at all include one or two who have become high-minded about not joining the digital age.  No mobile phones for them which, I’m sorry to say, I just find irritating.  Other friends rely heavily on their adult children or grandchildren to book them an outing or look something up.  I get it, that tug away from a younger world, alienated from something counter-intuitive for this age group.   I am as concerned as anyone else about the internet’s dark side – online pornography and gambling immediately come to mind – but I only have to know that North Korea prohibits its citizens entirely from accessing the internet to know that the digital age allows a freedom of thought that I want to be part of.

Why then does spending time on a computer leave me so brain dead?  I think it is partly to do with the restricted way of thinking – its linear logic often feels stupid and impenetrable.  As someone who loves weaving the different meanings of words into cryptic crossword answers or using empathic skills to discover the unsaid in a conversation, computers demand such limited competence that I, paradoxically, often can’t understand what they are asking for.  

I wonder too if there is something else going on in my older-age disturbance around computers.   I well remember how, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the pop music of the time annoyed the hell out of our parents and their parents’ generation.   If any of them did try to get ‘with it’, we would laugh at their endeavours, delighted that young people had discovered something which shook up the established order. 

I suspect that computing – and it will soon be AI – might similarly be a mechanism for wiping out the power of the old.  And perhaps this is right – that the young nip at the heels of previous generations, creating new ways of doing things so that the world moves on in a different direction, older people keeping up as long as they can but ultimately having to let go of modernity.  This is both a relief and a loss, that the world being created is no longer our world, the dilemmas and the fights left to younger people.  But it is also a recognition of having had our time, whether we used it well or not, and that if we feel pushed up the time-line that is the natural order of things.

So when the computer says No, I ask for help with as much grace as I can summon, holding on to a small part of my competence for as long as I can, aware that an internal screaming at the computer might just be part of a much longer Goodbye.