Computers

IT OCCURRED TO ME some months ago, in a thread of toots I think is worth reproducing here and now, later, as a blog entry, as I waited the usual three or four minutes for Word to open my document, that the basic tasks most people use PCs for (browsing file systems, opening documents and working on them, email) have barely improved or changed since the early 2000s. And have not sped up or become in any way more productive.

In fact there has been one great advance in personal computing since the Win95 era and that’s video conferencing becoming standard as Teams/Zoom etc. meetings. Which are certainly experienced as a productivity impact, but not necessarily as a gain.

Digital imaging/photography has altered completely in quality and in life impact, particularly with the use of phone cameras in everyday life. But the tech has been impactful largely in the device, not on PCs, where it’s about as productive to use Photoshop as it was two decades ago.

And for a lot of these basic white collar tasks, like reading email and passing documents around, it’s now significantly more arduous to do things than it was in 2000. Using computer is experienced as an endless series of demands, to multiply authenticate, to sign up for another service, to learn yet another new means to transfer one file from one computer to another. Or cloud. God.

The computer makes us do more, which is the reverse of the promise of futurism.

I was going to say, vastly more information has been digitised and is available online. But Web searching for information is significantly worse and less reliable than it has ever been. So that’s a wash I think.

The use of computers for leisure and socialising, on the other hand, those are unrecognisably changed and the experience is in every way better and more powerful, by magnitudes. Modern gaming would have blown your c.2000 ears straight back. So it’s not that it can’t be done.

I have two great big screens now, which is cool, and which beat the hell out of my old 1024x768 CRT for coolness. but it’s not clear that they make my work more productive.

I have a nice clicky mechanical keyboard because I personally am richer than I was in 2000, letting me buy it myself, and because Chinese manufacturing has advanced so far. Again, not clear it makes my work more productive.