I tried recently to revive a bit of geeky fun I used to have at football and cricket matches — only to discover that technological advance, which by and large makes things better and more convenient, had in this case made something worse and less convenient.
My innocent amusement used to be to take an old-fashioned thing known as a transistor radio to a match and listen to the BBC radio commentary on headphones as I watched the live game.
The commentary would be in perfect synchronisation with the action because, of course, radio signals travel millions of times faster than sound. As magazines for spoddy boys like me used to point out, a person listening to the chimes of Big Ben in Australia via the World Service hears them before someone standing on the other side of Parliament Square.
Well, I don't own a regular old LW/MW transistor radio any more, so when my football team happened to be playing in the Radio 5 commentary game one Saturday, I took along a tiny DAB radio — a Clarity Portable DAB Cube, since you ask.
Within seconds, it became clear that this was a waste of time on two counts. Firstly, the DAB signal in Britain is awful, so the commentary kept cutting out. Still more absurdly, I realised that DAB doesn't broadcast in real time. Yes, everything you hear on a 'modern' radio, including time signals, is delayed by two to five seconds.
As an experiment, I also tried the internet stream of the game, using the WunderRadio app on my iPhone. In this case, the wonders of technology delayed the live broadcast by some 30 seconds.
Since then, I have been thinking about other examples of technology slowing up or complicating processes that used to be simple, and there is a remarkable number of them. The phenomenon, I have discovered, is becoming known in techie circles as 'disruptive innovation'.
And there's none more disruptive, of course, than what 'they' have done to our TV sets. I'm not unaware that TV as a technology is rather more sophisticated than it once was. But — and again I'm trying not to be fogeyish about it — not long ago, we had four channels of stuff worth watching, with a genius mechanical device called a knob to switch between them. Now we have hundreds of choices of stuff barely worth watching — and an impenetrably complex way of selecting between them. It's not entirely fatuous to say that the return of the knob and some kind of vastly simplified control system would be welcomed by millions of people.
Another staple technology, the car, has also suffered in many ways from becoming too clever for its own good. Mine has dozens of electronic functions that I don't need and never use, which is irritating enough.
Worse, whenever the car is running badly, the service centre now tells me it needs a software upgrade, as if it were a computer. Needless to say, the upgrade never touches the problem, which always turns out to be basic and mechanical. The prime reason for the Toyota Land Cruiser's 60-year hegemony in harsh-terrain markets is that all but the most necessary electronics are stripped out of its basic models. Its legendary reliability is the result of this.
As consumers, we are infuriatingly slowed up by advanced, timesaving technologies several times a day. Every corner shop now has a bar-code-reading cash till at which the assistant frowns and holds you up for a few frustrating seconds each time you buy something. It was vastly quicker when old-style, numerate shopkeepers used a mechanical cash till.
The London Underground, similarly, used to employ manual ticket checkers who got passengers through at extraordinary speed. They were replaced by mechanical gates that slowed things up horrendously. Then came the London Oyster Card, a ticketless touch system designed to speed things up, but which, of course, has instead put the brakes on a fraction more.
Watch people checking through with Oyster cards and you'll see there's almost a second's delay for every transaction. When you're a tired commuter and there are 20 people ahead of you, each one delayed as the IT does its slow thing, this feels like anything but progress.
blog comments powered by
