I enjoyed kdan's post reminiscing about life before email:
gemini://kdan.smol.pub/dicta_phone
My work life has gone in a very different direction, but I suspect we're pretty-much contemporaries. Many of the experiences described in the piece remind me very much of my own.
There was great excitement in the small non-profit where I worked in about 1986 when we decided we were going to put an Amstrad computer on everyone's desk. 4 machines! We used to work with unemployed people who were contemplating setting up their own business, and if it came to it work with them on their business plan. We had been preparing cash-flow forecasts on large sheets of graph paper, so the spreadsheet came as a major revelation. (I had a spreadsheet on my Sinclair QL, so I was immediately "the expert")
After we'd had the Amstrads for about a month, I happened to see my colleague sitting in front of his, columns of client's figures on the screen, a calculator in his left hand. I thought he was checking the computer's addition.
But no.
Nobody had told him the spreadsheet could actually add things up.
He's assumed it was just a way of keeping columns and rows tidy. So he was using it exactly as we'd used the graph paper, putting in the numbers, adding them up with his calculator.
I think of that story quite often when a new technology comes along. We tend at first to use a new tool as though it were simply a shinier version of the thing it replaces. The spreadsheet was electronic graph paper. Email was a faster letter. The web was a collection of electronic brochures. It takes a while before the possibilities of the tool begin to change the process itself.
And, of course, that change isn't necessarily an improvement. Once the spreadsheet could do the arithmetic, we could make bigger and more complicated spreadsheets. Once email made sending a message almost effortless, we could send vastly more messages. Tools don't simply make an existing task easier: sooner or later they alter our expectations of what the task is, how quickly it should be done, and how much of it we ought to be doing in the first place. Perhaps that's the more interesting thing to notice whenever a new tool appears: not just "What can this do for me?", but "What is using this going to make me do differently?"
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk