I was reading an article on Slashdot today. This is not unusual in and of itself. However, this one asked a question about the relationship between technology and stress. The comments were the usual Slashdot drivel with the odd insightful or interesting comment thrown in. All this got me thinking about stress in the modern technological society.
As I thought about it in the back of my mind as I read through comment after comment, I realized that technology is not the problem. People have an expectations about technology which have a much more direct causal relationship to stress. We, not unreasonably, expect technology to work. But we also unreasonably expect technology to be able to solve every single problem immediately. Or sooner. In addition, we expect that technology somehow never fails. We expect that it will know just exactly what we mean. In short, we expect it to be more than a set of tools. This is unreasonable. Unreasonable expectations usually cause stress since if it’s unreasonable, it likely will not be met.
Expectations are not the whole of problem, however. Everyone seems to have these expectations. Even the people that know the expectations are unreasonable persist in having them. Obviously, there must be a reason for this.
It seems to me that most often when a new technology is created, there are people who expect that it is somehow a magic bullet for some situation. There are always unreasonable expectations for new technologies. This is only natural because the new technology is, after all, unknown. Its limits and its capabilities are not known. Initially, even the inventors will not know. It is, therefore, reasonable that there will be a period of time during which unreasonable expectations may be expected.
Another problem with a new technology is that while expectations may be reasonable, the implementation may not be capable of meeting them. As time passes, better implementations will be created which will have better capabilities. Over time, as experience with a particular technology increases, the gap between expecatation and capability tends to narrow. As this happens, more and more people are comfortable with what a technology can do and they use the tool for an appropriate purpose.
During the period of time where expectations regularly exceed capability, anyone using the technology would tend to expect more than can be delivered and will end up causing themselves stress over it. Either that or they will give up on it entirely or reduce their expectations significantly. Similarly, people who expect little will periodicallly be surprised and raise their expectations as capabilities are demonstrated. This category tends to have less stress with new technology.
Now all of this would be relatively minor if a new technology was introduced slowly and only used by people who understood the potential applications of such technology. And, historically, new technologies have been relatively slow to catch on. This allowed people to get used to technologies and adapt to their use. This would reduce the overall stress that technology would cause.
Now consider the modern technological society. Consider the rate at which new innovations and technologies are screaming onto the stage. Consider also that many of these technologies are based on nearly ubiquitous technologies. Many are simply outgrowths of well known technologies.
For the sake of discussion, let us consider the telephone. Most people reading this will know what a telephone does. Most people have some idea how to operate a standard telephone set to make a call and to receive a call. Now consider that a telephone can only do those two tasks. Now we start adding features to the telephone, such as caller id, hands free operation, hold, and so on. But each of these features has a clear interface and does not interfere with the basic operatoin of a telephone. Thus, most people have relatively little trouble dealing with it since the telephone does what they expect it to do. This is because the telephone has been around for long enough for people to get used to it.
Now consider the personal computer. Some people expect it to do their taxes, balance their chequebook, write to their grandmother, mow the lawn, and so on. Well, most people probably don’t expect it to mow the lawn. However, most people don’t know what it can’t do. They expect that it can somehow magically do anything. In fact, they somehow even expect it to know what they meant when it does the precise wrong thing they told it to do. They have not made the connection that just like dialling a wrong number on a telephone connects you to the wrong party, giving the wrong instructions to a computer will not provide the intended result.
Some of the expectations people have about computers can be excused by ignorance. Eventually, people will learn what a computer can do and what it can’t. Or that’s the theory anyway. Can anyone who is reading this state authoritatively what it is reasonable to expect a computer to do? Probably not. I can say that it is reasonable to expect a computer to be able to store and retrieve information. And I can expect it to be able to do arithmetic. But is it reasonable to expect it to solve a differential equation? Or identify grandma in a crowd? Or know what I’m saying? Or thinking? Or perhaps to retrieve "that document that I wrote the other day but which I never finished and I don’t know where I put it and it is partly about my dog Joe?"?
While the above problem can be put to rest with people simply becoming more familiar with computers and lowering their expectations, there is another factor. We just don’t know what the limits of computers are. That’s right. It seems that every day, someone is making a computer do even more fantastic and seemingly improbably things. People have just come to expect this since it has been happening for so long. And by extension, all other technology is expected to do the same thing. Never mind whether the new fangled feature is useful, it just better have it. And it better work. And it better be in my computer. And my friend’s computer. And the computer at the public library. And my telephone. And my car stereo. And my socks.
Then, there’s the fact that people are telling us that a computer can do this or that or the other thing. But they haven’t figured out how to make it do that quite right. So when we get the widget that makes the computer do some task and it fails to do so, we are disappointed. But we also expected it to work and were counting on it. So we planned on it working. Now we have stress because it didn’t work. And this completely ignores every more inferior implementations of some tasks where expectations are reasonable for the computer but the software fails to perform.
So now, with a single invention, we have the usual new invention stresses. But we also have the stress of inferior implementations getting worse rather than better. We have a technology where whole industries have been created to manufacture expectations, most of which will never be met. Yet we persist in buying into them even as we get burnt time after time. This is probably due to wishful thinking and an apparently recent failure in people to apply common sense to anything. After all, computers are supposed to make life easier so why should we have to put any effort into understanding them?
Now the same type of operation has been shifting into other technological fields. Now people expect ever more features from their toaster ovens, automobiles, telephones, shoes, eyeglasses, windows, furnaces, and socks. And whole industries have sprung up to provide these features, most often at the expense of the basic functionality or comprehensibility of the base object. And, of course, because only a finite number of items can be produced, the simplest form of many items simply disappears forcing people to get the newest piece of confusion every time something breaks.
So we are all now on a treadmill. We constantly feel that if we fall off, we’ll never get back on so we simply keep buying the newest thing and fretting because we don’t understand it. When we do understand it, we fret about being too far behind the front lines. Then we fret about fretting. And worry about what technology is doing to us. Then we worry about what worrying is doing to us. Then we worry about how it’s all pointless. And, to cap it all off, we worry about what we would do if we weren’t worrying about everything. All of which causes stress.
In short, we have, with modern technology, managed to create a culture of stress. What a long winded way to ramble into a conclusion, eh? Now you’re worried that you spent too long reading this diatribe. And you’re stressed over the fact that you now have ten minutes less to fret about that project at the office tomorrow. If you’re not worried, then, just maybe, you’ve got it beat.
But is there really a causal link between technology and the culture of stress? Personally, I don’t think so. Think about it. What actually causes stress? Expectations. In particular, unreasonable expectations. Expecting a computer to be able to understand your emotional state, for example, is currently an unreasonable expectation. Similarly, expecting Microsoft to make software that doesn’t crash randomly is currently unrealistic. Expecting everything to be done just so with no margin for error is immensely unrealistic.
And there, we get right down to the crux of the stress culture. Here we have created, with the aid of all our technology, a culture where everything has to be done according to strict timelines and closely regulated. Resources must be allocated as frugally as possible. So now, on top of stressing over technology, we stress about how we don’t have time to do everything. We stress about how technology makes things harder because we don’t know how the technology works. We stress about stressing about things. And so on.
Why do we do this? As far as I can see, we do this because everyone else does. That’s right. We have become so rapt in our tightly controlled worlds that we simply expect everyone else to be too. And because everyone else expects us to be, we continue to be. And we label anyone who is not rapt a nonconformist or a disruptive influence. We teach children from the cradle that we must achieve ever more than before.
Now to the point of this whole rant, really, is just to make the following statement:
Technology is not the cause of the culture of stress. We are.
The solution to the problem should be self evident. If it isn’t, take fifty steps back from your job, computer, cellphone, and so on and think about it.