Redefining Murphy’s Law

My last name has gotten a bad name. Though Murphy’s Law is truer than anything else you may know, it’d be nice if someone else took the brunt of it for a while. Any Smith’s, Jones’, or Chen’s want to share this burden?

If nothing else, I’d at least like to try to upstage the infamy with a new dictum that I hope will have a positive, rather than negative, effect on generations to come, in the name of Murphy. It is this:

A student who chooses not to learn cannot be taught
A student who chooses to learn cannot be stopped.

Dissertation to follow (hopefully!).

Technology = impersonalization?

This is a rough draft of an essay for one of my classes.

Technology always inherently leads to impersonalization. Tools replace people. Less people are required for tasks the used to require more people. We are learning how to do more with less. Doing more tasks with less energy. Making more money with less investment. Communicating with more people with less personal interaction. Though technology is the pioneering infrastructure behind globalization, from the first telephone to e-mail to publicly accessible videoconferencing, it is still depersonalizing our interactions. Just because I can visually see and audibly hear someone on a screen is not the same as having that person in the room; worse yet when we replace such interactions for genuine face-to-face meetings. Some argue that we are more connected than ever. But what is the quality and nature of that connection?

Furthermore, some say this is the information age. There is more information available than we know what to do with. Literally. Some people are discovering that posting party pictures of themselves on Facebook may affect employment. Employers and potential employers can often find a good deal of information about a candidate before the first interview by briefly “googling” the person’s name. Even scarier than that is the fact that there is so much information out there that some or most of the information they find might be wrong! So, either way, there is a lot of information out there that we do not necessarily know how to handle or regulate. Dissatisfied employees can use company time and Internet resources to search for other jobs or see how their company’s benefits package stacks up to their competitors.

Technological advancement is not only ubiquitous in major American cities and corporations, it is expected. However, our means are evolving faster than our ends. Our methods of communication transmit ideas before we have enough time to think about what we just communicated. Instant messages often become more of a stream of consciousness than a legitimate dialog. Well-thought out statements seem to be limited in supply.

Perhaps paper was not such a bad idea. We wrote out our ideas. Revised it. Scribbled out some words. Didn’t like the way all of the scribbles made the document looked. Rewrote a clean draft implementing all of the changes. Perhaps cuneiform was even better. You absolutely had to know what you were going to “say” and how you were going to “say” it before you baked your words into the clay.

With the advent of the word processor we are communicating more and thinking less. Perhaps the writing and revising process looks too clean. When we replace a word we forget that the replacement was an improvement. Our Word document isn’t full of scribbled out words. Both the incorrect and corrected words look nice on the screen. Embarrassingly, many of us were relieved when our web browsers and e-mail programs began catering to our increasing illiteracy by implementing an automatic spell-checker.

Human Resource Managers already face the daunting task of holding our status as human and corporately owned resources in tension. Technological impersonalization makes it even harder to keep the “human” in Human Resources. While e-mails may free up some time in their schedules, they lose the personal interaction they used to get when they had to communicate with their underlings face to face. Efficiency cannot be the highest value when it comes to working with people. This is where technology and Human Resource Management come into conflict. Efficiency is everything to technology, but it means relatively little to relationships. Tell your wife how much money you saved on her flowers and you will probably negate all the positive feelings you meant to convey. Thus, technology is great for tasks but terrible for relationships.

A confession: Technological heresy

I’ve fought tirelessly in campaigning for a paperless school, teaching several classes without requiring one sheet of printed paper. I was assigned a user name on the 8th day, of the cult of Mac, of the tribe of Apple, a technophile of technophiles; in regard to HTML, a code head, as for zeal, persecuting paper users everywhere, as for backing up important data, faultless (Philippians 3:4-6 if you haven’t caught on).

I’ve been working on computers for about as long as I can remember. My earliest memory involved a computer that ran at 8 Mhz in “turbo” mode. My most recent experience has been that of getting my Apple certification so I could help support our all-Mac college.

However, I wonder if all this technology is really helping us as much as we think.

I submit the hypothesis that our technological advances have made little, if any, net-contributions to the tasks we would otherwise do by hand. That is, I believe it comes out as a wash when you weigh the highly publicized advances against the ubiquitously subtle regresses.

Internet enabled classrooms are used for iChat and Facebook more often than for research purposes. For all the time and money computers save us in administration, we spend in downtime when they crash or require maintenance. For all the nicely printed purchasing request documents, we could have handwritten the same information in less than a third of the time.

Simply put, is technology the same thing as progress?

Again, I think I’ve grown accustom to the hundreds of little time-suckers, assuming that the advances somehow outweigh these frequent little problems.

I am very tempted to require hard copies of assignments for my classes. There. I said it. This just might be my Damascus Road.