Technology at a personal level

In those days before modern technology, police could beat up private citizens without fear that someone armed with a video camera might record their actions. Politicians could make outrageous statements and then claim they’d been quoted out of context, since video recorders didn’t exist. Dictators could promote the glories of their regimes without fear of contradiction by any ordinary Internet blogger. If you wanted to see a TV show, you had to watch when the network chose, not at an hour of your preference. If your car broke down on a lonely road, you had no choice but to hike to the nearest house for help, or wait until another car came along.

In business, the most critical tool was the Rolodex, which provided useful names, addresses, and phone numbers at an executive’s fingertips. Billionaire Chicago entrepreneur A.N. Pritzker, patriarch of the Hyatt Hotels chain as well as the Marmon Group of industrial companies, was famous for his omnipresent three-ring binder filled with such valuable information, which his secretary updated daily — a compendium that was less useful and more cumbersome than the handheld devices routinely carried today by you and me and millions of ordinary middle-class people across the globe.

Flying cars, or Twitter?

Why am I telling you this? Because Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon recently contended that today’s information revolution has made only slight impact on people’s lives, unlike the dawn of the 20th century, when electricity brought light in the evenings, the telephone and automobiles killed distance, and modern household appliances liberated women from domestic slavery. In The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Gordon essentially echoes the venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s famously dim view of information technology: “We wanted flying cars, but instead we got 140 characters.”

That got me thinking about specific ways — large and small — that the IT revolution has changed my life. Three examples:

My friend’s wedding

In 1967 I lived in Portland, Indiana, a county-seat town about 75 minutes’ drive west of Dayton, Ohio. One of my best friends was getting married in Easthampton, New York, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and I had written a long epic poem that I intended to read at the celebration. My wife and I planned to drive to Dayton and fly to New York on Wednesday, spend the long weekend with my family in New York, and then drive to Easthampton for the wedding on Sunday. But that Wednesday a blizzard struck eastern Indiana, forcing us to abandon our trip altogether. So I had four days to figure out how to transmit my poem to someone else who would read it at the wedding.

Today, with fax machines, Federal Express, and email, that would be no challenge at all. But in 1967 I had just two choices, both daunting:

1. I could make a long-distance phone call to another wedding guest and verbally recite my poem while he laboriously transcribed it — a process so prohibitively expensive then that I barely considered it. (Such a call would have cost about a dollar — the equivalent of $10 today — per minute, and the call might have consumed a half-hour.)
2. Or I could entrust my poem to the uncertain mercies of the U.S. Post Office. But would such a mailing arrive in time over a holiday weekend?

Leaving nothing to chance, I made three copies of the poem — photocopy machines had come on the market just a few years earlier — and sent them to three different friends who’d been invited to the wedding. Leaving nothing to chance, and at relatively great expense, I sent all three missives via both “air mail” (remember that?) and “special delivery” (remember that?). One of those three letters, thank goodness, reached its intended recipient in time. But what aggravation and expense I experienced for a task that, today, my six-year-old grandson could handle with ease.

Stuck in the elevator

One Sunday in the 1980s, I stopped by my Center City office for an hour or so. On my way down afterward, the elevator stopped dead between floors, leaving me stranded in an empty building. I pushed the alarm button, but nothing happened. I picked up the elevator’s emergency phone, but no one answered. Without a cell phone, I had no other way to apprise my wife or the building’s manager as to the problem. Luckily, after perhaps half an hour, the elevator began moving again and delivered me to the lobby. Today, armed with a simple cell phone, I wouldn’t need luck.

Hero or villain?

As an author, I spent more than 50 years wrestling with the enigma of the stagecoach and Pony Express superintendent Jack Slade (1831-1864), who was often dismissed by Western historians as a vicious drunk but was also credibly said to have played a critical role in holding the Union together on the eve of the Civil War. Was Slade a hero or a villain? The question seemed impossible to answer, given the world in which Slade operated: a time and place virtually devoid of courts, newspapers, or other written records, where the word-of-mouth fables reined supreme as sources of information. When confronted with conflicting accounts of Slade’s deeds, historians tended to seek refuge in some locution like, “Most historians believe . . .” But of course history is not a popularity contest. To sift the truth about Slade from his legends, I spent fruitless decades engaging in the time-consuming exchange of letters with other Western history buffs who shared my interest.

Then computers and the Internet arrived. By using the “search” function on my word-processing program and pasting phrases from various accounts into Google, I was able to see for the first time that many stories about Slade could be traced back to a single original account — which was wrong. At the same time, through email, I was able to assemble a virtual advisory board of Western historians who provided feedback within hours instead of weeks, and often transmitted supporting documents as well — simply because the Internet made such transmissions so easy.

The fruit of my labors — Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest For Jack Slade, the West’s Most Elusive Legend — was published by Westholme in 2008. (I concluded that Slade was indeed a tragic hero in American history whose reputation was unjustly maligned by his surviving enemies.) But without computers and the Internet, I’m convinced, I’d be working on it still.

Gutenberg’s shadow

Professor Gordon argues that 20th-century technology was revolutionary, whereas 21st-century technology is merely evolutionary. But the 21st century has barely begun. Gordon may change his mind once he comes in contact with driverless cars, 3-D printing, and the Internet transmission of objects (as opposed to words and images).

Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the 15th century produced the same initial negative reaction that greeted the Internet in the 20th: that it would stir up the masses and lead to an outpouring of pornography. And it did, it did. And so did the Internet. After all, letters and words are merely abstract symbols. And what positive difference could abstract symbols make in anyone’s life?