Digital divisors

It occurred to me not long ago that my relationship with my computer resembles that of a cargo cultist to a steamer: without really knowing how it works, I expect it to bring me stuff. Ordering from Zappos is the closest thing I've seen to magic since watching my kids get born. But it goes beyond material items: I now expect such intangibles as companionship, self-worth and, dare one say it, happiness all to reach me via the sleek, inscrutable box on my desk.

I viewed my first computer, a 20-pound laptop (apparently I had quite a manly lap in those days) as a time-saver and nothing more: no longer would I have to write a draft by hand or typewriter, mark it up, and start all over. Of course, the time I wasted setting up the machine (I was at one point dangerously close to being able to claim fluency in MS-DOS) sucked up a considerable portion of the time saved on editing.

The computer began to really consume time rather than produce it when I joined CompuServe... and then Prodigy and then AOL and then, with the advent of the Web, the entire computer-using world. Suddenly, the skills required to hold a job or maintain a relationship were the skills required to operate a computer. Trouble is, computers almost immediately began to evolve faster than the learning curve of all but a few human beings. With the multiplicity of programming languages now in use, not to mention the mind-numbing proliferation of features even in programs meant specifically to appeal to the technologically uneducated (i.e., consumers) I think it can now be said there is not a single person on earth who truly "knows" computers -- least of all programmers, who seem to be forced to unlearn the skills of adaptability that once seemed like the keys to white-collar success.

Work now, it seems to me, consists largely of learning computer features that one did not think one needed at the last job -- or even yesterday -- but that the person in the next cubicle considers essential. I was once ordered, for example, to create the script for a three-day conference in a spreadsheet. This is a completely inappropriate use of a spreadsheet, which is meant for crunching numbers, not massaging text. I learned a lot about spreadsheets that week, including the precise number of characters that can fit into a cell, but nothing that improved the quality of the product I'd been hired to produce: words meant to be spoken and heard. Ultimately the words went back into Word, whence they came, and from there out of the intended mouths and into the intended ears.

Any talk of curing the "digital divide" by providing children with computers is misguided. There is no "digital divide" -- there is, instead, an infinite number of digital divisors; opportunities for idiosyncratic usage habits to create misunderstandings. The personalization that the personal computer enables happens to make it uniquely unsuited for organizational life. It no longer matters what "platform" an organization adopts: we are all now on different wavelengths.