We're barely keeping up with pressures of tech-savvy world

Being Frank/Frank Ameduri

I think I was in third grade the first time somebody suggested that technology would someday set me free. It was on The Wonderful World of Disney, I think. It was a short film from the early '60s that showed "The Home of the Future." The house in question had all kinds of automatic stuff - lights, refrigerator, heater. There was a phone with a TV screen where you could actually look at the person you were talking to. It would be almost like really talking to someone, except you wouldn't have to feed them or make coffee for them or smell them. Cool.

The idea that our brains would liberate us is as old as … our brains. The reality that we just keep smarting ourselves into more stress and ridiculous behavior always escapes us.

There's no question that technology has made certain tasks easier. When I got started in the newspaper business, some newspapers were still using lead type. The process required a person who could spell entire articles backwards, and who could actually see and manipulate type as small as agate. These were people who eventually had more in common with moles and other subterranean dwellers.

None of the newspapers where I worked had that sort of system. By then we were printing copy out on long sheets of photographic paper, cutting them apart with X-Acto knives, waxing the backs and sticking them on newspaper-sized sheets of paper. Lines of all kinds came in the form of tape, and photos had to be half-toned and sized by use of an arcane proportional wheel first devised during the reign of Ptolemy II. All of that would be photographed, chanted over and then run through a complex plating and printing procedure that was known only to the high priests of printing.

Now all of that is done on computers, and we can go straight to plate from a computer screen if we want to. No more X-Acto wounds. No hot wax burns. No blindness by the age of 42. You'd think it was a great improvement. We're not putting out much more in the way of pages and stories these days, and it's a lot easier to do it. By all rights, journalists should be spending a great deal more time playing golf and watching daytime TV in our bathrobes. That's not the way technology works in a corporate world, though.

With "efficiency" as our watchword, we're simply doing the same things with fewer people, and we've found all kinds of interesting new ways to fill our time. On top of that, the addition of technology has brought with it a host of new, technologically joyous problems. When the Internet goes down, the power goes out or more than one computer locks up at a time, everyone in the newsroom just sits, staring blankly at one another or out the windows. We know that there should be some sort of contingency plan, some sort of backup.

Even on science-fiction shows there's always the option to "go manual." We can't go manual in the newsroom. We don't have any typewriters anymore, and if we did, none of us has sufficient forearm strength to operate one. If you handed a modern reporter a bottle of Wite-Out or a strip of correction tape, he'd either attempt to paint his fingernails or eat the tape. It might as well be papyrus or an astrolabe. When the newsroom goes dark for more than 15 minutes, people start getting squirrelly.

"What should we do?" someone will ask. "How long before we can just go home?"

Even when things are working well, we're barely keeping up with the pressures of our technologically improved world. We know this because we've made necessary terms like multi-tasking. In previous generations multi-tasking was known by other names - names like panic, nervous breakdown and disaster.

On Wednesday, I was multi-tasking. On one phone line I was talking to an angry reader who wanted to know why I couldn't do something about the traffic on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. On another line I was talking with someone from Kentucky who was trying to convince me to purchase his Southern Cookin' column. At the same time I was trying to interview a young reporter for a spot in the newsroom, answering questions for the guy who was changing the lock on my office door - for reasons unknown to me - writing an editorial and chopping vegetables for a stir-fry I hoped to have for dinner later.

That's what the technological liberation has done for us all.

The funny thing is that the short film about the home of the future was more accurate than I'd like to think. They actually make refrigerators that will keep your dinner cold until an hour or so before you arrive home, and then cook it for you, so it's ready when you walk in. I'm not making that up. We really do have phones with cameras attached, and we can even watch movies in our cars. Computers have become so powerful we can now use gaming software that enables to pretend we're doing all the things we would be doing if we only had time.

We can play games in a variety of formats - building little digital towns to live in, going on little digital dates, having little digital affairs and getting big, juicy, digital promotions at our high-powered digital jobs.

Men no longer have to be trusted with shopping lists. Now they can wander around the store with their digital cell phones while the little lady guides them to the groceries while driving the kids to soccer and remotely programming the microwave to put the finishing touches on the frozen chicken Marsala. If that's not relaxing, I don't know what is. Nobody even notices that the poor woman is swerving all over the road - other drivers are too busy handling their own phone calls, DVDs and faxes to care.

Maybe that's what people mean when they talk about the Good Ol' Days. It's not that things were easier to do, it's just that we were only doing a sane number of things. Who needed an electronic organizer when you knew you only had 10 things to do each day, and three of them were breakfast, lunch and dinner?

Frank Ameduri wants everyone to take a deep breath and hang up the darned phone once in a while.