I think the silliest thing I’ve read in a long time is this e-mail attempting to debunk myths about computers such as that they make people more productive. I especially liked this claim,
Fallacy 3: Computers Increase Productivity
– The sound effects in this presentation will make all the difference
– It only took five hours to format this memo
– The shading on this pie chart is simply superb
– The icons on my desktop are lined up perfectly
[sound of car screeching to a halt for each bullet point]We still produce exactly the same amount of letters as in 1945. Back then it
was okay to have 3 or so typos per page without re-typing the entire letter.
Nowadays, we rewrite the letter many, many times, changing fonts, format etc.
We are no better off in terms of letters produced.
Hmmm. I maintain monthly archives of all personal e-mail (i.e., I archive all of the e-mail lists I’m subscribed to, etc., in other archives). In January, I managed to archive more than 11 megabytes of personal e-mail, which works out to close to 2 million words.
I’d be very curious to find out how many people produced that much correspondence in 1945. Just the cost of printing out every e-mail I receive or send would be downright prohibitive, and I know of many people who send and receive far more e-mails than I do every day.
It is interesting, by the way, that traditional measures of economic productivity do not reflect massive increases in productivity from computers. But this is almost certainly a reflection of the limitations of productivity statistics rather than some inherent productivity problems with computers.
Consider something that I do almost every day — retrieve a document on the network at work. There are about 10 gigabytes worth of reports, documents, letters, e-mail, spreadsheets and other files on the network at work. When somebody says, “I need that evaluation report about the Marine Corps that we did sometime in the early 1990s,” I typically do a search of that 10 gigabytes and can generally retrieve the needed file in just a few minutes.
I’d like to see how that would have been accomplished in 1945. In fact, I remember trying to find a way to do that reliably in 1984 and it was still a nightmare then. At the time I worked for the Department of Defense for the summer when I was just a teenager, and was assigned the job of creating a database to track documents related to specific projects. Keeping track of those documents was, in fact, almost a full time job, that today could probably be accomplished with a few hundred dollars worth of software and a cheap server.
But notice, that measuring that sort of difference is extremely hard to do, because it rarely shows up in a quanitifiable way.
Similarly, in the early 1980s I had a collection of a few hundred cassette tapes. The time spent locating and managing the songs I actually wanted to listen to absorbed a lot of time. Today I have a few hundred CDs on my hard drive. Not only is the sound much better than those cassettes, but I can locate favorite songs and create playlists far faster than I was able to do with cassettes. And again, that sort of thing is very difficult to measure with traditional measures of productivity.
