Computers and efficiency: Here's my middle digit!

The curriculum proposal process at my university is now paperless and all electronic.  We upload documents, which are then routed through the process and the personnel ... all in the name of efficiency.

Is it really more efficient?

When it was time for me to submit proposals, I ran into dead ends, one after another.  And every time I had to email two people, who then spent time fixing the problems.

Another colleague wrote to me about his experience:

I was just about to email you that any frustration in my last email isn't directed one bit towards you but rather to this new "more efficient" process. What used to take me five minutes of behind the scenes paperwork will now take 30 mins of emailing and portal submission, plus waiting on the CC to meet etc. And that's going to be true for every dang term going forward. You and I both like reading articles about automation and the future of work, and this new process reminds me that just because a computer process can be programmed doesn't mean it's an improvement.

As if I needed more evidence that "digital" does not always mean more efficient.  I am all set to extend my middle digit to those who claim otherwise ;)

At least my work is not about life and death, which is the case in healthcare.  Atul Gawande writes about this in "Why Doctors Hate Their Computers."

Something’s gone terribly wrong. Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.

Welcome to the club, Dr. Gawande!

Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with “field required” alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.

Doesn't this sound similar to the experiences I described about the curriculum process at my university?

Gawande talked to others, like Susan Sadoughi, who is a primary care physician.  What was her experience?

Early on, she recognized that technology could contribute to streamlining care. She joined a committee overseeing updates of a home-built electronic-medical-record system we used to rely on, helping to customize it for the needs of her fellow primary-care physicians. When she got word of the new system, she was optimistic. Not any longer. She feels that it has made things worse for her and her patients. Before, Sadoughi almost never had to bring tasks home to finish. Now she routinely spends an hour or more on the computer after her children have gone to bed.

Efficiency,my ass!

The software “has created this massive monster of incomprehensibility,” she said, her voice rising. Before she even sets eyes upon a patient, she is already squeezed for time. And at each step along the way the complexity mounts.
“Ordering a mammogram used to be one click,” she said. “Now I spend three extra clicks to put in a diagnosis. When I do a Pap smear, I have eleven clicks. It’s ‘Oh, who did it?’ Why not, by default, think that I did it?” She was almost shouting now. “I’m the one putting the order in. Why is it asking me what date, if the patient is in the office today? When do you think this actually happened? It is incredible!”

Seriously, how and why do people so fervently believe that digital means more efficient?

Gawande reviews the research on computers and productivity and writes that "one of the strongest predictors of burnout was how much time an individual spent tied up doing computer documentation."

This is awful!  And we let this happen!

We can retune and streamline our systems, but we won’t find a magical sweet spot between competing imperatives. We can only insure that people always have the ability to turn away from their screens and see each other, colleague to colleague, clinician to patient, face to face.

Face to face, yes.

Recently, I met with a student who was trying to get transfer credits for a course he had completed elsewhere.  I told him to meet with the person in-charge.  "Email to set up the appointment, but discuss the issue in person," I advised.  He did.

Homo Deus is a threat to our souls

I was a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog--in its various avatars at different places.  I checked in with his blog every day, just like I did with, say, the New York Times.  I liked to find out what he had to say especially because of the unique intersection of his various attributes that we normally do not expect: An immigrant, with a PhD from Harvard, deeply committed to Catholicism, gay, a Republican ...  And, he was on the forefront of blogging.  I can safely bet that he was the pioneer in the kind of public-intellectual blogging that we now take for granted--and he even made money from it!

And then, one day, just like that, he pulled the plug.  He closed shop.  He went away.

The digital/intenet life of "living-in-the-web" nearly killed him.  Literally.

In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”

So, why did Sullivan keep doing that?

But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve.

And what was the problem with this?  A problem more than the health effects?

The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

Sullivan realized that he used to be a real human being before this life on the web.  And even worse, he did not know how to get back to being a real human being.

I read his essay a few days ago and I put it aside.  I was drawn to it a second time because a student in my class tweeted about it.  It is one awesome class; more on that some other time.

In many, many ways, technology is rapidly redefining our lives even before we have even had a minute or two to think about the changes.   Today is not anything like yesterday, and tomorrow will be even more different.  Even if you want to call a time-out to pause, well, it is not as if there is one person whose foot is on the accelerator and we can request that person to instead step on the brakes.

Continuing along this path of no return threatens "humanity"--as in what it means to be human.  This book-review essay notes:

The next great stage of our evolution has begun. But what will our successes look like – and will they be that different to us?

At the recent conference, when having breakfast with two retired geographers, I told them that virtual interactions are rapidly diluting, eliminating, an important attribute--empathy.  The face-to-face interactions through which we truly understand the other and the other's feelings are now rare.  The less we have real world meaningful interactions, the less empathy we will have, I told them.

Sullivan writes:

Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

In my classes, for the first time ever, this term I have made it clear to students--right in the syllabus--that I will not permit any use of laptops or smartphones.  For the nearly two hours that we meet, they have to shut themselves off from the outside world.  I was worried that this might backfire.  But, three weeks in, the trend that is emerging is clear: It is working great.  Students are engaged.  We are actually connecting as humans.

I recognize that my classes and my blog won't make a damn difference in the grand scheme of things.  But, when the time comes, I will assure myself that I gave it my best.

I will have Andrew Sullivan's words wrap up this post:

There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

The handwriting on the wall is digital

The rare work-related meetings that I attend--remember, I am átopos--I go with a notebook and a pen.  I write down the key points, even if I don't have to follow-up on anything.  I don't take my laptop or any electronic gadget.  I write things down. You know, that old-fashioned handwritten notes?  The original "digital" form!  I find that jotting things down helps me remember the important things.  I suspect that the act helps my brain separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say.

In my classes, I rarely ever write anything anymore on the board.  Some terms it is never.  Increasingly it is never ever that I use the white-board (I can't even recall the last time I had a blackboard in the classroom!)

My office has a couple of shelves of handwritten notes from students.  One of my favorites is a two-page letter from a student thanking me for the teacher/guide that I apparently was to her.  Two pages of handwritten text; imagine that!

A handwritten piece is a reminder to me that we are humans.  In fact, handwriting is so artisanal. We might--and do--use machines, but a handwritten letter or a thank-you card is wonderfully human even in how the lettering towards the end does not look the same as in the beginning.  In the digital font world, like even here in this blog-post the letter "e" at the beginning is the same as here.    

Unlike digital’s precision, writing is blurry individuality under a general system. But in addition to this, we all have our own personalized understanding of arrows, squiggles, double-underlines and so on—little personal codes we develop over time to “talk to ourselves.” To write by hand is to always foreground an inevitable uniqueness, visually marking out an identity in opposition to, say, this font you’re reading right now.

In a world where people seem to communicate via the hieroglyphics of emojis, and vowel-free txt msgs, the chicken-scrawl handwriting that most of us have is well on its way out, it seems.

what pens do offer is both practical and symbolic resistance to the pre-programmed nature of the modern web—its tendency to ask you to express yourself, however creatively and generatively, within the literal and figurative constraints of a small, pre-defined box. There is a charming potential in the pen for activity that works against the grain of those things: to mark out in one’s own hand the absurdities of some top ten list, or underlining some particularly poignant paragraph in a way that a highlight or newly popular screenshotting tool doesn’t quite capture. Perhaps it’s the visual nature of the transgression—the mark of a hand slashed across a page—that produces emblematically the desire for self-expression: not the witty tweet or status update, nor just the handwritten annotation, but the doubled, layered version of both, the very overlap put to one’s own, subjective ends. And then there is more simple pleasure: that you are, in both an actual and metaphorical sense, drawing outside the lines. If one can draw over and annotate a web page and then send it to a friend, for example, the web at least feels less hegemonic, recalling the kind of interactivity and freedom of expression once found in the now-broken dream of blog comment sections.

It will be awesome, indeed, if the comments at this blog were handwritten.  What a joy it will be to scribble on a Facebook page wall ;)

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