Today was definitely the most eventful day I have had in the past one year in my life at Yale. The day began with a short experiment that I participated in, then going to look for a prospective house where I would want to shift. After that, I was to meet up a friend for lunch. On the way, I met Juana who recently graduated from the MED program. It was a pleasant surprise to bump into her on my way to meet Dan over the lunch, with whom I had a long conversation - a trailing one. I came back to the school library, and scanned a few pages to be uploaded for a class. I then left for a meeting, and on the way I met Amrita, a friend newly arrived at Yale, New Haven. We had bumped into each other in the bus two weeks ago and were planning to meet over for a conversation since a long time. We immediately asked if each was occupied over our respective meetings (3 pm - 4 pm) and decided to meet up for a chat - and pleasantly, we both decided to meet not outside a coffee shop. this is the first meeting in the US with any person that I have had purely for conversation, without strings attached (like coffee, lunch, etc.. Take the example of my earlier meeting today, where we met over lunch to converse). So we met after our respective meetings at the Bienecke Plaza - under the open sky in great weather. Things were prefect and we trailed into a yet another extremely nice conversation.
After I dropped Amrita at the bus stop, I decided to head back to my desk at school, where I aimlessly hoped to kill some time in front of the computer screen! And just as I arrived at the school, I saw Britton (my co-MED fellow) sipping his coffee, after his day long field trip. I caught up with him, and joined him in a yet another conversation - extremely animated! The cherry on the cake was his mother joining in some time with whom we had a really exciting talk. And that is something I am going to trail off to in the latter part of this post! But it's 8 pm now, and I feel, this was my most successful day in the US. Why? Just because I felt this was the most socially active day I have had in the US over the last 400 days! It made me feel social, that I knew people around and that unexpected conversations do happen here... I felt happy about doing nothing in terms of work, but just being able to talk to multiple people, from different areas of study, about different subjects, in one day, on the same campus! May be it was just a lucky day. In the evening, a couple of friends passing by us told us that there was a rainbow in the sky - which Britton and I missed! But if that was supposed to mean anything, it was only that once in a while, the grey skies of New Haven can really get colourful! To still have it, I captured a picture of the dormer brightened by a streak of golden sunlight across us!
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As Britton went on to explain how he spent his day at a perfume factory, he explained the extremely mechanized and human-free environment of the place. This led us to a long conversation about the extremities of technology, its effect on humans and thus the condition of social space in America. Britton's mother told us that she works at the a public library in New Haven, to where she was (perhaps) extrapolating the idea of mechanical hands pulling books (or something to the effect of that, which I donot remember). This led us to talking about how the idea of bringing in the machine aims at eliminating any kind of human intervention in performing activities in order to achieve more efficiency, more output and increased productivity. The humans then, are merely controlling or managing the system, instead of actually participating or being a part of the setup.
I mentioned to both of them how the Sterling library (the chief library at Yale) has almost successfully initiated the process of accuracy checking of reshelved books (which was once manually done) via machines. To be more elaborate, the books that are returned to the library by the patrons are reshelved by a team of people who are trained to place them back at their appropriate positions. In order to make sure that these have been reshelved properly, till recently, there would be a team of people who would re-check these placed books by tracking them through the slips one inserted into them, which made them stand out amongst the other. Needless to say that inspite of the whole system being absolutely well designed and full proof, there may be a 5% chance of error, in the case of which one may not find a book in place! (This is totally understandable when you have about 30 lakh books in a single library!). However, still, the librarians wanted to be better (which I feel is commendable, and absolutely praiseworthy of their aspirations). Thus in this endavour, they wanted to make the process of accuracy checking human-free, or in other words, error-free.
The library has therefore invested some time and energy into creating a system where the books can be scanned using a bluetooth device, tracking their barcodes. They already have the entire digital database of the each and ever book that exists in the library. A person in this case would only need to keep scanning the barcodes of books laid in a row, and feed that information in this newly created software. As soon as that information is plugged in, the software generates a detailed report of whether the books are kept in proper order (as per their call numbers), which books are incorrectly placed, or whether the barcodes do not match to the call numbers of the books. In addition, the system would also be able to say which books are missing, whether they have been lent out to someone, for how long are they missing, when were the last borrowed, how frequently which books are borrowed, which books have been lying in the shelves un-borrowed since when, and such more and more information that is unimaginable.
Our manager called this report as "the archaeology of the library" and believes Yale to be the first University library to employ this system. When the above system replaces the old manual system of checking, one would require a team of people to sit and only analyze the data that has been generated. The statistics that this system offers is so dense, that one would literally require a team of managers to generate excel sheets that give out extremely fascinating and revealing information about the intellectual terrain of knowledge dissemination that the library extends.
Britton's mother was very pleased to understand that the Sterling library invested so much into checking whether the books were in order and pointed out how they were under-staffed at the Public library to be able to carry out this activity. From a trailing thought over which she mentioned that a lot of homeless would take shelter at the library, I tried to ask her why these same homeless couldn't be employed towards the needs of the library, since after all, checking numbers is not really an activity that requires complicated scientific knowledge. She had great stories to share on this.
We now have question about the homeless, the need for human resource, the extreme mechanization - which direct us to an skewed understanding of the skewed social make-up of America. In other words, there is a situation of the need for human resource, the excess of human resource (the homeless) and the gap created by the mechanization. I was trying to see if these resources could become symbiotic in any way.
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Every developed country, like the US, aspires to be more and more perfect in what it delivers to the world. It wants to be as consistent as the machine - something that never makes a mistake, that works without interruptions, that is extremely timely, punctual and works exactly according to the instructions that it has been fed with. Systems in the US are similar, rather, each activity is always broken up in to smaller sets of processes (imagine algorithms for people) and each person is allocated an algorithm to execute. Thus, people follow these systems and almost work like machines. however, the trend now is that they are slowly replacing these machine-like human activities with machines themselves. So a human activity of checking out a book through the librarian is automated using a kiosk, where you can scan the barcode of the book that you just pulled out of the library, and get a slip as a record of when you have drawn out, and need to return the book. Thus, soon, they would not require a front desk at all, eliminating the need of people to hand over books or receive books.
Similarly, the elimination of human intervention is a rapidly growing phenomenon. Each human activity is thus taken over by the computer, or computerised interface. While the present generation gets more and more savvy with these systems, the need and the work expected out of humans is not only reduced but also dumbed down. On the other hand, there is still the older generation that has no clue about what this new technology is all about, since they were born in an era when computers didnot even exist. I am referring to the generation, for example, of Britton's mother, who perhaps was born during the 60s!
Britton's mother explained how it was extremely difficult for the older people to get jobs here these days, because of their unfamiliarity to the new emerging technology. New systems here have a complete electronic interface. Even in order that you apply for a job, you will need an "e-mail" id, which itself is a very new thing to the older generation here. I have met a lot of people here, who are absolutely vary of the cell phone to. Take for example my own landlord, who doesnot use the mobile phone. To him, the mobile phone is as much complex as much it is an object representative of the new age. Inspite of the fact that he owns an age old version - a black and while, primitive flip phone, he is un-informed about its functions and usage. He struggles to make a call on cell phone and doesnot understand how much it is to be charged, what signs on its screen mean what and so on. To complicate it further, he almost (like many of us, who are technologically poor / not techno-savvy) fears these devices - which may misbehave in case they are fiddled with in the wrong way. This fear very much exists here too, as much like any other place.
Ironically here, I want to mention, that as much as technology aims to ameliorate this generation gap, or bridge it, and make itself accessible, it increases it. Strange contradictions appear. I will explain it through a series of examples.
People are pretty much on their own in the US (the result of the notion of independence and the independent self). This applies to all the older generation too, who have witnessed an almost exponential and dramatic shift of technology in their lifetimes - from once manually driven things, to the automated world today. One can only imagine the experience and effect of this sliding techno-social space to be sharper in the developed countries, for two reasons - one is the rapid innovation in technology, and the other is their pressures to not depend on any one else to understand new systems of working and operating.
My landlord often has to find his own way to solve issues that spring up regarding his phone bill, or gas bill, or television bills, or internet plans and so on. While he would ideally physically meet the person who installed these things at his home back in his young days, today he has to only get in touch with a customer service centre through a phone call. While one can perceive that this reduces the effort of the old man traveling to a real person to a mere phone call, here is what really happens. Today, when he calls up a service centre, he has to first enter a series of digits to prove that he is a human being, and eventually get to talk to a human being. The person who he eventually reaches to, asks him the same questions that he just digitally answered by pressing the phone keys! He does it anyway. And then the operator on the phone call talks to him almost like a machine. When he/she is not able to help him, my landlord keeps repeating and talking the same thing (after passing through a range of people, until he reaches the person in the right department, who is specialized to address the specific question regarding his specific doubt) - almost like a machine - which has frustrated him (remember his old age, his unfamiliarity to the technology and his level of patience belong to a different age).
This system is recently being more refined. Instead of the layers of pressing keys in order to get to the right department or right person, there are automated messages that speak to you over the phone. My landlord perhaps has still not completely taken gotten a hang of this. And rightly so, since these voices are so real, that you don't know if they are machines. A lot of times, when he is expected to answer as "Yes" or "No" - standardized answers which the machine can decipher through the sounds, he mixes up. He tries to have a conversation with the machine, elaborating on his affirmations or negations (Yes's and no's). As much as I pity him, I also realize the complexity of the system. That is, in its tryst to become human, and replace the human to make the space more 'easy', the machine does exactly the opposite. It becomes more and more difficult for the older folk to understand the machine automated world.
There are countless examples I can give regarding this. The automated self-check out stations at the shopping centres, the self check out gas stations, the automated bill paying systems, the automated printing stations - this country wants to automate every human activity. They want to eliminate any possible human activity by installing computerized interfaces. It wants to seamlessly merge the real and the virtual, in doing which, it cuts off social contact, it eliminates the possible meeting of two people, the possibility of chance encounters or casual conversations. It removes the existence of humans in physical space, and takes them into the virtual realm of social networking websites - of the facebook and the twitter.
The goal is sincere - to eliminate error and to be more and more foolproof. But this is exactly my critique of efficiency.
In their humble goal of being as accurate as the machine, a developed country like the US re configures social space. I celebrated this one day of chance encounters in the US today - where I felt human - meeting people on the street, bumping into them in unexpected ways and deciding to meet without prior planning. The machined world takes away the joys of these momentary exchanges which give you pleasures that stay with you for a long time.
To me, it is almost strange how the first world countries drive aspirations of the developing world to become like them. We (India and such other countries) are at a special, beneficial position where we can see the counter effect modernism has had on the social life of places like here. In such scenario, how does one channel technology to "empower" people, yet preserve a vital space that maintains physical real-time communication? And what does this "empowerment" hold anyway? We have seen in the above examples how technology only expands the existing gaps between humans and their spaces. So what does technological progress behold for us? These are large questions, but I wonder if developed countries themselves would address them in smarter, more human ways. And by human, I mean the human, that belongs to this mortal world.
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The golden ray of hope.
New Haven. 13th Sept, 2013. 7 pm. |
(this post is unedited, and may build up to more stories and anecdotes over time)
this story can also be found at the YaleStories blog here.
