Fragment 29: The Life &Times of a Social Experiment

Faster. Faster. Faster. Connect. Connect. Connect. But at what human cost? Isolate. Isolate. Isolate.

May 28, 2024

The 1970s, there’s this stream of amazing technology racing towards us, trying to ever more comprehensively annihilate time and physical distance. Connect. Connect. Connect. And we don’t yet know that, as we get ever closer to the annihilation, a counter-force will come into play. Isolate. Isolate. Isolate.

The positive part of technological connectivity was experienced more than a hundred years before, in the 1850s1. After laying a telegraphic ‘Great Cable’ across the twenty-mile sea channel that separates England and France, in 1851, it was prophesied that:

the whole earth will be belted with electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions … It shows that nothing is impossible to man.2

Thinking back on the year 1851, author Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) (yes, the author and poet of “the implanted crookedness of things”3 ) commented that it marked …

… an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit line, at which there occurred what one might call a precipice in time. As in a geological ‘fault’, we had presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact.4

And, of course, in the following hundred and twenty years all of the things that came to define the modern world came into being. Here are just a few of them:

1872 - George Brayton invents the first commercial liquid-fueled internal combustion engine. 1876 - Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone. 1876 - Nicolaus Otto, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach patent the compressed-charge, four-cycle engine. 1879 - Karl Benz patents the two-stroke gasoline engine. 1898 - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), a Russian schoolteacher, proposes the idea of space exploration by rocket. 1903 - Wilbur and Orville Wright achieve powered flight. 1947 - John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, at Bell Labs, invent the first working transistors. 1957 - Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, is launched by the Soviet Union. 1969 - Apollo 11 takes humans to the Moon. 1975 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft. 1976 - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple.

And on it went …

the continual drawing-together of the human race and the annihilation of time and distance by the power of technology.5

In early 1979, after my first marriage had ended, I moved into my new home. It was a terraced house in Chiswick, west London, that had been very nicely modernized. Bijou but just right.

In the house directly opposite lived an old lady called Lily. Old? She was almost certainly younger than I now am but, in my mind’s eye, she is forever ‘Old Lily’.

Because she was no longer very mobile, she lived upstairs. If any deliveries came to her door, mostly, it seemed, frequent top-ups of her essential Scotch whisky rations, she would communicate with the delivery chappie by shouting from an upstairs window. Well, it was effective.

Next door to her lived a young couple, Mike and Annabel. When I moved in to my house, Mike was working for a City of London shipbroking firm. He told me of his plans to start his own firm and explained that he was looking for an office to rent. He talked, too, about the significant expense he would incur for an essential piece of technology that shipbroking demanded - a telex machine.

Telex (short for telegraph exchange) is a messaging system that was popular from around 1930 to 1990. It was a step along the space-and-time-annihilation pathway. In fact, telex had a direct link back to the ‘Great Cable’ of 1851: at first there were telegrams - short printed messages that were delivered from telegraph offices to addressees’ homes by telegram messengers; but, later, telex machines fulfilled that task and became a familiar part of the office-based business comms’ kit. After that, for a time, the fax machine took over.

(The image at the top of this post, of a telex machine, is from Shutterstock.)

It is, admittedly, somewhat nerdish but, as you may already have gathered, I’m fascinated by some of the technologies that have come and gone in my lifetime. The fax (facsimile) machine, perhaps the first truly universal document transfer system, was just one of them. It met its Waterloo with the email.

In fact, from 1970 to 2010, umpteen communications’ technologies came and went, or were radically transformed.

In the 1970s, for example, two Japanese companies marketed videocassette recorders. Time-shift a TV program! Wow! In 1975, Sony announced the Betamax system, and in 1976, Victor Company of Japan (JVC) launched Video Home System (VHS). VHS grew to dominate the market although many aficionados maintained that Betamax delivered the better quality of TV reproduction.

Even if that was true, Sony kind of got their own back by, in 1979, coming up with the Walkman, a compact audio cassette player that, for the very first time, gave people access to recorded sound on the person, on the move. So, also for the very first time, we saw people walking down the street with headsets on.

Then, in December 1978, while I was adjusting to being single once again, just to add a little more choice, Phillips launched the Videodisc, a 30 cm disc that could hold a complete film.

These developments all constituted steps in the convergence of … well … everything. As a consequence, although it was hard to fathom at the time, life was not only getting faster and faster, but also more interconnected.

By 1979, I had left Trusthouse Forte Hotels, but, while still there, had become fascinated by the production of what were labelled AV presentations. AV is shorthand for audio-visual, which is not a very precise label given that lots of technologies are … er .. audio-visual. Both film and television, for a start.

However, the term ‘Audio Visual presentation’ refers to a presentation that connects 35mm slides with a tape-recorded, synchronized sound track - a slide-tape presentation. Sounds pretty basic, huh? Well, maybe, but we could really make those things sing!

It all started when I was discussing presentation work at the agency Stadden Hughes. Somebody said, “You should talk to John Doff”. “Who’s he?” I asked. “A film and AV producer.” And somebody helped make the meeting happen.

John, when I met him, would have been in his late-40s, maybe even 50. He was an elegant chap: tall and slim with a good thatch of auburn hair, and always turned-out in a rather dandyish way, dapper and invariably featuring a smart, perfectly-tied bow tie. He will feature quite prominently in this tale so permit me to introduce him properly.

John Doff’s father ran a successful import-export business, part of the Unilever empire, in Casablanca, Morocco. Consequently, early on, John had a French upbringing. However, in 1940, when France was defeated and the Vichy regime installed, the Doff’s moved to South Africa where John attended the very English-style Bishops Diocesan College, a private school, in Capetown.

After that he set off for Europe in 1948 - so, 19 or 20 years old - sailing up the west coast of Africa, then making his way to Paris for a time, and then on to London.

In London he headed for St. Martin’s Lane and the London Press Exchange - Lopex - one of the longest-established advertising agencies, where he was hired.

The period after the end of the Second World War, John told me, was particularly open and collaborative. The war had generated a “we’re all in this together” spirit and demonstrated that social position did not necessarily imply wisdom, or virtue, or work ethic. It was a smackdown against some of the old class barriers and a boost for merit.

John got involved with the production of films, many of them government sponsored public service films.

Later, he joined the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding (affectionately known as Footsore & Bleeding) as a creative. There, he told me, he came up with a couple of very famous British ad campaigns: ‘Full of Eastern promise’ for Fry’s Turkish Delight, and the Old English Sheepdog as brand identifier for Dulux household paints.

But, by the time I met him, he had settled back into film and presentation making, using his company, Corpro. So, I commissioned John to produce some AV presentations. Pretty simple ones, but nonetheless extremely effective.

I’ll no doubt come back to talk further on this topic in future fragments but, for now, let me come back to the bigger picture.

Shortly before I left Trusthouse Forte Hotels I was asked to give a presentation on behalf of the company to a tourism conference in Ireland and, miraculously, I was given carte blanche to go with whatever topic I thought best.

I chose to speak about the sense of the acceleration of time, and the challenges this created for people. And, of course, I talked about the opportunities that inevitably must accompany the process.

Looking back, I can see that I viewed it all in a rather mechanistic way and certainly didn’t see the longer-term implications - particularly insofar as the whole process affected our societies. But, though I say it myself, I don’t think I made a bad fist of it.

Later, in 2013, along came Hartmut Rosa and absolutely nailed the topic with a brilliant analysis. Here’s how it starts:

Since the Renaissance, which began a historically reconstructible debate concerning the ‘newtime’ (neue Zeit), the defenders and the despisers of modernity have agreed on one point: its constitutive experience is that of a monstrous acceleration of the world, of life, and of each individual’s stream of experience.6

That’s good but my favourite description, with the bonus that it has a poetic rhythm and quality to it, comes from Gary Hamel:

The Age of Progress is over. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during the Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century. For countless millennia there was no progress, only cycles. Seasons turned. Generations came and went. Life didn’t get better; it simply repeated itself in an endlessly familiar pattern. There was no future, for the future was indistinguishable from the past.
Then came the unshakable belief that progress was not only possible, it was inevitable. Life spans would increase. Material comforts would multiply. Knowledge would grow. There was nothing that could not be improved upon. The discipline of reason and deductive routines of science could be applied to every problem, from designing a more perfect political union to unpacking the atom to producing semiconductors of mind-boggling complexity and unerring accuracy.
… We now stand on the threshold of a new age - the age of revolution. … For change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious.7

One of the abrupt and possibly seditious outcomes is now proving to be the fragmentation of our societies. The drawing together is now matched by an equal and opposite force that is causing disconnection.

This has only recently been clarified, by Jonathan Haidt, in the particular context of childhood:

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution. Adults enjoy them, and children need them for healthy development. Yet the major social media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction, which can become more like work than play. Most teens have accounts on multiple platforms, and those who use social media regularly spend two hours a day or more just on social media sites. By 2014, nearly a third of teen girls were spending over 20 hours a week on social media sites. That’s half of a full-time job - creating content for the platform and consuming content created by others. That is time no longer available for interacting with friends in person. The work is often joyless, yet many feel compelled to do it, lest they “miss out” on something or be excluded. Eventually, for many, it becomes a mindless habit, something they turn to dozens of times each day. Such social labor creates shallow connections because it is asynchronous and public, unlike a face-to-face conversation, or a private phone call or video call. … Given the vast amounts of time now invested in asynchronous interaction rather than getting together with friends, is it any wonder that so many teens found themselves lonely and starved for connection starting in the early 2010s?8

That atomization is, of course, not entirely new. Back in Chiswick in 1978, in the house across the street, Old Lily had retreated into a tiny, isolated one-or two-room world. But it hadn’t always been like that. Down on the ground floor, on the kitchen wall, alongside the gas cooker, was an oil painting covered in grease and dust. It was an original portrait of a young woman. A beautiful picture of a beautiful girl. You’ve guessed, of course … it was Lily. And the painting was by Augustus John.

Aargh! by David Pinder

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