Christoph Reuss wrote:
>
> > One in 10 workers say employees have come
> > to blows because of stress at work. And 42
> > percent say there's yelling and verbal abuse
> > in their offices, the survey of 1,305 U.S.
> > workers shows.
> ...
> > * 14 percent say they work where machinery
> > or equipment has been damaged as a result of
> > workplace rage;
>
> I think a large proportion of this is due to a well-known computer
> operating system. A similar survey among 1,205 computer users in the UK
> found that 75% of the users regularly shout at the PC, and 25% of younger
> PC users have used physical violence against their PC. (Remember the guy
> who "massacrated" his PC with rounds of dum-dum bullets..) The main
> frustration is from frequent crashes that often lead to data loss. The
> increased stress from BlueScreens and software bugs also negatively
> affects users' relationship to co-workers.
In my personal experience, this is *right on*!
Computer problems can be intractably difficult to figure out, but
when you do figure them out, you have often learned
nothing of any interest ("Oh, so that's the stupid thing
that caused the problem."). And computer bugs never
end.
Computers are apparently
products of pure reason, but they refuse to do what we want them
to do: They mock us. Then throw in "management pressures"....
I have thrown keyboards and slammed decks into card readers.
The computer is in polysemously overdetermined ways a
mirror in which we see our own face spitting at us.
Of course, this could be changed, if computer work was
transformed into a *gentleman's activity* -- but we
are too advanced to have leisure any more. As Hannah Arendt
wrote, "homo laborans" has universally triumphed in
our society even before computers, which only exacerbate the
problem by enabling us to speed things up. To which I
always lament that we have not found a way to emulate
Little Black Sambo from the child's story, and to get
all the tigers chasing each other faster and
faster until they all turn into butter.
A German speaking reader has taken something
I have said and translated it on his
website: "Je schneller man in die falsche
Richtung hastet, umso l�nger wird es dauern,
wieder auf den richtigen Kurs zu kommen,
wenn man �berhaupt das Gl�ck hat, noch
gen�gend Zeit daf�r zu haben!" (The faster a
person makes progress in a
wrong[headed] direction, the longer it will take
them to get back to where they can begin to proceed
along a constructive path -- presuming one has
the good fortune to have the time left in one's life to
get that far.)
As Joseph Weisenbaum wrote in 1976: The computer has
been one of the most powerful forces for social reaction in
the 20th Century -- not to mention the reactionary
"mentalite" of many computer workers, whose imaginative
horizon is the affectively thin world of sci-fi -- what I call:
Neo-feudalism in flying fortresses
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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