| INDEX | ||
| Monday March 17, 2020 | ||
| How the virus changes us | ||
| In the 1970s I worked for a newspaper called the Doncaster Evening Post. Most of what you would today call 'online' was delivered by Telex or as they called it at the time, teletyper. This machine, a sort of electric woodpecker, rattled away constantly bringing news from Press Association or Reuters or similar, on a thin ribbon of paper: if you have ever seen film of an American ticker tape parade, ticker tape was what the teletyper produced.
But even then the teletyper was old technology. What was brand new and exciting was a strange new machine that could send copies of complete pages over the telephone lines: the fax. At the Post only a few aficionados could even touch the machine and they believed it could only send to a single dedicated receiving fax (which was probably about true at the time since there were so few of them about). Wind forward a few years to the early 1980s and the fax had become just about ubiquitous. Everybody had one (or every business anyway) but nobody trusted them. We sent everything by mail as well as fax just to make sure it got there. Then there was a postal strike and you simply couldn't send by post. From that time on everything went by fax and no-one bothered with the post. I wonder if we are going through a similar paradigm shift now. For decades people have spoken about working from home but they have always taken the attitude: others can do it but in my special circumstances it's impossible. And of course, middle managers have supported them, realising that if there was no-one around to crack the whip on, they would not have a job. Today, however, people have to work from home or not work at all, in many cases. Will this have far reaching consequences for the shape of our society for years to come? | ||
| Posted by Jonathan Brind. | ||
| INDEX | ||
| Monday March 17, 2020 |