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WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE?

(PRICE OF PROGRESS)

I was listening sleepily to that ingenious contraption, my digital clock radio, the other morning, when I half-heard one of those items that infects your day. It was about a new invention. A genius has decided that we wait too long at supermarket check-outs, and so he has developed a considerate computer to let the brain take the strain. It all involves weighing, and tearing off special little tags from each item you buy, and feeding them into a machine land weighing again.

Now I can recall a time when there were a few long queues in supermarkets, because the companies ploughed their profits into employing two people at each check-out one to ring up and the other to help you speedily pack. Remember? It was also when every garage was staffed by friendly men who filled the car up, checked the oil and even did the tyres, before ah infernal machine encased a solitary soul in glass by the till, reading off the digits and charging you accordingly. It meant jobs for them; and for you … people who had the time to be jolly, grouchy, helpful or saucy.

Maybe you believe in that sort of progress. But I would like to smash the dreadful machines. I simply cannot understand why otherwise intelligent humans have gone computer-mad. It starts early: teachers despair of time-telling when all the kids sport hideous digital watches that peep, play tunes, start and stop, even show firework displays, but instill no sense of the hands moving majestically round a clock face. No more ‘Happy Families’; computer toys bark at them in Americanese and cost a fortune in batteries. Instead of learning mental arithmetic they grow up thinking that calculators are their right.

As adults, they drivel on about Space Invaders, and learn a dead vocabulary that owes nothing to Shakespeare or Milton. Boring, mindless, boring. As for thinking, our computers will do it for us.

Computers breed laziness and discontent. I go to a library and see my beloved dusty manuscripts and old newspaper cuttings replaced by gleaming terminals, so you cannot actually handle the stuff. Then I hear from a friend that he is actually contemplating spending money on a cozy ‘home computer’, so that all the little details of his life can be stored in its nasty cold brain. As for organizing, our computers will do it for us.

All the science fiction fantasies of computers taking over the world, or being used to plot some devious overthrow of government are not far from the truth I see all around me. Myths are rooted in a need to explain to ourselves the workings of the Universe and a human nature. That modern myth foretells the insidious corruption of man by his own dinky little invention.

The computer generation (God help them) assumes that it is better to calculate, buy petrol, tell the time, work out your holiday plans, pay your bills, and even shop, with the aid of a computer. After all, our civilization is founded, now, on the certainty that we can kill by remote control, and a computer error could unleash Armageddon. The age of the Computer is the age of dehumanization. Significantly in my old (c. 1969) Oxford dictionary the word does not exist except as a subheading – a person who computes or calculates. Now the person has gone. As for feeling, our computers won’t do that for us.

On a recent trip back to America, I decided to take a nostalgic walk through my old neighborhood, a walk down memory lane, as it were.

I visited the baseball field where life-and-death games were played until the ball was nothing but a dangerous silhouette against the night sky. I walked through a small patch of urban woods where baseball players became fearless soldiers and crude tree branches substituted as guns.

It wasn't until later that I realized something was oddly amiss: there were no children to be seen – anywhere. My old neighborhood had become a ghost-town, devoid of the voices of children (cynics may counter that this is not such a bad

thing). With a bit of detective work I soon discovered that the kids were all “interacting” with some electronic gadget. If they weren't sitting blankly in front of a television screen, they were staring blankly at a computer screen; if they weren't playing a video game, they were sending an email to a friend, who probably lived right down the street. In short, they were all “plugged- in” one way or another. And the playgrounds stood silent.

Nor is Moscow immune to the scourge of the technobug. Here, the mobile phone is Public Nuisance Number One (that is, next to the shrieking car alarm). On a recent trip to a restaurant with a friend, it suddenly became obvious that an uninvited third party had joined us. The ultra-hip Nokia phone literally had a seat at the table and enjoyed far more conversation than me.

How about the Walkman stereo system that includes a convenient head-jack that plugs directly into the skull? The idea behind this invention, it seems, was to provide the listener with an opportunity to listen without disturbing the peace. However, over time, most walkman users have lost most of their hearing and must turn the volume up to the highest possible decibel. Thus, everyone within 10 meters is susceptible to the musical tastes of the soon-to-be-deaf adolescent. These gadgets should come with the government health warning: “Can cause permanent hearing loss.”