WE LIVE IN AN ERA of unparalleled technological achievement. Information abounds, communication channels swell, the massive planet shrinks. And I had lots of quiet time today to think such lofty thoughts, since I was stuck in traffic for an hour and the cellphone kept cutting me off.
Intellectually, I know we're living life in the fast lane. But viscerally, it feels a lot like we're spinning our wheels. I've got a great new computer system that freezes about once a week and occasionally refuses to let me use the Zip drive. My cellphone is pretty sleek, but it often sounds like I'm dialing up another country when I call home, and it routinely drops my calls to colleagues in other states. There's a flock of satellites floating above us--snapping spy pictures and locating jetliners--yet they're of no help whatsoever when I'm trying to find my kids, my golf ball, or my car at the baseball stadium.
But perhaps nothing symbolizes the disconnect between high technology and low problems better than this: I don't know what time it is. As I sit here, my telephone display says it's 4:02 p.m., my watch says it's 4:05, and my desk clock says it's 4:07. Worse, my most sophisticated piece of office hardware, the PC, declares it to be 3:37--a full half-hour behind the desk it sits upon--and it's busily stamping all of my e-mail and documents accordingly. I don't even want to know what time my VCR thinks it is.
A big problem? Maybe not. But talk about an indictment of the information age. And it all points to a conclusion we feel in our gut but don't often say aloud: Technology isn't doing nearly as much to make our lives simpler or better or faster or safer as conventional wisdom says it is. It's the dysfunctional underbelly of the body digital.
These daily disappointments seem to stem from one of two sources: Either our high-tech products don't really work as well as advertised, or they just aren't aimed at solving everyday problems. Buggy computers, scratchy cellphones, and the like fall into the former category, and they're plenty annoying. But the gap between existing technologies and existing problems is cause for even greater frustration, since solutions appear to be so close at hand.
Take the time problem. It's not that we, as a species, are unable to keep track of time. We even have a government agency on the job. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, has an atomic clock that minds the time down to the vibration of a cesium atom (9,192,631,770 oscillations per second, if you're keeping score at home). And you can even go see exactly what time it is on the NIST Web site at nist.time.gov. So why--with my PC connected to the Internet, my phone connected to everybody, and satellites hovering me--don't any of my clocks know the correct time?
The answer, of course, is that no one has taken the time to devise a system whereby all of these devices are automatically fed the exact time and kept current around the clock, as it were. Well, almost no one. Chaney Instrument Co. of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, sells reasonably priced clocks and watches under the Atomix brand name (www.atomixtime.com) that are updated several times a day to within a fraction of a second by receiving radio signals from NIST. (This includes adjustments for day-light-saving time.) Which only serves to underline the premise and raise the question: Wily isn't every timepiece and electronic gadget on the planet so connected?
There are many more important frustrations too. GPS technology's usefulness today may be largely limited to road navigation in rental cars, but why aren't we routinely using this same satellite-location system to find our cars, whether parked or stolen? (An aftermarket system called LoJack provides localized signaling in some areas, but isn't this pervasive enough to warrant a standardized system that all police departments use?) More urgently, why can't we bury GPS transmitters inside kids' jewelry or shoes to help reduce the number of missing children? You could even do the same for lost pets if transmitters were in every collar.
If satellite technology is underused, terrestrial wireless is undercooked. Wireless phone coverage is good, in theory, but clarity and reliability are still sore subjects with every cellphone user I know, a full two decades after the advent of cellular. And for all of the talk about the wireless Web, it remains an elusive place. My so-called Web phone barely worked at all, and the wireless modem inside my handheld computer is problematic enough that I leave it off most of the time, and check my e-mail on my wired PCs. Hey, I tried.
In fact, with so many types of wireless technologies allegedly being perfected, you'd think companies would be lining up at my door selling me on the benefits of new communication, entertainment, and security systems for my home. No one's knocked yet. Except the cable company--and it wants to bury new wires in my yard so it can charge me for pay-per-view movies.
If the laughable lament of the early 20th century was that everything good had already been invented, then the curmudgeonly complaint of the early 21st may be that we have more technology than common sense to apply it.
To comment on e-Life, e-mail Chris O'Malley at chris@popsci.com.
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