I return to technophobia. Lest this blog become a neo-Luddite tract I want it clearly understood that I’m not trying to be “amusing and eccentric”. I’m genuinely angry and concerned about digital convergence and my struggles to keep apace with it. This incompetence is neither funny nor charming and hardly unique. The wider ramifications of that last point I want to explore, but first a clarification: my problem is not with computers in the strictest sense. Computers- the machines- are a marvel, a deeply impressive manifestation of mankind’s genius, conceived by engineers and scientists whose only limits appear to be those of natural, physical laws; the width of molecules, the malleability of light, the speed of an electron are all that hem them in. No, my problem is with software. Software, for the most part, seems to be the progeny of sociopaths. It is designed, executed and disseminated by fraudulent, bullying, blackmailing hostage-takers, and I’ve had it up to my degenerating eyeballs with them.

I’m going to make a comparison with the motorcar, that other great advance and illness of the twentieth century and another device I have enormous difficulty reconciling myself with. Cars, like computers, are complex machines of which very few of us have a complete, nuts and bolts understanding. We rely on others to repair them when they fail, yet most of us in the (Western) world own at least one, rely on one, depend almost utterly upon one to convey us whence we need to go. Complex as it is, as constantly refined and improved upon as they are by the manufacturers, we need no “user interface” with a car. We acquire the requisite user skills and then we control it directly, using our working knowledge of the car under licence and insurance. The same knowledge is rarely acquired in advance of computer ownership or use; we unpack it, plug it in and expect to “go” anywhere and everywhere immediately. Indeed we are encouraged to expect so by the software mavens.

The software is our chauffeur, a middleman, translating our human A to B desires into the zeroes and ones language of the computer. Yet imagine how frustrating a literal journey would be if you surrendered the driving seat to a chauffeur who not only could not speak your language but also lacked knowledge of the local roads, the quickest or safest routes, the Highway Code or was just a complete fucking idiot. This is the software experience.
My recently documented problems with eBay aside, let me name and shame some other examples of software and web design idiocy:

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP
The software that killed a hundred thousand printing businesses and, more than any other package, heralded the rise of the “good enough” amateurism that is the hallmark of the digital era. Despite latterly being adopted by many professional printers as their package of choice, it remains widely misunderstood and ham-fistedly used. I could fill a book with stories, but a recent example saw colleagues handing a layout into a pro print shop, said layout containing certain fonts that the shop did not have on file (one questions why a printer would not avail themselves of any and all fonts, but never mind). Photoshop, rather than flagging that discrepancy, simply replaces all text in the unknown font with another random font from the files. That substitution, in the days of plate-based lithography, would not only have been virtually impossible but tantamount to wilful sabotage of the job, as anathema as changing colours or text content. Yet every day, in digital print shops up and own the land, computer software packages like Photoshop make countless automatic “helpful” changes to specified layouts that go unnoticed until the job is printed, resulting in masses of paper wastage and costly reprinting.
BIGFOOT
This woeful troop of keyboard-stabbing baboons offer a webmail service that will periodically deliver your messages to recipients bereft of all text. Infuriating.
HP SCAN PRO & PHOTOSMART STUDIO
These pieces of garbage came with my scanner and the former has to be used in order to import images from it to other, better applications (such as iPhoto). The software will occasionally and completely without input, warning or discernible reason skew the images it scans by about twenty degrees clockwise. This will happen time and time again on repeated scans of the same image, yet scans taken from other images placed on the flatbed during these periods are fine. This skewing ceases as suddenly and inexplicably as it starts, again without any given instruction. The Studio package also features a tool called Stitch, which is clearly intended as a quick way to join disparate images into one, especially to create panoramic landscapes. Yet the software will crop a pre-set amount from the ends of each photo before fuzzily “melting” them together. In other words, even if you were a sufficiently skilled photographer as to have taken shots that married with one another right down to the last pixel, there’s no way for this inherently useless tool to provide you with anything other than considerably less than the sum of their parts. Mind-boggling.
iTUNES
The latest versions of iTunes will, when downloading music from the store or uploading it from certain cds, retrieve album artwork for the purposes of the improved screen displays on newer iPods. Can someone explain to me why, when I listen to Danny Elfman’s score for Spider-Man2, I’m shown the cover to his first Batman composition? Or when I’m enjoying Derek & Clive: Come Again, I’m looking at the debut album from Derek Clegg? Correct me if I’m wrong, but in terms of raw data, aren’t the words Spider-Man & Batman and Clive & Clegg as different as the numbers 34678 and 74386? Imagine what would happen if, say, Excel were as lazily written as to allow those to be transposed? Why does iTunes have the discernment of a cloth-eared, slightly stoned record shop assistant? Puzzling.
MICROSOFT ENTOURAGE/ MAC OSX/ SAFARI
I cannot use the Macintosh application Mail on my computer; imported emails from my previous machine brought with them a fatal error that prevented Mail from ever launching properly. I had no choice but to abandon it and start using Entourage instead. Fine. But there is no way- at least no way I know of- to set Entourage as my default email application. Whenever I’m looking at a website in Safari and click on an email link, off my hard drive goes, looking for Mail. The OSX software allows for a dazzling array of preferences and personalised touches. I can, naturally, set my machine to “prefer” any number of applications other than those specified in the factory settings. Yet it appears to have occurred to no-one at Apple that users might not want, or even find themselves unable, to use Mail. Cretinous.
I say “no way I know of” because the in-built Help application, intended it seems to offer answers to users in strife, cannot provide assistance. How is it- in 2008- that Help appears to have been equipped with as narrow a vocabulary as a ZX Spectrum text-based role playing game? Staggering.
US AIRWAYS
This airline run a website that accepts international bookings, yet include a billing form that can handle only US zip codes. Entering anything else sends the system into an anti-fraud spiral that’ll have your credit card frozen and your phone bill jacked up by unplanned calls to their American contact centre before you can say “no meal option”, negating any money saved by “booking direct” in the first place. Galling.

Bear in mind that every one of these examples is by design, ipso facto. Computers cannot think, they cannot act, they cannot decide. Programmers though, acted and made the choice to have their software perform in this fashion. Human beings crafted facilities, features and applications that run counter to human intuition, needs and expectations. Madness. And yet the marketers and the developers continue to sell us the lie that these things will make our lives easier.

How to end the kind of widespread misery that has followed the launch of, say, Microsoft Vista and the subsequent deliberate withdrawal of Windows? I return to the car, and the need for either an equivalent to the red flag-waving signalmen that used to precede the earliest motorists (i.e. a frank unilateral admission that this is all bullshit, that new applications can scarcely do anything other than stumble, fail and misfire) or a driving licence, a standardised certification of IT knowledge that will enable us all to circumvent the inherent problems in mass-marketed software. Absurd, you say? Misuse of cars can inflect terrible damage, ditto firearms, which is why their ownership is subject to licence. Computers may exasperate, but they can do us no harm. Really?

Several organisations charged with social policy provision, including the International Futures Forum, recognise an increase in mental health problems approaching “pandemic” scale. They believe a significant factor is the shortening of both attention spans and patience by the breathless pace of broadband media, the incredibly high turnover and rapid obsolescence of digital product, the associative effect of prolonged screentime (your computer becomes you; its flaws are your flaws) and moreover the disassociative effect of constant alias or avatar use and certain sites that simulate social interaction but signally fail to offer the subtle, multifaceted reward and hard lessons of the human experience. I’m heartened to read of the advent of Griefers, latter day Dadaists and “virtual terrorists” who- it seems to me- are the only ones to have truly embraced what’s possible in these sprawling digital realms of the imaginary (Second Life etc.); disrupting mawkish “weddings” between over-sized pink tigers and anti-gravity boobed glamazons, asinine business conferences between pretend people selling pretend products for pretend money and po-faced “campaigns” by highly-strung role players. Griefers exhibit an unstoppable joi de vivre and healthy disregard for taste, decency and manners and we need more of them before the whole bloody planet gets Facebooked.

But I digress; hardware good, software bad. I’m afraid I don’t have any neater or pithier coda than that, just an ache in need of articulation. Like Sideshow Bob before me, I’m aware of the inherent irony of using a media in order to decry it. Unlike him, I do not propose it be abolished. What I think is sorely needed is reflection; we’re heading somewhere, but we’re going to fast to see the passing landscape and thereby appraise the likely destination. The way we receive information influences the way we process it, the conclusions drawn and ultimately the way we perceive and manage our world. As outlined above, the printing industry as we knew it has all but ceased to exist. The recording industry is set to follow. There are some in publishing who plan in earnest for the “end of paper”, expecting it early in the next decade. The recent American screenwriters strike and the accordant scarcity of new television has shown broadcasters just how willing audiences are to turn from spoon-fed scheduling and polished, “event” programming to self-selected channels, gaming and endless hours of amateur offerings. TV sets, phones, furniture; all become computers, computers become all. Certainly no one will die for lack of YouTube, but always, always, the gulf between those connected and those who are not widens. We face enough discord in the years ahead without an irreconcilable iGap between young and old, east and west and rich and poor. This needs debated, loudly, reasonably and quickly, and somewhere other than the self-serving blogosphere.

And with that, I exorcise the subject. Time to get back to what I came here for; big time, industrial strength geekery.