My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #31, March 14, 1997

PLAN AHEA
D

Much as I love the internet, I do worry about what effects it will have on us as a society. And one of the effects, I suspect, will be to decrease our already scanty stores of patience.

I'm old enough that I remember a country that moved at a more leisurely pace. When I was a kid, no stores were open on Sunday. If you forgot to buy a key ingredient for your Sunday dinner, you either did without it or borrowed it from a neighbor (and, of course, you knew your neighbors, in those days).

As a matter of fact, the stores weren't open in the evenings, either. Most of them opened at 10 a.m. and closed at 5 or 6 p.m. Some daring merchants stayed open until 9 p.m. on Mondays, but, by and large, if you wanted to buy stuff, you did it during the days. Of course, that meant that the men and women who worked full-time Monday through Friday only had Saturdays available to shop in, but that was O.K. It was a different time. It wasn't a problem for men, because most men were married, and mostly their wives took care of the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the child care. It wasn't a problem for most women, because most women weren't employed outside the home.

Because you knew the stores wouldn't be open, you had to plan ahead. We knew how to do that in those days.

As for kids in school, when they did their research papers, they had to spend a lot of time at their local libraries. There were no copy machines (Northwestern University's library got its first copy machine during my junior year there), so, if you were using a reference book, or something else the library didn't loan out, you had to take notes on what you read. (Or steal it or rip the pages out, as some anti-social people did). Even kids knew they had no choice but to start early and plan ahead to do their research.

Because, if they started late, and somebody else had checked all the books out, they'd be stuck. They had nothing but the local libraries to use. There was no way they could find out what libraries in other towns had, short of going there and using their card catalogs and using the resources on that library's premises. Interlibrary loan existed then, but it was a rare and special privilege, reserved for scholars and scientists.

Things started changing in the late 1950's, as women began pouring into the labor force. This was a major new market: women who were working full time AND still had to do the shopping, cooking, cleaning and child-care. Gradually, the stores started staying open late Mondays through Thursdays. Some stores even started opening up on Sundays. And before long, there were stores that were open 24 hours a day. Since another change that had occurred in America was nearly universal car ownership, women could go to the stores that catered to their needs for immediate service whenever they needed it.

Of course, shopping by mail had always been another option. But that took time, too--even in its best days, the post office was never what you would call in a hurry. And then businesses like UPS and Federal Express moved in, offering 3 day, then 2 day, then overnight delivery. Even if you didn't get your Christmas presents wrapped until December 22, you could still get them delivered on time by express services.

Computers speeded things up, too, and so did fax machines. Libraries started putting their holdings online, so someone at the Davenport Public Library, in Iowa, could find out what books and journals the Augustana College Library, across the river in Illinois, had to offer; furthermore the library system's shared cataloging/circulation system allowed library patrons to check books out of any other library in the system--or even ask that the books, or photocopied journal articles be sent over to their own library. So even if you did start working on the paper a lot later than you should have, you still had a lot of material available to you--if not at your own library, at someone else's.

And if you were REALLY in a rush, the other library might even fax you the article.

And then came two new advances: full-text databases, and the internet. With full-text databases, you didn't so much as have to think about whether you even wanted a particular article. All you had to do was press a button and print.

As for the internet--wow! Just click, and there you have it: downloadable full text articles, court cases, statistics, laws, pictures, columns of opinion, you name it. You don't even need to read entire articles--you can just hypertext from one link to another, picking up the odd fact here, the odder opinion there. The only time you need to wait at all is when your computer gets caught in that great cosmic traffic jam on the communication lines.

And there are other areas in which "instant" has become the watchword. There is the microwave oven, to bake your potatoes in seven minutes rather than an hour. There is instant oatmeal. There are "gourmet" frozen dinners. There are restaurants available, 24 hours a day. There is one-hour dry-cleaning. No waiting through the commercials anymore; you just surf through other channels while you're waiting for your program to return. No time to read entire books? That's o.k.; the Readers' Digest and like-minded publications have been in the business of giving you abridged books for years. You don't need to wait until you come to a public phone booth to make a call; you can take your cellular phone right with you. Heck, in Las Vegas, you can meet somebody, marry her, bed her and divorce her, all within a 24 hour period.

I hear some of you scratching your head and saying "This is something to worry about?" To a lot of you, what I am describing is unmitigated progress. Instant access to anything you need, no need to plan ahead ever again. Our new national motto could well be, in the words of the Dead Kennedys, "Give me convenience or give me death."

But yes, I do worry about instant everything. Because most valuable things take time. It may be possible to get instant sex, but there's no such thing as instant relationship--that takes time and effort and patience and trust. You don't get instant flowers--you have to plant the seeds and nurture them for a long time. And you don't have a baby and get an instant grownup--that too takes a lot of time, a lot of nurturing, a lot of love. You may get instant information, but you don't get instant thought--thinking about what it means and what you're going to do with it also takes time.

You don't get instant revolution, either. We Americans have had a distressing tendency lately to say to our politicians, "Make me happy." And if they don't do it within 18 months, we throw them all out and start over again. It's not a real good way to run a country.

No, I'm not blaming the internet. It's just one of many technologies that are moving us steadily toward a more fickle, impatient, point-and-click-and-deliver society. But I worry about it because even I have gotten to the point where I figure, if it doesn't deliver in 15 seconds, to hell with it. And I'm the one who loves that Del Amitri song that says "We're taking time, 'cause we're in love with time."

And if it has that effect on me, what does it do to people who never learned in the first place how to plan ahead? To the people who never learned to savor the things that take time?

I know you don't get something new and wonderful without losing something else. I understand that magic and loss is what life's all about. But I'm entitled to regret what we're losing, even while I enjoy the benefits of the new--like the fact that I can tell you, online, how sad it makes me.

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