TECHNOLOGY AND CAREERS
(March/April 2003 Issue)

One-third of computer users admit to physically attacking a computer (Nicols Fox, in a book called Against The Machine). How many more attack their computers but don’t admit to it? Most of us have experienced raging anger while being carried by a 4,000 pound machine. All of us have felt similar anger while being put "on hold" by another type of machine.

Machines blurt out their little jingles in public places. Computers go crash in the night. Cell phone conversations pop up in restaurants, rest rooms, everywhere. Car dashboards look like airplane cockpits. Ovens require an engineering degree to operate. Phone menus make robots of us all.

We depend on machines too much and they often let us down. Last week, all of a sudden my computer wouldn’t let me get on-line. I got a message something like: "Authentication failed the host because your password was wrong". Sounds like a party I did not get invited to.

All of my e-mail correspondence was behind a door in the computer that was now locked. It’s a lonesome feeling calling a "tech support" phone number out there in netherland, to talk to a disembodied voice you will never meet. The healthy recovery of my computer hangs by the frail thread of what this person tells me to do. What if he doesn’t like me, or she’s having a bad day? Does the voice care? Why should he? If I write a letter of complaint, it will fall in a well somewhere and never be read by anyone.

If it’s technological, is it always good? Who said so? Orwell’s world is more with us every day. Technology has a big down side, but, as though brainwashed, we accept the onslaught as "the price of progress". Hold the progress, please, I’d like some of my freedom back.

Are we building a future in which, whenever our system fails to work properly, we’ll be calling some 800 number located in the Arctic Circle, and praying they will listen to us and solve our problem?

I’m envisioning the day, hoping it won’t happen, when doctors offices, hospitals, and emergency rooms are so overcrowded that medical care will be dispensed by 800 numbers out there in the ethers ("If you’re bleeding from the elbow, Press Three"). Or, worse yet, you’ll be required to go online as the first point of contact for medical care. You’re hurting bad. And then you get an error message. And then your cursor freezes. And then your computer crashes. And the 800 number yields an elaborate, relentless phone menu that won’t give you a "live" person no matter how desperate your need may be.

Maybe we’re getting what we deserve. In our vain attempt to conquer the physical world with our technology, this technology may become our enemy more than our friend.

What does this have to do with career counseling? Our counseling is not only about how to get a job, but about the kinds of work people are choosing to do. Our clients are entering careers where human contact, especially face-to-face, is increasingly de-valued.

Call me a Luddite, or call me worse, but I feel that you and your clients need to take a look at what machine-dependence means to careers. Greater anxiety. Less ability to control work through human effort. Greater need for human networks to counter the impersonal nature of electronic communication.
I don’t believe we should be sheep about this and blindly accept all technology as automatically good for us. Just because we invent something does not mean we are compelled to use it.

A career is about choices, but technology may gradually take away choices. We’re fast approaching the day when everyone must use a computer to do their job and get through life. And, do we really think the automobile gives us freedom? We are chained to our cars and unable to live fully because of the time and energy spent riding in them, maintaining them, and earning resources to pay for them.

It’s time to question what machines have done to us before The Minister Of Technology (there is none . . . . yet) decrees that everyone will be woken up, fed, and tucked in by computer.

A career is a choice of values. If you love technology, wade in there and have fun. However, if machines make you nervous, don’t work around them any more than you have to. If machines bore you, find something more interesting to do.

I worry about sending clients into a world where many of them will sit in front of electron-loaded computer screens 50 hours every week. That is not real living. It probably warps or distorts their bodies. It certainly
does not build strong bones, muscles, or teeth.

How much mechanization is too much? Is a golf cart the ultimate in comfort, or evidence that human beings have abandoned their bodies?

People buy machines to exercise when all the exercise one could ever want is available from walking through life and being in the natural world. People use machines to communicate electronically when one hour of face-to-face contact would carry more meaning than a dozen e-mails.

The more careers are run by machines, the more the people in these careers will act like machines. The people who own technology will mechanize your life as much as you let them. They’ll sell you a mechanical page-turner if you don’t want to lift a finger while reading a book. They’re already
selling you machines to blow nature’s precious leaves around before you watch another machine that will sell you still more machines that make your life "easier".

Technology is not your master. It is not even human. It is your servant. you decide how much technology you want in your life and how much you do not. It is not compulsory to carry six different electronic devices on your person, like some sort of modern gunslinger.

OK, you’ve heard enough. Technology lovers arise, you may start your fusillade now. But what if we had no machines to express our differences in attacks upon each other? We would get together and talk about it.

Howard Figler, Ph.D., is the author of The Complete Job Search Handbook and The Career Counsleor's Handbook [1999, with Richard N. Bolles]. He can be reached at: hefigler@pacbell.net