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The Message From a Multitude of Changes: Serendipity Is Out, Power and Efficiency Are In

Confronted with the difficult task of making sense of the last 10 years, the first question that popped into my head was, "How many?"

As in: How many old PCs of mine are now leaching mercury into African streams because of crummy processor speed or whatever creeping disease it is that makes them get slow and unreliable? How many blue screens of death have I confronted? How many times have I Googled myself? How many spams have I deleted? How many hours have I spent wandering the Web's highways and byways instead of doing whatever I was supposed to be doing?

For me, 10 years immersed in technology is the accumulation of habits and routines, from getting used to the way a new cellphone fits in the pocket to making room in my morning routine for a newly discovered Web site. Technological change has a way of sneaking up on you -- most of the last 10 years' changes were so gradual that I didn't really notice them until months later, when I found myself wondering how on earth I used to do something. There were a few "A-ha!" moments, but they were oddly anticlimactic -- better methods of accomplishing a given task were so clearly superior that I switched over without a lot of fuss and bother.

Those "A-ha!" moments? There are five of them.

1. Google: Before Google arrived on the scene in 1998, I bumped along with the likes of AltaVista and Yahoo. But once I tried Google, I quit bothering with anything else, and I've never been tempted to seek a new search engine -- Google is accurate enough and easy enough to use to keep my loyalty. Moreover, that loyalty has transferred to other Google services, such as Google News and Gmail. But for all that, I'm not sure Google has been able to "monetize" me very effectively. I rarely notice the text ads alongside my searches or email, I've clicked through a handful of times at best, and I've never bought anything.

2. Broadband: I was finally able to trade up to a broadband connection in 2002, but the change wasn't exactly the stuff of revolution: I was used to a high-speed connection at work, so my reaction to getting one at home was to wonder why that had taken so long.

3. ITunes: I started transferring an enormous music collection to MP3s in 2001 (you can read about my misadventures here), but the turning point was changing the jukebox software I used to organize my music. I started with MusicMatch, but with my big library, accessing and updating song information was horribly slow. For a long time I resisted a switch to iTunes, fearful that the transition would be painful -- a classic case of "switching costs." When I finally did change, iTunes was so easy and nimble that I regretted having waited. I've heard MusicMatch has dramatically improved since I stopped using it, but as long as iTunes meets my needs, why would I switch back?

4. TiVo: We got TiVo the same week we brought our newborn son home, and never has a gadget's arrival been more perfectly timed: Babies reduce your attention span to tiny chunks, and their arrival ensures you're going to miss things. Instantly, TiVo swept away fussing with cranky VCRs, timer recording and hunting through unlabeled tapes. That was gift enough, even before we started using it to force TV to abide by our schedule.

5. Blogging: As I've written before, I started blogging on a lark more than a year ago, and quickly found it intoxicating -- it made the "every PC a printing press" claims of the digital age real, and immediately shoved its way into my life. For better or for worse, once I got a taste for blogging I had no doubt I'd rearrange my routine to accommodate it.

Those big moments had an impact on my daily life and my digital habits. But other changes have been more far-reaching, and those changes didn't happen all at once; rather, they took the form of a slow slide from one habit to the other.

The way I find and read news has completely changed. Each morning (and several times thereafter) I check my My Yahoo! home page, which aggregates news from 14 sources and shows me sports scores, financial information and weather. Then I have a toolbar's worth of favorite Web sites that I quickly run through. If I'm looking for something those sources don't cover, I check Google News; if that makes me curious about a subject, I go to Wikipedia. As for the physical newspaper, I get the Saturday and Sunday papers, and while I dutifully bring them in each morning, they often go unread. I no longer bother with the front page: The big news there hasn't been news for hours, and I've already read any interesting features online.

The Internet has also revolutionized how I shop. Once upon a time, I regularly prowled music stores for used CDs and took leisurely strolls through bookstores. No longer. After I digitized my music collection, I bought used CDs for a while -- except now I'd rip them into MP3s and toss them aside. Gradually, I began buying songs and albums on iTunes; now, I rarely shop for used CDs -- it takes too long, and getting stuck with a plastic case seems wasteful. To my amazement, I almost never go to bookstores -- if a review catches my eye or someone recommends a title, I put it on my wish list, and often buy a used copy from one of Amazon's Marketplace sellers.

(What hasn't kept up with the march of progress? The biggest laggard is my cellphone. Since joining the cellphone hordes in the late 1990s I've had two carriers and four cellphones, none of which I've liked. Despite all the hype about ringtones, camera phones, wireless Web and the rest, I've never regarded my cell as anything more than an irritating necessity of modern life, prone to dropping calls and running out of battery life.)

Is there an overall theme to all this change? I think there is: In 10 years of bending technology to my will (or, possibly, being bent by it), I've consistently opted for power and efficiency at the expense of serendipity.

Reading a physical newspaper, flipping channels on the TV remote, wandering around a bookstore or thumbing through used CDs is about serendipity. Filtering one's news, picking programs to record on TiVo, making an Amazon wish list and buying music digitally is about power and efficiency. (Though it should be noted that online, serendipity is emerging in new forms, through lists of most-popular stories and recommendation engines.)

The truth is, I don't miss serendipity. As with a lot of things, our memories are rather selective, remembering the occasional entertaining show we found channel-surfing but forgetting the hours upon hours we spent cycling through the channels while our significant others grew homicidal. Given a choice between a serendipitous find here and there and making better use of my increasingly precious time, I'll take the latter -- with heartfelt thanks for the technological advances that made that possible.

That said, I can't keep from thinking that there's a dynamic at work that has nothing to do with technology, and is several orders of magnitude older than the Online Journal's 10th anniversary. In 1996 I was 27 years old and recently married; today I'm a 37-year-old dad. Is there a 37-year-old dad who doesn't value more-efficient time management over youthful serendipity?

Oh well. At least I'll always have TiVo.

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2008


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