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Science and Everyday Life

Article  in  Environment and Planning A · April 1998

DOI: 10.1068/a300571b

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Erica Schoenberger
Johns Hopkins University
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Science and everyday life

Academics are often asked how their work applies to everyday life. It's not a bad
question, although it can be overdone. But I wonder if we oughtn't to be asking
more how everyday life applies to our work.
Currently, for example, a lot of scientifically respectable people are puzzling over the
apparent slowdown in productivity growth rates in the advanced industrial countries,
especially in the service sector. It's hard to understand because services provision is
being computerized and automated at a fantastic rate and this seems to be exactly the
right thing to do. To the degree that services are about manipulating information, they
seem ideally suited to a computerized world. Why isn't productivity leaping ahead?
Any normal person who has used a phone recently to get information knows why.
There used to be a person at the other end who knew quite a lot, who could interpret
imprecise questions, suggest more efficient alternatives, and clarify misunderstandings.
Now, of course, you get an automated answering system that prompts you through a
possibly quite intricate set of nested menu choices. If you're an experienced caller, you
waste rather a lot of time waiting for the automated voice to complete its instructions
and read through its lists before you can make a choice. If you are inexperienced and
the menu choices don't exactly correspond to what you think you want to know, you
are, for all practical purposes, doomed. If you choose incorrectly at the outset, you find
yourself trapped in some branch of the system that leads nowhere you want to go, but
there are never any instructions about how to retrace your steps. You can hang up and
call in again, but that means listening to the whole automatic spiel again. You can hold
out for a promised actual person, but most likely you'll be delivered to a voice mailbox
that is full and at that point the system simply goes blank on you.
If you by chance end up more or less in the right place, your heart lifts—only to be
dashed again when that voice demands a peculiarly precise bit of information you're
not prepared to give in exactly the way it wants. Say you want to take a train some-
where and know roughly when you'd like to leave. The system will only want to know
when you wish to arrive which requires you instantly to calculate how much time the
trip ought to take and add it to your preferred departure time. Having done all that,
 576 Commentaries

the voice will offer you a train that leaves 50 minutes after your wished-for time, but
won't mention the one that leaves two minutes before because its algorithm doesn't
allow it to anticipate.
Services production is highly interactive. We have always known this. Automating
one side of the transaction may improve productivity someplace, but only at the cost of
throwing the rest of us into slow motion. No one escapes from this trap. The handful of
people who are left at the phone company, the bank, the insurance agency, or the train
service must themselves call other automated systems and endure the same purgatory
as the rest of us. Productivity statistics can't elucidate this interactive effect—the way
gains in one location create bottlenecks and costs at another. All they can see is some
number of people working with more and more expensive equipment without a propor-
tional rise in aggregate output. This is only mystifying because they don't notice that
half of those people are on hold.
Does the internet—the information highway—allow us to bypass this bottleneck?
Here again, I think we may learn from everyday experience. Here is mine.
In my office I have a 486-based personal computer, hardwired into the university
system. Not the latest technology, but neither is it a Model T Recently I wanted
to gather some data on manufacturing wage rates in several Asian countries. This
information, as I knew, is available in the Yearbook of Labour Statistics published by
the International Labour Organization and I also knew that I could find it in five
minutes at the government documents library. Even if I hadn't known exactly where
to look, the reference librarians would have. But the weather was bad that day and
I didn't feel like walking across campus. Besides, there is the internet!
I got to the ILO home page without difficulty and ended up cruising around it for
quite some time before finally realizing that they don't publish data on the internet,
they just provide information about themselves. However, there was a plethora of other
promising possibilities to click onto and so I was off into the internet wonderland—
albeit slowly because it always took a lot of time to 'connect with host' and to transfer
the 160 000 bytes of information. I visited countless web sites all over the globe—from
multilateral lending agencies to government agencies to university institutes—and
couldn't find the information I needed. It was an entirely absorbing experience. Each
time I hit a data void, ten other possibilities would offer themselves and I would veer
off again. Three hours later, I finally wrenched myself away but it took tremendous
self-discipline to break the link. The next day I went to the library and had the data in
twenty minutes.
I realize this could be just me and am perfectly aware that any ten-year-old can zip
right past me on the information highway. On the other hand, perhaps it's not just me
and there is another productivity sink opening up beneath our feet.
How would we know? The standard scientific approach can't tell us, which isn't
its fault, but this certainly suggests that we should be working hard at developing
alternative ways of studying productivity if we really want to understand what's going
on. And rather than supposing that science can work the problem through and carry
the answer into everyday life, this seems like a good moment to look to everyday life to
inform the scientific project.
E Schoenberger

p © 1998 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

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