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coaster ride. Then,

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May 13, 1984 - North Shore News

Strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

Coaster out-of-control

T’S HARD TO ESCAPE the feeling that
history has become an out-of-control roller

in a while,

somebody puts their finger on something you

overlooked, and for a moment at any rate

seems to make sense.

We have known for quite
some time now that the world
has changed: domestic
satellites, microprocessors,
answering machines, video-
cassette recorders, EXOCET
missiles, laser-guided bombs,
digital watches, smart sewing
machines, microwave ovens,
pocket calculators, assembly-
line robots, night-vision
scopes. None of this stuff
was around when I was a kid,
and, heck, I’m not even mid-
die aged yet. (Not quite.)

Although I, for one, am
just scratching at the surface,
it is clear to me that there has
been a fundamental change
in the world, something that
is as basic as, say, a change in
the types of chemicals that
make up our atmosphere.

It is a bit as though we
have all grown extra limbs or
evolved an invisible mental
ability, like x-ray vision or
precognition, without quite
realizing the enormity of
what has happened to us.

Often enough you _ hear
reference to the ‘‘new age”’
but what is it? We still get
hangnails and hangovers. In-
laws are there to be coped
with, as ever. The grass keeps
growing al an appalling rate
in the back yard, and half the
tume the lawn mower won't
Start.

The historian Theodore
Roszak once told me that all
‘“‘ages’’ and ‘‘eras’’ and
‘‘revolutions’’ are to some
extent figments of scholarly
imaginatton. Examined
closely, the Dark Ages, tor
instance, could be seen to
contain quite abit of
brightness The Renaissance

, it all

was a time of much reac-
ulonary conservatism.

So how to put a handle on
this nebulous ‘‘new age’’ of
ours?

Writing in a recent issue of
Saturday Night magazine,
Robert Arnold Russell points
to a Rubicon of sorts which,
looking back, feels just about
right. He says the world
changed forever in 1975. And
I think he’s right.

Certainly, there were any
number of watershed events,
the most obvious being the
end of the Vietnam war.
Russell's list of inventions
and breakthroughs that oc-
curred in '75 is impressive.

Pay-TV, which had been
going nowhere, suddenly
took off, in large part thanks
to the Ali-Frazier fight
broadcast live from Manila.
Until then, nobody had really
been able to figure out what
to do with domestic satellites.
The Canadian government,
which sponsored the worid's
first such device, had been
piously thinking about link-

ing up isolated French-
speaking communities via
satelhite.

Now, tt became clear, 1

was television coverage peo-
ple wanted, never mind tele-
medical facilities. Shortly
after the Manila bout proved
that hundreds of cities could
all be simultaneously plugged
into a single sporting event,
The Wall Street Journal
began transmitting facsimile
pages to a regional printing
plant, emploving a satellite,
pointing the way for later ef
forts by such publications as
The Grope & Elail

In 1975, the U-S. ruled thar
non-telephone-company
equipment could be attached
to the AT&T system, thus
breaching the defences of the
world’s largest monopoly —
and incidently ushering in the
era of the answering
machine. That same year,
pocket calculators plunged so
rapidly in price that they
became ubiquitous.

Sihcon chips were added to
gasoline pumps, making the
self-service station possible.
Cash registers became point-
of-sale terminals, keeping
inventory at the same time.
Microwave ovens became
‘“‘intelligent.’’ Taxi meters
went digital.

That year, the Altair 8800,

the first} micro-computer,
reached the market. So did
the videocassette recorder.

Video games took off with
the release of Pong. And the
newspaper industry began to
install video-display
terminals.

The meaning of all this?
According to Russell, 1975
‘*marked the end of smoke-
stack North America and
signalled the birth of the new
global economy.’’ It was the
dawn of the information age.

his description isn’t mere
poetic licence. For it was also

in 1975 that a Stanford
researcher examined the
Standard Industrial Classi-

fication list of all the jobs in
the U.S. and made the startl-
ing discovery that over half
of America’s wages and
almost half of its GNP now
originated ‘with the produc-
tion, processing, and dis-
tnibution of information
goods and services "’

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take as collateral. From that
watershed economic reassess-
ment onward, however,
information, in the form of
data, culture, know-how and
learning, had become the
backbone of wealth tin
modern society.

Maybe that’s what feels so
differents. Information.
There’s so much of it you can
choke on it.

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