There's something that's really starting to bug me and thats that the electronica-world we live in nowadays is actually slowing me down, especially as a consumer. This, by the way, applies to the real world - because I know that online things can happen in 0.0014 seconds!
For example, I used to go to the ATM machine in town, put in my card, type my pin & extract some lovely money.
Now, I go to the ATM machine, put in my card, wait 10 seconds for it to check my chip & pin and then type in my pin number, for it to do some more checking & then we enter the money grabbing stage.
Secondly, the ESSO garage. I used to go in, ask for a mobile phone top up, get given a card and walk off. Now, I go in, ask for a top-up, wait 30 seconds or more for the little machine to print my top-up receipt and then go.
The same goes for chip & pin in shops, I find myself standing there waiting for it far longer than it takes to write a signiature.
These are just a couple of examples, and I know in other places - like Vue cinema, ordering through the machine is quick and easy, but I get the feeling a lot of things are relying too heavily on technology. And for computers to work effectively their users have to be on the ball, yet you see older people fumbling about with PC's not really knowing how to do something or learning the shortcuts. It's not their fault - in fact I feel sorry for them, because the paper age was much more fun, and much less eye-straining.
Maybe I'm seeing this all wrong though and things will speed up, but at the moment they're slower than hell!
What do you think?
Don't blame technology, blame the people that rob from us and forced our government to use technology to tighten security.
Shouldn't you blame the paranoid government instead, Matt?
I don't think the government has much to do with ATM or mobile top-up technology, security and otherwise.
Its funny thought that these transactions are waaay less complex than, say, roaming between one mobile network and another and yet they go so slow.
I know what you mean, m0ds. Even machines that you just put cash into instead of a credit card take forever to process it! Maybe it's because now that there are so many of them, they have to wait in an electronic queue, sort of like FilePlanet.
Answering machines. Hate hate hate hate. Actually predate "the digital age", but those new fangled ones are even more annoying. I'm calling someone long distance, time is running, it's costing me money, and the machine is telling me in the slowest voice possible: "For this, press 1, for that, press 2, etc.". Drove me to hang up and waste my money anyway.
QuoteI don't think the government has much to do with ATM or mobile top-up technology, security and otherwise.
Actually, in most countries they have everything to do with it. m0ds is talking about infrastructure, or the lack of it. There are companies and governments that are run by those same old people you see fumbling around with the movie ticket machine. They just don't get it yet.
The Japanese Schoolgirl Effect is by far one of the most fascinating technological incidents I have ever heard of. It goes like this:
When the cell phone market first started to grow in Japan millions of Japanese Schoolgirls ran out and bought cell phones and brought the communications industry and infrastructure in Japan to its knees. Japanese telecoms had to respond by backing up their technology with a more sophisticated backbone. The result is that Japan is now leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world. There are video phones and other high speed connection related services that most other countries just couldn't handle in their current state.
America lags greatly behind and it sounds like the UK may as well. It is up to governments to make sure that their citizens are not left out in the dark ages of dial up ATM's and 8088 powered electronic services. If the money isn't there, and by money I mean lack of Japanese Schoolgirls, the telecoms won't do it.
I was also told that another reason for the Japanese Schoolgirl Effect is that in Japan the middle class make of some ridiculous portion of the population (80 or 90% I guess). Wired magazine has a regular column that runs called the Japanese Schoolgirl Watch (just sounds creepy huh) that keeps an eye on what they are buying because their buying power is so enormous that it affects world trends.
later,
-junc
Actually, you chose the worst possible example for Japanese infrastructure. Bloody minded protectionism of certain zaibatsu in Japan [as well as a bit of technological chauvinism] led to a reliance on a mobile phone network that relies almost entirely on wires. The system doesn't work in most cases unless you're within a few hundred metres of a receiver, and from there it's wires. As Japanese mobile phone prevalence is actually less than many western countries [I know this doesn't fit with our perceptions, but reality frequently doesn't] since it hasn't infiltrated all demographics like Europe and elsewhere, the bottlenecks haven't come up too much yet. But they will.
Which is wonderful if you're already in a country where all the power and phone lines are above ground to protect the telegraph pole industry [I'm not kidding].
Another minor point I find about Japanese mobile phones is that they have no SIM cards. You get a new phone, you get a new number. Fullstop.
The sad fact is, the most major and important consumer trend in Japan is the past 15 years has been the proliferation of 100 yen shops.
Interesting. I guess the American/Japanese fascination bug got me there. I heard that story and assumed it was true, or at least a little bit true. Is it possible that the story I heard is isolated to Tokyo, and not the whole of Japan? Also, the way I heard the story I didn't really get an impression of cell phone prevalence. That was kind of the blindsided part. It was just that the Japanese Schoolgirls alone were on them all day, not the society as a whole. How about the wired magazine thing? Is that just a bad American joke?
Anyway, bad example aside, I guess my concern is that government should be involved in internet infrastructure and they don't seem to have a large role. It seems that consumer demand drives the entire thing in America too. Consumer demand is too often met with half baked solutions to problems and not long lasting solutions.
later,
-junc
I think the main problem is us. We're completely spoiled, and any minor convenience puts us off. Regardless of the fact that I'm able to save about four hours of my life by registering for classes on-line. I don't have to wait at the DMV for a new liscence, just did it all on-line. But if I have to wait one minute of my life on something, it pisses us off. Take life for what it is, a collection of inconveniences, which give us something to talk about.
-MillsJROSS
Don't worry, just be wary of Wired since it's a magazine really based in reasserting what people already beleive, or want to. I know most media is like that, but consider how closely tied it was to the dot com boom. All booms rely on stupid mutual assuarance of bullshit, in the 1920s stock had "reached a permanently high plateau", in the bubble economy everyone knew that Japanese property prices couldn't fall, in the early 90's Wizard magazine made sure everyone knew their copy of X-Men #1 was worth a thousand dollars and in the late 90's Wired made sure everyone knew that tech stocks were immune to gravity or the need for physical assets or revenue...or anything you need to look at to run a solvent business.
Japan as a massive consumer society which drives massive technological innovations is one of those things that "everyone knows", so people go out of the way to tell them. Everyone knows that Americans are lazy and Japanese are hard working, so the stories will always contrast the workplaces in that mindset. The fact American workers are, and have always been, far more productive [amongst the most productive in the world] doesn't matter. An article about Australia would probably be full of anecdotes confirming relaxed and laid back people. Massive suicide rates, prescriptions for anti depressents and long work hours come second to the image.
An interesting thing, that I stumbled on the other day whilst trawling through some statistics [you may have guessed I study this stuff formally and in my spare time because I like it]. Whilst in the early 90's the Gini coefficient of Japan was 0.22, it was 0.33 by the end of the decade. 0 means all households earn exactly the same, and 1 means one household earns every single cent. Most industrialised countries are between 0.25 to 0.35, and America is around .33 to .34 [and the likes of Brazil 0.6]. Japan was a wonderfully equitable society, but that's now dead it seems. I wonder how long the image of a middle class country will take to die.