Pre-Digital Relics

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare, and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're discussing pre-digital relics. And due to the lockdown, unusually, we're recording this remotely. So speaking of pre-digital relics, Chris Wragg, lead us off. Why are we talking about this?

Speaker B: 00:00:32

What's our interest? Well, it's recently become apparent that Microsoft in MS Word have now started highlighting, if you do two spaces after a full stop to break a sentence, they're now highlighting this with the dreaded blue squiggly lines of a punctuation or grammatical error. And this sort of came to my attention. And I started to think, I mean, I ceased a few years ago doing the double space. I didn't know this was a thing. But yeah, go on. Right. Okay. But still those double line breaks though. Yeah, yeah. But up until that point, and I sort of had this slight sense of, are we throwing out something important here? Because obviously, the reason that double space was there was for the typewriter era, when you had mono spacing, and you wanted to visually signal a change in, you know, a break in the text to signal a new sentence. So they've done away with it. And it's now, you know, most style guides now don't have that as a recommendation that you put two spaces, whereas it was previously the standard way of doing things. And I started thinking, well, you know, actually, for me, that double spacebar tap served more of a function than just the visual, visual break. And so for me, you know, if you think about what a sentence is, right, it's really the point of, you know, if written language is a record of the spoken word,

Speaker A: 00:02:20

it's really a breath. Well, what I was gonna say, I just think we're going slightly too deep into

Speaker C: 00:02:24

this. Sorry. Okay. He's getting very involved. For someone who claims not to like long sentences. He's been stuck on this one for a long time. Because the principle is that we're talking about, you know, relics from you know, while we're on double spacing, though, I've got a hypothesis. I was a double spacer, right? I learned to type on a typewriter. And I bet Peter isn't a double spacer and never has been. And yet, he's consistently denying that he's a millennial. We all know he is. I think that you can tell whether someone's a millennial if they double spaced. If you grew up double spacing, like me, then you're not a millennial. But if you grew up, if you grew up with the old single space, and I think just, you know, let's just set put this in perspective. We haven't got rid of double spaces. It's just that now Word does that for you. Right? Word is adding a bit more space between a full stop on the next letter. So that's just it's doing the type setting for you, which I have to admit, I find a bit irritating. And I was, it was only about four or five years ago that I stopped double spacing. I had to because it was cocking up, like the layout of things like blog posts I was writing, because like blogger, add spaces and things, it starts adding space, if you do a double space, it'll add a space at the beginning of a line, and it looks horrendous. So I reluctantly gave up double spacing, but having spent 15 years, telling everyone who worked for me to double space everything. So I think the battle I was

Speaker B: 00:03:56

reluctant to lose. But yeah, I mean, the point the point is, for the I was making in a rather long winded fashion was that basically, the double space is not just there as a as a function for the person reading something, it is there for the writer as well. And I wonder how much stuff by introducing these, these different kind of measures, how much stuff we are unknowingly chucking out, because we're focusing on one aspect of its function, as opposed to right to

Speaker C: 00:04:32

another aspect. Well, I have a list of these things. I have a list of pre digital relics experiences that the likes of Chris and I would have had that Peter didn't have, because he's a millennial, and only grew up five minutes ago. Why don't you let me speak for myself? No, well, we'll just tell you what these things are, right? These are things that I think we grew up with doing possibly even every day, which are completely unknown today. Thanks to the evolution of digital technology. Okay. So a big bunch of them. Obvious one handwriting, writing letters and writing in handwriting. Browse, browsing, physically, physically browsing in shops for books and films and music and computer games that you're thinking of buying, having a phone call to just have a chat with someone reading the papers, and in fact, going to the news agents and buying papers, and looking things up in and owning encyclopedias and reference books, going to the travel agents to arrange your holidays, acquiring pornographic magazines, reading maps, sending greetings cards, making surprise visits, popping around to see people, sending or receiving telegrams, not using your phone while having debates in the pub about factual issues, having fun without worrying about social media, being uncontactable in general, making tapes and CDs for people, there's only a couple more, wearing a watch, remembering things like phone numbers, addresses, the routes from one place to another, and facts. And lastly, waiting for news. So particularly, you know, we all remember those summer holidays in France, where you would find out two days later that the Prime Minister had resigned, or there'd been a massive accident or something, and you had to wait for that, you know, till the papers arrived from London, you know. So there's a whole bunch of things. And all of those things, I think I sort of missed a little bit. And the question is, whether or not it is good to keep them going, whether we should try as far as we can to do some of these things, or whether they're deservedly

Speaker A: 00:06:49

becoming obsolete. And indeed, welcome to, if anyone's just joined us, welcome to the Grumpy Middle-Aged Men's podcast. Absolutely, everything now, I feel a great nostalgia for especially a couple of things, like especially being uncontactable. I like that one, I missed that one. Peter, let's hear from you, your thoughts on all this. I don't know if you would have understood

Speaker D: 00:07:11

all of those things. Yeah, I don't miss any of those things. And most of them you can replicate, I don't understand, like, I'm being uncontactable, just turn your phone off, rather. Yeah, but you don't know, do you? Why not? It's just a discipline, it's just a personal time.

Speaker C: 00:07:25

You go down, in the old days, you'd leave school, you'd bugger around with your mates, you go and do something, you get home, you know, an hour and a half later. And in that period of time, you were free, you're uncontactable. You know, you can say you can do that, but they don't, people won't, and they won't be allowed to. So it doesn't, you know, as usual, your technological optimism is not matched by the reality.

Speaker A: 00:07:49

Peter, I mean, I don't know what angle you want to take from this with this.

Speaker D: 00:07:53

Well, yeah, I mean, I had a couple of examples of more actual digital hangovers that we've got from a pre digital world, I think, are different types of examples, but the things that we do sort of use every day. So pocket calculators, right? I know, I know a few people who still use a pocket calculator, maybe even when they're sat in front of a computer with a spreadsheet. I've got a calculator watch. Yeah, and they'll use their calculator to add up Excel spreadsheet values. I don't know why they do that. That's one thing, one thing I've noticed. Yeah. Right, keyboards, right, QWERTY keyboard. Whatever the reason is for it being the case, and there's lots of controversy about why we have a particular arrangement, but it is a hangover from mechanical keyboards that that solved a particular mechanical problem. But they're still around. And we're sort of locked into a cycle of perpetually using the same keyboard layout, even though it's potentially not the most optimal. Now the jury's out as to whether that's true or not. But that's interesting, I think. Sizes of paper. A4. There's a very nice reason it's particular size it is. But thinking that, you know, most documents are produced now in on a word processor, we still this page still defaults to being an A4 page, even though most documents never going to get printed. I don't know why is that? The reason that the A4 was a particular size is because the ratio between length and the and the and the width is... Well that's only the ratio,

Speaker C: 00:09:38

it doesn't tell you why it's that absolute size though. No, and there's different standards. So

Speaker D: 00:09:42

you get the A standards, the B standards and the C standards. They're all the same ratio, but different sizes. But yeah, so why do we assume that documents are always going to be for print? And then screens are always landscape because that's how TV works. But most documents are portrait. So your laptop, why is it not a portrait screen? Yeah, interesting sort of hangovers from pre-digital, pre-computing, personal computing things that we keep going with, within everyday life. And I think there's a few, there's a few of those which carry

Speaker B: 00:10:21

hidden sort of ancillary purposes, but behind them, like the QWERTY keyboard, and the fact that it slowed people down from typing. Actually, I think again, in the way that a double space makes you think after a sentence and go, what am I going to do next? And it breaks in your mind at the end of a sentence. Typing at a particular rate or limiting the rate at which you can type means that your thought and what you're writing kind of interact at a particular speed, which I think is kind of optimal for producing good prose.

Speaker C: 00:11:00

I think we discussed that on a previous podcast and concluded exactly that, that actually the constraint was not the speed of typing, it was the speed of thought. Look, sorry guys, I want to try and focus us a little bit. Yeah, right. Can I just, I've got a way of doing that. Go on then. Here I go. We've actually been discussing, we've looked at two separate things here, right? We've got two questions. First, which is superficially distinct, but actually is the same underlying thing there, which is first of all, there are things that are dying out because technology is making them obsolete, you know, writing letters. Is there something good about those that we should be striving to retain, right? Secondly, we've got things which appear to be sort of we're locked into for various path dependency reasons, which don't appear to have an advantage, but which are nevertheless hanging around. That's the QWERTY keyboards in the A4 paper. Should we be actively trying to get rid of them? So the question is, are there hidden benefits to the things that are going obsolete? Are there hidden secret benefits to handwriting that we're losing without knowing? But are there also hidden, are there hidden costs to things like A4? I mean, paper has to be a size, so why not that one? But would we be losing something without knowing if we were to get rid of it? So I think it's the same kind of question. It's about those hidden costs and benefits of these things, of these sort of standards or ways of behaving.

Speaker A: 00:12:28

Okay, well, let's weigh in on this. Chris, go for it.

Speaker B: 00:12:33

Yeah, well, I think there are, so handwriting is a good example, right? There have been studies, there was a study done by academics at Ulm University that showed with children that are learning to read and write, if they are just taught using typing versus using handwriting, they are less, they're less good at learning, correctly spelling things and learning to write sentences from the typing versus the handwriting. And there with handwriting, there's obviously a sort of kinesthetic link between forming a letter, getting somehow stuck in your memory, the movement of the letter and the actual, its existence, it's sort of kind of getting ingrained physically by you writing it. And that gives you an advantage. So there are little things like that about, particularly about the physical world, stuff that relate like the size of paper that relates to the physical world that no longer exists in this digital space, which we get rid of, but we then lose these fundamental sort of cognitive links to the physical movement and the physical space that existed. So yeah, I think for me, I'm definitely not a Luddite, right? If something's rubbish and pointless, chuck it away. But have a good think before you chuck it away to make sure you're not losing some of those hidden benefits.

Speaker C: 00:14:11

So I think, I mean, I've been thinking about arguments, categories of argument for retention or abolition of these sort of things, of things which are unnecessary. And I think the kind of common thread here is we're talking about Chesterton's fence type situations where, you know, there's a thing we're not, where, you know, we feel like it has no purpose. So the example of Chesterton's fence is, you know, you're walking down a country lane and there's a fence in the middle of the road and it seems kind of like it's not doing anything. So should we just get rid of it? Cause it's in the way. And the Chestertonian argument is no, that fence almost certainly has a purpose that you're unaware of. And the, so the categories of sorts of types of Chesterton's fence here would be, first of all, I think robustness, right? Which is that there is something about doing things that way that protect you against a risk of something that just hasn't happened. So you neglect it. So for example, we let sat naps do all the work. Now we don't bother looking at maps. We don't even bother carrying maps. We just assume we'll be able to, you know, use Google maps to get somewhere. But, you know, the day the internet goes down and you've got five minutes to get to your, get to your appointment is the day you rue the fact you didn't print out a map or remember where you were going. And so I think there's some categories of thing, I would say things like sort of perhaps paper, paper reference books, and, you know, maps and things like that, where you, there are plausible scenarios where you would regret not having them. Whether it's worth the cost, separate issue. Point is that's one argument you can make is, you know, we are becoming reliant on things where, you know, the old way of doing it is more robust. The other category is what Chris is talking about, where there are things that actually secretly make you better at doing other things. So handwriting, we don't learn handwriting because we need to write things by hand. We learn it because it has an impact on the other skills that we have, you know, and we learn mental arithmetic, not because we need to, but because it makes your brain better at, you know, learning and spotting patterns. And it just is the foundation of all the other stuff you need to learn in maths, you know. So that's the other, it's sort of the incidental benefits element. And then separately, I think there's, there's a, you know, the third category, which is, well, actually, it's just intrinsically better because, not because it's easy, but because it's hard. And I would say handwritten letters and greeting cards and things like that fall into that category where, and things to a certain extent, like make, yeah, like making tapes for someone. Now making someone a tape, I made tapes for billions of people in my life, sadly, obviously haven't done for about 15 years. And the point is that it takes a long time to do that, you know, you sit down, and you have to record each song one by one, and then you give someone a tape, and it means something, you've taken some care over it. Making them a Spotify playlist is a, is the work of five minutes. And you probably nicked it off someone else. Anyway, it's nowhere near as good, just isn't as good. And it can't be because it's too easy. So there you go. There's my sort of three reasons why we might want to hang on to a particular

Speaker A: 00:17:34

relic. So all sounds a bit reactionary, Peter. What do you reckon? Well, I think they're good

Speaker D: 00:17:39

criteria for judging whether or not you should keep hold of something. I noticed that none of them are just for nostalgic sense. They're not the stake of nostalgia. They're all they're all practical reasons. So if you can't find a practical reason, then is a good candidate for eliminating

Speaker C: 00:17:56

something. I like nostalgia. I actually think that's also, I think my third, my third category, the one about it's intrinsically better, is partly that it's partly that there is a value to things that are inefficient. If if they are, you know, old and traditional, I mean, partly, you know, that letters and telegrams, there's something nice about them, because they're old technology, you know, it's the same reason that handmade things are better than mass produced things, even if the mass produced things are better. You know, I don't think we should be

Speaker D: 00:18:35

ashamed of that. No, yeah, it's, but it's the unquantifiability of it. That's the issue, really, is the your, your handcrafted object, which could be mass produced by the millions of at a higher quality. Yeah, there's, there's something nice about it. But if it's if it's a bit of is a practical object, I'd rather have one that's less likely to break and one that's more likely to work than a particularly nicely handcrafted one. Look, where'd we go? Because

Speaker A: 00:19:10

we're, we're pretty much at the end here, we need to draw this to a conclusion. So how do we round this off? Who wants to sort of have a crack at, you know, summing it all up? Well, in in support

Speaker B: 00:19:22

of the, of the sort of, well, I suppose in support of conservatism with a with a small c, you know, what what I particularly rail against is, you see, I'm less emotional. Or maybe that's not true. But I think nostalgia has a has a purpose. I don't think it's just an emotional connection. I think that emotional connection exists for a reason. And that's because fundamentally, conservatism has a point, which is that the the next generation always comes along and arrogantly chucks everything away. And, you know, more often than not throws throws the baby out with the with the bathwater. So I, yeah, exactly. But, but, but, but, you know, that we've we've talked, you know, at great length previously about things that, you know, were were better under a previous system, and so on. So yeah, I think for me, the, the, the, the reason really to, to think carefully about these, these things is not necessarily because it's, it's nicer if something is handcrafted or more difficult to do, I don't, I don't care about that so much. It's just simply functionally, we'll be losing stuff because, because people won't have considered the the, you know, the secondary effects of a particular technology or process. Okay, I do have a question which we

Speaker C: 00:20:52

could round up with. Yeah, go for it. Because I'm here it is. What post digital thing will our kids be nostalgic about? So what what are our kids in when they're 40? What are they going to do? They're going to look back and say, God, you remember when I remember seeing that there was a joke cartoon in Private Eye many years ago, where a dad is talking to his son and saying, on my day, some we used to have to walk all the way to the TV to change channels. And I just wondered if you know, we're gonna if there's going to be what are we going to be nostalgic about?

Speaker A: 00:21:27

I think that's a really nice question. I think I'm gonna go I'm gonna put my stick my neck out here. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be mobile phones in one sense or another. I think, you know, people are gonna go remember how attached we were to our mobile phones that we used to step outside a tube station. Hey, remember those tube things. And you'd get out your phone to sort of work out which way you were going to go. Rather than and I think I've used this example before rather than just blinking your eyes and it's there. So you know, in your cyborg mind kind of thing. I think somehow this sort of ubiquitous thing we have now the mobile phone in your hand, I think we will still have some kind of communication device or something that does all the things that mobile phone does, but you don't hold it in your hand. That's, that's my prediction. I hoped, Fraser,

Speaker B: 00:22:12

you were going to go sort of in the direction of my utopian vision, which is where we realised how damaging it was to have that ubiquitous technology with us. And we cast it away society realised. Like a Butlerian Jihad against mobile phones. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And on the Butlerian Jihad idea, I think mine, my thing that I think children will get nostalgic about in, you know, 40 years from now, is personal assistance, and how, how crap they are now, you know, I think basically the gags when you you know, you ask it something and it totally garbles whatever it was you said, or it doesn't know the answer to something straightforward, you know, I think they'll look back and say, do you remember those quaint early versions of, of, of personal assistance,

Speaker D: 00:23:05

you know, conversation with their personal assistant? Yeah. How stuck in the middle,

Speaker A: 00:23:11

I thought you were talking about actual personal assistance. Right? Yes. Batman. Yes.

Speaker D: 00:23:17

Okay, I like that. Peter or Nick? I think that I think something along the lines of, do you remember the time when your battery would run out halfway through the day? Or do you do you remember how awful it was when you got no signal on your mobile phone? So fairly sort of fundamental things, I think we'll, we'll just solve very, very soon. Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:23:37

Do you remember when we used to go on holiday to the to that house in Norfolk, where there was no mobile phone reception, which will be our equivalent of looking back, you know, to not be not not having a mobile phone at all? Yeah, no, I mean, my kids are going to grow up with a with a memory of using of having DVDs. So you know, we when we when we go in the car on long journeys, they've got DVD players. And that really is, I mean, we do watch DVDs if I've got the DVD of that film, but obviously, we don't buy them anymore. And, and I think that that that may be, you know, they're sort of probably the last generation to, to, to experience owning

Speaker B: 00:24:14

media or media. Yeah. Interestingly, I was watching on Amazon Prime with my, my youngest daughter's about eight. And we were calling up the video and it's the film. And it on there, it says, watch video now you can select, you know, do you want to watch it later? Or do you want to watch video now? She was like, what does that? What does that mean? Watch video now. So I then had to explain to her, you know, what, what a video was. And it reminded me of when I was about her age, we were one of the first people I knew to get a video recorder. And my dad loved these kinds of bits of technology, brought it home. And he was telling me what it did, right, as he was plugging it in and, you know, assembling it and so on. And I was looking at it. And he was saying, you know, so it plays you films and so on. And I looked at the little display where the, where the clock is. And I was like, but we're never going to be able to see the film on, on that. I thought that little tiny display was where you would see that.

Speaker C: 00:25:14

Yeah, it's funny that we, I don't think we've done one about, about kind of fossilized words, but you know, those sorts of, the words that hang over like the word film. I mean, obviously, nothing's, you know, we haven't, none of us watch films, but we still talk about films.

Speaker D: 00:25:29

I think there's a whole podcast because there's a whole lot of iconography to do with computers, which has got nothing to do with what it is. Yeah. And the email icon is often an envelope. A little phone, phones that look like phones rather than like mobile phones.

Speaker A: 00:25:44

And I hope when she was asking Chris about what video is, I hope you sort of went into little detail on Latin and all that kind of thing. Okay. So nice. Let's wrap up there. Thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Chris Wragg, Peter Coghill, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.