Saturday Essay: The Hell of Hypercomplexity and Hyperchoice
The perils of overwhelm, or being dumb in a smart world.
Technology is a wonderful thing. Choice is a wonderful thing.
Except when they aren’t.
Grant me your patience - because this may sound at first a bit ‘old man moans about the modern world’ (I hope it’s more than that) - and allow me to preface this piece with three true stories from my life. Each of them taken alone are perhaps inconsequential, but in my mind at least they represent something broken in the culture.
The first is about buying a new TV, after my old one broke. Since I had limited space it had to be a certain size, so I was restricted in what I could buy.
I was looking for a 27” screen. When a searched online for a 27” Smart TV, despite the enormous amount of apparent choice, I couldn’t find one. What I could find was a 27” smart monitor. The only trouble is I didn’t know what a smart monitor was and how it differed from a TV.
After spending an hour or so trying to work it out - not as simple as you think and I’m still not really sure - I decided I could manage fine with a smart monitor. It turned out that they were mainly for gaming and a lot of them didn’t have speakers. There were literally hundreds of choices, and I got quickly bogged down into trying to decide which one. The websites for each product were laden with technical descriptions, none of which meant anything to me. It was flicker free. It had an aspect ratio of 16.9. The viewing angle was 178 degrees. The resolution was FHD1080p. And so on and so on. I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted something that resembled a TV. In the end I practically played pin the tail on the donkey and chose a mid price one, hoping it would be OK.
The one piece of information that wasn’t on the endlessly over-detailed website and which would have been genuinely handy was whether or not the stand was adjustable and what height it was. But after tracking down a few product reviews, the stand appeared to be adjustable and therefore would fit in the space I had.
This all took quite a few hours of headscratching. I got the TV/Monitor a few days later. It fitted the space - although the stand actually wasn’t adjustable - but the screen was too small. (Am I the only person in Britains who doesn’t know that a TV screen size is measured from corner to corner, not side to side?) Anyway, my bad, I suppose ( although it would have helped if they had put the actual screen width on the details in inches rather than centimetres, since it was advertised as a 27” TV/Monitor).
OK, so I’m an idiot. I accept it. I plugged the TV in and it seemed to set up very nicely and simply, although the home screen seemed to be some App I had never heard of and couldn’t get rid of which seemed to speicalise in crap dramas. I had my 21 year old daughter round to watch a film, and we easily got Netflix working. The only trouble is that neither of us could work out how to turn up the volume to a level where we could hear it. It took maybe half an hour to work it out. It would have helped if the TV had come with a simple hard copy setup guide, but it didn’t. The massively long model number I typed into Google to get a manual produced nothing useful. In the end we worked it out, but it was amazingly frustrating.
I’ll stop now, although I could go on to say that even now I haven’t worked out how to download an app on the so called smart monitor, or find BBC i-player. Let’s move on to the second piece of technology I bought that week, something much simpler, an Amazon Kindle. Nothing could go wrong there, surely.
I decided to buy a Kindle after I started reading a very long Russian novel and kept forgetting which character was which,since there were scores of them and they all had more than one name. My daughter showed me a feature on her Kindle called X-Ray, which I thought was brilliant. All you had to do was touch the screen on a particular character name and it would give a quick biog to help you understand where they fitted into the story.
So were all Kindles equipped with X-Ray ( since there were about 100 different models)? The Amazon website didnt tell me, but a bit of Googling seemed to suggest that they were. My Kindle duly arrived, but after many frustrating attempts, I couldn’t get X-Ray to work. So ( at 10.30 pm for some reason) I got into an online chat with an Amazon chatbot, which eventually, after much wrangling, passed me on to a human. Why, I asked the human, couldn’t I use with X-Ray?
After going through endless questions that seemed to me entirely irrelevant, I began a 90 minute inquiry with three separate operators, each giving up and passing to another ‘customer service agent’ after about 30 minutes. By this time I was so tired, I nearly gave up, but the third one revealed to me something I didn’t know, and that neither of the other operators ( or my daughter) had known - that not all Kindle books were compatible with X- Ray. Among them, naturally, my Russian novel.
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A few important points. My gen Z daughters were just as puzzled by the technology as I was, so it isn’t just me going senile. And although i got there in the end, the time and stress it involved was massively disproportionate to what should have been in either case a simple procedure.
Third story. Having, like everyone else, been sucked into the maw of the Internet for my information, I decided to ( as detailed here a few weeks ago) to let my subscription to The Times expire and delete my Facebook page. Now I hoped I wouldnt spend so much time ferreting about pointlessly in the virtual world. But then after I left The Times, I noticed Apple News, and thought I would give it a free trial, idiot that I was. It contains just about every news source in the globe and once again I got sucked in into reading stories about the new fashion in eyebrows. Now I want to cancel my subscription - but I can’t work out how.
This is the way that hypercomplexity and hyperchoice eat into our everyday world, hour by hour, puzzle by puzzle, distraction by distraction.
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