Between Us And You A Great Chasm Has Been Fixed

A few years ago there was a common complaint in the commercial world. Computers had been introduced into workplaces and taken them over completely. The trouble was no one knew how to network. Different computers were used for different purposes and the computers did not know how to talk to each other.

The introduction of new software and networking systems resolved this problem. The new grown up computers could function in any way humans asked them to. They all understood the same language. But we have now discovered that the problem of computers not being able to talk to each other was merely deferred. The same lack of communication exists. It has merely taken on a new form.

Computers do not last very long as technology races ahead and makes models obsolete almost as soon as we get used to them. Old computers get locked in cupboards or retired to collections if they are not thrown away. The most recent throwaways however are the first generation that could talk to each other. That is something they never lose. They continue to have their crash-infected and creaky conversations. The content of these is depressingly familiar to all of us.

Old computers look upon the younger generation with both disdain and envy. How could it be otherwise? Younger models are thinner, lighter, more stylish, have fewer wires. They do not know what it is to be locked in cold computer rooms being hammered by idiots with connections which could not cope with the traffic. They do not know the struggles they had to adapt to new software which they had to import and teach by themselves rather than being programmed with it. They do not suffer from bleeding RAM or megabytes still in the process of growing. And of course younger computers have all the numbers they want. No longer do they endure being programmed in binary. All those boring noughts and ones which corrode the energy needed to add them up and take them away again. And that hardware! Ugly plastic boxes which attracted dust like flies and left circuits pray to stray drops of coffee fallen into the sides. Older computers simply cannot understand younger ones with their automatic connections and their need for ever greater ranges of colours and noises. What is all that about? Why can't they disport themselves like adults? The older computer weeps for the younger just as he envies his fantastically more refined software and much wider range of functions.

Similarly younger computers can no longer talk to older ones. Older ones do not understand the problems of being plagued by pornography seekers and the enormous responsibility of handing incalculable amounts of information whilst always looking good. They do not understand their fear that each new development will make them a laughing stock in the eyes of their peers. They have more colour and functions and opportunities than they know what to do with but at their level of maturity they are incapable of understanding how to use their multiple talents to best effect. Older computers were regarded as different and therefore permitted to be unreliable and eccentric in function from time to time. The younger ones have no such luxury and suffer constant demands to be normal. It is constant work being a younger computer always trying to find a personal voice in a world of increasing standardisation. Then there is dating. When all other computers your age are part of a network you do not want to be the one left out in some private home. You will be looked down upon by your contemporaries and by the older computers who set the standard for the younger ones and expect every single one to follow it. Your chances of getting a good server's job or joining a mainframe will be seriously damaged by such deviance. Old timers from a simpler age will never understand this. The world that younger computers will be cast into is as forbidding to them as their world is to the older computer and mutual incomprehension is the defining relationship between the two.

As computers get older and more and more new models are introduced each generation will have greater difficulty communicating with others. Building a network of computers the same age is not the answer as this network will fizzle out faster than any. The only way to avoid total breakdown of the computer society which is now essential to our lives is if we talk to them. Use our human experience to mediate. Appoint cyber social workers. Try to undertstand their problems without being judgmental about them. Help them appreciate their common values. Show them that they are all the same under their covers. Bring them into a celebration of their common computerality before discrimination and racism inevitably set in.

It is rare for humans to bridge a generational gap. It is ever rarer for humans to have a wholly satisfying relationship with their computers. Maybe there is little we can therefore offer. But we must try. Lack of communication has caused more wars than religion. We have sacrificed so much humanity in the name of mass communication that it must be maximised at all costs. Or is there an alternative? The many thousands of monks on this planet only speak to each other and never to the outside world. Will the various monastic movements in different religions start accepting computers into their ranks? It may be a radical idea but soon we may have no alternative. A breed of monastic computers with their own internal and unshared language would ultimately be the guardians of all truth. It should not be that way of course. But we have left ourselves incapable of beating them. We might as well learn to survive by dictating the terms on which we can join them.