View from the terrace of the family's Brooklyn Heights apartment

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Bells and Whistles

Too Much of a Good Thing?

At a supermarket parking lot recently, a man driving a spanking  new car said to me, "That's a nice truck." He was referring to my diminutive white pickup.
"It's ancient--18 years old, and they don't make them any more," I replied. "No bells or whistles. Even the windows have to operated  manually!"
"Take a look at this," he said, opening his car door and indicating a dashboard with lights, knobs, screens and other gismos that might have been appropriate in a jumbo jet. "I have to get the manual out all the time to see how to turn something on or off!"
Each one of those bells and whistles probably made sense individually, but all together they've produced problems for a lot of drivers. Similarly, many computer programs try to cover multiple situations and have become too complicated for many users to navigate. We tend to think that because something is "improved" it represents progress. When I ordered my desk computer I opted for a wireless keyboard and mouse, thinking them cool, but not realizing that a simple plug-in was a lot better than forever replacing batteries! The plethora of bells and whistles on some cars, I suspect, is a recent example of too much of a good thing.
When I was chair of the English department at a state university in Connecticut, we had no required courses except freshman comp, which was mandated by the administration. When we hired young faculty to develop new fields reflecting their specific interests, they convinced a majority of the department to make the new courses required. First was a course in women's lit, then one in African-American, next a study of Native American, and then Latino/Latina, and so on. Any one of these requirements was reasonable, but all of them together began to produce English majors who graduated without taking a course in literature earlier than the twentieth century and were not familiar with "dead white men" like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, or Wordsworth. Of course it is true that the accomplishments of women and minority writers had been overlooked or ignored in the past, but our new requirements seemed to me to be too much of a good thing. This problem was eventually resolved by requiring any two of these specialty courses.
Often what is initially considered a wonderful innovation, in time develops a sinister underside. Television, promoted as an entertainment media, became for the most part an annoying advertisement media. Email is currently in the process of suffocating itself with relentless ads compounded by never-ending pleas for donations to political and humanitarian causes. The move from email to texting may give temporary relief, but ruining a good thing by overdoing it seems built into human nature. 
These problems may be trivial, but recently an added precaution to correct an imbalance caused by larger. fuel-saving engines appears to have been a key element in airplane disasters killing hundreds of people. When a device to prevent a jet from climbing into a stall was adopted, some pilots were not told how to disable it if it malfunctioned. The result has been catastrophic. Before adding a new wrinkle to a car, an airplane, or a computer program, it is imperative to consider the larger picture.

BB