For the Boomers, GenX, and Millennials...remember when we all used to maintain a physical address/phone book decades ago? We still do, in a sense, maintain those databases of contacts, but we're digital now. It's just as important to do so now as then, however, it so much easier. Younger readers may have to imagine how their parents knew Aunt Carol's phone number or the dog groomer's phone number - they referred to an address book sitting by their phone. How did they send out Christmas cards? They referred to their address book to get all those addresses for snail mail holiday cards using postage. Phone numbers and addresses eventually made it to memory for those called or visited enough. For those phone numbers of everyone else you didn't personally record, a bound book was delivered to your door with everyone's phone number. The thing weighed 4 pounds! EVERY SINGLE HOUSEHOLD got one of those books.
Similarly, any older folks remember how your family made cross-state or cross-country trips in a car? My family used something called a Trip-Tik...a bound book from a roadside service called AAA that is specific to your route. The service MAPPED out every highway and road, printed it, bound it in a spiral notebook, and they either mailed it to you, or you went to pick it up at one of their numerous storefront locations. As a traveling application/sales engineer, I relied on a well-worn Rand-McNally atlas - again, a bound book I kept in that little slot between my driver's seat and the center console of my car. It contained maps from every state and city. It was how I made it to all my paper mill customers. Eventually, I knew every route by memory.
How about watching your favorite TV program? To know when a show was airing on a TV network decades ago, you needed a TV Guide. As with the other cases I described earlier, the TV Guide was a bound book mailed to you through a monthly subscription. The local newspaper, delivered to your door every day, chock full of news, also listed the day's TV schedule. Again, like the cases already mentioned, over time, you just knew what day/channel/time you would find 'The Dukes of Hazard' show. Even if you knew the details to catch the show when it aired, the show's synapsis was still a mystery until you watched. You were really aggravated when your favorite show aired a re-run (meaning an episode of your show you already had seen months ago.) Show producers could not afford 52 new shows a year, so they recycled most of it over and over to fill the time slot.
Generally, people who care to read a column like this on a paper-industry specific digital outlet might suspect where I'm going with this. All those functions performed between the years 1900-2000 for hundreds of millions of people year after year required paper. Printed, written, bound, delivered. With all those functions I bring up going digital, whether its phone books, maps, or guides, the demand for paper dwindled. Yes, mills closed. The grades of paper were no longer needed in any volume. That's NOT where we are going with this week's column. I want to think about how we changed as humans functioning in a society as digitalization arrived.
In the days of yore I opened this month's column describing, you just figured stuff out and remembered what you had to...to be efficient. Repetition, like from regularly dialing a rotary phone on the wall, certainly helped burn those phone digits into my head - particularly all my neighborhood friends. The funny thing is I can still remember my childhood home phone number (most parents were pretty good about forcing that number into their child's head for emergencies.)
Now days, thanks to modern advancements, I just ask the personal assistant in my pocket to call the person I want to talk to. Easy peasy. Most of the time, I'm asking my car to call someone - imagine saying that statement 30 years ago. We're not any worse by not knowing things by heart. My last column was about how efficiency drives adoption, Jevon's Paradox, so that comes into play in this case too...I'm talking to so many more people on the phone, more often, than I did decades ago. I guess everyone being reachable - since they carry a phone too - makes it easier as well. Now my problem is if I ever leave my phone at home accidentally I can feel the panic set in. That's not healthy.
The evolution we all have experienced is a phenomenon in the zeitgeist called "Digital Dementia." Wow. That's a perfect name for it. Adopting technology creates a void in our knowledge base we developed under the old rules. I don't have to know all the phone numbers I could potentially call because my phone knows. That is...until you're on a triage table in an emergency room while on vacation and your phone has been removed or damaged - how can you notify anyone back home of the situation? That happened to me. Luckily, my daughter was with me, who was 9 at the time. She could recall phone numbers because she was not yet introduced to the cell phone. She needed to know her grandmother's numbers if she wanted to call them. That sure came in handy in that particular situation.
Digitalization is absolutely fantastic for efficiency, but Digital Dementia is what we have to watch out for. As we adopt AI, automation, and robotics in our lives and in our industry you might ask yourself, "what are we losing?" When AI writes the program, who knows how it was constructed or how to fix it? Of course, the answer is AI will do that too...until AI is not there, turns evil, or becomes cost prohibitive. Then what?
As automation, databases, and systems run our paper machines, businesses, and lives, are we going to forget how to do it ourselves? Are we going to be forever dependent on something else to do it for us? Absolutely. That is the dementia aspect of digitalization. The effect worsens as more time passes by.
We're all susceptible to Digital Dementia. Even NASA couldn't remember how they got to the moon on 4 kilobytes of RAM. At least that's what I heard.
Steve Sena (stevesena@me.com) is a Cincinnati native. He obtained degrees in Paper Science & Engineering from Miami University in Oxford, OH and an MBA concentrating in Economics from Xavier University. He's worked for a broad array of leading producers, suppliers, and converters of pulp and paper grades.
