James B. Rule
“just joan” is on vacation
Last year Robert and Amy Ahleman of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, lost their home to foreclosure. Like hundreds of thousands of other American families, they resisted that outcome desperately. But when they sought to negotiate an alternative, they could find no one to talk to: “… they could not get anyone from the bank or its law firm on the phone to discuss a workout or get a payoff statement,” according to Gretchen Morgenstern‘s account in the New York Times.
In other times, or other countries, this story would be incredible. But most twenty-first century Americans will nod in sober recognition of similar experiences. To get on with our lives, we must deal with vast, centralized, monolithic organizations deploying the most sophisticated information technology—and they’re not listening.
Think of that sin ing feeling you get, when you realize that you have to engage a big company or government agency to answer a slightly out-of-the-ordinary question, or to get help that the other side does not find it profitable to provide. You need to get the wireless internet service that you’re already paying for actually to work. Or you need to determine what coverage your managed care company will provide for a specific treatment. Or you need to adjust the dates of that air ticket that you purchased on the internet. Or you need help from your state department of motor vehicles to make an unusual vehicle transaction.
Faced with such utterly normal and legitimate needs, Americans might well intone the words Dante imagined inscribed over the entrance to hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
The stultifying routines are utterly predictable. An electronic voice enjoins us to listen up, so that “we can serve you better.” Or it seeks to divert us to a website, which it warns is much more promising than staying on the line. Or it refers us to “menus” of “options,” none of which corresponds to the purposes of the call. Or we are interrogated by voice-activated human-being-impersonators, who understand only those responses that the organization prefers to hear.
Or we are switched from menu to menu; subjected to repetitious ads from the very organizations that are wasting our time; exhorted to do something else, besides insisting on a response—and often, ultimately, disconnected. Prospects of reaching an authoritative human being become an ever-receding mirage—one that Americans seem increasingly to despair of. That outcome, of course, is exactly what the creators of these diabolical systems are hoping for.
Fifty years ago, Americans transacted their affairs overwhelmingly with live human beings in institutions close at hand. They did their shopping, and obtained consumer credit, from local retailers; booked travel through nearby travel agencies; did their banking in person, close to home or workplace. Obviously the results could be more or less satisfactory. But both the institutions and those staffing them were within reach, part of a single community.
Technological and social change have conspired to upend that increasingly distant world. Computing has enabled organizations to compile vast amounts of information on people and their affairs, and to act on it in real time. Over the same period, highly centralized public and private bureaucracies have metastacized, overwhelming local institutions in favor of national and supra-national entities. The result: we now depend on these twenty-first century monoliths for vital needs ranging from consumer credit to medical care to birth certificates.
In the official mythology of our times, all this is supposed to leave us better off. Economies of scale allegedly generate services more cheaply. Computerization makes it possible for organizations to make and implement decisions far more quickly than before. The resulting savings are passed on to the consumer.
If you believe all this, you no doubt also gain reassurance from the recorded voice affirming “your call is important to us.” In fact, we are witnessing a net regression in human relations, as one of the wealthiest countries in the world leads the way in undermining the quality of everyday communications.
The mammoth organizations now managing our vital affairs have exploited technology and social distance to ignore those they are supposed to serve and deflect their legitimate demands. They have separated their taking-in-money functions from the helping-customers-get-what-they’re-paying-for responsibilities that should accompany them—fine-tuning the first, and starving the latter. They have calculated that they cannot get away with totally shutting down their phone lines and other links to the public. But they have done the next best thing: attending only to requests for responses that they want to make in the first place. In a Faustian bargain, many Americans seem inured to a world where every sort of product and service can be had from a distant source—if only one renounces all rights to talk back.
In an election year, with public disaffection running high and politicians touting the need for change, elected officials should be addressing this debacle. Needed is a bill of rights for consumers and citizens confronting large and distant organizations–starting with three precepts. First, an identical telephone number for all calls from the public concerning accounts and service needs—the same for calls generating immediate revenue, and for all others. Second, a mandated mean waiting time of one minute for a response to all calls to such numbers, for all purposes. And third, the option for every caller to speak to an authoritative human being, rather than a machine.
Then we’ll see whether the public agrees that the automated systems really work “to serve you better.”
James B. Rule, PhD is Professor of Sociology at State University of New York at Stony Brook, and writes on privacy, technology, and politics. Comments may be sent to feedback@sonomasun.com.
