Graphic designers and cabbies

In a discussion with a journalist from Times Higher Education last week about Twitter he asked how I responded to critics who said Twitter threatened to "dumb down" education and research I speculated that the same complaint was probably made about moveable type (Guttenberg, not the blogging tool).

Stephen Bayley over in The Observer asks if technology makes us stupid.

All new technologies, going back to fire and the wheel, by way of movable type and light bulbs, de-skill people. Old crafts are abandoned or lost in favour of automation. And when you de-skill someone, you alter not only his culture, but his personality. Satnav has done this to black-cab drivers. Once this proud tribe had a private religion known as the Knowledge; all of London's streets had to be memorised. It was an amazing feat achieved only after great effort, and consequently it was admired and therefore empowering and dignifying. The Knowledge gave black-cab drivers what the marketeers call a "point of difference".

Now any larrikin can buy a satnav for £199 and tell you how to get from Edmonton to Peckham by using rat runs. The USP of the black cab has disappeared in a miasma of pixels. As a result, some urban anthropologists have noted a change in behaviour of cab drivers. Once known for courtesy and reliability, many have become sullen and aggressive. This is because technology has democratised their proprietary knowledge and beliefs.

When I read that I thought "you could say the same about graphic designers as for cab drivers". By which I mean the invention of Photoshop, QuarkXpress and so on. I know, I was there at the time. My first job interview consisted of a guy throwing me out of his studio because he wanted a paste-up artist - a skill - not a Mac operator. His business didn't last long after that.
Funny thing is, I still hear it. Bitter old men (and not so old, and not always men) bemoaning the loss of respect for their once proud profession.

The thing is, being a cabbie is more than just taking someone from one address to another. Surly cabbies are missing their real USP if they think the satnav has castrated them.
There is a difference between "skill" and "craft". And "the knowledge" is more than knowing the quickest route from A to B.

Designers need to bear that in mind, too.

Ye Sacred Muses

Ye Sacred Muses is a song written by William Byrd after the death of fellow composer Thomas Tallis. It's one of my favourite pieces, usually sung by a male alto (as it would have been originally).

I rearranged it a while ago as an experiment, so here it is for your listening pleasure!

By the way "ye" is pronounced "the" - the "y" is actually a "th" written in a way that makes it look like a "y". So "ye olde tea shoppe", like you see in certain English towns, should actually be pronounced "the old tea shop".

I've never heard a recording of Ye Sacred Muses that gets it right...

  
Download now or listen on posterous

Ye Sacred Muses (Byrd arr. Baldwin).m4a (3709 KB)

It's not funny! You shouldn't laugh...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/7981904.stm

I'm not dead yet!

Buying travel insurance for my imminent trip to China (Shanghai and Beijing over two weeks - very excited!) I was a little concerned at some of the small print in different policies.

One insurer offered to pay me £50 every day in the event I am kidnapped. Up to a maximum of £500. Go figure.

Another promised to pay for me to be cremated or buried, but omitted the clause "in the event of your death". Fearing some overzealous undertaker knocking on my hotel bedroom door, I decided not to go with them.

Reminds me of this classic sequence from Monty Python and the Meaning of Life:



Or this, from The Holy Grail