Our chief correspondent writes:
In the 1980s-1990s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, the six-year-old boy Calvin at one point caricatures his father’s attempts at discipline by swiping his glasses, striking a pose and admonishing: “Calvin! Do something you hate! It will build character!” Well, certainly childhood is full of rules and duties whose purpose, it appears, is only to make us uncomfortable or unhappy. Some people (even some kids) may enjoy classic literature, some do find working with numbers fun, some are found every weekend at the pick-up game of basketball; but everyone, as a child, is dragged through Moby Dick (or some equivalent), has to pass algebra, is drafted onto a PE team.
Of course adult life has its unpleasant duties (many among them connected with raising children), and they’re much harder to avoid or postpone than writing a book report. But we have more choices—that’s what being an adult means—and we can spend more time and effort on things we’ve chosen to do, rather than things chosen for us. We hang out with people who like the same things we do, do the same things, think the same way. Modern technology (including websites and blogs) supports a sometimes worrying fragmentation: we may not often be confronted with people who are different.
Unless, of course, your business drives you to it. The whole point of Five Colors Science & Technology is to place a collection of expertise at the service of people who don’t have it. And that means our consultants must deal with people quite unlike our consultants.
Take, for example, our webmaster. He has been known to desire a weekend in a secluded wooden cabin, lit by kerosene and heated by a wood fire, to read eighteenth-century essays. It’s not that he dislikes or cannot handle technology: he was hand-coding HTML when the “blink” tag was the height of sophistication, and using digital cameras professionally when Kodak was still the big thing in photography. It’s just that he does not understand the point of some of it. So we have set him the additional task of handling our presence on social media. He can certainly work out, or find out, how to press the right buttons and connect the right software; that’s not terribly difficult. The hard part, the important part, is to understand our clients (our potential clients) who use social media in ways that would never occur to him.
We think this is a good thing, for all of us. We might have become, say, technicians building scientific instruments for other scientists, or managing programs to build them, or salesmen selling them. In that case we would spend all our time among people much like ourselves. We would wonder why people don’t just add up the numbers and realize . . . various things.
I think that would have been a pity, and a great waste. Better to pick up the challenge of understanding someone quite different.
But it will be a long time before our webmaster figures out “reality” TV. That will take a lot of character.
