“The system does not allow for it” – how often have you heard this answer when trying to change or streamline something at a customer care center or at a counter of a major airline or company. It seems to me, that the more we try to perfect the systems to run and organize our lives in society the more we are giving away this little quench of humanity making companies, city administrations, airline companies and in general any entity dealing with clients or customers on a bigger scale.
Systems should be there to serve people, especially computer programs are invented to make life easier but in reality, they are starting to complicate things. Living in South Africa, I am sure most of my fellow comrades will have had run ins with Telkom, the SABC or even the traffic department because payments are not registered properly and the helpless and mostly clueless customer care agent can only try to calm down the customer while the system is the person in question hunting down without mercy or relief up to the debt collectors letters without having the possibility to stop the nonsense.
I guess we also have to take care that our systems in church or an NGO does not become the perfect battle ground for inhumane systems and that we strive the balance between work easier done and having the chance to show that we as human beings still deal with human beings. I remember a diplomat getting into a court battle at home, because the church system of taxation didn’t recognize him being abroad for some years but initiated at the end a legal battle because the system did not allow for being abroad a longer time. Obviously this harmed his relationship with the respective church quite a bit.
I guess to counter the computerization of our lives we have to escape the idea to connect everything we are doing, from work via fitness via eating habits via social media with a digital system. I know people who run around the kitchen table just to have the magic number of steps given by their fitness wristband computer.
To remain human we must de-computerize our life where our personal habits become prescribed by a brainless micro-chip. There is indeed more than ever the need for an extended ethics of computer use and digitization of our lives. This besides the fact that such systems are indeed dangerous for our personal freedom and all the civil rights people so hard-fought for… 1984 from G. Orwell is starting to become more reality than we as normal citizens are aware of.
And so, while still fighting already paid traffic fines I will continue to think how I can balance better my personal freedom versus a digital world promising convenience of life without telling the whole story.
Filed under: Networking, Politics and Society, Reflection, Religion and Ethics, Society and living environment, Uncategorized, administrations, airline, church, civil rights, company, computer, customer care, digital, freedom, NGO, system
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