Sat in a meeting with Xerox reps this morning. We’re charging toward
the "paperless university." As I understand the sales pitch
(which has already been accepted…we’re in the planning stages), the
institution will save lots of money by transforming its documents into TIFF
images which can be over-layered with add-ons to replicate paper
documents. That’s the promise, anyway. In the meeting, I learned
that I’m a database nut; information, IMHO, is most useful when it’s most malleable,
when it can be sorted and grouped, arranged and randomized apart from paper or a static image. I’m talking about institutional data now, lists of names and
associated details, mostly. But the meeting wasn’t about that. It was set
up to inform Xerox about "workflow" in our department.

Postman tells us that one of the active agents in a technopoly is bureaucracy
(the others are experts and technical machinery, following his taxonomy).
The data-gathering form is one of the sublets of the bureaucracy; bureaucracy
is, like a rubber ball (my metaphor, not Postman’s), ever-redirecting between
two inevitable forces in a technologized culture–information glut and efficiency models. Many advanced data management technologies are in place to assist with the problem of information retrieval, tracking, analysis and storage. But I think there’s a cultural lag forming; actually, it’s been long forming–most of my life,
probably. Or longer. The lag, simply put, looks like a wedge between
the capabilities of the technology to aid information processing in a bureaucratic system and the bureaucrats themselves, many who don’t have time, inclination or interest in their appointment-littered work-lives to keep up with the technology, which is rabbitting along at a rapid pace. Enter Xerox.

The solution Xerox promises, given these conditions, is a stopgap, a way of
fending off the technopolistic forces from crushing institutional functioning
under the weight of too much information (too much to process, to understand, to
read, to apply, and so on). It’s a patch, sold on the promise of greater
efficiency, but–at least today–the aim wasn’t revisiting the value of the
information. The stopgap appeals to the paper-loving bureaucrat who often
asks for more information than is really ever needed–a kind of insurance of
excess. I don’t want to sound unaffectionate when I say bureaucrat.
The name bears certain negative connotations, but I’m using it here as Postman
does to refer to one of the active agents in a technopoly. Back to
the meeting. Rather than interrogating the value of information,
the focus was on ease of flow (conduction) and ease of access to old records
(storage). And these are legitimate problems for the administrator whose
desk is littered with papers. I spent the meeting wondering whether we’ll
have more critical, discerning relationships with institutional data any time
soon or whether, as Postman posits, we’ll continue to watch information excess
encroach on our lives at the expense of cultural orientations, social
interactions, rational agency in decision-making (rather than following the lead
of data), and humanism. Those aren’t the only two possibilities by any
means. But they are patterns suggested by Postman, and, after reading
about them, I’m seeing how information glut and efficiency models are reconditioning the student services side of higher ed–at one institution. After a half hour, I figured I’d take a few notes (so as to have some information of my very own). Copy was the most-used word (32 times in one hour and 15
minutes)–slightly ahead of form and file, and well ahead of information.