Dialogue: When technology ain't all it's cracked up to be

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Howard Stringer, chairman of Sony America, listened to participants at this week's Davos World Economic Forum waxing on about digital Darwinism companies and how their executives had to compete or die in the race to keep up with the proliferation of technology.

Then at question time he stood up and said: "Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off."

This struck a chord. I was reading that news story while changing the billing name for phone lines, electricity and gas at the house a relative has rented out while he's working overseas. After 11 minutes hanging on to the appropriate extension at Telecom, someone opened the line and then cut it off. Change of shifts probably. I started again and was answered in nine minutes. I then discovered there was also an alarm line so had to call back. That took seven minutes of holding on.

Mercury Energy didn't answer within 12 minutes and I had to go to a meeting. A while later the call was answered in 17 minutes. I struck up a conversation with the pleasant woman who took my call. She explained they had staff shortages and were training newcomers. Staff had been short for some time and, yes, they did monitor the length of time people waited, but, no, I couldn't talk to the supervisor who didn't take calls and, no, she couldn't give me the supervisor's e-mail address.

It took 10 minutes to get an answer before fixing the gas bill with Contact Energy, a company that gauges efficiency by the size of the directors' fees.

So it took almost all my morning to do these chores. The utility companies know time is money so they cut staff and shift the cost on to the customers. Later that day I drove my relative to catch his plane and lo and behold the Auckland International Airport company has adopted the pass-the-costs-to-the-consumer practice. Whereas formerly you took your luggage to your car and drove through the gates and away, you now join a queue of weary travellers on foot, pushing their laden trolleys to the pay booths so the company can be more efficient at its customers' expense.

So good on you Howard Stringer who, by the way, was not the only voice in the backlash at Davos against the proliferation of technology. Perhaps common sense will out, I thought, and the world will not go mad from what a Microsoft researcher has called "continuous partial attention" - people have so many simultaneous interactions on phones, e-mails and in person they can concentrate only partially on each.

But watching Larry King Live that evening, I shifted back to the diagnosis that the world is, indeed, going mad. People slag Holmes for pretending to be current affairs when it's really an early-evening David Letterman-type talk show for those with a short attention span, but compared with Larry King this night Holmes is rich with wisdom and gravitas.

King - hair dyed a tasteful auburn, eyes staring through spectacles that look like those glass bricks you use for light walls, and face looking increasingly like a tribute to the embalmer's art - was conducting a respectful interview with the Bakker family because the son, Jay, has written a book called Son of a Preacher Man.

Now Jim Bakker was a televangelist who stole millions from poor suckers who believed in his avaricious god. He lived a life of obscenely conspicuous consumption in a huge mansion and spent some of the time between sermons, in which he condemned lust and worldly pleasures, with lovers.

His wife and evangelical partner, Tammy, was so tuned in to a benevolent and compassionate god, she regularly burst into tears of joy. She looked then like a tart and if you could imagine a Barbie doll as a dishevelled 80-year-old in an old dolls' home, well, that's what she looks like now.

Jim went to jail, the right place for this particularly despicable type of conman who preys on poor deluded believers. He and Tammy were divorced while he was inside and young Jay went off the rails with the booze. He looks the sort of guy who could give alcoholics a bad press again.

Well, Jim's back in the evangelism business, brought to another level of grace by his son who, in turn, is chuffed to see a minister restored; you don't often see that. Jim wants to take his ministry back on television. He's remarried to Lori Graham Bakker, who resembles a rubber blow-up doll. Son of a Preacher Man will no doubt sell well thanks to Larry King having this odious family on his show. He gave respect and credibility to the awful underside of religion in America.

Addendum: Someone should make a list of hyperbole by television writers. It would make funny reading. Last weekend we had Louis Armstrong (of whom I am a fan) described as the most important musician of the 20th century and The Brady Bunch became the show that shaped a generation.