By Jamie Portman
“Isn’t technology wonderful?” The young couple had just been seated at a restaurant table next to mine, and he was ecstatic to discover that, instead of a paper menu, he would be able to access it on his smartphone through a QR code.
He began fiddling with his phone, anxious to display the marvels of the digital age to his companion. But he was having difficulty getting the menu to pop up on his little screen.
“Just hang on. I’ll get it in a moment,” he muttered. His companion patiently gave him a few more minutes before she gently suggested that maybe they should request a paper menu. The very idea of going paper horrified him. “That’s not progress!” he said disapprovingly. Then came success. “Got it!” he exclaimed happily.
Meanwhile I had ordered from a paper menu and had already been served my appetizer. As I finished that course, he was still scrolling up and down his tiny screen trying to see what was on offer. Fed up, his girlfriend finally summoned a waiter and requested a paper menu. “You’re ruining our evening,” her boyfriend complained. They were still arguing when my main course arrived.
Here’s another scene, this one at an airport gate, as passengers prepare to board a flight. There’s a delay in the lineup, because one traveller with an electronic boarding pass can’t locate it on his smart phone. Finally he’s politely asked to stand aside so other people can board. He objects, saying that he’s being unfairly treated. So the other travellers and I continue to wait in line, paper boarding passes at the ready.
We move on to the plight of a VIA rail passenger who arrives at the station to catch a train and discovers that the parking ticket machine has been replaced by a poster showing a QR Code—now the only way of paying for a parking space. Using her smartphone to access the site, she gets back a message that it isn’t available. So, worried that she will miss her train, she boards without paying and finds a $50 fine on her windshield when she returns the following day.
Or perhaps you drop into a branch of Canada’s leading chain bookstore in search of a particular title. It’s not available in the store so you assume you can avail yourself of a service that has long been a fixture of the retail book business: you ask the staff to order a copy for you. But they refuse. After all, you can now order it yourself on your smartphone and they’ll show you what to do right there in the store. You don’t have a smartphone? No problem. You can still place an order on your home computer—assuming the store’s website is functioning, also assuming that you actually own a computer and that you’re not so fed up with the aggravation that you switch to Amazon.
A major problem with our exciting new digital world is the assumption that we’re all wired into it to the fullest and most up-to-date extent possible—and compliant enough to overlook its failings. In other words, welcome to a dangerously idealized fantasy land that victimizes millions of Canadians, many of them senior citizens.
I’m writing this piece on an Apple desktop, fully appreciative of the benefits it affords me. I also own a serviceable tablet and laptop. But I do not own a smartphone and have no intention of acquiring one. My very basic cellphone is all that I require. But to many, a smartphone is a necessity of life in today’s culture.
Unfortunately, it’s a culture that can also be discriminatory. Consider the grotesque saga of the ArriveCAN app, a $59 million folly imposed on the public by a federal government responding to the need for tighter border restrictions, including proof of vaccination, during the pandemic. Ottawa blithely assumed that travellers would simply access the app through their smartphone and electronically dispatch their required border-entry information before returning to Canada. Early on, there were stern warnings about the unacceptability to customs officers of paper proofs of vaccination and threats of a $5,000 fine and 14 days quarantine if one didn’t comply digitally
We know now that this was a flawed system that kept crashing and on one infamous day went sufficiently haywire to send some 10,000 returning citizens into quarantine. But worst all was the fact that, even had it been flawless, ArriveCAN disadvantaged a substantial chunk of the population in a manner that was unacceptable.
Senior citizens, 35 per cent of whom see no need for a smartphone, were the most obvious victims, because of the government’s cement-brained assumption that every Canadian owned one. Yet, ironically, possession of a phone offered no guarantee of success. Even to access ArriveCAN, you were out of luck unless your particular device met its peculiar needs. Many did not do so.
So how welcoming should we be to the digital age? At a time when the Phoenix pay system remains a national embarrassment and serious data breaches and Ransomware attacks are a continuing concern, it pays to be prudent. The promise of the digital universe can be seductive, but we have a right to push back.
It may be something as simple as rejecting the proposition that the nightmare of trying to read your weekly supermarket flyer online is infinitely preferable to the old-fashioned paper copy delivered to your door. Or it might be questioning something more fundamental, for example the Nova Scotia RCMP’s shocking admission that in the aftermath of a nightmarish shooting spree it chose to alert the public via Twitter alone. Whatever has happened to common sense?
