I started uni in 1996. The prospectus had proudly declared that every single student would be provided with an email address. I didn’t understand the concept at all and thought that this meant we would all be supplied with our own computer – and obviously computers back then were huge so I just couldn’t understand where these thousands of machines would be kept and how I would access it.
During freshers week there were two compulsory classes. The first was how to use email – we were all paired with a stranger on the other side of the computing lab and had to contact them using email. It was an eye-opener and very exciting. The second compulsory class was about the dangers of becoming addicted to email.
Essays were hand-written for the first two years but then the University introduced a policy that essays now had to be emailed as an attachment. There was absolute uproar and we actually staged a protest – holding placards saying that we were there to be tested on our academic ability, not our IT skills.
My first proper job after graduating and travelling was in 2002. The organisation were proudly boasting that they had invested in computers for all office-based staff – no more typewriters and carbon paper. When I was invited to interview they said I would have to take an email competency test. I was really nervous and got one of my geeky friends to teach me everything that could possibly be done on early Outlook (including diaries, when the use the cc and bcc fields etc). When it came to it, I was given a handwritten letter which I was asked to type out and send to someone and then asked if I knew how to forward an email. That was it. My colleagues thought I was a proper techy wiz due to my additional knowledge. I feel quite lucky that I’m of the generation which was young enough to fully embrace technology when it started to take over but also old enough to have had a childhood without it.
On the Ms thing, there was a pizza place local to me when I was young, which had a ham/sausage pizza called the Ms Piggy. I don’t know if it was a genuine misspelling or if they were avoiding copyright but I recall my mum laughing her head off at the idea that they were suggesting Piggy and Kermit had divorced. One day we went there with a classmate from school who dared to look my mum in the eye and questioned why this was funny. She was only 12 years old and I was in awe as she explained that Ms was the correct term for modern women and there was no need for us to have to demonstrate our marital status. From that day onwards, I called myself Ms, much to my mum’s chagrin. She thought people would think I was a lesbian and that no man would ever want me.
Throughout several jobs in different organisations, my title was always used in correspondence, on company literature etc – Ms Creature Deep. It was the same for everyone although obviously there were different titles used – Miss, Mrs, Ms, Mr. Sometime around 2008, the company I worked for (and still do), announced that titles were to be dropped and we would all be known as Firstname Secondname only. It was explained that neither gender nor marital status should be important in the workplace. Some people were really angry – I remember a friend who was about to get married being upset that she would lose out on the time-honoured ritual of changing her details. I was torn – my feminist ideals completely agreed with the argument but by losing my Ms title (which I retained after marriage) I was losing the opportunity to show off that I was a feminist and therefore different to all the Miss and Mrs. It strikes me as strange and interesting that, just over a decade later, we’re now pushing back the other way by detailing our pronouns.
What I find particularly fascinating though is what we managed to do before technology took over. When letters took a day to be dictated, typed, corrected and re-typed, when memos were handwritten and delivered by trolley twice per day, when people were not available and connected 24/7 and did not have all the information in the world in our pockets. At that time, we still managed to put a man on the moon, send rockets into space, explore the globe, run a health service, a food chain etc. We have clearly fixed inefficiencies but we’ve created distractions and problems. I think there are lessons to be learned from both the present and the past as we move into the future.