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December 1998, Volume 1 Number 3 To Box or Not to BoxIs boxing cruel?
In grade school, thinking outside the box used to mean “flunking.” I don’t have that much experience in the corporate world, but I have a hunch that boxes pretty much come with that culture as well. If you’re in human resources, you don’t go leaping out of your cubicle to give the folks in product development a hand. If you’re the sanitation engineer, you don’t tell accounting how to count. If you’re the boss, you don’t sit around all day dreaming up alternatives to profit-making. And programmers? You don’t insert haiku into source code. Fifth graders don’t hang out with seniors, and vice versa. It just leads to trouble. Boxes are there for a reason: Your box is your job. Thinking outside one is okay, as long as your body stays where it’s been assigned. (As a matter of fact, another term for thinking outside the box might be “daydreaming,” which has been a frowned-upon but tolerated aspect of the business world for centuries.) Many kinds of people could be said to think outside the box. Take me for instance. Show me a box and I’ll think outside of it at the drop of a hat. I’m a creative guy, and I’ve got the mountain of debt to prove it. I can think outside of boxes till the cows come home. But we both know the truth, don’t we? I’m a middle-aged lonely guy looking for the one true box he can call his own, something he can crawl inside and profit from without thinking too much. So far, all I have is television — a fun box, sure, but only on-air personalities make money inside it. I one day hope to make money by watching television, but that remains a foolish dream. Like many of you, for many years I held out hope for another box — the computer. But I never thought inside that box, not once; I’ve remained outside my computer at all times, I swear. I have witnesses. Even if I could find the interface for that kind of activity, frankly, I’d leave it on the shelf. But the computer did make my life easier in a lot of ways. I can revise documents in minutes, file them forever, and collaborate with others without ever seeing them face to face. Video games? The Internet? Public offerings of service providers? Envy of Bill Gates? Ah yes, the past 20 years have been pretty darn heady. But now, even mighty Microsoft is inside the box of federal scrutiny for the alleged crime of trying to keep other operating systems out of the boxes in which its products operate. Internet service providers, once the stock market darlings, are starting to show signs of wear. The market for computers just hasn’t grown as big as its hype, mainly because most people don’t care about serial ports, expansion options, integrated floating point units, or power apps. What the typical American wants from a computer is a home appliance—a toaster, microwave, or television. What about the hysterically touted Internet itself? Despite years of promises and hope, as near as I can tell, nobody’s making money from the Internet except pornographers. Not only that, a recent study from Carnegie Mellon University indicates that those who use the Internet regularly are more depressed and lonely than those who don’t. Robert Krause, a social psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, was quoted in the New York Times: “We were shocked by the findings, because they are counterintuitive to what we know about how socially the Internet is being used.” “Counterintuitive.” Maybe that was the researchers’ mistake. What is intuition? Thinking outside the box! Of course the Internet is counterintuitive. You can’t use a computer intuitively. Even with a graphic user interface. Believe me, I’ve tried. Perhaps the researchers should have used a little common sense. Obviously, when it comes to social estrangement, every moment spent online talking with strangers is a moment not spent talking with friends or family. On the Internet, nobody knows who you are. When you can be anybody, conversation is easy. It’s fantasy. Make-believe. Pretend. You can be a dog, a predator, a Klingon, or a warrior-wizard. You don’t know whom you’re chatting with, really, and they don’t know you either. This inevitably leads not only to fun, but to depression, loneliness, and the death of civilization as we know it. Creativity? Obviously, it’s a soul destroyer. Believe me, I’ve been there. And hey, I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Still, before you start thinking outside the box, maybe you should make sure you have one.
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