Is This Progress?

This is about three instances of "progress" recently made in our rapidly evolving world—that don't look like progress to me at all.

Writing was invented a hundred years or so before 3000 BC. It took another thousand or two thousand years before someone had the clever idea to somehow mark where one word ended and another began, and/or where one sentence ended and another began. Before that, everything was run together. With the new invention of the separations, writing became easier to read.

Now, interestingly, in this age of the Internet we are back to where we were three or four thousand years ago. Web site addresses (URLs), email addresses, and screen names often run words together. This occasionally makes for interesting possibilities to misread, but it almost always means we're having to learn to read writing that once again doesn't use spaces—thus going back thousands of years in the history of writing.

I remember when I was very young. During World War II no cars were being manufactured, so shortly after the war my family still owned a pre-war car, a LaSalle. To start that car, you pressed a button. Then at some point, a car's starter was activated by turning the key. That seemed like a good advance. Now, however, cars once again are "featuring" a button to start them. I don't see that this is an advance and can't see a reason for this—other than to imitate the hybrid cars which have a start button.

Another interesting trend is that now a lot of men's underwear is made without flies.
Frankly, I think flies are a good thing. Maybe I need not, or should not, go into detail on this one. I'll just call it another instance of very dubious "progress."

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein