Sticking up for ‘squidgy’ technology

By Mark Field

I have a list of favourite words that includes liminal, enthalpy, animadversions and shopping. Actually, that last one occurs more than once – at least three times in fact – more than Merlot, which occurs twice in the list. One word that has sadly fallen out of my list is enrichment, which I used to think was a lovely word. I’m sure all languages have lovely words – although maybe our German readers don’t think that glockenspiel is as lovely as our English readers do. Anyway, enrichment, in English, is a word of beauty that has become tainted.

It has become tainted because it is one of those poor dear words that have become pointlessly associated with ‘content’ – a word that itself was, once upon time, a good one suggesting sufficiency, substance, something filling and beneficial. But now it has been horribly debased to mean a morass of snarling incoherence, which can only be tamed by technology that uses a lot of silicon, rather than squidgy, fatty protein.

Now, I like silicon-based technology. This is well-known because I repeat it ad nauseam in this column. Silicon-based technology can do lots of big, simple things very quickly (and even very complicated things quickly) but squidgy, fatty protein technology can do so many things that we don’t fully understand, even though that technology resides just behind and slightly above our eyeballs.

Squidgy technology had no problem with content for thousands of years because, as soon as it got complicated, we would chip a few marks in some chunks of stone or dab some animal fat and dirt on some animal skins and, voila – record system! Squidgy technology is very, very clever: it can scan animal skins, catalogue cards, contracts, CD covers, tallies on bits of stick and porn magazines. And if there are any productive relationships in and between those things, it can spot them and work out how to use them.

I’m really very proud of this ability – even though it just kind of happened – because it helped my distant ancestors find their supper and avoid becoming supper. I like tools, too. Tools help me impress myself with my cleverness even more. But modern tools don’t help me become more clever. On the contrary (contrary is another of my favourite words), while silicon tools can make me very clever indeed, it’s damned difficult to assemble them. I can’t just dig them out of the ground and knock a few flakes off. If it was as simple as killing something with lots of skin and mixing its fat with some nice-coloured dirt to make myself a record system, I’d be as happy as a man with his supper.

Modern tools do ‘content enrichment’. Enriched with what? Animal fat? They have lists of features so long that they can only be managed by themselves – wonderful, after thousands of years we have fully-recursive records systems.

An early 21st century records system procurement exercise produces more documentation than the bureaucracy of a pre-unification German principality. User-requirements documents, statement-of-requirement documents, project-board documentation: in physical extent, this is only exceeded by the civil service of West Bengal. And I am very pleased that I don’t have to contend with the records systems of West Bengal, not least because any day now, a systems integrator will call on its chief executive and start discussing features and enrichment. If I was the chief executive of the West Bengal civil service, I wouldn’t want my content to be enriched. Not just because my staff would object to all the animal fat, but because I would simply want my squidgy technology to include the silicon technology that makes it cleverer. And that’s simple things like filing faster and retrieving better – not enriching content.

Perversely, I quite like statement of requirements documents. They are very heavy and have sharp edges. Just right for killing something with lots of skin and fat, to make a record system.

Mark Field is a group leader of library services, Dstl Knowledge Services (part of the Ministry of Defence). The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of Dstl Knowledge Services.