The Sound of Changing Jobs
The hosts of the National Public Radio syndicated show, The Takeaway, recently joined up with BBC Producer Kate Arkless Gray on a BBC project called Save Our Sounds. The BBC is asking people all over the world to upload distinctive sound bites and help them build an interactive map of the world in sound. Check it out and upload a few sounds of your own.
The Takeaway hosts, John Hockenberry and Femi Oke, are taking their own tack on the project, asking listeners to submit sounds they feel are rapidly disappearing from the soundtrack of our everyday lives. They plan on building a library of these sounds, to save them for posterity such as the dialing of a rotary telephone, the clacking of a typewriter or the buzzing of a dot matrix printer.
Listeners pointed out how broadband internet has made the sound of a dial-up modem a thing of the past. And one listener remarked how the digital ring of her 6-year-old cell phone sounds out of place among all the phones that are set off by actual songs.
With all the Twittering about the death of the press release and the demise of printed newspapers, I look back at my days as Associate Art Director at AutoWeek magazine, a weekly car enthusiast publication. While the job itself remained the same, the methods I used to do that job changed dramatically during the nine years I was there.
I drew my first page layouts on paper mats, counting copy lines and outlining boxes for placement of photos. A computer pagination system moved all that work to the desktop to flow and edit copy and place digital images into the pages before they were sent to the printer.
I worked with a Sunday night crew to put together the racing pages that shipped on a tight Monday morning deadline. Part of the process required picking up unprocessed photos from the airport, shipped counter-to-counter via one of the airlines. The film was processed in a darkroom downstairs and black-and-white prints were made and scanned to be stripped into the final film.
That process gave way to digitally-scanned photography, followed by high-end digital cameras that could shoot images at the track and send them almost immediately over the internet. With all the advancements in computer technology, a job that used to take two or three people up to 12 hours now took three hours to do solo.
In the spirit of the BBC Save Our Sounds project, I’d like to initiate the Save Our Jobs project. (A lot of us can relate to that). Take a moment to think back or think ahead, whichever suits you best. Tell us how technology has changed your jobscape. For example, do you still print your fax number on your business cards? When is the last time you even used the fax machine?
Or look ahead and play visionary and tell us how you see your job changing in the next five years. I’ll collect the responses and we can all gather sometime soon and laugh at all the silly things we used to waste our time doing.
