Opinion: Rage Against The Machine

As with so many things these days which are downloaded from computers, East Midlands Railways’ (EMR) timetables give information that is in such small text that it is practically unreadable without a magnifying glass (one of which, fortunately, I have attached to a compass.)  Derbyshire County Council used to produce a comprehensive and legible booklet of Derbyshire Train Times (the cover printed in the mainly orange and partly purple that you see on the Library’s signboard). It seems that Derbyshire County Council can no longer afford to produce them.

Planning a bus journey is much easier if your journey involves more than one bus using the Derbyshire County Council’s Bus Timetables book (£2.50p now, available from the Library) than by looking on Trent Barton’s online website journey planner. (Believe me, I’ve tried it!) It also contains useful maps of the major towns in the county.

Or take the example of the Radio Listings in the Independent Weekend newspaper. The text is so small that it is unreadable. People may believe that the entire country has got so used to reading things on the tiny screens of mobile phones that they no longer care about such things but many of us do not use such devices and anyway I would suggest that it is doing our nation’s eyesight no good at all. (I write this as someone who is fortunate in having very good eyesight).

People may think that doing away with paper information altogether is the way forward (and yes we should be planting trees and recycling paper), but as one who likes to live in the world of material reality, it surprises me how little consideration there is for the human.

On a different but related matter, did you know that the word “ergonomics”, which means “the study of workers in relation to their environment”, in the US is called “biotechnology”. Well I for one do not want to be subject to cybernetic control, in the workplace or anywhere else and consider it a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Think on’t.