The time was 1979 and these are the outtakes from an incredible interview that I conducted with this Social Security administration spokesperson for my television special titled The Information Society. It ran in the prime time on PBS that fall. The TV special focused on the end of the industrial age and the coming of the information age. The dawn of the use of computers radically altered what the Social Security Administration could do to provide support for individual Americans. First it became a punchcard world and then computers took over. She witnessed all of it.
Government. Politics. Bureaucracy. Social Security. Old age. Rising Medical expenses. All of this it seems to have substantively changed in the last 50 or 60 years. She remembers the Social Security Administration and was there when Social Security began during the Roosevelt administration and after the great depression.
She reflects on what has changed technically and what has changed politically. Today, the SSA provide support for individual Americans in complex ways that it could not have done back then. I found her comment toward the end of the interview where she hopes that politics does not get in the way of what she and her coworkers were doing touching and admirable in terms of what has been happening in our government in recent years.
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David Hoffman filmmaker
13 апр 2021
