Me unplugged
I feel compelled to share a couple of random thoughts that suddenly become intriguingly intertwined.
I've been commenting for some time that the new digital age is a double-edged sword. It's been written that this is the first economic revolution that has actually resulted in LESS personal time for the average worker. The reality is that the immediacy and pervasiveness of technology has tethered us to our work. We can't escape it. Blackberrys, email, cell phones, laptops...it's all about taking it with you. Even if you don't want to, the expectation of your clients is that you do.
You're always on the clock these days. When someone sends you an email, without you even knowing it, a clock somewhere starts ticking. You could be away from your desk for 30 minutes, or a few hours (God forbid a day or two) and you come back to angry emails demanding to know where you've been. This forces you to proactively communicate where you are at every given moment to stave off the bristling, lathered emails that begin prowling your inbox like so many virtual rabid wolves.
I was lamenting to Lori about being tracked down Sunday by a client, bringing me back down to Earth after my Saturday high. The client was at a tradeshow in Vegas and I admittedly gave them my cell number in the case any urgent situations arose. I rarely give out my cell, but it was the appropriate thing to do in this case lest I return to a Monday morning cataclysm. Lori and I were bemoaning the fact that certain late decisions on the client's part rolled down hill to me. While this is true, I realize that shit just rolls down hill on everyone. And with technology, the shit is excreted at the speed of data. Even the biggest companies that you think are proactive, regimented and disciplined are plagued with the same insane trickle down theory. One email from an executive and the entire company goes into hyper-reaction mode. Even the way an email is written and interpreted (or misinterpreted) can cause uncertainty to spread like wildfire.
We spend insane amounts of time responding to emails for fear of invoking the wrath of impatient senders. One business writer talked about what the experience would be like 10 or 15 years ago -- before email. Imagine returning to your desk after a day away only to find 150 "While You Were Away" memo post-its piled there. It would be ridiculous, right?. But that's what it's like now with email. Its cute, innocuous little digital facade makes it seem so harmless, but it's actually more invasive and soul-sapping than you can consciously fathom.
That crossed in my mind with the thought about rush hour traffic. After our first experiences driving from OC to San Diego, we began seeing the patterns. There are certain hills or blind curves that cause a chain reaction in traffic. You can see it from elevated perspectives as some car in the distance hits their brakes and the Christmas tree of red lights trigger in rapid succession in its wake. A Discovery Channel show commented on the phenomenon. It's like neural synapses firing...one person taps their brakes and literally miles of cars behind will slow in response.
Kinda like email trickle down. Everything moves so fast; like a gigantic, vicious vortex of data and deadlines. Be there, do it now.
That thought just commingled with the recollection of a science fiction novel I read some fifteen years ago. In the Across Realtime books by Vernor Vinge, he writes about a future when the human race disappears entirely. Certain small groups of people, leveraging an exotic technology that enables them to trap themselves in a stasis field that "freezes" them while the rest of the world evolves around them (the "bobble"), emerge from their induced hibernation to a planet where all humans have vanished. The eccentric time travelers of sorts speculate about the cause of the disappearance over the course of chapters. The prevailing sentiment is that the computer networks people used became so pervasive and so powerful, that they enabled people to finally transcend physical form. The idea was that -- with the Net wired into each person's brain, enabling them to share ideas with virtually anyone on the planet and retrieve information from any resource instantaneously -- the race simply evolved to a point where intelligence required no flesh.
So I muse tonight about how far-fetched this could be. Certainly it's hard to see us completely evaporating into pools of consciousness and energy, but I think this century will see real challenges to our sense of physical self. Will we become gargantuan sloths tied to our computers (as our national obesity statistics indicate) or will we whither and atrophy as we become inextricably meshed with our networked fabric...senses perpetually overstimulated by the adrenalin charge of access to everything all the time?
Don't know. But frankly, I wouldn't mind unplugging for a while.
I've been commenting for some time that the new digital age is a double-edged sword. It's been written that this is the first economic revolution that has actually resulted in LESS personal time for the average worker. The reality is that the immediacy and pervasiveness of technology has tethered us to our work. We can't escape it. Blackberrys, email, cell phones, laptops...it's all about taking it with you. Even if you don't want to, the expectation of your clients is that you do.
You're always on the clock these days. When someone sends you an email, without you even knowing it, a clock somewhere starts ticking. You could be away from your desk for 30 minutes, or a few hours (God forbid a day or two) and you come back to angry emails demanding to know where you've been. This forces you to proactively communicate where you are at every given moment to stave off the bristling, lathered emails that begin prowling your inbox like so many virtual rabid wolves.
I was lamenting to Lori about being tracked down Sunday by a client, bringing me back down to Earth after my Saturday high. The client was at a tradeshow in Vegas and I admittedly gave them my cell number in the case any urgent situations arose. I rarely give out my cell, but it was the appropriate thing to do in this case lest I return to a Monday morning cataclysm. Lori and I were bemoaning the fact that certain late decisions on the client's part rolled down hill to me. While this is true, I realize that shit just rolls down hill on everyone. And with technology, the shit is excreted at the speed of data. Even the biggest companies that you think are proactive, regimented and disciplined are plagued with the same insane trickle down theory. One email from an executive and the entire company goes into hyper-reaction mode. Even the way an email is written and interpreted (or misinterpreted) can cause uncertainty to spread like wildfire.
We spend insane amounts of time responding to emails for fear of invoking the wrath of impatient senders. One business writer talked about what the experience would be like 10 or 15 years ago -- before email. Imagine returning to your desk after a day away only to find 150 "While You Were Away" memo post-its piled there. It would be ridiculous, right?. But that's what it's like now with email. Its cute, innocuous little digital facade makes it seem so harmless, but it's actually more invasive and soul-sapping than you can consciously fathom.
That crossed in my mind with the thought about rush hour traffic. After our first experiences driving from OC to San Diego, we began seeing the patterns. There are certain hills or blind curves that cause a chain reaction in traffic. You can see it from elevated perspectives as some car in the distance hits their brakes and the Christmas tree of red lights trigger in rapid succession in its wake. A Discovery Channel show commented on the phenomenon. It's like neural synapses firing...one person taps their brakes and literally miles of cars behind will slow in response.
Kinda like email trickle down. Everything moves so fast; like a gigantic, vicious vortex of data and deadlines. Be there, do it now.
That thought just commingled with the recollection of a science fiction novel I read some fifteen years ago. In the Across Realtime books by Vernor Vinge, he writes about a future when the human race disappears entirely. Certain small groups of people, leveraging an exotic technology that enables them to trap themselves in a stasis field that "freezes" them while the rest of the world evolves around them (the "bobble"), emerge from their induced hibernation to a planet where all humans have vanished. The eccentric time travelers of sorts speculate about the cause of the disappearance over the course of chapters. The prevailing sentiment is that the computer networks people used became so pervasive and so powerful, that they enabled people to finally transcend physical form. The idea was that -- with the Net wired into each person's brain, enabling them to share ideas with virtually anyone on the planet and retrieve information from any resource instantaneously -- the race simply evolved to a point where intelligence required no flesh.
So I muse tonight about how far-fetched this could be. Certainly it's hard to see us completely evaporating into pools of consciousness and energy, but I think this century will see real challenges to our sense of physical self. Will we become gargantuan sloths tied to our computers (as our national obesity statistics indicate) or will we whither and atrophy as we become inextricably meshed with our networked fabric...senses perpetually overstimulated by the adrenalin charge of access to everything all the time?
Don't know. But frankly, I wouldn't mind unplugging for a while.
posted by JabberDrew at 11:18 PM
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