The upsides and downsides of instant information

Another apt commentary on the state of the world and our addiction to cell phones from my favorite cartoonist--Stephan Pastis--and his menagerie of talking animals (and birds) in Pearls Before Swine. 

Finding balance

It seems to me that the lines between our personal and work lives are becoming more and more blurred. They may not even exist for some people. I think much of it has to do with the prevalence of technology and social media and how easy these make connecting to others at all hours; we can be connected 24/7 to family and friends, so why not to colleagues and bosses as well? I know employees who can never let go of work, or vice versa--their bosses and workplaces can never let go of them. These employees leave their workplaces, go home, eat dinner, and work some more, sometimes right up until they go to sleep. Or they accept phone calls and answer text messages from bosses, colleagues and/or clients the entire evening. They never shut their phones off; they check their work emails constantly. They are on when they should be off; they are available to their workplaces when they should be doing other things. Those other things include having a personal life, a family life, a social life, a hobby or two, or doing volunteer work, or maybe just time out for meditation, relaxation, reading a good book or watching a film. The odd thing is that these people travel to an actual workplace each day; they do not work at home. Somehow they have a harder time physically and mentally separating themselves from their workplace than many of those I know who work at home or who work several days a week at home. I am not sure why that is; it would certainly be worth studying. It seems as though working at home forces those who do it to make rules for when they are available and when they are not, and they have learned to enforce those rules.

If a workplace expects the majority of its employees to be available at all hours or to finish work at home, I call that tyranny. Possible exceptions include high-level leaders in times of crisis. If employees cannot let go of their workplaces and must be connected to them and their work at all times, I call that idolatry, especially if there is a certain amount of arrogance attached to the worship of work. These are the people who could choose not to idolize their jobs, but they choose otherwise. Not being able to let go of work can also be a form of addiction. The latter can sneak up on employees after several months of taking work home because they are interested in finishing up an interesting project or because they want the answer to the question now. And taking work home every now and then, by choice, is much different than being forced to do so by your workplace. But over time, the results can be the same. Employees become slaves to their work and to their workplaces. They cannot put their work aside; it preoccupies them to the point of nervousness and anxiety, which is not healthy in the long run. This happened to me a number of times during the past twenty years, I would take work home and stay up to all hours in order to complete it. But what happened was that one project would get finished, and then two more would take its place, and so on. My point is that we will never be finished with our work. It will always be there waiting for us the next day. It is absolutely fine, totally ok, to pick up the next day where we left off the day before, after an evening of rest, relaxation and a good night’s sleep. It is important to have balance in our lives. More to the point, it is important to maintain balance in our lives, because it is so easily lost to or disturbed by workplace tyranny, idolatry, or addiction. And that means shutting off the phone, not looking at work emails, not 'checking in', and not being available; no matter how much it plagues us (or tyrannical workplaces) in the beginning. It means cutting the cord and not worshipping on the altar of work. The rewards are that we find ourselves again in the process of deprogramming ourselves, and we find balance in our lives. It does not mean that we no longer enjoy our work, rather that we enjoy it within the context of a balanced life. 

Smart phones, not-so-smart people

Today’s Aftenposten newspaper ran an article about the use of smart phones here in Norway. According to the article, 57% of Norwegians over the age of 16 have a smart phone, 93% of all Norwegians have internet access, and nearly three million Norwegians use Facebook (TNS Gallup statistics). But the article didn’t focus on the usage statistics; it focused on the growing addiction of smart phone owners to their phones. One of the managers at the National Theater was interviewed, and she meant that the addiction was becoming a problem for the theater because the users were looking at their phones throughout performances and disturbing the people around them because the light from the phone is so bright. I quote her (translated from Norwegian): ‘We have had nights where so many people in the audience have had their phones on during the performance that it could have been New Year's Eve’. I call this the height of rudeness.

The advances in computer and phone technology just during the past ten years have been pretty amazing. I understand the fascination with all things new; I also understand how important it is to keep up with the pace of modern technologies. If you don’t, you’ll end up lost and exiled to the outskirts of modern society. I do feel sorry sometimes for elderly people who haven’t kept up or who haven’t had the chance to keep up—who may feel overwhelmed and confused and who wish the world was still as it was thirty or even twenty years ago. But it’s not. I want to keep up and I have kept up. We are fast approaching a world where most ordinary things we do will happen online—from banking to shopping to trip reservations as well as a myriad of other things. It is already that way to a large extent. I don’t have a problem with any of this. I love banking online, for example. We have two laptop computers at home, I just bought an iPad2, we bought a big flat screen TV a few years ago, and I own a top-quality digital SLR camera that I use quite often. I don’t own a smart phone, however, and am not sure I will buy one now that I have the iPad.

However, as much as I use and love all the new gadgets available, I also know when to put them aside for the most part. I know I am not addicted to any of my gadgets, although I can overdo it a bit at times with snapping photos. I do on occasion use a lot of time on my laptop; especially during the evenings when I use it to pursue my writing and photo projects. What I can’t understand is the point of being on Facebook for hours at a time or of sending hundreds of text messages or emails. So I can’t really relate to the addiction problem. I can go to the movies, the opera, the theater, or out to a restaurant and leave my cell phone at home. It has happened. I don’t miss it. I usually have it with me, but when I am together with others, it’s off or silenced, ditto for being in a theater. I don’t need to be constantly conversing with other people, on buses, trains, boats or planes. I don’t walk behind other people and make them nervous by chatting on phones they don’t see. When that happens to me I feel like I am being followed by crazy people talking to themselves. I don’t need to check my emails constantly, so I don’t need to be online constantly. I write this blog but I don’t need to check it constantly either. And as time goes on, I know that I will organize the free time I treasure even more optimally than I manage to now. That will be because I don’t want to spend all my free time writing on a computer or connected to some gadget, updating the world constantly about where I am, what I am doing, or who I am together with. That is because I value my private time and my private life. There are many things that no one else except those closest to me will be privy to. That’s the way I want it.

I find it sad, apropos this newspaper article, that so many people are living online rather than experiencing the ‘now’. The now is all we have. Think of what they’re missing. I would rather be together in person with a friend and enjoying an evening talking and relaxing, without having to check my phone every ten minutes. It’s rude to do that—that’s the way I grew up. I can hear my mother’s voice in my head saying something to that effect. I have seen enough people sitting together at a restaurant table, and each of them was texting messages to friends or family that were not there with them, ignoring the others at the table. More rudeness. I attend professional meetings that are constantly interrupted by emails and phone calls. It is difficult to pick up the thread and to go forward with the meetings after four or five of these kinds of interruptions. I’ve been to lectures where many in the audience are using their laptops and smart phones to check their emails and/or to edit their own lectures or reports. It’s become a brave, new, rude, socially-unintelligent world, despite all the gadgets that can socially connect us and which should be used intelligently. I would always choose the personal connection over the gadget or social media connection. I appreciate what the latter have made possible for me, the ex-pat who lives across the pond from her country of birth, in terms of keeping in touch with family and friends, but give me the in-person experience of being together with them any day.