I received a wonderful comment on my last input with great stuff in it too....just see this fragment:
"No, all this new tech isn't instrinsically bad...... Isn't it up to us to find a middle gound?..."
As we are experiecing a "24-hours Society" as the scientists have named it with totall availability and no difference between work and play we have constructed a world in which we can see symptoms of what the psychiatrists call ADHD(Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) with distractability, forgetfulness, communication problems etc...All of which we can see in our daily lives today. It seems like we have done ourselves a bad favor in creating this totally flexible/accessible world through new technology.
If we go back only twenty years our work mailbox were at the office and we emptied it once a day. Our work phone was also inthe office and we answered when we were there too during office hours. Our workstations were amazingly placed in the office too. Today all this has changed.
Our mailbox is in our pocket and we have to empty it every other minute and at all hours and every day. Our phone is in our pocket too and we have to answer at any given moment. Our workstations travel with us every day and everywhere - even on vacation.....We have installed social GPS and now have nowhere to hide!
But yes - technology is not a bad thing in itself and yes we brilliant people are the ones that should figure out how we should deal with it. I truly believe that opening our minds to a bigger picture and not only staring blindly at all the details will lead us in the right direction here. It is up to us! I myself think that my wife and son might appreciate that when I come home from work it will not be only the body that arrives!
Hans, good stuff as always!
Your post reminds me that I got on to Facebook some months ago and for the first few weeks was amazed just how much time it sucked out of my life. I had to literally find a happy medium of my own, and now spend only 5 minutes every day, or every other day, on FB. I see buddies of mine doing Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, all multiple times per day, all complete with photos throughout the day - and wonder how they do it. I sometimes wonder why they do it, too. and then I realize they are merely catering to the curiousity of anyone so concerned - myself included.
It's funny, though - curious as we are, in all the inavding of email, cell phones, and PCs into the office, it's interesting that even with all the ways of communicating, we manage to keep work life nice and seperate from all the other aspects of life. I hope part of the happy medium involves us making sure those two *stay* seperate too!