Communication is a major factor that separates humans from beasts.
Ever since homo-erectus started making grunts that were understood, the evolution of the human race quickened and before you knew it we had telegraphs, faxes, phones and baguettes.
This gift is now reaching its payback time, many years ago the world was still a big place, we wrote letters to Aunt Maud in Tasmania that took weeks to get there. Companies ordered textiles from India months in advance and if we wanted to speak to a friend up the road we got up and walked there in a few minutes.
Of course, progress dictates that we need to move faster, more efficient and in higher volume. The standards of the past need to be torn asunder or you run the risk of getting left behind, a dinosaur to be mocked and fossilised.
This is fine for business and work, but what I especially notice is the seepage of this attitude into our personal lives. All too often now the lines of work/life are blurred to the point were life IS work, the tool for this phenomenon
is the curse of the Blackberry.
Ten years ago a Blackberry to most people was a small soft fruit that tasted delicious in cordial, now it is the scourge of the modern office. The wondrous delight of email, once caged in the workplace was unleashed from it shackles to invade the pockets of everybody. There's now no escape.
It started with managers, they receive inflated wages to deal with work outside the standard office hours and are expected to be contactable.
They were the first to get Blackberrys, suddenly we started getting emails from bosses at 8pm, 6am etc, worst still they expect a response there and then.
So then more Blackberrys started to get doled out to the next step down the corporate food chain, yippie!
Ok so not every company has succumbed to the virus of out of hours email but it's a catalyst to the culture of constant contact.
Two separate technologies came around the same time, mobile phones and the internet. Mobiles started as a yuppie gimmick, a status symbol when in reality it was hairy builders that first took up and used cell phones to do business as they worked in places that didn’t have phone lines.
As these devices, once the size of small African nations, got smaller and cheaper it started to become an item of luxury as most of us still had landlines.
The boom of pre-paid phones suddenly meant mobile telephony was available on a ‘pay and go’ basis, no contract required so students, low paid workers and drug dealers could all play a part in the wireless revolution.
Now you are a weirdo if you don’t have one.
The internet was the preserve of nerds that roamed the bulletin board systems like polar bears on tundra. In the early years it used existing landlines so the dialup was slow and restricted the data that could flow as well as being expensive.
As more and more people started using computers and business started email that utilised the internet things inevitably started snowballing, big leaps like broadband and 3G coupled with smarter computers meant that in a matter of a few years having a home pc went from a niche hobby to a household essential.
From the start of my entry into the mobile phone world I found it more and more annoying that you are contactable all the time. And when SMS text messaging took off it seemed like every 5 minutes a beep signifies yet another message.
I willingly gave my personal freedom to a small electronic device.
Now rather than just drop into see friends or meet at a pre-determined time, you are expected to announce your presence beforehand and give regular updates.
My PC has Instant Messaging where as soon as I go online I get what I call ‘MSN Bukkake’, several conversations spring up, 90% of which consist of just ‘How RU?’ or along those lines and if you don’t respond within a nano-second you get ‘RU there?’.
I have both Facebook and MySpace pages where I literally am in contact with thousands of people directly. I won’t deny that these are useful tools for me but there comes a point when I wonder how much time I waste with this stuff.
To make matters worse these two once separate technology are now combined. Most new phones have the capability to surf the net, log into email accounts, instant message, video-confer and Skype. This started with the Blackberry and now every mobile company has jumped on the bandwagon (or bandwidth wagon).
So even with my 'quite basic' phone I cannot escape email, Facebook, MSN and the world at large!
The sad fact is I am now so ingrained into this lifestyle I just cannot bear to reach for that off button!
My musing is what is next? What could possibly be round the corner? Could we be more switched on than we are presently and what will be eroded in the process?
