New technology makes us unhappy and stupid?

January 26th, 2009 No time to read this? In a nutshell: Social networking sites and new tech is good not bad. It disturbs us too much though, turn it off when you don't want to be distracted. It is ok to be not available all the time. Otherwise be prepared to effectively sacrifice your concentration. New tech might just be a new form of distraction which we need to selectively ignore when we need too.


Since forever people fight over the fact that new technology is changing our life style and us, meaning our brain, in a negative way. These are interesting claims and have been already made in the past for printing press, radio, televison and so on. Now the newest voices argue that Social Networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter alike harm us and change our brains in a bad way.

Main points against sites like that are that we,

You can find the original blog post here and the referring video :


(The first 2:00 minutes give a good overview of the argument)

Interesting enough is that one of the main arguments is that technology is reducing our face time and making us socially impaired. Well, just coincidently I had an assignment recently where I was required to review a Paper from Gaspar and Glaeser from 1998 on Information Technology and the future of cities. This paper is a interesting but complex read where the authors build a mathematical model to support their theory that cities will shrink, but never diminish and human interaction increases in cities rather than to shrink. This is interesting because it is the same argument that Social networking sites decrease our interaction, where the opposite is true. We are now only more selective of how to spend our face time and the overall quality of it has to be higher. Face time is now a much more valuable commodity which we choose more carefully to spend. Our general interaction has according to statistics and studies increased in the recent years, greatly. (I can't emphasize that enough.)

Here are the original slides from my presentation:

Information Technology and the future of cities
View more presentations from brennhak. (tags: it cities)


Now we have this argument on the one hand side that technology is changing us in a bad way. On the other hand side it can also be very positive. Take for instance this video. I was surprised how true it actually is. (Seriously watch it, it's worth it.) We take tech for granted even though it improves our life and life-style so much. Now you will ask me what has this to do with each other? Well, what are the side effects ?

Just think about it. New technology at least recently (+15 years), puts more and more pressure on people to respond or be responsive in a very short time. Our mobile phones disturb us all the time, we need to respond very quickly on eMails (hours mostly, days, but if its half a week we already tend to dismiss it and its "too late".) and anyway everything is changing so fast. If you are into the IT Industry you know what I am talking about. For a strong counter argument, read for instance this.

Even, I, found myself reading things like David Allen's Getting Things Done because I don't know how to manage everything I have in my schedule. So rather than to argue that Social Networking sites are bad and harmful. I would rather argue that we need to be aware of their influence on us. We need to selectively turn off certain things so that we can concentrate on what is important in the moment. If this means to be unavailable to mobile phone, twitter, irc and so on - it is good. Humans might grow with the technology but for now, we must realize that we can only focus on one thing at a time if we want to do a good job. This means for every distraction we loose 15 minutes of our work time we need again to focus and concentrate. Also be careful with your assumptions, this probably depends and changes from group to group, work type and so on.

References

Cool statistics

December 20th, 2007 Gapminder

I am a fan of TED. There are often pretty interesting talks and here is another one. Its from a fellow swede, Hans Rosling, who is comparing or better debunking the us vs. them myth. Seems the third and the western world aren't so different anymore and comparsions in those terms are just senseless.

I think the data speaks for itself but then people like always to say ,,I just belive in the statistics I have forged myself''... ;)