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Are our lives more productive thanks to the use of communications technology?

All Acting Regiment

16:11 / 10.06.05

Instant Messengers, Mobile Telephones, Emails and others: do they cause us to spend our time in a a more useful way?

For example, before mobiles became widely owned and used, it was quite common to miss a meeting because one just wasn't aware that details had changed. Now people can ring you straight away.

As well, when I feel like going out for the night, I can now get all my pals up on an IM program without having to ring them one by one.

That is, the concept of accuracy and acess- we can acess more people, and thus can increase the accuracy of each person's knowledge.

The question is, now that we have this technology, does it make our time any more useful/productive?

16:53 / 10.06.05

I'm not sure how verifyable that answer to that question would be. In the past people made plans in advance and stuck to them. Now people expect to be able to contact and alter their plans on an ad hoc basis. This certainly seems to be less organized...

17:12 / 10.06.05

Adding on from sleazenations point - if you don't have access to technolgy and arrangements are altered leading to you missing or arriving late it becomes your fault. I think what I'm trying to say is before we had the technology people took more care to plan things, make allowences for everyone and made more an effort to contact people. With the technology it seems some people can take the attitude of it not being up to them to make the effort to contact you, but up to you to make the effort to be contactable. If that makes sense.

19:09 / 10.06.05

I do believe Mobile phones makes us more productive, which is why I avoid them like the plague.

I went to the movies the other day with some friends of mine, and just when we were leaving at midnight, my friend's mobile phone starts ringing. He answers.

"José, the database is dead, we need you NOW."

Sure, my friend José became more productive, but he probably didn't sleep that night.

All Acting Regiment

19:58 / 10.06.05

Good points: especcially about acess to technology. Computers and phones aren't cheap.

11:48 / 11.06.05

But they are getting cheaper by the minute. I've got a leaflet lying in front of me from Dell which includes a computer for £300. OK, that's still not pocket change, but when I consider that the computer I bought for uni eight years ago cost three times that it is comparatively speaking nothing when you factor in the performance increase since then. Same with mobile phones.

But back to the matter at hand. Is our time spent more useful? It depends. If you take Juan's example, I'm sure his friend's employers considered his midnight work a very useful way to spend time. He, on the other hand, might have considered a more personal way of spending his time more 'useful'. The way I see it, modern communication technology is slicing away at the time we would otherwise have had to spend on developing ourselves as balanced individuals, rather than work-centered individuals. Expectations of availability and response times now can be described in terms of hours, rather than in terms of days (back when we relied on the postal system).

14:57 / 11.06.05

I suspect constant contactability may mean we end up with the same split of time spent at work and time spent at leisure, but in a less discrete way - while at work, people can now message their friends, chat on IM, and so on (I suppose this could've been done on the phone in the past, but the technology makes it easier to hide), but when not at work, people end up getting contacted on work-related matters. Might even out in the end.

I'm a big believer in play and recreation as necessary for recharging the mind, though, and I'm not sure one can reach a true recharging state when one's permanently on standby mode.

00:36 / 12.06.05

Now people expect to be able to contact and alter their plans on an ad hoc basis. This certainly seems to be less organized...

or is more flexible? the new technologies are freeing up our brains to have them focus on other aspects - we have a far greater 'memory' store now than ever in history due to the technologies we have developed to 'extend' our brains and minds [if they are not the same thing]

to address the summary, no they don't 'cause' us to do anything. we still have to choose which of the capabilities they allow us we will utilise. we can become slaves to our associates' demands through these technologies if we allow them to, or we can put them to the uses that best suit our own desires, needs, etc...

juan's friend could have had his mobile switched to 'voice message' or even 'off' if he'd not wanted to be called in to work at midnight. that was his choice, and one he could have communicated to those he expected (and wanted) to call him at that hour. (although, the very fact that his business runs those hours is a sign of the times that technologies enable!)

yes, our lives can be much more active and enabled by these technologies and they will be ubiquitous in almost no time, even in now third world environments.

who would choose to go back to pre-computer days now? [the first windows based word programs are only fifteen years old!]

19:34 / 21.06.05

I find it a double edged sword. The benefits of instantly sending info or speaking to someone make life easier, but then it is also a hindrance. There are the mountain of emails i recieve at work on a daily basis, not because I really need to be a recipient, but because if the sender copies in enough people they can consider their backside covered when it all goes pear shaped.

I regularly switch off my mobile, and by the time I return the calls, they have inevitably worked out their own solution.

I suppose the technology is only as good as the people using it!

21:45 / 21.06.05

I suppose the technology is only as good as the people using it!

but that was my point, jimbo. we have the technology and it is [potentially] a much better thing than not having it...

of course, yes, it is how we use it - you may get a bit picky about the no. of bodgy e-mails each day, but you'd be surprised perhaps to count up the no. of 'interesting' ones (incl invitations, etc) that you now simply take for granted? think about how these snippets and delicacies might have had to be transmitted to you ten years ago...

if your contacts work out a solution for themselves, then they didn't really need to call you. but again, how many times have they helped you - which perhaps precipitated them calling you in the first place, no? and who do you call...?

i think all this technology is a scintillating display of our minds' capacities to extend itself beyond our physical bodies. and it won't stop.

06:43 / 22.06.05

Define productivity.

Is 'productivity' a meaningful exchange of ideas, a catalyst for societal change that ultimately catipults the human race to a higher level? Or is it the strenghtening of monetary/governmental systems, with commercialization and consumerism triumphing over all?

On a hokey quantum take, I'll throw out the view that it's probably both, with more of a lean towards the latter view.

I've always been fascinated with the collective unconsciousness concept.....the same goes for global brains, morphogenetic fields, etc. It is my firm belief that instant communication is an expression of an underlying network, or perhaps a manifestation of a collective need.

That being said, why would we need cell phones/pagers/etc? What is the suppressed focus, the yearning urge in our species to be so neccessarily linked?

And is it proper that commercial agents inject their memes/guidelines into the works?

I only own a cell phone if I have a long trip to make by car (the hinterlands of Canada are quite vast), simply because of the fact that I hate having an electronic leash tethered to my hip. Seperation from my fellow humans is something I'm comfortable with...I don't have to fill the empty spaces in life with idle (and expensive) chatter. If others need that, that's entirely their own perogative.

It'd just be nice if some way, somehow, technology could connect us all on a deeper and more meaningful level. That's something I'd gladly buy into.

All Acting Regiment

13:33 / 22.06.05

Well exactly. How many people are aware that there are other methods out there than MSN Messenger to do IMing?

In some ways, the expense of all this software, while helping us in the first world to communicate, in some ways lessens our ability to communicate with the 3rd world.

How many Americans or Japanese do you think would feel happy living in a small 3rd world township where communication, by cost, is connected to technology by a much smaller degree?

18:39 / 22.06.05

but that was my point, jimbo. we have the technology and it is [potentially] a much better thing than not having it

I agree completely, the +ves outweigh the -ves. But I was trying to show that for all the advantages we gain, that "some" people will use the technology purely to further their own agenda by passing the buck or avoiding responsibility or being just plain lazy - (Mainly in a work context)

03:34 / 23.06.05

The question is, now that we have this technology, does it make our time any more useful/productive?

if we're talking about economic productivity, then yes, by staggeringly huge and measurable margins. individual productivity in the workplace has exploded pretty much in direct proportion to the growth of communications technology.

in terms of our ability to use our personal time well, that's harder to measure or define.

07:06 / 06.07.05

Answering the thread's question, for me no they don't. Was a time, in my line of work, where people would make arrangements for a job in advance, book the people to work on it and that was that, now it's all last minute pencils, can you get here tomorrow, can you do this and that now, and there is no time to plan how to use my spare time in a useful way as half the time I'm waiting for a call, the other half I'm running around sorting out last minute arrangements because a call has come. I've even missed out on jobs because I thought day off, I'll go to the cinema, and in that two hour space of non-contactivity I'll recieve three phone messages that normally go like this - "can you call me back, it's urgent..." "Can you call me urgently, it's about a days work tomorrow..." "That day has gone away because I couldn't contact you...". So technology has made people more complacent in my opinion, because they now have a sense of being able to alter things last minute, whereas before they had to organise and plan things. Plus there's that whole attention defect idea of technology being destracting, ie if you are working or reading a book or something and you hear the ping of a message in your in-box, the SMS morse code or the trumpet of an IM box opening, you leave what you are doing to attend to these things first.