“I read somewhere that the half-life of an innovation is getting shorter and shorter these days, and it occurs to me that this can be said about much of our experience,” Menzies writes. “Anything we do – be it attending a meet-ing, preparing a report or sending and receiving e-mails, voice mails, faxes and letters – no matter how urgent and important it might be, is replaced by the next thing and the next, so fast that we only half-experience it. Then it’s gone, and almost as quickly forgotten.”
Out in Dilbert Land, many people nod in recognition. Cubicles are rife with tales of e-mail dreck and drivel, workdays obliterated by surfing or overloaded with no-context info-bits and data-shuffling. Look around. Does it seem that many of your colleagues, friends, and perfect strangers, too, are standing half-expectantly, a little absently, a little zoned, in some sort of existential Tim Horton’s lineup, waiting, waiting – for what?
When life is half-experienced and poorly-absorbed, when change is too rapid to comprehend, when work demands begin to escalate, the stress becomes unbearable and other forms of illness are a predictable result. The cost to human health is measurable. In 2001, about one-third of working Canadians sought treatment for depression, compared to 14% in 1991. Employers shouldered a large burden. The cost of absenteeism and disability claims in Canada in 2001 was over $5 billion.
If you have the good fortune to be running a company in Alberta, things are no easier for you. Where technology is concerned, we’re all in the same hamster cage. Chances are you invested dearly in information technology in the mid-nineties, thinking you had to get on board or else. By now you know it wasn’t a one-shot deal. Surveys show that IT budgets for large and small companies alike are headed in one direction – up. The reason is not primarily the rush of new inventions, but fiddling with the ones you just bought. About 80% of current IT spending by Canadian companies is for the upkeep and repair of already-purchased systems. Did we mention security? If your data is hacked or corrupted you could lose your business. This year alone, SMEs in Canada will pay more than $50 million just for security software.
For business, the iceberg is growing. E-mail, judged to be critically important to modern commerce, is also one of its biggest headaches. A University of Maryland study found that deleting junk e-mail costs American businesses nearly $22 billion a year. Surveys say that corporate North America leads the world as the main address for spam, which comprises about 86% of its incoming mail. Recent eye-popping examples of security failures, including Citigroup’s loss of unencrypted tapes of credit information for 3.9 million customers, lend an added sense of fragility to the equation – and to corporate budgets.
Within the modern office, individual workers while away hours checking and deleting e-mail, at least half of which is not work-related. Productivity suffers. So do office dynamics. E-mail is less confrontational – workers prefer to e-mail in sick rather than phoning, and supervisors prefer to e-mail their orders rather than talk about them – but the relative anonymity is contributing to a decline in office civility. The Johns Hopkins Civility Project now under way at the Baltimore university lists technology-induced anonymity, especially e-mail, as a major factor in the decline in overall civil behaviour in the workplace.
Stressbusting.co.uk, a Bristish website devoted to technological impacts, suggests the average British citizen now spends more time waiting on the telephone, an average of 45 hours a year, than making love. And as they wait they are likely to be listening to Greensleeves, judged in consumer surveys to be the most annoying telephone-hold music in existence, worse even than Bee Gees tunes or the theme song from The Sting.
Exasperation is the new human condition. People sputter with rage about the impossibility of reaching a ghost helper on a phantom help desk. They grumble about the expensive purchase that refused to work, or stopped working, or picked up a fatal virus, or became obsolete, mere weeks after it came out of a factory. Frustration is all wrapped up with the packaging.
Yes, the technology is amazing, and the revolution is a work in progress. Google didn’t even exist in the days when Officer Curley’s red light revolved above our newsroom, and now it rules the world. Six years ago, MP3.com was a file server in a San Diego basement. Your technology gives you a worldwide market whether you’re a T-shirt manufacturer in Red Deer or a pipe fabricator in Olds.
But I don’t believe we have begun to address the troubles visited by technology on people at work and at home. The solutions advanced so far by the self-help writers are unrealistic (pull the cord, quit your job, drop out) or banal (practice yogic breathing while listening to Greensleeves on the telephone). It’s not good enough to point out that it takes 349 facial muscles to frown but only three keystrokes to make a smiley face 
The impact of modern technology on human life is profound, but poorly understood. Basic rights are involved: the right to privacy, the right to a respite from work, the right to a family life. A good starting point, whether we are in the corner executive office, in the lineup at Future Shop or in the sanctity of an office cubicle, might be to ask: Is it serving us or are we serving it? We could take it from there.
Editors Note: While editing this article, managing editor Tracy Hyatt re-ceived 35 e-mails. Only three weren’t spam.
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