Callable-But Not Available

You may be steadily climbing the corporate charts, but you never made it to
your kid's birthday, or your anniversary, or when your friend's father
passed away. You are now always callable, but hardly ever available. The
cell-phone helps you stay in touch, but you are mostly in touch with your office
in Bangalore, Singapore or California. You have to check mail wherever you
are-on your laptop, on your mobile. The best way to keep in touch with your
family is probably e-mail, now that the distance between the rooms in your house
is growing all the time.

Is this what technology was supposed to help us achieve? 24x7x365 is a great
rule for server uptime and business customers, but may not be for an individual.
How did we manage to lose sight of that? How come employees in many companies
are not allowed to switch off their phones any time of the night or day? Why
can't you relax on holidays anymore? Because the minute you start playing with
the kids, the phone starts to ring, or there's new mail.

The computer was supposed to make lives more efficient. The cell-phone was
supposed to help us stay connected wherever we are. Email was supposed to
smoothen out communication. The devices have done what they were designed to do.
But they have not created time for individuals. For many, they mean more work to
catch up on, and more projects to handle at the same time. Multi-tasking is a
skill you are supposed to know by default.

So who is to be blamed-the technology creators, the technology sellers or
the technology users? Unquestionably, it is the latter. Technology is a tool
meant to help us work easier and smarter, but not any more. While some of the
demands of work are real, there are many that are virtual. It is not necessary
to look at each email the moment it arrives. It is not necessary to keep the
mobile on ring mode all the time. It is not necessary to treat every incoming
message as a national emergency. Yet, it tends to happen. The control obviously
is with the individual-and to an extent with the organization that he works
with. An individual, who wants to set his professional-personal balance
straight, can find it difficult to do so in a company culture that demands
instant response. Work-life balance should leap out from company homepages, to
become a key focus area. It should now make frequent appearances in training
sessions.

Take the example of this information boom, which is the move by media to use
blogs as a source of editorial inputs. Blogs are being used as a means to
provide information in areas hitherto untapped. Questions of quality and
authenticity remain. With blogs turning into a prolific new medium of
communication, media companies are finding ways to tap into them. They link
their websites to blogs that are relevant to the topics being carried. The blog
gets mileage, while the newspaper taps into new readership, gets a new angle of
the topic or manages additional coverage that would not have been possible
otherwise. But what if the blog content is not original? What if the blog report
of an event or a description of a place or a review of a book, is carried
without any verification? What if the blogs in the background manipulated by
vested political or commercial groups? Media, is so far seen as a service
provider that sifts through vast quantities of information and supplies what is
relevant and correct to its readers. With the above devices it could turn into
just a supplier of quantity information with little quality.

The technology tiger is not an easy beast to ride. Often this ride produces
unintended consequences. That is something to guard against.