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.