15 November 2007
I've been thinking a lot lately about my relationship with my gizmos. The little ones, not the adult systems all grown up and trailing wires everywhere, the big-screen TVs and stereos and desktops. I'm talking about the cell phones and pagers and Treos and BlackBerrys, with which we are much more intimate. We carry them everywhere, so that any time they twitch we feel it on our hip. Because they have no wires, they depend on us to feed them their juice every other night or so.
[...]Given all the disruption, all the crowding of bosses who can track us down anywhere, anytime, the fears that our gadgets may make us ruder and dumber and more easily distracted, it's a natural temptation to abandon technology, or at least vacation from it occasionally. First-time--and best-selling--author Timothy Ferriss has become a Silicon Valley darling by pushing his low-information diet as the secret to achieving The 4-Hour Workweek, which among other things involves checking e-mail no more than twice a day. Maybe it's worth taking the test: Do our devices really make us more efficient or less so? Do they bind us--or isolate us, becoming screens against intimacy and contact, zoom lenses that let us operate from a safe distance so that we seem closer than we really are? One suspects that trying to cut back may only teach us how attached we've become, at least to our gizmos. Like our children, they are little miracles, whose workings we can't really understand, as they make our lives bigger in surprising ways and keep us from ever feeling like we're all alone.
Love Thy Blackberry, Love Thy Kids (navigates away)
Thanks to: CLS
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