News Regarding the Center
April 10, 2008
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James Katz, a professor at Rutgers University who leads a research centre on the sociology of mobile technologies, says that the shift amounts to a "historical re-integration" of our productive and social spheres. In the hunter-gatherer, agricultural and pre-industrial artisan eras people did not separate the physical space devoted to work, family and play. Blacksmiths, say, worked from their homes, with family and village life all around. It was only with the capital-intensive work of the industrial era that a separation of homes and factories became necessary, because workers ?had to be co-located? in order to work efficiently. This also applied to bureaucracies before the digital era. Now, however, the different spheres of life are merging again.
This leads to more pressure, says Mr. Katz. The difference between the integration of work and family in pre-industrial times and today is that in the old days there were clear limits on personal productivity and now there are not. Today "people judge what they should achieve by what they could achieve," says Mr Katz, and with our new technologies we can always theoretically achieve more. People thus "feel inadequate compared with the enormous opportunity they have."
The optimists counter that all it takes is a bit of self-discipline and perspective to overcome that anxiety. Mr Ware advises his clients to draw clear boundaries of etiquette. He has an agreement with his own business partner in another time zone that they not bother each other out of hours. Sun's Mr Schwartz has an iron rule that he spends two hours after work "rolling around on the floor?"with his two sons before returning to his gadgets. Mr Coburn admits that work and family are ?all one big blur? but likes it that way. Mr Saffo and his wife ban all gadgets during dinner by candlelight.
Almost all the sociologists and psychologists in academia, however, take a more pessimistic view. Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who studies the psychology of gadget use, believes that the addicts, often called "CrackBerries," are "watching their lives on that little screen and can't keep up with it," leaving them permanently anxious.
Rutgers' Mr Katz argues that the "frenzy is only going to get worse." This is, first, because of "random reinforcement," the desultory pattern of rewards that comes with addictive behaviours such as gambling. A CrackBerry winnows through his e-mail throughout the day, knowing full well that most of it is chaff, but cannot help himself because of that occasional grain. The second reason, says Mr Katz, is that most people suffer from the illusion that more information always leads to better decisions, and there is always more information available on our phones and laptops. The third reason is that ?people today need to do constant impression-management,? because the mere ability to stay connected during weekends, vacations or sabbaticals means that going offline risks reminding others that we are expendable.
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