Uncool Technologies at Work


Friday, October 13, 2006


Today we are enjoying an explosion of technologies that make life cooler, and sometimes, not so cool. I don't know about you, but most of us today are starting to customize our technologies to match our personal lives and enhance what we normally like to do. So, what is it that you have adopted in the last couple of years....maybe an iPod? Or a cool cell phone/PDA? How about Tivo, how many hours of TV do you watch live now vs. a couple of years ago?

And, in the office, do you use net meetings or net learning? The old A/V systems of the past that used to cost $10,000 to have a coast-to-coast meeting over video are rapidly being replaced by simpler, easier-to-use technologies at a fraction of the cost and allow us to communicate either one-to-one or in groups. The old speakerphones of the past are getting replaced by new ones that are digital and allow us to use Skype or utilize other internet technologies. Even today a doctor could remotely perform a surgery on a patient using robotics and the internet. Tomorrow, artificial intelligence will be bombarding us with avatars and speech recognition devices that are smart...some may be performing your most rote tasks for you while you are at work! Artificial intelligent technologies will think the way you want to think, make decisions you would make anyway and will advance our productivity significantly. And teachers of tomorrow will not need to always be human. They will be artificial humans that can teach, answer questions and test your knowledge better than most humans.

Yep, things are changing fast and on simultaneous frontiers. But, one unanticipated effect of a lot of this technology is the dehumanizing, interruptive stuff that bombards our senses, or derails our thoughts or is just plain rude. How many times have you been in an airplane or at lunch or waiting in line while getting disturbed by someone on a cell phone - talking way too loud and not caring a bit who they interrupt? That's why some places today are banning cell phones, of course. But, there's a lot of other technology that does the same thing from an interruptive perspective, we just don't acknowledge it as readily.

Take the ubiquitous plasma, HDTV screens everywhere. They're cool and provide lots of information or entertainment but, at times, can take us off track from a conversation or change the course of a meeting or a productive session we're having. Or, have you ever been in a meeting room on time only to find the leader fumbling with the technologies that can't seem to work right while we stare at the screen and think about what is happening instead of getting work done? We don't give it much thought, but if you added up all the minutes of waiting for the technologies to work everyday in the U.S., the lost productivity hours would be staggering. How about the total noise effect of other people's music playing in the background or screen savers that make sounds....there are varieties of new noises in work spaces bombarding our senses and creating distractions we're not even aware of ....distractions that actually reduce the productivities of the work space.

So, as technologies advance and provide new mediums for audio, video and information, how will we manage the interruptive effects of all of this? What's going to happen when much of this technology is in peoples hands or worn by people all day long? How will new norms be developed for respecting the privacy and rights of others while still optimizing the use of all of these technologies? These are all questions still up in the air and still evolving that no one has good answers for. The use of just the telephone took years of changes in the way people used it and learned to respect the rights of others. Now, we're getting bombarded with new technologies that don't allow the same relative time for us to adapt to their use, to minimize our impact on others' "space".

So, in the future, imagine walking through an office from workstation A, to workstation B, past workstation C and in each area are different sounds, different visuals. We don't allocate enough space to separate all the effects of technologies on each other. In fact our space allocation is getting denser. Does this mean we all have headphones on or ear devices to privatize us? Or will there be new technologies that incorporate sound and light barriers with their technology? I wish I knew, and if you know apply for your patents now! Because this is a social pattern that will have to change or we'll start banning all these technologies just to solve the problems, and that's the last thing we need to do!


posted by Scott Messmore @ Friday, October 13, 2006   1 comments