Threshold

I was at my friend’s house the other day. We were looking at something on the internet via wi-fi using his laptop at the kitchen table. His wife was working on something on another computer upstairs and was having some kind of difficulty printing a file. The laptop had another version or something that she needed and she said “email it to me.” I realized that this was the first time I had ever experienced a situation where it made perfect sense to email something between two rooms of someone’s own house. It seemed to me that some kind of technology threshold had just been crossed; a glorious day or an unnerving sense of things having gotten completely out of control depending on how you looked at it.

A while back when instant messaging first soared in popularity with teens, my own kids were clackity-clacking away on keyboards with friends a mile or two away. It made sense to me to do this cross-country or cross-ocean in order to save a long-distance phone charge, but made no sense at all when the kids could just get on the phone and talk as long as they wanted for free. But it not only made sense to them, it was extremely attractive. It dramatically boosted their typing skills, so my reaction was, as they would put it, “whatever.”

More recently my wife has gotten way into text messaging with her cell phone. Again, this seemed more primitive than just using the same phone to simply talk. And, counter intuitively, it cost more. But looking at it a different way, I realized that there was a different emotional component to the process. It is a similar dynamic to what we used to experience before email when long distance phone calls were twenty five cents a minute or more and we were forced to write letters. The communication was completely different. The limitations of the system forced different thinking which added a dimension (often of depth) that didn’t exist face-to-face or on the phone. We didn’t like the limitations, but we liked that added dimension. IM and text messaging now become a choice because of the recognized emotional uniqueness and value that the style of communication stirs up. It’s a conscious decision to embrace the limitation because it just does something in you.

This self-imposed limitation goes further and becomes more important the more we become wired, or more currently speaking, wi-fi. (It’s ironic that “Wired,” one of the hippest tech magazines ever published now has a name that is completely obsolete.) We are long since past through the phases of information consumption, information overload, and even information management. Now there is too much to even manage, let alone consume. Now it’s all about drinking from the fire hydrant while trying to avoid having the torrent knock you down. It makes sense that self-imposed limitation is the mindset one approaches with when one has been bowled over by the data flood.

I recently read about a trend for corporations to declare Fridays email-free in order to encourage people to actually talk to each other and regain what has been lost when it’s easier to shoot an email down the hall than to walk down and stand in a colleague’s doorway and discuss. Some seminar speaker guru guy is encouraging people to observe a weekly “data sabbath.” I tried this one day last week and found it extremely difficult, but I think I’m going to do it some more. (Ironically, the guru had been interviewed at his beach house via cell phone.)

“Hi, I’m Wingman and I’m a dataholic.”

Dataholism is insidious because it gets you on many different fronts that you can easily fail to recognize as related. I use my computer to blog, email, write in a word processor, organize and store photos, manipulate images, read on the internet (which has all but replaced a former addiction of reading magazines), check the weather radar, fly a flight simulator, listen to music, watch video, edit video, record and edit audio, make labels, do financial planning, shop and purchase things, do my banking, and sundry other tasks. In my mind these are all distinct activities. I can “take a break” from working at my computer and then play at my computer. But to my wife, I’m still sitting here doing exactly the same thing. “You’re on the computer.” Now, she uses the computer for different tasks as well and, of course, understands logically. But there is a huge emotional dynamic that runs counter to the logic. And, as much as I’ve argued my point, I realize now what she has recognized for a long time: it does all have a commonality and comprises an overall, obsessive, compulsive, addictive dataholism. My wife is almost never wrong about these things. I should have listened to her sooner. I’m now going to push myself away from this keyboard and go outside and ride my motorcycle and feel the wind of the beautiful day on my face. Just as soon as I download some pictures out of my camera and get them emailed off.