[ Posted by Janka
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:47:11 GMT ]
Sometimes a thing happens that really drives home how much technology has gone forward in fifteen years.
When I was a child, my family had a sailing boat. Internet was not invented yet. Neither were mobile phones. Sea charts had a special sign for harbors with a pay phone, and we turned on the radio every day at the exact hour when they sent out weather forecasts and emergency contact notifications to persons traveling.
Now I am sitting in the boat of a friend’s parents, in Kasnäs visitor harbor (which is huge, compared to what I think it used to be), writing a blog entry, and chatting on IRC.
My friend says that pretty much every visitor harbor has wifi these days. This one is apparently crappy.
Posted in Plain English | Tags elämä, internet, purjehdus, teknologia | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:15:38 GMT ]
This entry is for Yoe, who once asked on IRC if someone who is reasonably net-savvy and does not like Facebook and/or other new “social media” would write about why they object to those. I gave a lot of disclaimers, but she said I will do.
Here are the disclaimers. I do not know if I like Facebook or not. I have never tried it. I do not have an account. I have watched someone use it once, and did not get much out of that experience. I suspect that if I tried, I might like it well enough. I also by no means object to other people using it, and I do not find that they are potentially stupid or morally suspect if they enjoy it. (There are a lot of things that I do not object to when other people do it, even though I find them potentially stupid or morally suspect to do so, but Facebook is not one of them.)
I know some people object to Facebook because they worry about their internet privacy, because they do not like the idea of coming to contact with people they do not explicitly choose to be in contact with, because they think “virtual” socializing is (morally or in quality) inferior to “real” socializing, or because they simply do not enjoy socializing in general. I use my own name practically everywhere on the web, I have a public blog, I run IRC in a screen 24/7, I enjoy talking to people, and before the Long September I was practically addicted to Usenet News. I am not one of those people.
I also know that some people object to Facebook and the internet in general, because it is somehow “not real”. I am not one of those people, either. Internet is “really” there as much as a book, a movie, or a park is “really” there: it is something people made. I find it is very relaxing to take a cup of tea and let myself wonder into the wilds of the internet, marveling at its wondrous sights and curious inhabitants, stumbling upon fascinating knowledge and bizarre entertainment and the occasional oasis of real art. Exploration of one’s surroundings, virtual as well as real, is a sign of a healthy mind. This world humans make is a delightful place and there is nothing, nothing at all, wrong in indulging in exploring it.
My worry about Facebook, Twitter, Qaiku, blogs, text messages, newsfeeds, Usenet, IRC, and the web in general is a very particular feature of them: they work on a fragmented timescale. You poll your sites, you read something, you check your feeds, you do something else, an incoming message interrupts, you poll them again, you have discussion on one of your forums, you check your email, you read a bit of a news story here, you twitter it, you check your feeds, an incoming message interrupts, you answer that, you check your email, you do a bit of something else, you poll your webforums, you go back to the discussion you started an hour ago… and whoom, there was the day.
You do not have to do it this way, of course. You can read news only in the morning with your breakfast coffee, you can poll your Facebook and Twitter only once a day when you come home from work, you can only read your emails at lunch break. But a lot of the people who extensively use these services, and especially those who sit in front of the computer for work or free time do not limit themselves that way. The services themselves encourage fragmented usage, starting from the fact that most email programs have continuous polling for new messages and alerts for them turned on by default. Pretty much every communication gimmick we are marketed these days is geared for noticing stuff now, immediately, without delay, as soon as other people do. Being in constant touch so you will not miss anything.
Many people claim this constant staying connected and polling for new comments/articles/tweets/whatever does not bother them or impede their work or their life. I know at least some of them are mistaken or lie to themselves, and I know this because I know I do. It is easy to lie, because it does not feel like continuously reading IRC or polling blogs while I work bothers me – for gods’ sake, it is not like I do it “continuously”, anyway! Just when I have a slow time in my brain work anyway. Yea, right. But let me switch to a mode where I agree with myself that I either do one thing or nothing at all, even for as short a time as for 15 or 30 minutes, and boy does my productivity improve.
No, distractions are not inherently bad. We do not really need to be super-productive or super-focused at all times, despite of what your boss or the gazillion self-help books about motivation and getting rich, beautiful, and popular on a fast track tell you. In the Western world, most of us who have access to the services mentioned also have enough of everything else to get by; we do not need to work harder to get more. We just need to be happy with it. We need to do the things we like to do, and work towards the goals we really want to achieve, and to spend time with the people we really love. With a peace of mind, and no stress.
The danger of fragmentation is that the chopped-up socialization and the constant context-switches eats so much of your time and brain power that there is very little room for anything else. You are less productive at work, less effective in realizing your dreams, less focused on people when you really meet them. Fragment your attention enough, and you completely lose the ability to tolerate slow times. Lately, I have asked myself to spend five minutes every day doing nothing. Five minutes – how hard is that? Very hard. When I started, I had to stop myself about 25 times in that time, getting an impulse to check this or that web forum, or my email, or take up a book, or (in a fit of extreme desperation from my brain) do some laundry. I have a friend (actually, several) with whom it is very weird to have a face-to-face conversation, because if you stop to think about what to say for 20 seconds, they whip up their mobile phone and check their IRC and emails.
The scariest effect of this is that if you get get wrapped up enough in these constant distractions, even peace of mind will not have room, because if your brain slows down enough to feel that peace, the constant-polling sub-process in it pops up and starts screaming “I am not doing anything! I am bored! Do something! Feed me information!” And if you follow the urge, you are not spending your time relaxing and recovering from stress. You are spending your time being distracted from the fact that you need to relax and recover.
And that is why I do not want to know if I would enjoy Facebook: I have enough to do already, and more distractions than I need, and I am not willing to give up any of them, despite actually feeling that I would benefit from less.
Your mileage may vary.
Posted in Plain English | Tags elämä, internet, social media | 4 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:02:37 GMT ]
Vuosittainen off-the-grid-aika jää lyhyeksi, mutta mainittakoon nyt kuitenkin, että ennen sunnuntaita on turha yrittää soittaa, mailata, pingata ircissä, jättää ravelrymessuja tai muuten kommunikoida muuten kuin kasvokkain.
Oon Pariisissa viettämässä hääpäivää. Eiks oo romanttista?
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags elämä, internet | no comments
