The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [27]
Of course, there is no area where technology has so thoroughly enthralled us than in the field of communications.
We have kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, yottabytes—the bytes just keep adding up, don’t they? And to what end?
“More information” is the answer. In fact, it’s been said that we live in the information age.
That’s not true. We live in the data age. Data are coming to us endlessly, 24/7. More and more data coming at us, faster and faster, from all sides. According to one estimate, more than sixty billion e-mails are sent around the world every day. By the time you read this, the estimates will be in the trillions. Not to mention telephone calls, which are now in such stratospheric numbers that any guess as to the volume is meaningless.
We communicate and communicate—responding instantly like automatons pouring out a stream of consciousness that just adds more data to the flow—without any evaluation, without anyone really sitting back, shutting the door, turning off all the bells and whistles and in a few moments of quiet reflection doing some serious thinking.
In Brave New World, published in 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote, “People are never alone now…. We make them hate solitude, and we arrange their lives so that it’s impossible for them ever to have it.”
One of the great fears many businesspeople had in 2006 and 2007 was not fear of market failure or something catastrophic like that. It was the fear that maybe BlackBerry would go away. We’re in danger of becoming a nation of squint-eyed hunchbacks because everyone is scrunched around these tiny little gadgets getting news of something, anything, everything.
I don’t have any idea what the ultimate impact of the Internet-based social network services like MySpace and Facebook will be. It may be very positive. I hope it is. As we continue, however, to transform the nature of human interaction, we come very close to electronic sensory overload coupled with human sensory deprivation. The simple interaction of one human being with another is being lost. Even among children. When a large percentage of young people play, they don’t just play, of course. Their lives are so structured that they have scheduled playdates—like business appointments. But when they are together, they often are not looking at each other. They look at screens or fiddle with little handheld things.
One magazine ad for Panasonic showed a man sitting in a car, typing away on a laptop with the copy: “It’s not just a laptop. It’s having your driver circle the building a few more times while you send a few more e-mails.”
Can you imagine what it must be like working for this man? Thank goodness he’s the fictional creation of Panasonic’s advertising agency.
There are three major problems inherent in this addiction to all this unprocessed data flooding in without any time to think.
1. In-box Shock—the Human Toll
Many office workers are already showing symptoms of and complaining about what some have labeled “In-box Shock.” There’s just too much stuff to mentally sort. According to a study in 2006 the average corporate worker has to deal with 133 e-mails every day. Not only that, they deal with multiple communications—a fax here, a text message there—attend a meeting here and teleconference with another meeting there—watch a PowerPoint presentation here, watch a video report there. Phones ringing on the desk and vibrating in the pocket. The average human nervous system is not built to process material at anything approaching this blinding rate of speed and volume.
On Bloomberg TV the other day twelve headlines zipped by between 4:34 and 4:35 P.M. In addition, there were two crawls, a box score of the market indicators, and a continuous