Insights: Culture—The Trouble with Technology

Wireless gadgets may be a godsend, but they're still ruining summer

Catherine Greenman
From the Print Edition:
Bo Derek, Jul/Aug 00

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How are all these work interludes--the 15-minute phone calls here, the five-minute pages there--affecting our psyches? Can we ever really focus on what's in front of us, with some wireless gadget or another vibrating in our pockets?

I don't have wireless e-mail (yet) but I can think of countless times when my cell phone has been both an indulgence and a godsend. When we're playing Scrabble on the beach, for example, I enlist my father, a crossword puzzle writer with a huge stash of dictionaries, to be our remote word judge.

I scream out his verdict if it's in my favor, and sometimes have to pass the phone around so that people can hear it for themselves (they don't always believe me). We could just as well work on an honor system, where more than one person has to know the word, but we call my father because we can, and because it's more fun.

And there was the time last summer when we passed what looked like our friend's car, stranded on the Long Island Expressway. We immediately called her cell phone and learned that she'd hiked with her dog to the next gas station. We turned around at the next exit and went back to pick her up, feeling like high-tech SWAT commandos. Within 10 minutes, she was in our car, on her way home.

But there's a huge price for the small luxuries and feats of heroism that being connected allow. The ability to work also creates the obligation to work, whether we're conscious of it or not. Sure you can turn the stuff off, just like you can disconnect a regular phone. But whether you're napping, swimming or strolling on the beach, or squeezing zucchini at a roadside stand, that incoming voicemail or urgent e-mail message is just a push-button away. For me, just one look at that charging laptop with the little flashing green light puts the Monday morning right back in me.

Voicemail messages will mention the fact that, although a person is out of the office for a few days, he or she will be checking in for messages. Some will even leave their cell phone numbers in the event of an emergency. Who are we? The babysitter? A friend of mine who runs a consulting business (and who wears an armor of pager, cell phone and handheld personal digital assistant even when he drives to town for bagels) told me that when he was first starting out, his fantasy of true success was that the people he worked with would consider him indispensable to the business. But as communication technology has become so prevalent, that fantasy died as predictably as his cell phone batteries. His revised version now consists of the opposite: having the ability to delegate responsibility so well that his pager, along with the rest of his work life, fades into the background, at least for a day or two.

As for me, I'm hoping that the less immediate pace of wireless e-mail catches on and becomes more relied on than phones and pagers. I'm encouraged by the possibility that people are starting to take control of their reachability through the use of automated e-mail messages. The other day I e-mailed an editor about a story and got a speedy reply, which he'd obviously programmed before he left for a full-fledged, honest-to-goodness vacation. The e-mail I got back said, "I've received your message, but will be away until Monday the 24th on a sailing trip. I will reply in full when I return." That note was electronic music to my ears.

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