Dependency on Tech Gadgets

An article four years ago in USA Today said it all: “Personal computers, cellphones, and high-speed Internet are considered essential to getting by for millions of Americans who are showing early signs of addiction to the next wave of high-tech toys…”

The article went on to say that “many people… consider high-tech gadgetry essential to modern life,” and quoted psychologist Bob Greenfield who observed, "Part of the reason is the hype, the commercial selling of it. Some people feel the products will improve the quality of their lives. But do we really need to be connected in every way, shape or form?"

Eliminate the Extraneous

When you're besieged by information on a continual basis, you begin to feel overwhelmed, which leads to the feeling of over-work and stress. If you're able to eliminate a lot of the extraneous information that makes its way to you, you will actually experience being overwhelmed less frequently, and you will not feel as over-worked. Try getting off mailing lists and dropping most subscriptions, avoiding extraneous information whenever you can.

Your Own Knowledge and Wisdom

When you draw upon your own accumulated knowledge and the wisdom that you develop, you're able to intermittently free yourself from ever accelerating flows of information.

Life is Finite, Information Infinite

Too much information violates our senses and even becomes harmful. As you receive more information, you experience stress, anxiety, and even helplessness. Your perception of breathing space is adversely and directly influenced by the more news, information and details that you ingest, or believe you have to ingest.

* In 1302, the Sorbonne Library in Paris housed 1,338 books, most handwritten, representing nearly all of humankind's accumulated knowledge spanning a few thousand years.
* In 2005, at least 730,000 books are published each year -- more than 2,000 a day.

In today's business environment we are being pulled in so many directions at once!Recognize, with the clarity of death, that life is finite; you cannot wistfully ingest the daily deluge of information/communication and expect to achieve balance.

Don't passively yield to the din and settle for living your life in what's left over after each day's onslaught. Hereafter make sensible choices about what is best ignored and what merits your time and attention.

Today's Forecast: Data Smog

In his 1997 book Data Smog: Surviving The Information Glut, David Shenk remarkably predicted our current state of social affairs:

"The law of diminishing returns, applied to the growing speed and abundance of information, will produce infoglut that will no longer add to our quality of life. Infoglut is already beginning to
cultivate stress, confusion, and ignorance," he said. "Information overload threatens our ability to educate ourselves, leaves us more vulnerable as consumers, and less cohesive as a society, and diminishes control over most of our lives."

Here are Shenk's first 12 Laws of Data Smog:
1. Information is now plentiful and taken for granted.
2. Silicon circuits evolve more quickly than human genes; a future information overload disease is called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome.
3. Computers are neither human nor humane.
4. Putting a computer in every classroom is like putting an electric power plant into every home; education cannot be fixed with a digital pipeline of data.
5. The sales goal of the information industry is information anxiety; by 1995, computer users considered their machines obsolete in just two years.
6. Too many experts spoil the clarity; the paralysis of analysis.
7. In a glutted environment, the most difficult task is finding a receptive audience.
8. As info supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease, and people turn to niche media and specialized knowledge.
9. The electronic town hall allows for speedy communication and bad decision-making; government is too responsive to an ill-informed citizenry.
10. Personal privacy has replaced censorship as the prime concern of civil liberties.
11. In our increasing distraction and speediness, the lies will move so much faster than the truth, they will too often become the truth.
12. On the info highway, most roads bypass journalists, reducing the power of the press
and enhancing the power of public relations.

Drugged Nation

You'll never convince me otherwise: as a society our default response to information and communication overload is ingesting psychopharmaceuticals. Patrick Di Justo, writing in Wired Magazine says, "America may be the land of Mickey Mouse and Goofy, but the US isn’t exactly the happiest place on Earth. Antidepressants are the most commonly popped pills in the country, accounting for 227 million prescriptions filled last year alone. Of course, Prozac and its descendants aren’t the only popular psychiatric meds: Remedies for seizure disorders — often used to treat bipolar disease, as well as epilepsy — and for anxiety are among the 10 most-prescribed drugs in the nation."

"But even as our hunger for pills has grown, basic innovation has slowed. Many “new” medications are actually reformulations of previously approved drugs, not novel molecules. As a result, some of the most widely taken treatments have been around for years: Today's leading anxiety beater, alprazolam, for example, originally hit the market in 1981 as Xanax."

An Epidemic of Unhappiness

"Being able to choose has enormous important positive effects on us, but only up to a point. As the number of choices we face increases, the psychological benefits we derive start to level off. At the same time, some of the negative effects of choice...begin to appear, and rather than leveling off, they accelerate...a point is reached at which increase choice brings increased misery rather than increased opportunity. It appears that American society has long since passed that point."

"There's a good reason to believe that the overwhelming choice at least contributes to the epidemic of unhappiness spreading through modern society."
- Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

Too Much Info, too Little Sleep

Only 3 per cent of professionals get eight hours of sleep every night of the working week. According to Travelodge's 2007 sleep study, company directors are the most sleep-deprived of all, with 8 per cent getting under four hours of rest per night.

The survey included more than 5,200 individuals from 30 different careers to discover more about how work affects rest. Those in the travel industry, such as cabin crew and pilots, found it hardest to get to sleep: 86% struggled with sleepless nights. Teachers were the most likely to stay awake because they were worrying about their work (39%). Here are the top 10 most sleep-deprived professions are:

* Company directors (averaging 5.9 hours of sleep a night)
* Ambulance crew/paramedics (6 hours)
* Tradesmen (6 hours)
* Leisure and hospitality workers (6 hours)
* Police officers (6.1 hours)

* Factory workers (6.2 hours)
* Nurses (6.3 hours)
* Engineers (6.3 hours)
* Doctors (6.4 hours)
* Civil servants (6.4 hours)

Cell Phones Decrease Freedom

"Cell phones-and, indeed, all wireless devices-constitute another chapter in the ongoing breakdown between work and everything else. They pretend to increase your freedom while actually stealing it. People are supposed to be always capable of participating in the next meeting, responding to their e-mails or retrieving factoids from the Internet. People so devoted to staying interconnected are kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, because they may have missed some significant memo, rendezvous, bit of news or gossip. They may be more plugged in and less thoughtful.
--Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek columnist

Great Expectations

"Technology reduces the amount of time it takes to do any one task but also leads to the expansion of tasks that people are expected to do." --Juliet Schor

Cell Phones Plague Family Life

A study published in the "Journal of Marriage and Family" finds that cell phone and pager use has become a vehicle for job worries and problems to interfere with family life for both men and women. Cell phone technology is linked to increased psychological distress and lower family satisfaction in general for working men and women.

Upshot: Manage your cell phone after hours or it will quickly manage you.

The Strain of Cellphone Use

HealthDayNews.com: Cell phones and pagers, part of the technological revolution that was supposed to liberate everyone, is tethering people to their jobs to an unprecedented degree, to the point where family life is suffering. The study limited the blame to cell phones and pages, and not computer-based communication such as e-mail. Cell phones and pagers were linked to increased psychological distress and reduced family satisfaction for both sexes.

The research, by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sociologist Noelle Chesley, appears in the December issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. "The use of cell phones and pagers was linked to increased distress and a decrease in family satisfaction over time," said Chesley, an assistant professor of sociology. "There is clearly a link between using the technology and experiencing increased access."

Cell Phones and Family Tension

Study: Cell phones tied to family tension

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- The round-the-clock availability that cell phones and pagers have brought to people's lives may be taking a toll on family life, a new study suggests.

The study, which followed more than 1,300 adults over 2 years, found that those who consistently used a mobile phone or pager throughout the study period were more likely to report negative "spillover" between work and home life -- and, in turn, less satisfaction with their family life.

Spillover essentially means that the line between work and home begins to blur. Work life may invade home life -- when a parent is taking job-related calls at home, for instance -- or household issues may start to take up work time.

In the latter scenario, a child may call mom at work, not to say that he aced his English test but that the "microwave exploded," explained Noelle Chesley, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of the study.

The problem with cell phones and pagers seems to be that they are allowing for ever more spillover between work and home, according to Chesley's findings, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. This may be especially true for working women, the study found.

Among men, consistent use of mobile phones and pagers seemed to allow more work issues to creep into family time. But for women, the spillover tended to go in both directions -- being "connected" meant that work cut into home time, and family issues seeped into work life. And people who reported more negative spillover -- spillover of the exploding-microwave variety -- tended to be less satisfied with their family life.

The point, Chesley told Reuters, is that cell phones and pagers seem to be opening more lines for stressful exchanges among family members, rather than positive ones….