Posts Tagged 'history'

Who stole our reading time?

Posted on February 3rd, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Novelist Alan Bissett wrote a fascinating post in The Guardian’s books blog, titled Who stole our reading time? It points out explicitly what we all experience: we read less today than ever before. And I’m not complaining about the young generation; I’m comparing now and then within the same generation, whether mine or Bissett’s (who is about a generation younger than me). The basic observation is that nobody has the time, or the will, or the ability, to finish books the size of War and Peace anymore; or to read the voluminous classics of centuries past at all. Bissett links.. Read more

Email overload: snowflakes or terror birds?

Posted on December 13th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Email Overload had originally (that is, in the mid-1990s when the problem erupted) involved the existence of too much incoming mail. There were just too many messages arriving in the Inbox and needing to be processed. The metaphor I liked to use was of snowfall: the flakes keep coming down, and unless you shovel the accumulated layer away your driveway will be buried. What you had to do was set times to do the shoveling, and learn to do it faster. But today the snow metaphor is giving way to something much less serene and more sinister, perhaps akin to.. Read more

The way we were: messaging before the email overload era

Posted on November 13th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A friend in a US Hi-tech company once commented to me that all this business communication that is manifesting itself as email overload is nothing new: we also had this in the days before email, even if it used paper instead of computer screens. We called it Correspondence, he said. And then he added: We devoted a couple of hours a week to it; the rest of the time, we worked… The difference, of course, is that then, it took two hours a week, where today – the data shows – it takes ten times as much. That’s the problem… Read more

The risk of doing mail in a meeting

Posted on October 30th, 2009 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Everybody “does mail” in meetings. These days it’s email, and earlier it was snail mail; whether the attendees sit with a glassy stare fixed on their notebook screens or they shuffle piles of paper, the impact on the meeting’s effectiveness is obviously negative. This is hardly new behavior… as a hilarious anecdote from ancient Rome illustrates. This is a true story, documented by Plutarch. The attendee in question is none less than Julius Caesar himself, who was standing in front of the Roman senate, engaged in a debate with his arch-opponent Cato (the younger). Someone came in and delivered a.. Read more