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A slow media movement
Photo illustration of a phone in a mousetrap signifies being trapped by technology.
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Kai Ryssdal: It is possible, in this day and age, to stay in touch 24 hours a day if you so choose. Or, if you'd care to look at it another way, cell phones and laptops and Blackberrys have made it almost impossible to disconnect. Try as we might, it is just hard to ignore all those e-mails and text messages and phone calls. So it's no wonder a lot of us are overwhelmed. But Sally Herships may have found an answer.
SALLY HERSHIPS: Every night my boyfriend brings his iPhone to bed. And his Blackberry. Did I mention the laptop?
HERSHIPS: It's 5:45, and my boyfriend's phone just rang.
BOYFRIEND: It was somebody from work.
HERSHIPS: And you answered it?
BOYFRIEND: I did.
This, to put it mildly, doesn't make me happy. I'm trying not to take it personally. My boyfriend is a journalist and a news junkie. And it's not like he needs an excuse to stay wired all the time. Connected is the new normal.
That drives Jenny Rauch nuts. Rauch is a journalism professor in New York, and she's what you might call old school.
JENNY RAUCH: I've tried telling my friends, I don't text. I don't have a text plan. Every time you send me a text message it costs me 15 cents.
It's not the money that gets Rauch. It's the expectations. She says people who are totally wired expect everyone else to be, too. Rauch doesn't want to feel pressured to answer e-mails on Saturdays. She wants her time back.
RAUCH: Something has to go. And the thing that has to go is the digital media.
Rauch is planning to go all the way. Next year, she'll set the clock back to 1985.
RAUCH: There will be television.
But no DVR.
RAUCH: A land-line.
But no cell phones.
RAUCH: Records.
There's a movement for people like Rauch. It's called Slow Media. Kinda like slow food, but without the food. Slowies write letters, and, you know, talk to each other, offline. They like to do one thing at a time.
Nick Jones is a computer programmer who lives in North Carolina. He has a Slow Media group -- on Facebook. Jones gets the irony. But he knows the downside of multitasking.
NICK JONES: Sometimes I would have the British Office, it would be like, on mute and running and then there's a song playing and then there's me writing code, and it was just too much, it was like trying to drink from a fire hose, it just wasn't -- it didn't work. Thanks, high-speed Internet.
But what does work, especially at work? Can you really get away with slowing down?
Tom Jackson, also known as Dr. E-mail, teaches information science in England. He says technology isn't the problem. It's the way we use it.
TOM JACKSON: The majority of employees react to incoming e-mail within six seconds. Now, most people have their e-mail applications set up to check for new e-mail every five minutes.
Jackson says every time you're distracted by an e-mail, it takes about a minute to get back to what you were doing. All that time adds up, the average employee spends almost 800 hours a year just reading e-mail, that's not including recovery time.
Eric Bradlow is a professor of interactive media at Wharton. He says even if we took technology away, we'd still have a problem.
ERIC BRADLOW: So I'll go back to the old days, I'll walk around to the water cooler, and I'll sit there chatting with people. I think people will replace one form of distraction with another.
Bradlow says certain types of people, like him, and my boyfriend, want to be connected 24-7. And that can be a good thing for employers. Bradlow says people who spend a lot of time in social media tend to be high achievers.
And Jenny Rauch, the journalism professor, and Nick Jones, the computer programmer, do want to stay connected. They're both blogging about their new approach to media, slowly.
I'm Sally Herships for Marketplace.
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Slow Media is about more than texting, emails, Twitters, Facebook, cell phones, Blackberry's, IPads... It's also about meaningful community news and not the "if it bleeds, it leads." As an editor and sr. writer of a healthy lifestyle magazine for the last 7 years, I've interviewed many people from communities throughout our country about the grassroots sustainability movement but read little of it in mainstream media. I took a cross-country trip, which I called the 2010 Stone Soup Listening Tour, and met people who had great stories to tell about what was going on around sustainability in their communities. In other words, I connected my own dots, which demonstrated what was people were really doing to make a difference. It gave me great hope to see so many young people involved in this movement. Actually, my trip gave me more hope than I'd ever gotten from mainstream Fast Media.
Well put and entertaining,entertaining because of the unique perspectives and new conceptual framework, "slow media." My mind was leveraged out of a rut, and while I was reading, I slowed down just enough to hear the plaintive song my muscles had improvised for my body-mind connectedness. TY from Lynn
As a CIO, I have been following the problem of interruptions (as well as the related problem of information overload) for multiple years. Some of the points here require some degree of clarification.
Jackson sounds as if he is trying to quote research from Basex on interruptions but he misses the mark. Basex's studies explain that recovery time from an interruption is typically 10-20 times the duration of the interruption (you can read some of their research at no charge at http://www.basex.com/io). This could be a minute (which is the figure Jackson mentions) but it really depends on how long one is interrupted. Basex also found that the typical knowledge worker loses about 28% of his day to unnecessary interruptions PLUS recovery time and that the bulk of the 28% is recovery time. At the time, Basex published that this costs the U.S. economy around $650 billion but I believe they have updated and refined this figure a bit in the past two years.
The Web site I mention above has a brilliant movie about interruptions and information overload - in the course of interviewing executives on the topic, the director let the camera run when one person is clearly knocked off balance by a ding from her mobile. Great stuff.
With regards to work, those one minute communications should generally be work related. In addition, what a person spends five or ten or twenty minutes explaining to another in words can be received, understood, and reviewable in half the time.
Outside of work, your hours logged into social media are up to what is relevant to you. We have no cable, because it isn't relevant. We have Facebook accounts, because we like to keep up with our friends even when we don't have a chance to call for a week. And it's all available to save and look at later, when we've forgotten what was relevant to us now.
Any tool misapplied is dangerous.
I insist on using my rotary phone on my clean, crisp land-line and will take records over mp3s any day, I even have rabbit ears hooked up to my flat screen. I'm living a 20th century, neo-Amish lifestyle. My only wish is that fedoras would make a comeback.
I actually don't have a problem with email and look at it as an improvement over phone communications since it is an asynchronous process, but the disruptive comms like texting, IM and good ol' phone calls, which require almost immediate response are extremely disruptive, and are out of control.
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