Some thoughts to get us started ...

Chatting with Ale we were thinking that the starting point for this exhibition should be a reflection on our own experience, to understand both the positive aspects and the difficulties we have in our use of technology. The idea would be to use our experience to identify some common themes that we can work on. Here are a few immediate reflections of my own to start the process off.

1.    Relationships – Modern technology has great possibilities to help build relationships between people. The fact that I could speak to my friends and family and see their face at the same time was science fiction when I was growing up (and I’m not that old!). I can also build relationships with people I rarely meet face-to-face.  However, it is also easy that we begin to measure our relationships by the number of followers we have on Twitter/ Facebook, that I get excited by the fact that I have a new follower or that someone has responded to me. When does technology serve our relationships and when does it dominate?

2.    In many occasions I find myself easily distracted from what I am doing, e.g. the temptation to check the news on the internet, email or Twitter as a quick break from my work is constant (and very easy when you work in front of a computer). Does our desire for novelty take us away from the task we have in hand, to look for a novelty or satisfaction elsewhere? Or is the fact that a new email arrives while I am in conversation with someone else part of the reality to which I am called to respond?

3.    Also connected to point 2, it is often difficult to concentrate on just doing one thing. A particular example that struck me recently is that sometimes I spend time reading in the office at the end of the day, while waiting for the traffic to die down. If I leave my computer on, I find it impossible to read for more than 20 minutes without a quick check of my email.

4.    Does modern technology change the value we put on things? A few years ago I had a new mobile phone contract with free download of any music during the first year. I was completely lost and actually downloaded very little! The fact of having immediate access to so much choice meant that I didn’t know what I actually wanted to listen to.

5.    Modern technology gives me the great possibility to work from home. However with this easily comes the ‘always available’ culture, when I feel the need to respond to emails immediately, no matter when they arrive. Why is it so difficult to decide that I’ll respond later?

In Jonah Lynch’s book The Scent of Lemons he touches on the problem of concentration, saying that we now read books the way we read web sites, with a quick scan. An interesting study he points to in this respect is at
   http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
which shows how we scan web pages forming an F shape. Studies have shown that people no longer read in a linear way. I’ll try to post more from this book in future.

Please reply with comments or new posts to help deepen some of these themes or bring out new ones.