Unitasking
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. Buckminster Fuller.
For many, life seems now to be happening on our phones. We take them with us everywhere and seem unable to untether from them.
Almost everyone knows that we need to switch them off more but hardly anyone knows how. I know I am guilty, so it was with great interest that I read Simon Kuper’s column in the FT.com this weekend, Log out, switch off, join in
I think he is right on the mark. I’m betting you, too, may agree with his view that we need to do something to get a handle on our phones and take back our lives.
He quotes from a new book, Reclaiming Conversation, by Sherry Turkle, the director of the Initiative of Technology and Self at MIT. Her findings reveal how smartphones are damaging human interaction, suggesting ways we can kick the habit and regain a semblance of sanity in an ever-evolving social media environment.
Multitasking, she suggests, contrary to popular wisdom, is unproductive and a waste of our time. Instead, she is positing a new approach, “unitasking,” she calls it, concentrating more on one thing at a time. She advocates that we need to develop a new set of rules, a social etiquette governing how and when we use our devices.
We talk continuously about the importance of communicating and building relationships even as we lean more heavily on our phones and the internet. The more we use them the faster we send out electronic messages, buying into the myth that in this era, technology is communication.
Contrary to popular opinion, though, we humans need and crave personal interaction, not a soulless smartphone connection delivered in 140 characters or in two or three short lines and pithy phrases.