A few years back I wrote a post for my blog called “In Praise of Analog”. It was inspired because the home we were living in at the time was celebrating a birthday and a host of it’s systems, all technological marvels of their time were suddenly in need of repair and/or replacement. Allegedly state of the art flat screen TV’s were aging out and glitching. WiFi routers were not routing. A built in security system was having a nervous breakdown and alerting us to its discomfort and failure. Programmable thermostats were dying and our rather expensive, all electronic washing machine was freaking out and declining to do its job. And of course, our smart phones, tablets and laptops were reaching their premature end of life stages. Meanwhile, in our basement a 20 year old plain white refrigerator was quietly doing its one job: Keeping things in one compartment cool and in the other, frozen.The point of the post was not that things were better in the days of vacuum tubes and gears. It was that the desire for “frictionless” tech and commerce often creates the exact opposite result. Consider what happens sometimes after you update to a new OS. Think about all the spam and unwanted pop-ups you get if you click on an ad on one of your social networks. We citizens of the new digital era have significantly less privacy than our counterparts did many years ago. What I find even more interesting and, frankly, frustrating, is the amount of work we all now do for companies, apps and websites that are supposed to work for us. This happening in both my professional and personal lives and it's pretty frustrating to feel so powerless. Because this is the third decade of the 21st century and we're supposed to be living like the Jetsons, and we're not. What is harder to accept is that our personal and professional lives are merging. In many cases, the professional life is taking more precedence than it should. People I speak with feel like they're always working, always thinking about work, always a cog in the machine.Are you seeing this too?
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It's Tuesday: Are You The Customer? Or The…
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A few years back I wrote a post for my blog called “In Praise of Analog”. It was inspired because the home we were living in at the time was celebrating a birthday and a host of it’s systems, all technological marvels of their time were suddenly in need of repair and/or replacement. Allegedly state of the art flat screen TV’s were aging out and glitching. WiFi routers were not routing. A built in security system was having a nervous breakdown and alerting us to its discomfort and failure. Programmable thermostats were dying and our rather expensive, all electronic washing machine was freaking out and declining to do its job. And of course, our smart phones, tablets and laptops were reaching their premature end of life stages. Meanwhile, in our basement a 20 year old plain white refrigerator was quietly doing its one job: Keeping things in one compartment cool and in the other, frozen.The point of the post was not that things were better in the days of vacuum tubes and gears. It was that the desire for “frictionless” tech and commerce often creates the exact opposite result. Consider what happens sometimes after you update to a new OS. Think about all the spam and unwanted pop-ups you get if you click on an ad on one of your social networks. We citizens of the new digital era have significantly less privacy than our counterparts did many years ago. What I find even more interesting and, frankly, frustrating, is the amount of work we all now do for companies, apps and websites that are supposed to work for us. This happening in both my professional and personal lives and it's pretty frustrating to feel so powerless. Because this is the third decade of the 21st century and we're supposed to be living like the Jetsons, and we're not. What is harder to accept is that our personal and professional lives are merging. In many cases, the professional life is taking more precedence than it should. People I speak with feel like they're always working, always thinking about work, always a cog in the machine.Are you seeing this too?