Читать книгу Digital Universe - Peter B. Seel - Страница 27

The role that technology plays in our lives can be negotiated, to a point. People in contemporary networked societies have a great deal of choice concerning their use of technologies to communicate and recreate. We each make daily choices about whether to carry a mobile phone, tablet, or other portable electronic device. When it comes to the working world, we may not have as much choice. Increasingly, employers are requiring that employees be electronically connected to the company 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The numerals 24-7 are universally understood by workers in Bangalore, Beijing, Boston, and Berlin. We are losing the clear demarcation line between home and work that has been in place since workers stopped shopping in company stores and living in company houses in nineteenth-century mining towns. The option of working at home by telecommuting has been a boon to many, especially parents with pre-school children in the house. The downside for telecommuters has been learning where to draw the line between work and home. 24-7 access means that laboring for one’s employer can extend far beyond the traditional 40-hour work week.

Aside from work, we do negotiate with ourselves and our families about whether to adopt a new technology and its use. Parents fret over whether to give a child under age 12 a mobile phone for safety reasons, knowing that its usage will be predominantly social in sending text messages back and forth. For adults, turning off one’s mobile phone can be seen by friends and colleagues as an anti-social act – likewise for the failure to answer an email within a day. We can negotiate with the usage of communication technology, up to a point, where social norms have increasing influence. This process of negotiating the use of technology by both individuals and organizations will be explored in subsequent chapters. It is a multifaceted and continually evolving aspect of the digital universe of information and communication technology. However, one has to marvel at the clueless person in church who takes a mobile phone call in the middle of a funeral – and then reacts in surprise at the angry looks of other mourners.