Read Online The Blind Giant by Nick Harkaway - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nick Harkaway
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hearth and the world of work has become blurred. Distraction shatters focus, and, once gone, it’s hard to re-create the fragile entity that is a mood of peace and tranquillity; but even more, to reconstruct the sense of private place and safety. Before ever there was Myspace – the first of the big social networks, which aptly recognized the importance of a bounded personal area online – there was the hearth space, and physical or not, outmoded or not, we need it.
In response to the external pressure, some people simply shut down or refuse to engage. A lawyer who worked in my wife’s office when she was starting out refused to hold any meetings by phone at all, and did everything either in person or by letter. These days I suspect that is simply impossible, unless you are sufficiently powerful in your own arena that you are able to define the rules, but how you would get to that point these days without using digital communications I’m not sure. All the same, many people of my parents’ generation own mobile phones but carry them switched off, getting them out only to make calls and immediately putting them back to sleep as soon as they have finished. My father in particular has a tendency to do this, often leaving me messages to which I therefore cannot hope to reply. I’ve likened this to the old children’s game of banging on someone’s door and then running away, but he remains Luddishly and somewhat joyfully unrepentant.
The interesting aspect of this solution is that while it protects the hearth space by blocking the channel, it doesn’t seem to helpwith the feeling of pressure: in the case of people I know who have adopted this or more extreme strategies (one woman threw her mobile phone into the Thames), the results are the opposite of what is intended. The phone, inactive, becomes an accusation or a harbinger of doom. ‘What if someone’s really trying to reach me in an emergency?’ I turn my mobile off overnight, on the basis that anyone who really needs me at 4 a.m. has my home number. The landline phone is next to the bed. As in most things, I’m midway between the Always-On generation (young Americans overwhelmingly go to bed with a mobile turned on and close to hand or even under their pillows, which according to a 2008 study might have a negative effect on sleep, leading ultimately to ADHD-like symptoms, although a larger experiment a year earlier found ‘no support for the notion that the aversive symptoms attributed to mobile phone signals by hypersensitive individuals are caused by exposure to such signals’) 1 and the previous one.
But the spectacle of people on buses, in the street, with their children, alone on park benches, bending over their handsets and tapping at the keys – and the awareness that in one’s own pocket there’s a device very much the same which is even now bringing in messages from friends, colleagues, bosses and commercial entities, 24/7, every week of the year – can create a feeling of oppression. The intrusion of work into the hearth space, of responsibility into the place where professional responsibility is supposed to be shelved in favour of home life, is particularly hard to handle. It’s worth noting that the idea that work messages must be answered immediately has more to do with the nature of our relationship with capitalism than it does with our understanding of technology, but, in a sense, that’s a dodge: capitalist enterprise will expand to fill the available space, and in any case, the technology and the culture have grown up together. And on the subject of noise, the nay-sayers certainly have a point. Fifty million tweets and 200 billion (yes, billion) emails are sent everyday. We are generating more communication now every few days than we did from the dawn of human history until 2003. And much of it – as science fiction novelist Theodore Sturgeon could have told us – is crap.
Somehow, we need to come to terms with the influx; and
In response to the external pressure, some people simply shut down or refuse to engage. A lawyer who worked in my wife’s office when she was starting out refused to hold any meetings by phone at all, and did everything either in person or by letter. These days I suspect that is simply impossible, unless you are sufficiently powerful in your own arena that you are able to define the rules, but how you would get to that point these days without using digital communications I’m not sure. All the same, many people of my parents’ generation own mobile phones but carry them switched off, getting them out only to make calls and immediately putting them back to sleep as soon as they have finished. My father in particular has a tendency to do this, often leaving me messages to which I therefore cannot hope to reply. I’ve likened this to the old children’s game of banging on someone’s door and then running away, but he remains Luddishly and somewhat joyfully unrepentant.
The interesting aspect of this solution is that while it protects the hearth space by blocking the channel, it doesn’t seem to helpwith the feeling of pressure: in the case of people I know who have adopted this or more extreme strategies (one woman threw her mobile phone into the Thames), the results are the opposite of what is intended. The phone, inactive, becomes an accusation or a harbinger of doom. ‘What if someone’s really trying to reach me in an emergency?’ I turn my mobile off overnight, on the basis that anyone who really needs me at 4 a.m. has my home number. The landline phone is next to the bed. As in most things, I’m midway between the Always-On generation (young Americans overwhelmingly go to bed with a mobile turned on and close to hand or even under their pillows, which according to a 2008 study might have a negative effect on sleep, leading ultimately to ADHD-like symptoms, although a larger experiment a year earlier found ‘no support for the notion that the aversive symptoms attributed to mobile phone signals by hypersensitive individuals are caused by exposure to such signals’) 1 and the previous one.
But the spectacle of people on buses, in the street, with their children, alone on park benches, bending over their handsets and tapping at the keys – and the awareness that in one’s own pocket there’s a device very much the same which is even now bringing in messages from friends, colleagues, bosses and commercial entities, 24/7, every week of the year – can create a feeling of oppression. The intrusion of work into the hearth space, of responsibility into the place where professional responsibility is supposed to be shelved in favour of home life, is particularly hard to handle. It’s worth noting that the idea that work messages must be answered immediately has more to do with the nature of our relationship with capitalism than it does with our understanding of technology, but, in a sense, that’s a dodge: capitalist enterprise will expand to fill the available space, and in any case, the technology and the culture have grown up together. And on the subject of noise, the nay-sayers certainly have a point. Fifty million tweets and 200 billion (yes, billion) emails are sent everyday. We are generating more communication now every few days than we did from the dawn of human history until 2003. And much of it – as science fiction novelist Theodore Sturgeon could have told us – is crap.
Somehow, we need to come to terms with the influx; and
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