Drowning in Data: Unplugging to Think Again

Quite the week to rail against the machine and highlight the perils of being über plugged in. The New York Times introduced us to the Campbells, Brian and Brenda, with he so consumed by data that an offer to buy his company sat unopened in his email inbox for a good 12 days, while she, like the football widows of lore, looks for ways to peel him from his gadgets to get him to partake with the family.

While the evolution of technology initially untethered us from our offices, we now drag our office with us. What was once a time saver is now a time consumer. The Twitter, the Facebook, the texting, the email. In her blog, Marci Maddox, Director Global Product Marketing for E2.0 at Open Text shared a line from Forrester's Tim Walters at the Forrester IT Forum when he said: 

Humans have lost the battle of information overload – only the machines can save us now.

Marci and I exchanged some emails on this and I offered that new technology will provide us with more ways to filter, to derive meaning from those burgeoning in boxes. She returned: "How often do we let computers handle the meaningless stuff and it seems that we are marching toward a moment in time where we will truly let the machines run us.  Reminds me of iRobot and a conversation I had with my daughter on what distinguishes a computer from a human."

As I pondered I began examining my own obsession with information. How I created my own taxonomy of folders to help me find things again -- for when I have "more time" -- only to realize that once it is filed it is forgotten. Like Lucy in the candy factory, more is coming so quickly, who has time to "catch up?" There is no more time to go back. And yet I can't stop the futility.

In Tracy Kidder's eponymous book The Soul of the New Machine, engineers breathe life into a next-gen computer -- giving it soul -- as they give pieces of themselves to it. Today, machines and technology seem to foster our individual most compulsive desires, teasing us until we are fully junkified:  Can I get more Twitter followers, he wrote to me so I must write back, I need to update my blog, I need to get through my emails, I need to keep up with my many personas over all these social sites. So integrated are our lives with technology that a mere vacation threatens to create a Tsunami of emails, a void in the Twitter-sphere, a stale blog. If you aren't participating do you continue to exist?

Would Rene Descartes' famous intonation "I think therefore I am" succumb to "I updated therefore I am?" And when we "stop" do we cease to exist? Or by constantly interacting have we ceased living? This theme was loosely explored in Iron Man 2, where the machine initially saves the comic book hero played by Robert Downey, Jr., only eventually to be killing him.

In the Times article, Stanford research is cited that explains the addicting lure of technology. Researchers found that a portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated. In past lives, man would rely on this primitive brain function to let him know danger was near. Alerts and chimes have the same effect: drawing our attention.

With multi-taskers, the research finds, we can not distinguish essential alerts and chimes from non-important ones. So as we change our ring tone to let us differentiate between loved ones, work and other, it is virtually impossible for those wired in to ignore any alert. We are training ourselves to react -- but can we still think? There is no doubt that focusing is near impossible with all these distractions pulling at us. And, yet, for a highly connected person, the abrupt removal of technology -- can be just as disorienting. A week's vacation, where I truly unplugged, interrupted my rhythm and flow -- and getting back up to speed was like trying to jump into a turning rope; clumsy, off-balance and daunting.

The downtime was a realization of how exhausted I had become and an awareness of how technology had become the master of my life.

Will we be able to eventually find a balance between machine and life?  Perhaps. The good news is “the bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Maybe our evolution will include learning to surf. Like water, ride the information wave, don't try and control it. The information will be out there when we need it. And we still exist without it.