Digital Universe. Peter B. Seel

sometimes become upset when a reply to their email is not immediate. This is a significant negative aspect of the increasing speed of information processing and transmission linked to Moore’s law – because a task can be accomplished quickly using digital technology, it becomes an expectation that it always will be.

Another negative aspect to this always-on networked environment is that of interruption. Author Thomas Friedman calls this era the “Age of Interruption” and cites former Microsoft executive Linda Stone as elaborating that these interruptions create an environment of “continuous partial attention.”⁵ He had this insight when he was traveling in the Amazon jungle in Brazil and was “off the grid” and disconnected for four days from both mobile phone and internet access. As someone who lives his life as a journalist and author typically connected 24-7, he found this period of disconnection strangely refreshing. Habitually multi-tasking in a communication and information-saturated working environment in New York, he became aware that he was providing only “continuous partial attention” to his environment. When he was immersed in the jungle – without his media connections – he realized how fragmented his urban attention had become.

It is estimated that a staff member in a networked work environment is interrupted every 11 minutes by incoming messages or calls. Once interrupted, it may take 25 minutes to return to the task at hand. Workers in cubicles are 29 percent more likely to be interrupted than those in separate offices.⁶ It may be argued that these interruptions are part of the modern working world, but one has to wonder how many of the interruptions are work-related.

A survey of 645 respondents in Europe and North America revealed that companies that restrict access to social media sites by their employees have higher levels of productivity. In some cases, these restrictions led to productivity improvements of 10 percent or more compared to companies that allowed unrestricted access.⁷ Social-media sites generate the familiar ping alert on one’s mobile phone that can create almost a Pavlovian-style stimulus to look and read the response to a recent post.

All this started innocently enough and provides a classic case study of Merton’s law of unintended consequences.⁸ In their excellent history of the internet, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon relate that the first emails were sent in 1964 as part of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) initiative to link mainframe computers at major research universities.⁹ This predates by five years the official start of the ARPANET network at the University of California, Los Angeles on September 2, 1969 – the date accepted by most historians as the founding of the internet. The ARPANET was designed for computer time-sharing rather than personal messaging, but users soon discovered that there was available bandwidth on the system for what we know today as email. By 1971, several ARPANET users, including Richard Watson at SRI, had started experimenting with sending electronic messages using a “mailbox” protocol.¹⁰

Computer programmer Ray Tomlinson at ARPANET-contractor Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) in Boston is credited with developing the first networked email program in 1971. He developed an email system that could communicate between different types of computers by including the now well-known @ symbol between the user name and the host address.¹¹ This addressing system allows for the almost infinite expansion of email addresses. After Tomlinson developed this universal addressing system and refined the communication protocols, email quickly became one of the most popular applications on the ARPANET and was a harbinger of the popularity of contemporary social networking technologies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

      The creation of the internet will be addressed in Chapters 4 and 5, however it is important to note that the human desire to communicate electronically with others predates the development of the internet. The success of the telephone as a communication tool was based on its ability to facilitate real-time voice dialogue. In large organizations in the tele-connected world today, employees typically have little say about which communication modes they will use. Email is a primary tool for intra-organization and external client communication, and ignoring one’s messages for any interval beyond one day will lead to irritated phone calls from colleagues and customers. Failure to reply promptly to a client’s inquiry could lead to a loss of their business, and possible termination of one’s employment. To ensure a speedy response, some companies have set minimum time requirements for employees to reply to client emails.

This time pressure to reply to messages (from within the organization and from one’s personal work ethic), combined with the increasing number of electronic interruptions, adds yet another stress-inducing component to the workday. For many of those employed in the networked world, a central question is how to balance the need to accomplish daily work-related tasks and still allocate the time needed to manage email, voice-mail, web teleconferences, and conventional written communication. The central question to examine is: In this tele-connected world of multiple modes of communication, do we control these technologies – or do they control us? Information workers today often feel that they are servants of communication technology, rather than the other way around. This perception is not a new one and it is helpful to review the work of three key critics (Jacques Ellul – Figure 3.1; Neil Postman – Figure 3.2; and Safiya Umoja Noble – Figure 3.3) of technology’s role in contemporary life to gain useful perspectives that are especially applicable today.

Figure 3.1 Jacques Ellul. Source: Photograph by Patrick Chastenet – copyright, Association Internationale Jacques Ellul, used with permission.

      Figure 3.2 Neil Postman.

      Figure 3.3 Safiya Umoja Noble. Source: Photo of Safiya Umoja Noble by Stella Kalinina, used with permission.

      Jacques Ellul’s Critique of Technology

French theologian, sociologist, and philosopher Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) was a prolific writer and perceptive critic concerning the role that technology plays in modern life. He was the author of several books that dealt with the social effects of technology, including The Technological Society – one of his most-cited works.¹² First published in France in 1954, the English translation was issued in 1964 at the behest of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, who considered Ellul’s book a seminal work on the role of technology in society. The French edition of the book was titled La Technique: L’enjeu du siècle, (Technique: The stake of the century). In the text Ellul defined “La Technique” as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at, and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”¹³

This all-encompassing definition moves beyond a simplistic view of technology as strictly tools and hardware to a much broader definition that includes every area of what Ellul terms “rational” human endeavor. From this perspective such diverse activities as cooking, playing basketball, sleeping (influenced by mattress technology and pharmaceutical sleep aids), sending a text message on a mobile phone, teaching a college course, gardening, and even sex (e.g. the use of contraception or romantic music playing from a smart speaker) would involve the use of “la technique,” as defined by Ellul. The rationality aspect was important to Ellul as it reflected his view that technique in any given field of activity evolves over time toward its most efficient use. The evolution of technique toward “absolute efficiency” is a key theme in Ellul’s writings on technology, a thread picked up by later critics of the role of technology in contemporary life such as Neil Postman. Ellul scholar Darrell Fasching