The rise of technology addiction

BBCs Click website has recently published an article about Technology Addiction. I think I have a problem ;)

Prof Kakabadse added: "It's addiction to portable technology, which you take with you practically to bed, the cinema, to the theatre, to a dinner party. The symptoms are, like with any other addiction, that people spend more time using their technology than spending it in socialising or in family time."

Also there is a good section dedicated to how the medium is the message.

For instance, an e-mail can wait two days to be answered but a text message demands an almost immediate reply.

Stefana Broadbent from Swisscom said: "E-mail is considered the most formal. At the other end of the spectrum SMS is the most personal of all.

"That's where we find all those little exchanges, little endearments, what we call grooming, which is sending: 'I think about you. How did it go? How did you sleep?'

He added: "That is actually given by the number of characters. With such few characters, you have to have a lot of mutual understanding and mutual knowledge."

But it's not all bad news... apparently it forces us to get smarter.

"Studies have been done showing that people can actually enhance their cognitive abilities, which helps them to process more information at the same time. And their performance even transfers to other tasks."

Perhaps one day we can just double space our brains and jack a fibre optic cable into our ears.

Information Addiction - no seriously hah

Marjolein just pointed me to a post by Kirk Biglione (Kirk.. great name).

He has just published a post called "My Life as an RSS Junkie". I feel sorry for him. 1000 feeds and counting.

He (rightly?) blames Nick Bradbury for his addictions. I too would like to blame Nick - his app is the first I tried and I still use it to this day. It started me on this wonderful journey of RSS reading. Maybe a class action is in order? Just kidding Nick :)

He writes:

Things really started going down hill around the time I discovered FeedDemon. Damn that Nick Bradbury! With FeedDemon I was tracking nearly a thousand feeds a day. I’d focus on the topics I was most interested in by setting up watch lists. At first I thought that FeedDemon was helping me to effectively manage my information addiction. On the contrary, the problem was actually getting worse. I eventually realized that the more blogs I read, the more blogs I subscribed to. Each day I’d add a dozen new feeds to FeedDemon. It was a vicious circle. My feed reading began taking up larger chunks of my day.

At some point I came to my senses and realized that I had a serious problem. I had become overwhelmed by the sheer number of feeds that I’d subscribed to.

I am not sure if Kirk is the right user for Touchstone though. Kirk is the sort of user who needs to know what every post in every feed says. He could use it in conjunction with FeedDemon to get alerts about important posts when he is doing other things... but by the sounds of it he doesn't do other things.

Good luck Kirk - sign up to the mailing list and give Touchstone a try. I'd be fascinated to hear if it helps.