About a decade before the Web exploded, I started noticing how various technologies were speeding up the pace of my work. One example was the fax machine, which though it had been invented even before the telephone, back in 1842, did not come into common use in smaller companies until the 1980s, if memory serves. Editors at magazines with multiple offices were accustomed to delays of at least one day, while they shipped versions of stories back and forth; sometimes we would expect a week to pass before a colleague on the East Coast, say, could react to something we'd sent from the West Coast.
By the late '80s, working in the San Francisco bureau of California magazine, I routinely started sending and receiving marked-up manuscripts via fax to our Los Angeles headquarters minutes after the work had been done. The old waiting period was evaporating before my eyes.
At the time I considered it a speed-up, i.e., a work issue. But it didn't bother me, because I've always liked to work relatively fast as an editor.
An even more revolutionary change was the earlier arrival of word processing technology that suddenly turned every writer into his own editor. The act of writing itself underwent an instant transformation. I'd written long manuscripts for years on typewriters, then laboriously retyped them into "final" versions.
Now it was possible to start over and over and over again until I got my lede just right, then proceed through the piece. I've never been the type to work on one section one day and another the next, anyway. I always start over from the top and write down to whatever ending place I can reach in one sitting.
So, the iterative process of writing was accelerating, in line with the dictates of the software development cycle. Nowadays, some versions of word programs are too smart for their own good, or at least my own good, as they misinterpret my intentions and pre-populate fields with bullets or indents that I do not desire at all.
Word processing has thus altered the creative process profoundly.
These are simply two early technological examples. I won't even get started on email, IM, text messaging, video blogs, or multiple other avenues by which our world continues its speedup.
Meanwhile, I have been considering the dilemma of people with extraordinary ability to focus not on multiple tasks but on one significant task only. It is endlessly frustrating for these special beings to constantly be interrupted and diverted from the task at hand. They can become disoriented and depressed. They often don't feel valued by our current, hepped-up economy. They start to question their nature.
Artists, scientists, investigative reporters -- almost anybody who tries to do special and unusual in-depth work have certainly benefited from new technologies, but not necessarily from the work culture that is emerging as a result. How can you concentrate on any one thing when the flood of incoming lights and pings drowns out the virtual island you need to carefully construct for yourself? Or when others expect immediate attention from you when what you need is the space to be able to think?
To be clear here, I personally am among the worst of all multi-taskers. It's not unusual for me to balance seven or eight discrete work tasks simultaneously, plus an equal number of personal matters. So this era is really a dream come true for the likes of me.
But this entry is not about me; it is about my polar opposite. It was provoked by one brief conversation this afternoon with my sweetie in Biloxi. She most definitely is not a multi-tasker. She doesn't excel at juggling multiple projects, nor does she need or want to indulge in instant communications most of the time. Her forte is her ability to focus and concentrate. The people she's helped post-Katrina would be the first to testify that her dogged persistence in staying on their cases no matter how many barriers were placed in her way is the singular quality that got them out of leaky tents last winter and into FEMA trailers.
And her clients have benefited enormously in her role as a graphic designer over the years due to these same qualities of hers.
On the personal side, having her concentrate just on me, whenever she was able to do that, was like receiving an emotional laser beam straight into my heart; it made me warm all over. No one else has been able to lock onto my eyes and pour her soul into mine, extracting mine in the process. This is her power over me, and what I miss so much.
For our world to regain its proper balance, all of us probably need to take a breath and step away from the pace of change now and then. Take a vacation from email, and so forth. And consider how much poorer our experience of life will be if we continue to race through our lives, never stopping to even consider why we feel the need to move on so quickly in the first place.
The alternative is to reach the point where we may be continuously running only in circles, like my dear departed hamster, Spark, did every night until the one before he died. Nor will we ever figure out what it is we might be running away from.
That challenge, however, is precisely where my polar opposite and I meet again, either racing toward or running from, and neither of us can truly say which applies to whom.
No comments:
Post a Comment