Opinion: Technology is the servant, not the master

A recent study by the University of Cambridge, ironically sponsored by BT, found that one in three people felt overwhelmed by communications technology, including texting, email and social networking, to the point that they felt a pressing need to escape it.

Certainly with so many different communications platforms now available, it is hard not to feel pressure to use them. But it’s important to remember that communicating just for the sake of it doesn’t help anyone – it only creates a mushroom effect that sucks even more people into its vortex and means that even more of us spend even more time talking, rather than thinking or doing.

When email first became mainstream in the early 1990s, many of those new to it complained of the information overload it caused. Back then there was a realisation that too much communication was not necessarily a good thing, whereas today those voices have largely disappeared, to the extent that the current never-ending orgy of internet, mobile and smartphone usage has become an unquestionable norm. It might be a generational thing coupled to the success of SMS in the mid 1990s, but as soon as that message arrives, in whatever form or channel, we stop what we are doing and read it, even though it often disrupts what we were concentrating on previously.

Worse, if academic theories turn out to be correct, all of this multi-tasking can have a negative effect on our mental capacity. In the Cambridge study, the authors highlighted concerns that so much flitting about between different activities could degrade our ability to focus on one thing at a time, and that as well as impeding memory and knowledge retention, people who multi-task in this way are not as good at filtering out irrelevant information as those who do not.

To minimise any potential downsides, we should be taking a more selective approach to ICT and how we use it.

Technology is a great servant, but a terrible master. It is innovative and flexible enough to provide us with all sorts of communications options that can serve all sorts of useful purposes in both our personal and professional lives. But just because we can, it doesn’t mean we should, and it is equally important to bear in mind that buying in new hardware or software in the absence of any immediate or imminent usage need brings nothing more than additional cost, complexity and maintenance time.

As a firm that makes its living out of selling communications technology, BT deserves credit for sponsoring and publishing this sort of study. Perhaps we as individuals can now be equally as honest with ourselves.