Technology: it's about time

Communication World, March, 1998 by Tom Geddie

So, just where does all the time go when it slips away?

What does this line of thought have to do with technology?

Both technology and time are integrally intertwined with our personal and business lives. The connection between technology and time isn't always obvious.

Each of the musicians cited in the first paragraph sang these songs in the past, but I can listen to them any time I want. Thanks to the technology of recorded music, people listen to obscure Texas musicians all around the world. Through e-mail, I've personally and sometimes rapidly shared this passion with people in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden.

As the globalization of business and technology shows us, time certainly is relative. When somebody in Kuala Lumpur sends a fax at 4 pm and I get it 14 hours earlier at 2 am in my home office, that relativity becomes obvious.

Technology can wake us from a sound sleep and force us to think about time in new ways. It also becomes obvious that relativity, like a coin, includes not only two sides (commonly referred to in North America as heads and tails) but a rim and the less-considered inside and outside.

The business world conditions us to think of time as a linear tool that we never have enough of, if we think about it as a tool at all. We learn that time is money. We can simultaneously suspend time or feel it pass too fast when a task interests us, or drag on forever when we must stay indoors on a warm, sunny spring day.

We seldom think about the fact that time keeps everything from happening at once. (Some days, it seems, time fails at that simple task; but then we may be confusing time with deadlines or organizational skills.)

Technology has traditionally reinforced linear concepts of time, because technology is most often mechanical and linear. How much is technology affecting how we work and live?

Is traditional linear technology forcing us to think about time in non-linear ways? Is that ironic, or a natural progression?

Technology is changing our coined perceptions of time in at least three areas today: 1) information access/dissemination, 2) the related area of virtual communities, and 3) creative potential. Let's consider just a few of the advantages and disadvantages in each area.

Information Access/Dissemination

Content, combined with easy access, is still king. If that truth is still self evident in our cynical postmodern chessboard of a society, then credibility is the powerful, feminine queen to the masculine content.

Technology is giving us the ability to rapidly share information around the world, which is changing the nature of business. At the same time, technology is creating a battle between the "eff" words - efficiency and effectiveness - through "pull" and "push" dissemination. Should we put information "out there" and let employees and other audiences come get it if they want it, or push information directly into audiences' hands and hope they pay attention to it? "Pull" is, day to day, more efficient because of the Internet, intranets and e-mail.

But is it, in theory and practice, more effective?

A mid-level manager at a global company recently said that when his inbox gets too full, he just deletes all his mail. If it's important, he says, people will get back to him.

That's a very human reaction to technology overload. It saves his personal time in the short term. It's personally efficient, in a way, but is it effective for him or his business?

Rapid dissemination gives us more information choices and, in relative terms, less time to use them. It empowers people who are smart enough to access, sort, prioritize, and use it. It has the potential to help us improve our listening skills amidst the babble, and to shorten decision cycles.

Formatted poorly, rapid and economical dissemination has the potential to drown us in words and misused time.

Virtual Communities

Virtual communities are groups of people with common interests and common contact. Those of us who go online often think of virtual communities as Internet discussion areas where people exchange information and opinions about popular TV shows or movies or any other subject we can imagine. (Reportedly, more than 2,000 web sites exist for fans of Texas music and musicians.)

Geography doesn't create the borders of virtual communities; only time, interest and imagination do that.

Companies are our most entrenched virtual communities - most of them with virtual neighborhoods of engineers, lawyers, accountants, friendly and mercenary shareholders, communicators, etc.

Enabled by technology, the growing global communities of companies create, at the same time, both wonderful and fearful new frontiers. Rapid communication among employees in different locations and movement of employees from one region or nation to another creates great potential for sharing and growth. It also can help create larger, stronger communities without diminishing individuals.

As exposure to one another makes us grow more alike, how much individuality will we eventually maintain? How much will we become, as Hari Kunzru, associate editor of Wired UK, wrote, "nodes on networks" - science fiction human/machine cyborgs than as individuals? This may seem like a silly notion. We already live in a world where some people believe well-trained managers are interchangeable.