Friday, May 20, 2005

Technology & Interaction

On Wednesday, I woke up late and I ran out of my apartment straight to the gym then straight to work. I do not notice at first, but I left my ipod and blackberry at home in the rushed. I did feel out of touch that's the good and bad thing about the blackberry you have your cellphone, email, and text messaging all in one place.

What struck me the most was my ipod. I go everywhere with this thing. Gym, grocery store, Starbucks, the bank, and etc... What's even more interesting is that not wearing that damn thing all the all time you actually regain one of your senses - hearing.

What I also learned is that life goes on without them. I can get my emails at work or home or at any Starbucks if I take my laptop with me; I can listen to my music and books at work or home; and I can call my voicemail to see if anyone call me from anywhere. Now with nothing in my ears or in my hand for the majority of the day, I think I might have gotten what some of the experts talk about - outside my internal state. There was nothing keeping my mind on work or personal stuff (email, phones, calls, & etc...) or nothing reminding of other things such old songs. Also I could hear everything going on around me and actually have context to add to my conversations with people.

So I spent the rest of the week not using my ipod just at the gym. I set my blackberry to silent and only check and responded to emails, voicemails, and/or texts when I was sitting down at my desk. Now, I don't know what profound effect on my skills that this experiment will have, but I do know that it is a little easier to speak with people when you're completely aware of the environment around you and a lot easier for people to approach you when you don't have the phone or ipod in your ears or your pda or blackberry in your hand.

Maybe, along with a couple of other things, technology has been playing a part in hampering the way we interact with people.





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Haha, I've had that before.


And now it happened again.. I lost my MP3-player at home a week ago and I still haven't found it. :'(