Technology, no doubt, can do amazing things. Google Maps can tell me when my next bus will arrive so I don’t have to brave the -10C weather. It’s like magic.
However, there is ONE important side effect that I have not noticed until now.
Most technologists crave speed. Faster processors, faster disk drives, faster networks, faster everything. Bottlenecks are our common enemy. YES. They are evil. I can relate to it because I spent a good amount of time in my career fixing performance problems for financial systems.
No one likes to wait for the computer to respond.
Unfortunately, this craving for speed (in technology) has quietly bled into other aspects of our living. People learn to speed read to gain more knowledge faster. People speed walk regularly (yes, I can also feel it in Hong Kong’s subway stations.) And the most crazy thing is: we don’t realize it until our body cannot cope with the demands of our speedoholic minds.
I watched this Carl Honore’s talk from 2005 (http://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness). 10 years later, it’s hard to believe that many of us (including myself) still get caught up in thinking “Slow is bad.” But no, there is such thing as “Good slow.”
You need to be patient in building a relationship; you need to have a clear mind in thinking strategically; and you need to be willing to spend time making mistakes in order to invent something useful.
So, please don’t let us, technologists, news or media slloowwlllyyy turn you into a speedoholic.
> No one likes to wait for the computer to respond.
Ha, you wouldn't know it from using a modern computer interface. I have a hobby of counting the seconds since when I click something on my phone, a computer more powerful than supercomputers were in the 2000s, and when something actually happens. It is often in the double digits.
This may even be a result of the thing you're describing: our desire for speed has bled into our 'productivity' as developers, leading us to sacrifice the user experience for the sake of (theoretically at least) building an application faster. Though honestly, I'm not convinced that's actually happening because we've introduced so much complexity in our effort to automate as much as possible that we've actually just made everything much worse.
Yeah, Microsoft Teams occupies 2Gb of RAM at start and switching between "chats" takes a hefty 15 seconds ALL THE TIME. I developed PTSD at the very thought I gotta change to a different channel.
My grandma never moved on from Lotus 123. She made a lot of money with that application. Excel and most new stuff "was just too slow" for her. I didn't blame or shame her a bit. She was correct in that people were trying to foist negative productivity on her--and she always proved her point to me. She is far too stubborn to accept a loss in productivity.
Heavily agreed. Our psychologies are becoming unrooted from our bodies' physical needs. Years of evolving towards the mental stimulation we seek these days is detaching us from our bodily sensations, and often we can't feel the bodily consequences of our choices until a complex chronic health problem arises. We're burning ourselves out on a global scale.
If you like Honore's talk, he also has a book of the same title. I read that a few years ago, and it really changed my opinion about a lot of things. I try to go slower now on things, though I still struggle a lot. Eating is a big one, though I put that down to 13 years of conditioning on 23 minute school lunches, coupled with 5 years of that while teaching. Such a hard habit to overcome.
However, there is ONE important side effect that I have not noticed until now.
Most technologists crave speed. Faster processors, faster disk drives, faster networks, faster everything. Bottlenecks are our common enemy. YES. They are evil. I can relate to it because I spent a good amount of time in my career fixing performance problems for financial systems.
No one likes to wait for the computer to respond.
Unfortunately, this craving for speed (in technology) has quietly bled into other aspects of our living. People learn to speed read to gain more knowledge faster. People speed walk regularly (yes, I can also feel it in Hong Kong’s subway stations.) And the most crazy thing is: we don’t realize it until our body cannot cope with the demands of our speedoholic minds.
I watched this Carl Honore’s talk from 2005 (http://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness). 10 years later, it’s hard to believe that many of us (including myself) still get caught up in thinking “Slow is bad.” But no, there is such thing as “Good slow.”
You need to be patient in building a relationship; you need to have a clear mind in thinking strategically; and you need to be willing to spend time making mistakes in order to invent something useful.
So, please don’t let us, technologists, news or media slloowwlllyyy turn you into a speedoholic.