Postkiwi

Infomania is leading to reduced IQ.
That’s the message coming through this weekend.

I read it first sitting in Australia Fair, looking out over the Broadwater, espresso in one hand, The Australian in the other. The mobile phone was at home, keeping the laptop company.

There on page 17 was the heading, “Low IQ 2day, m8? It’s the technology, stupid”. Michael Horsnell of The Times told me all about the research at King’s College that exposes the impact of constant checking and sending of emails and SMS messages at work and home. It’s getting so bad that people will even check their work email when they’re on holiday or at home for the weekend.

Glenn Wilson, psychological expert at King’s College, London (pictured right) took 1100 people through tests to measure the impact of constant infotech multi-tasking on their intellectual capacity. He’s found that people become exhausted by trying to focus on too many things at once, holding too much information at once. The result is worse than the impact of smoking marijuana.

That certainly got my attention.
And I’ve followed it up online.
Not everything you read in the newspaper is true!

The London research was sponsored by Hewlett Packard, who issued recommendations on practice in the King’s College press release. These �best practice tips� including using �dead time�, such as travelling time, to read messages and check e-mails and turning devices off in meetings. David Smith, commercial manager of Hewlett Packard UK, said: �The research suggests that we are in danger of being caught up in a 24-hour �always on� society. This is more worrying when you consider the potential impairment on performance and concentration for workers, and the consequent impact on businesses.�

The Times version of Horsnell’s article finished with a few statistics that weren’t included in the condensed Australian version. More than 50 billion e-mails are despatched every day wordwide; in 2001 the traffic was less than 12 billion. Of these 88 per cent are junk e-mails including around 1 per cent which are virus-infected. The average number of e-mail messages received per person per day is 32. This is rising by 84 per cent each year.

Saturday morning I sorted through 1096 unread emails, all from one discussion list, fortunately stored in a separate folder. I normally don’t have the energy to engage with these discussions while I’m focusing on the more pressing parts of my job. Even though I pay to be part of the discussion, I just can’t afford the energy to check in on conversations that ultimately have little to do with my work.

Blogging can blunt my intellectual sharpness. There’s the research I do to keep current on five areas of research can be exhausting. Add to that effort required to write something worth reading. And then there’s catching up with what others are writing - a task that could take over one’s waking hours.

I don’t think it’s just the infotech side that is at work here. It’s the expectation we have about how much information we can process, the number of people we can engage with at one time, and the number of tasks we can take on at one time. I was at a meeting all day Friday. Four out of seven people had their laptops in front of them. One was taking the minutes. The others were mult-tasking - filling in the dull moments by writing emails, reading documents and so on. I didn’t bring my laptop that day. But I found myself drawn to read a pile of documents on my desk from another committee. I believe that as a result of our multi-tasking the meeting lost its intelligence quotient. Why do we do it? It’s because we want to achieve MORE. What we get is more mediocrity.

The problem isn’t going away. We’re going to have to train up the kids in dealing smartly with information overload, or face exhausted, overstretched and mediocre generations.