Not So Fast: Is Technology Diminishing Our Quality of Life?

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that I am an advocate for the appropriate and effective use of technology in our personal lives and in our schools.  I am not a Luddite.

Nevertheless, I also share the conviction that technology, like many good things in our lives, can become an obsession and a cruel master.  Any addiction, even to good things, is harmful and unbiblical whether it is sex, food, work, or technology.

I recently came across a beautifully written article by John Freeman in the Wall Street Journal.  You can read the entire article here.  If the link is broken, you can access the article in PDF format here.

Because the article is copyrighted I will not post it here but I am providing a short excerpt with the hope that you will read the entire article. 

Not So Fast (August 29, 2009) WSJ Online

… We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Process­ing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dial-­up seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the cor­poration. For everything else, especially in nature, the consum­ing fires eventually come and force a starting over.

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per­sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, work­place meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?

If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur. It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements—it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the mani­festo of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world, where the following three statements are self-evident …

Remember, click here to read the full article or if the link is broken, you can access the article in PDF format here.

Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth??

I stumbled upon a great site (Tiplet) that provides useful technical “How To” advice for laymen and techies alike. Click on the image below to go to the site. 

One of the “How To” articles was about how to test your broadband speed.  If you pay for internet service at home you will want to periodically check your speed to ensure that you are getting what you are paying for. 

The article is reprinted below to give you an idea of how helpful these tips can be.  You may want to pass this along to your staff.

How Fast Is My Broadband Internet Connection and What Does Connection Speed Mean?

February 1, 2009

by Gabe Goldberg

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like to brag about connection speeds offered and speak glowingly about the wonderful “experience” their services offer. But how honest are their claims and how does connection speed affect what we do online?

The two most important words in any ISPs advertisement or service contract are “up to.” As in, speeds promised are described as “up to X megabits per second.”

(Megabits means “millions of bits” and “megabits per second” is often abbreviated Mbps. A bit is the basic unit of information or data, a “binary digit,” a single unit that is either 0 or 1. Everything on the Internet and all information and software on your computer is composed of bits.)

But quoting “up to” speeds is like saying that an automobile whose speedometer dial includes the number 160 can travel “up to 160 MPH.” When shopping for a car or an ISP, claims shouldn’t be taken as facts — though some are safer to verify than others.

It’s a pleasant surprise when ISPs deliver speeds faster than promised. That results from advancing technology and — in areas fortunate enough to have multiple broadband ISPs — competition. More common, though, is discovering that delivered service doesn’t quite match the 160 MPH sort of promise ISPs make.

So to keep your ISP honest and detect problems, and for bragging rights, it’s useful to occasionally measure connection speeds. Internet connections are usually described with two speeds: download and upload. For nearly everyone, download speed matters most — it’s the rate at which data, Web sites, email, sound files, video streams, telephone calls, and services yet to be invented reach your computer. This greatly affects your Internet experience, determining whether your browser responds quickly or sluggishly to Web requests, how quickly email arrives, etc.

Upload speed measures how fast your computer sends data such as email or Web requests to the Internet. Unless you frequently send large volumes of or huge email or other files — or run a server of some sort – this speed likely isn’t critical.

Speed test

A number of Web sites measure connections speeds. My favorite is SpeedTest.net; Googling “speed test” finds others. It opens showing you a couple of gauges, a small map of the world, and a large map of your region. Your local map will include many blue pyramids and one orange symbol — that’s the closest and recommended server for your test.

Click the orange pyramid to run download and upload speed tests. When they finish, click My Summary at top to see your download test results along with a number of comparisons — your ISP’s average speed and its speed in your state, your state’s average, and similar numbers for the USA, North America, and globally. Click Upload Results for that set of speeds. SpeedTest.net reports speeds in kb/s — that is, kilobits per second. One Mbps is 1000 kb/s, so an ISP’s promised speed of 5 Mbps would show as 5000 kb/s.

As you run occasional speed tests, your history of speeds achieved lets you can track trends and detect problems. If your speeds don’t match your ISP’s promises — or they decline — it’s worth investigating. Note that cable connection speeds often vary more than those of DSL or FiOS services, though cable broadband is usually faster than DSL. I’m pleased with my Cox cable service, usually delivering more than 20 Mbps download and about 2.5 Mbps upload.

Gabe Goldberg (tiplet@gabegold.com), a lifelong computer pro and technology communicator, has written three books and hundreds of articles for audiences including techies, baby boomers and senior citizens. He enjoys sharing tips and pointers that help people use and have fun with technology.