There are two skills we seem to be losing in this always-on, always-connected world we now live in (there are probably many more, and as many we are gaining, but bear with me…)
The first is our ability to remember telephone numbers. I can still remember not only the number for my parent's first house in 1973 (the joyfully palendromic 42324), but also that of their neighbours, and also the telephone numbers of a number of friends' parents' homes from when I was at school. These days I can just about remember five – my own work, work mobile, personal mobile, home, and my wife's mobile. The fact is that modern (particularly mobile) phones make remembering phone numbers as obsolete as DNS makes remembering IP numbers.
It's a good thing… Until you lose access to your mobile (as I found in a madcap journey around much of Southern England when I locked myself out a few years ago).
The other skill we seem to be losing is that of patience. The always on, always connected world provides instant gratification as the norm. In some areas this is great – I've become a far better photographer by benefiting from instant feedback on the results of my actions on the LCD display on the back of my SLR.
However, I'm not sure it's necessarily always of benefit. I've recently launched another survey using the wonderful SurveyGizmo tool. They have built instant feedback into their product, and I now can get a real-time view of where the results are at. It's like watching a horse race, and means that I'm tempted to constantly hypothesize and re-hypothesize about the 'results' before the results are actually in.
The trouble is that it breaks a very established model of research model of survey – pause (whilst you not only receive back the surveys but also enter the data from all of the responses) – analyse. Analysing all the time can become counter-productive.
There is a broader question in my mind, though, about how the digital immediate gratification might impact on social relationships. If our expectation is that everything happens Now!, what happens when our demands can't be met because of competing priorities faced by a person providing a service? It's a very stressful place to be where your workload prioritisation means that doing one particular task for one person results in negatively impacting on your ability to deliver on another task for another person. One solution is to systemize the prioritisation process, but this also then can lead to another set of demotivational environments where employees have no control over their task prioritization. Designing jobs within processes that aren't just extensions of the machine is going to get increasingly difficult in a world where everything is wanted Now!
mmitII 