The advent of the mobile phone has demonstrated how important people feel it is to be able to communicate anywhere and anytime, and to be reachable anywhere and anytime. It is fascinating to see how quickly telephone booths have vanished from the streets. Tough luck for the superheroes who now have nowhere to change their clothes.
Reachability has become a word, but also a sort of state of mind.
We are reachable. Period. And this is becoming more and more intense.
Once upon a time it was “emailo ergo sum”: “I email therefore I am”. But nowadays we want to be able to communicate faster and faster and, especially, to reply faster. My much younger brother-in-law, who belongs to the Facebook generation, still sends me emails, but if I don’t answer within three minutes, he will call me up to ask “if I haven’t fallen and broken my leg or something?” So these days it has become “twittero ergo sum”: “I Twitter therefore I am”.
We are also no longer willing to stand for those automatic email replies. I recently received a brilliant email reply that not only showed that the sender was on vacation but it also gave an idea of how many emails this person was going to have to answer when he got home.
I don’t want to be told that people are on vacation. I want to know WHERE they are. Enter Google Latitude. The latest application from Google allows you to follow exactly where people are, and you achieve perfect reachability. If they don’t wish to answer, if they don’t want to send a text message or answer an email, you can still track them down. The Ultimate Reachability.
Some people find this idea horrifying. Some fear that their privacy will be invaded. That Big Brother back in 1984 was nothing compared with what Big Bad Google is up to.
Frankly, I’m afraid that our old vision of privacy is sorely out of date and that the new generation simply has a completely different way of approaching personal information. This is something we can see every day when we check the Facebook pages of job applicants and are treated to the most startling photographs. Privacy is old hat, I’m afraid.
Is there no longer any escape? Are we doomed to be perpetually reachable and will it just go faster and faster? Probably. But a new trend has also cropped up lately: ’Slow IT’. Just like the reaction to the increasingly rampant fast-food culture, the ’Slow Food‘ movement that sought to reclaim that good old relaxed culinary pleasure, you now have a whole ‘Slow IT’movement that is advocating a calmer approach to all the latest IT razzle-dazzle. So you can just relax and enjoy being completely UNreachable for once. Heavenly.
Peter Hinssen, ubiquitously reachable
Identikit
Peter Hinssen is an ICT person in heart and soul. He was one of the internet pioneers in Belgium when, in 1995, he established e-COM, which later was taken over by Alcatel. He is Co-founder and Chairman of Porthus, a listed software-as-a-service company, and is the CEO of Across, which focuses on alignment and communication between IT organizations and the business world.
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