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Is It Time to be Human Yet?
Ours is hardly the first generation to face disruptive change. The steam engine, the chronograph, the telegraph, the light bulb, the telephone, vulcanized rubber, the elevator, the steam train, pasteurization, the four-stroke gasoline engine, the airplane, the Internet—in their day, each of these technologies set in motion profound changes that effected how people worked and lived.
And while pundits, scholars, philosophers, and clerics have been railing against the hustle and bustle of modernity since way back when, we seem to be living in an era where “too much,” “too fast,” and “too soon” have truly inflected and infected both the rules of business and the rules of everyday living. At least that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves for the past ten years.
There are still places in this world where people don’t feel overwhelmed by modernity. I’ve even been to a few of them. For example, I recently spent a week with my wife hanging around a lovely place called the Kewarra Beach Resort just north of Cairns, Australia near the Great Barrier Reef. It’s true they did have a working phone and a pretty lame Internet connection, but I got the very distinct impression that nobody was all that concerned about the sorts of things I think about on a daily basis. For that matter, I wasn’t either.
But if you’re reading this missive, chances are you’re not living in one of those places and may not be one of those people. Nope, you’re probably one of the teaming throng I’ve taken to calling Customer 6.0: the cyber-mutated, attention deficit disordered, Internet-enabled, message-drenched, privacy-demanding, “inform me/leave me alone/lookey-what-I found”, stare at a CRT until you go blind, over-worked target of every database marketer’s fantasy, and the driver of the global economy.
It doesn’t sound very fun being us when you string all those words together. But what else would you call us? Consider the following statistics:
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In the great PX, more than half the households have Internet access. Half of Singapore’s households are tethered to the Internet. In the U.K., there are now over 14 million home Internet users. In total, nearly half a billion people around the globe access the Internet, which has about one billion discrete Web pages. Three million new pages are added daily.
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All those Internet users check roughly 600 million electronic mail boxes.
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E-mailers send approximately four trillion e-mails annually.
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At least one Internet music seller offers 500,000 items including CDs, movies and digital downloads. Another Web site offers 30,000 free radio stations, which is about the total number of terrestrial commercial radio stations out there.
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There are the 20,500 different periodical titles available in the U.S. and Canada.
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In the US, we run 15 trillion pieces of paper through copiers, printers and multi-function fax machines and the number will probably double in less than a decade.
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By 2000, the average worker in the U.S. toiled 1,978 hours per year, an increase of nearly one week over just a decade. The previous champions of overwork, the Japanese, only put in 1,842 hours per person in 2000—3.4 weeks less than workers in the U.S. Only workers in the Republic of Korea and the Czech Republic, among countries considered as “developing” or “in transition,” topped the United States in annual number of hours worked, clocking in almost 500 hours and 100 hours more, respectively, than their American counterparts.
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The average white collar worker does e-mail 130 minutes a day and sits in meetings another bottom-numbing120 minutes a day.
Indeed, 24x7x365 has progressed from shorthand for hours and days in a year to an anthem for a generation. Time is the single most important currency Customer 6.0 has to spend. The nine-to-five work week is dead. The standard days where employees counted on regular start-times, lunchtimes, and going-home times, have given way to nonstop work and non-stop overwhelm.
Meet the New Superman
What’s funny about all that attention draining froth is that we not only brought it on ourselves, we celebrated its creation and mutation every step of the way.
We celebrated it as we threw buckets of our hard earned cash (as well as the easy winnings of an overwrought stock market) at firms that offered products and services that contributed to the general sense of hyper-reality.
We celebrated it as we subscribed to piles of hip new magazines, e-zines, web-zines, newsletters, and all manner of new media that rushed to laud the limitless, recession proof, risk-free, victimless economic miracle that stretched unimpeded before us.
We celebrated it as we lionized the new titans of modernity: youngish, usually male, hard driving, obsessive creatures of the media age whose singular focus on amassing wealth through rocket-ride entrepreneurialism was forgiven because after all, we were in on the fun too. Weren’t we?
This last point is the one that leaves me most agog. In retrospect, we should all have had Charles Barkley’s immortal words tattooed on the back of our hands: “I am not a role model.”
Just because someone gets a lot of press, doesn’t mean they’re smart, or great, or even good. It just means someone needed something to write about.
Just because someone has an eight or nine digit net worth doesn’t make them a visionary. Turns out they might have simply gotten lucky . . . and gotten out before the rest of us did.
Just because someone is a senior manager at a famous company, that doesn’t mean that they’re not arrogant, mean spirited, manipulative, or greedy. Some are; many aren’t.
The truth is, one of the remarkable features of the past half-decade or so is that our collective “need to believe” led us to not only suspend any sense of macro-economic proportion any reasonable adult inherently posses (remember the one about “what goes up, must come down”), but to lionize a group of people—business leaders all—who were no better than any other random sampling of humanity. In fact, as a group, they may even have been far worse. We held them up as gods, only to find they had feet of clay, and in many cases, shrunken hearts of lead.
. . . continued
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Last modified:
05/03/06