And that’s just on the weekend. Work is worse. Consider Carl Melby, a loan officer at Chase Manhattan Bank in Chicago. He says he’d get rid of his info-gadgets (he wears two pagers and a cell phone) if his job would let him. Or Charles Cobbs, a 33-year-old neurosurgery resident at the University of California, San Francisco, who says he must carry a cell phone, laptop computer and a handheld organizer to stay on top of his busy schedule. Cobbs even wears a pager under his wetsuit when he’s surfing. Hollywood film producer Linda Obst conducts business nonstop from her cell phone and gets upset if, when she’s flying, all the in-flight phones are being used. “I go crazy,” she says.
Crazy is a good word for how a lot of folks are feeling these days. In his new book, “Data Smog” (250 pages. HarperEdge. $24), author David Shenk argues that they’re not just imagining things. Shenk’s premise is that today’s abundance of information, while generally good for society, is having some bad unintended side effects on individuals. The excess, Shenk writes, has created a noxious environment of overstimulation that’s pushing people to their limits. Psychologists are seeing more and more cases of stress caused by “information overload.”
A single weekday edition of The New York Times today contains more information than an average person in the 17th century would have encountered in a lifetime. But Shenk thinks it’s the mass commercialization of the Internet that’s pushing people over the edge. In addition to all the other information spigots, paper-pushers must now contend with electronic mail and the seemingly infinite World Wide Web sites. New statistics show that the average worker in a large corporation sends and receives an astounding 177 messages a day–a numbing cocktail of “wired” and cellular phone calls, e-mail notes, pager blips, Post-its and faxes. According to the study conducted by the Institute for the Future and The Gallup Organization, about a third of executives at these companies say they feel “almost always or usually” overwhelmed.
Combine the sheer volume of information with the Type A culture of the workplace and you’ll start to see cases like Carl Melby, who says he has a hard time winding down, even on quiet Sundays, without a phantom “ting” of his beeper echoing in his head. Psychologists say they increasingly hear from patients who complain about stress but who aren’t making the connection between feeling burned-out and the fact that they take their cell phones to the golf course. Steven Berglas, a Boston psychologist who counsels high-level executives, tells his patients to consciously cut back on access. “It’s just like controlling eating,” he says. “You have to count calories.”
Of course, most info-stressed professionals aren’t seeking help but coming up with their own remedies. Daniel Cheever, president of Simmons College in Boston, put himself on a techno-diet. Now, he checks his e-mail only once a week, he turns off the voice mail when he’s on vacation and the cell phone got the big heave-ho. Cheever says he feels liberated and doesn’t mind that his colleagues see him as “somewhere between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon.” He adds, “I don’t see them getting more work done.” Obst, the film producer, is beginning to curb her need to constantly check her voice mail. “I’ve learned that you can always clean things up three hours later,” she says. Shenk himself doesn’t like reading books in his home office anymore, where he keeps two computers and a fax machine. “I prefer to read in a slower-thinking room,” he says.
A “slowness” trend seems to be emerging, and not just in Shenk’s apartment. This spring, a raft of books with titles like “Slowing Down the Speed of Life” will arrive in bookstores. The cover of the current Utne Reader urges people to find their “natural rhythm in a speed-crazed world.” Cobbs, the wired resident, thinks we’re in the midst of backlash. “We want to turn off the TV, unplug the phone and read a book,” he says. Now that we’ve embraced machines, maybe it’s time to move on to the next stage: making them conform to our pace for a change.
