Transcript for the Slow Media 4:11 version of Slow Media
INTRO
Ever feel overwhelmed by all the emails in your in-box? Cell phone messages? Texts? But what are you supposed to do? Disconnect? Well, some people are doing just that. Sally Herships has more on slow media.
HERSHIPS 1
Every night my boyfriend brings his iphone to bed. And his blackberry. Did I mention the laptop?
ACT HERSHIPS 1 (:09)
S: It’s 5:45 and my boyfriend's phone just rang.
A: It was somebody from work.
S: And you answered it?
A: I did.
HERSHIPS 2
This, to put it mildly, doesn't make me happy. But I'm trying not to take it personally. My boyfriend is, like me, a journalist - he needs to stay on top of the news. And it's not just him - nowadays lots of people are feeling overwhelmed by work and media. Like Nick Jones. He lives in North Carolina and i s a computer programmer and he's got two monitors on his desk. But he doesn't just write code.
((SFX - Fade up the office, switch off, music, and then typing... Fade out))
ACT JONES 1 (:17)
"Sometimes I would have the British office, it would be like, on mute and running and then there’s a song playing and then there’s me writing code and it was just too much, it was like trying to drink from a fire hose, it just wasn't - it didn’t work. Thanks high speed internet."
HERSHIPS 3
Or in the case of Jenny Rauch no thanks. Rauch is a journalism professor in New York. And she's what you might call old school.
ACT RAUCH 1 (:08)
"I've tried telling my friends, I don’t text. I don’t have a text plan. Every time you send me a text message it costs me 15 cents."
HERSHIPS 4
Rauch can't seem to get the message across, but that's not her biggest complaint. She says its other people's expectations. Every time a co-worker answers an email on a Saturday it sets up the expectation that Rauch should be available on Saturdays. She wants her time, time spent emailing and fending off text messages, back.
ACT RAUCH 2 (:04)
"Something has to go. And the thing that has to go is the digital media."
HERSHIPS 5
Nick Johnson also wants to go a little old school. So he started a group called Slow Media for people like him and Rauch - on Facebook.
ACT JONES 2 (:07)
When I told my little brother he’s like, oh perfect – the irony of this is totally lost on you, huh?
HERSHIPS 6
Slow media is becoming a movement - slowly. There are programs you can use to automatically disable your own internet connection, facebook groups and websites for Slowies. But Rauch is upping the ante. She's going all the way. Planning to abstain from digital media for a month - or even a year.
ACT RAUCH 3 (:02)
"There will be television"
HERSHIPS 7
but no DVR.
ACT RAUCH 4 (:02)
"There will be a land-line"
HERSHIPS 8
but no cell phones.
ACT RAUCH 5 (:02)
"There will be records"
HERSHIPS 9
You get the idea... But what happens at work -without the internet or email? Tom Jackson, also known as Dr. Email, teaches information science in England. I asked him if older media, like the kind Rauch is planning to use is more efficient then the new stuff. He told me about a study on some software engineers. They'd be at work.
ACT TOM JACKSON 1 (:11)
"The telephone would ring, they’d pick up the telephone, answer the query, put the telephone down. It would then take them fifteen to twenty minutes to get back into the work that they were doing before the interruption."
HERSHIPS 10
But if that sounds bad Jackson says the way we deal with email is worse. The majority of employees react to email within six seconds. And most people have their email applications check for new messages every five minutes. Add in recovery time - on average about sixty seconds. All that time can add up to almost eight hundred hours a year. So, for a company with one hundred employees.
ACT TOM JACKSON 2 (:12)
"The total cost of just interacting with email, reading email, managing email is 5.5 million pounds which I make to be roughly 8.25 Million dollars."
HERSHIPS 11
And anyway, Jackson says a person can only really deal with about a hundred emails a day. After that they become overloaded. So maybe Jenny Rauch is right to cut herself off. Or not. Eric Bradlow is a professor of interactive media at Wharton. He says just like the old argument - guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's not the media that's takes up time- it's the people using it.
ACT BRADLOW 1 (:08)
"So I’ll go back to the old ways, I’ll walk around to the water cooler and I’ll sit there chatting with people. People will replace one form of distraction with another."
HERSHIPS 12
Bradlow says certain types of people, like him, and my boyfriend, want to be connected 24-7. Even without new media they'll find a way. And Jenny Rauch and Nick Jones do want to stay connected - just not as much.
OUTRO
They're both blogging about their new slow media diets.
