Risparmiare tempo con la tecnologia
Saving time through technology
Feb 3rd, 2009 by Ivo Quartiroli | 
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One of the most-heard mantras of fans of technology is that it “saves time.” Every new software contains procedures for making things simpler and faster, better than before, automating tasks having longer procedures earlier. All very well.
The problem is that for every task made simpler, more tasks are added. We will never save time through technology because the nature of the mind itself is to be kept busy, more so when our bodies are frozen in front of a screen. So we welcome new ways to keep it busy and we overload our minds with more – mostly useless – information and procedures.
Peter D. Hershock in Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) writes:
According to Marshsall Sahlins, whose Stone Age Economics (1972) is an eye-opening classic, the average work week in Hawaiian and most other so-called “Stone-Age” cultures is about twenty-five hours (p. 45).
We lost the capacity to stay in empty spaces where our minds are not engaged and could be fed by an inner view, instead of giving attention only to external inputs.
Our capacity of conscious attention and presence does not grow according to the amount of information available. It actually becomes scattered and less. We can “be there” with just one thing at a time. We can even be there with none. Then we will be really “there.”
[...] http://www.indranet.org/saving-time-through-technology [...]
Excellent blog post!
I fully agree with your perspective, we’ve lost the the ability to focus and ourselves, and by extension of that lack of ability we have lost the ability to “awe”
Technology won’t give us more free time, but in some cases, it will give our live more fun, if anything.