From AOL News on the work practices of desk workers:
A survey of over 1,200 office staff found that most admitted that better communications made them lazy because it was easier to email someone than meet face to face.
The study, by employment law firm Peninsula, showed that seven out of 10 workers described themselves as unfit because they sat at their desks all day.
Managing director Peter Done said: "Modern technology has made people lazy. It has even got to the point where employees prefer to send each other emails to someone sitting in the same room, just so they don't have to engage in a spoken conversation."
"This over reliance on technology is taking away the social side of people's jobs and leaving workers too lazy to bother with exercise."
I had a conversation the other day about a moratorium on the word "community" unless it is used with some sense of what is meant by it. So. Amongst the things I mean by it are two principles implied in the titles of two books. These six words describe a basic philosophy I've long subscribed to and tried to live - "respect for persons," and "persons in relation". If community is the working out of human relationships then the interchange of human beings is integral, essential and defining, and that interchange presupposes respect and relationship between persons.
So it matters that I see a face, hear a voice, be present to and with the other person, share at least in the broad outlines of a life story, care and be interested in who someone is and what other than work goes on in their lives. The email exchange is a highly efficient and useful tool for some purposes; sure, a conversation can be tiring, less informationally focused and time consuming. But a conversation isn't a tool - it isn't only a means of communication - it is an opportunity for human relationships to be kept open, for understanding to have a chance, for coming to know those with whom we work, however tangentially. Conversation maintains those bridges that enable us to travel freely into each other's world, at least far enough to know and understand those who live there.
The workplace community is sometimes called a "team", and "team-building" has become an important priority in a shared workplace - it's hard to see how emails do it better than conversation. Respect for persons, and persons in relation, are phrases which provide a minimal sub-structure for workplace practice. As a Christian, I follow One whose way of encountering people was the expression of the love of God. The conversations of Jesus are told with great delicacy and sharp observation by the Evangelists. And while I find the 'What would Jesus Do' question is often clarifying, it can be frustrating when the situation is anachronistic. Would Jesus send an email or go speak to the person along the corridor? Would the Word who became flesh, reduce the Word to texting? I've a feeling Jesus would have preferred human faces to digital screens, and an embodied voice instead of electronic cyphers.
Now to send an email suggesting a meeting to talk over the matter.....? That uses the tool but doesn't reduce the person we contact to mere recipient of the information WE want to pass on. It sets up a meeting - of persons, faces and minds.
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