Ali Jackson | Shunning today's technology will cost you

I am a whore.

A technology whore, that is. I return e-mails within three minutes of their arrival, answer my phone 24 hours a day, never sign offline, and I know you've updated your Facebook.com profile before you do.

My obsession with technology doesn't come without drawbacks - as Linda Stone, a technologist and former Apple executive put it at the Emerging Technology Conference in March, I have "continuous partial attention."

She lamented the fact that we are never fully focused on one task, always doing multiple things at once.

(Hold on: I think my Statistics professor is about to say something important. Never mind, false alarm.)

In her talk, Stone discussed the effects of technology on our social lives, noting that we never devote all of our energy toward one task, instead spreading our attention to the point where we don't do any one thing to our fullest potential.

This is the surely the case in my life, in which I find myself texting during conversations and surfing Facebook while on the phone.

And what do I have to show for this besides nimble fingers and friends who think I'm a stalker? I am constantly reachable.

We all have that friend you can never get a hold of - the one whose phone goes straight to voicemail, who disappears for days on end, and whose away message is always an infuriating "I am away from my computer right now."

And if you're reading this thinking you don't know anyone like that - put down this paper and go find your friends. They're worried about you.

I've always been the opposite of that friend. Within a week of meeting my roommate last year, I said to her, "If you call me and my phone goes straight to voicemail, call the police - I'm lying in a ditch somewhere."

On the off chance that I don't pick up my phone for longer than an hour, I get voicemails with increasing urgency from everyone I know.

"Ali, you're not picking up your phone . this is weird . call me back."

Or. "Ali, it's been an hour - where are you? I'm worried. Call me back."

And my favorite: "Ali, if you do not call me back within 15 minutes, I am checking the hospitals!"

You get the idea.

No matter what time of day, no matter what I'm doing, I can be contacted.

So, for three days last week, I attempted to become the unreachable friend. I turned my phone off for at least 12 hours of the day, didn't sign into Facebook and refused to send out e-mails until at least a day after reading them. I thought I would feel invigorated, playing hard to get with the world. Instead, I discovered the truth:

Being unreachable sucks.

I missed out on dinner outings, lunch dates and several calls from my mother, who thought I'd decided to go through my rebellious stage a few years late. In all my efforts to free myself of the social shackles of technology, I ended up further limiting myself. Suddenly, I found myself eating dinner alone, thinking, "where is everyone?" only to remember that I had purposefully shut them out.

In an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Stone said, "We're so accessible, we're inaccessible." She believes that, in allowing ourselves to be contacted in so many ways, we are actually closing ourselves off to real communication.

Unfortunately for Stone, it's nearly impossible to remove yourself from technology in today's world.

Just because you've decided to take the high road and have face-to-face conversations with people doesn't mean the rest of the world will follow suit.

What's even worse, I wasted a lot of time when I wasn't using e-mail or the phone. Instead of spending 30 seconds typing a message to my editor, I walked 20 minutes to exchange fewer than 20 words with him.

While some may call me lazy, I consider myself socially energetic. Overly energetic, some might say, but I like it that way. It keeps life interesting, always having something new to focus on. I never get bored, and that's worth sacrificing some quality in my interactions.

Now, back to my stat lecture - at least until my next IM.

Ali Jackson is a Wharton and College sophomore from Cardiff, Calif. Her e-mail address is jackson@dailypennsylvanian.com. All Talk and One Jackson appears on Mondays.

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