Smartphone?

Recently I was at the hospital being treated for a torn rotator cuff while my public relations firm was frantically trying to reach me to schedule an interview with a national newspaper. When I got back to my office and my laptop, I found a series of increasingly frantic emails trying to reach me with news of the time sensitive opportunity. It was necessary, I concluded, to finally get a smartphone.

I had resisted for a long time, priding myself on being a neo-luddite, probably more so because my wife’s blackberry drives me crazy. It seems like all of our conversations are interrupted by Chris Brown’s singing announcement that she has mail.  We’ll be walking down the street together and I’ll realize that she’s no longer by my side, but has stopped to tap out a reply. No matter how eloquent I wax, his less than dulcet tones take precedence.

But it’s not just her, it’s everyone everywhere. In Manhattan, it appears that everyone now walks down the street either reading or tapping away, heedless of both pedestrians and traffic. Today, I watched in horror as a toddler, on one of those tricycles with a handle attached to the back, rolled toward Fifth Avenue while her mother obliviously tapped away twenty yards behind. Thankfully, the child was saved by a collision with a pretzel vendor.

What might visitors from other planets think of our strange obsession? If they happened to catch us viewing soft porn with our new iphone app, I’m sure they’d understand. But how would they make sense of our preoccupation with emails from work or text messages scheduling our next tennis match. Perhaps they’d conclude tapping a hand held device is erotic as well.

But this is a dangerous obsession we have. There was the well publicized case of the woman injured when she fell off a curb texting, and now we have a new study showing that texting while driving is twice as dangerous as driving under the influence, and it doesn’t even come with the pleasant warm feeling alcohol brings.

If perceptive, I’m sure visiting aliens would pick up on the fact that our smartphones are just a way for us to realize our deep-seated human need to maintain social relationships. It is to facilitate these relationships that our over-sized brains have evolved, and we owe our dominance as a species to the collective effort such relationships make possible. But our brains, as wonderful as they may be, are only capable of attending to one thing at a time, as John Medina has demonstrated so well.

So while we read or tap, we are unable to attend to everything else going on around us, including other people that are present in flesh and blood. My two young daughters don’t like my new “raspberry” as they call it, because “it makes you cranky, daddy.” Children want our undivided attention, and they get upset when they don’t get it.  They don’t care about our work, because nothing can be more important than them.

Adults are no different. We all want the attention of those we’re with. When it’s not forthcoming because the smartphone takes precedence, we are hurt and insulted. Yet somehow to many, it’s now socially acceptable to ignore those present in favor of those digital. A recent NYT article cited examples from both the business world and Washington, where smartphone use in meetings is not only seen as acceptable, but as an indicator of superior status.

Only those deficient in empathy could possibly think so, and it’s empathy that builds the relationships our collective effort depends on, whether at work or in the community as a whole. When we’re in a business meeting or walking down the streets of Manhattan, we need to attend to the people around us. Smartphone use, with or without the new iphone app, should be restricted to the privacy of our own space.

1 Comment  |  Permalink  |  Posted in Brain Science

Socrates Versus the Apes

I am overwhelmed by the incredible number of opinions I am treated to everyday in blogs and columns, some of which I find quite helpful and others not so much. With my logical and opinionated mind, I’ve tried to make sense out of them by dividing them into two categories.

In the first category are those whose authors assert a strong point of view and declare that those not in agreement are wrong. Often such statements are accompanied by colorful metaphors that characterize in less than flattering terms those that might hold an opposing point of view. These authors appear to believe they have found truth and that it is self-evident.

All too often they neglect to define the logic supporting their opinion or pointing out the flaws in others’ arguments. It can be fun to read them when I’m in agreement, sort of like listening to talk radio or cable news. But given the mind’s ability to discount ideas we don’t share, I have a hard time believing that they change anybody’s mind.

This makes it hard for me to understand the purpose of the writing, and so choosing a colorful metaphor of my own, I end up thinking about Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees. In their battle for alpha status, the chimps will often hoot and throw rocks to demonstrate their strength. But then they will become conciliatory and engage in mutual grooming to build the strong relationships social groups thrive on. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga believes most human behavior is also aimed at creating alpha status. Unfortunately, too many writers don’t get past the hooting.

I, for one, love to read a well reasoned opposition to my opinion. If I’m wrong, I’d like to know it before I do any damage or make a fool out of myself. If I’m right, challenges just force me to make a better case for my position. But there’s also the possibility that I’m not totally right or totally wrong, and then an opposing point of view prompts me to broaden my own thinking.  And that brings me to my second category.

There are writers that really capture the original meaning of the word essay as a trying out of ideas. While they may present strong opinions, they are careful to explain the logic that produced them. When addressing opposing points of view, there’s more of an effort to consider their validity. I think such writing stems from a belief that we’re all seekers after truth and none of us are in sole possession of it.

Socrates is the role model for these writers. While revered (and feared by some) as the wisest of all men during his time, he was careful to assert his ignorance, and to question more than declare. In Plato’s Symposium, we see his belief in a competition of ideas, not to determine whose is better, but to arrive at bigger ideas that incorporate opposing points of view.

As this post shows, I’m not above unsupported opinion and I too favor colorful metaphors. I’m also human and subject to the logical fallacy of seeing the world as black and white when it’s actually gray. Rather than the two categories I’ve proposed, clearly there is a continuum. But perhaps we’d all benefit, regardless of where we are on the continuum, by keeping in mind a lesson I struggle to keep in mind everyday: we have readers.

We owe them, at the very least, writing that is worth their time to read. Either it should entertain or inform, or even better, do both. Ideally, it will make them smarter so that their opinions are well thought out, even if they end up being different than our own.

4 Comments  |  Permalink  |  Posted in Conflict Resolution, Ideas

GM's Inferno

One summer when I was in college, I landed what I thought would be a plum of a job at a General Motors plant in Pontiac, Michigan. In just under four months, I would earn enough money to carry me through the next academic year.

On my first day of working the afternoon shift, I parked my car in this huge lot and walked a quarter of a mile to the gate. I showed my badge, was given directions to my workstation, and was admitted into the factory. It was like an oven and had this eery lighting that made everything seem spectral.

As I walked the half mile to my job, I increasingly felt like I had just entered Dante’s inferno. The men I passed were engaged in a bewildering variety of tasks that forced them to contort their bodies in unnatural ways, the noise was deafening, and everything was covered with a oily sheen.

When I arrived at my job location, I was told that I was to be a punch press operator. These were gigantic, three story machines fitted with dies. I would take a piece of sheet metal off the line, fit it into the machine, and place both my hands on the safety buttons. The top die would then come down with tremendous force and stamp the metal into a bumper, a fender, or whatever else we were making that day.

The booming of the machine was so loud it was impossible to even talk to the person standing next to me. The pace of work was never-ending, for no sooner had I stamped out one piece than another was waiting for me. If I delayed even for a second, the pieces would begin to pile up and the foreman would be on me for slowing down the line. Each piece of sheet metal was covered with a grease so that it wouldn’t break when stamped. My terry cloth gloves would soon be soaked and it would become increasingly hard to handle the pieces.

Beyond the brutal heat, it wasn’t physically demanding work, but it was boring as hell. There was a ten minute break in both the first and second halves of the shift, separated by thirty minutes for dinner. I would live for the breaks, but it seemed forever before they came. When they did, I’d stand in line to use the bathroom and then have a couple of minutes left to buy a stale donut from the vending machine.

While I tried to be a good press operator, I soon ran into trouble. Often pieces of sheet metal would be cut off the part we were making. These could be razor sharp and the force of the press would send them flying. It wasn’t long before my arms were a mass of profusely bleeding cuts covered with grease. Finally, a piece flew out of the machine, entered my work boot, and pierced my toe. I was sent to the infirmary.

I found the nurse to be less caring than I would’ve liked. She had somehow determined that the injury was my fault, and I was admonished to avoid any in the future. But it wasn’t just me that was getting cut, it was all of the college hires, and every couple of days one of us would to taken to the infirmary. Somehow the veterans on the line had learned how to dodge the shards.

This was the late sixties and the height of the protest movement. Management had apparently concluded that the injuries were part of an organized conspiracy to slow down production and bring GM to its knees. We were told in no uncertain terms not to get injured again or we would lose our jobs. From that point on, we would ignore the cuts and gashes, waiting until we were back home after work to clean and bandage the wounds. It was just one more thing we had to put up with for the princely wage of six dollars an hour.

No matter how I tried, I never quite got acclimated to the work. Everyday I dreaded going to the factory, and when I was there, time just seemed to stand still. There was a hope, though, that was there would be some breakdown that would stop the line and give us a respite for five or ten minutes. How we relished those times.

The veterans would push us to work quickly so that we would meet our production quota early. If we really went all out for our eight hours, we could finish fifteen minutes early and have time to lounge in the line waiting to punch out at the time clock. On the bulletin board next to it was an article posted about the yearly salary of GM’s CEO. Someone had done the math and calculated that he earned in a week what we earned in a year.

Before work one day, I learned that my grandmother had just died, but I knew that if I didn’t show up at my job, I would lose it. At dinner, I stretched out on a bench to rest and realized that I had my arms crossed just as if I were in a coffin. I looked up at the ceiling and thought to myself that if this were to be my job for the rest of my life, I’d rather be dead.

I could allow myself that thought because I knew I would be returning to college in the fall.  But the veterans, who had learned to dodge the shards of sheet metal and drove themselves unmercifully to be able to enjoy that fifteen minutes at the end of the day, were going to be there for life, if they were lucky enough not to be laid off.

Ironically, it’s now the workers that are going to own GM. Amid all of the talk about cost-cutting and new products, and how unfair it is that the workers will own more than the bondholders, I can’t help but believe there is a more fundamental management change needed if the company is ever going to compete against those Japanese I saw a few years ago in Toyota City, working in teams side by side with their leaders, in a clean, well-lit, and safe environment.

Leave a Comment  |  Permalink  |  Posted in Change, Management

« Previous Posts  |  More Posts »