The Hare & the Tortoise vs. the Cyborgs

What if the hare and the tortoise, having resolved Aesop's Relative Speed Conundrum centuries ago, had to join forces to battle an army of evil cyborgs that were consuming our time, literally and figuratively?

Did someone say literary mash-up? Wait, I'd better text my agent!

Here's a question I hope will start a new book trade conversation here: When considering your relationship with electronic devices, social media and other online tools, are you a hare (up to speed but still losing the race), a tortoise (in the race, but taking it one step--and one device--at a time) or a fully armed cyborg (earbuds plugged in, laptop engaged, iPhone/Blackberry at hand)?

In recent months, I've noticed several articles on the Slow Media Movement and thought it worth discussing, especially in an industry like ours where many of us move seamlessly (more or less) from desktops to laptops to smartphones throughout the day and often well into the night. And where the now thoroughly virtual line between personal and professional life appears to have dissolved.

Last November, APR's Marketplace program featured a segment that defined the Slow Media trend this way: "Kinda like slow food, but without the food. Slowies write letters, and, you know, talk to each other, offline. They like to do one thing at a time."

Jenny Rausch, one of the Slowies interviewed, has a blog called "Slow Media: A compendium of artifacts and discourses regarding digital disenchantment and the possibilities for a less-mediated life." This week she wrote in response to a recent New York Times article about the increased time pressures and workloads placed on many contemporary workers.

"Would your life be better if you only worked 40 hours a week?" Rausch asked. "If your work didn't follow you home, and wherever you go? If you enjoyed time spent with friends and family without distraction? If you got extra compensation for extra work, or reclaimed those surplus hours for moonlighting at another (paid) job?"

Slow Media isn't the same as no-media. Slow Media even has a Facebook page.

The tortoise and the hare are still in the race, but now so is the cyborg, and even "the fox yonder," who was recruited to umpire Aesop's classic competition, may not be qualified or sharp-eyed enough to declare the winner of a contest with a digitally altered finish line.

Carl Honore praised Slow Thinking in the Huffington Post last fall, noting that even Google "understands the need to step off the spinning hamster wheel in the workplace. The company famously encourages its staff to devote 20% of their time to personal projects. That does not mean brushing up on World of Warcraft or updating Facebook pages or flirting with that hot new manager in Accounts. It means getting the creative juices flowing by stopping the usual barrage of targets, deadlines and distractions."
   
It seems appropriate in an Aesop's Fables–inspired column that Honore concludes: "The moral of the story is that, even in the high-speed modern world, slowness and creativity go hand in hand."

The New Yorker's George Packer recalled the debut of William F. Buckley's National Review, "whose original mission statement, back in 1955, declared that the magazine 'stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.'"

While dragging his feet a bit in the virtual sand, Packer does concede that he may have get a Blackberry at some point or he "won’t be taken seriously as a Washington journalist and phone calls from my retrograde Samsung cell phone will go unanswered. On Amtrak between New York and Washington I sit in the Quiet Car with my phone off, laptop stowed, completely unreachable, and find out if I’m still capable of reading for two hours."

Near the end of Don DeLillo's Point Omega, a woman and a man study Douglas Gordon's video installation "24 Hour Psycho," which projects the Hitchcock classic film on a translucent screen and slows it down to the duration of a full day.

"She told him she was standing a million miles outside the fact of whatever's happening on the screen," DeLillo writes. "She liked that. She told him she liked the idea of slowness in general. So many things go fast, she said. We need time to lose interest in things."

So here again is your literary mash-up question: In your work and life, are you a hare, a tortoise or a cyborg? Embarrassing personal anecdotes always welcome.--Published in Shelf Awareness, issue #1130.