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The refrain is by now well known. Cell phones and a wave of new mobile e-mail and messaging services will wring inconvenience from our inefficient social and business lives. But consider the side effects on display during this typical Friday night: That same ability to reach anyone at any time means that these days, all plans are negotiable. You can now spend as much time planning, and replanning, a meeting than the meeting itself takes. A billion new cell phones are expected to flood the globe by 2005 -- nearly all of them sending e-mail and instant messages, too. Get ready for the all-time longest game of telephone tag. This illustrates one of the growing paradoxes of the Information Age. Information does make us free. More productive, too. It's impossible to fathom being a reporter before e-mail and Web sites. Need to know the gross domestic product of tiny Persian Gulf state Qatar? I just found it, literally, in 15 seconds ($11.2 billion is the answer, by the way). But we've given little thought to how the flood of information can give us too much freedom: Able to cancel a lunch date up to the last second, we make schedules we know we can't keep. Then there's e-mail, which we carpet-bomb to colleagues, giving them up-to-the-second status reports on yearlong projects. SLOPPY HABITS. Slowly, some people are beginning to realize that the absence of instant communication can be a blessing. I recall speaking to Michael Knupp, CEO of Thermoretec Consulting Corp., an environmental consulting firm in Concord, Mass. He loved what the Net had done for his business, linking him more tightly to his customers. He also was beginning to hate e-mail. For years, he had overseen employees who drafted proposals for new projects -- a critical job. When everything was done by postal mail and express services, his team had to stick to tight deadlines or risk turning in the proposal late. Once e-mail came, their habits changed. They often waited to do work until the last minute, slipping in spur-of-the-moment changes before zapping the proposal into the ether. The result was sloppier, less thoughtful, proposals. This is more than a business question. On a personal level, info immersion is already making many of us jittery. And who doesn't feel unsettled in a world when no day-to-day plans are ever set in stone, only in sand? A funny coincidence, given that sand is the building block of silicon. It's not hard to imagine a future in which there is no longer a concept of "setting plans." Rather, pocket organizers will be in constant contact with one another, monitoring you and your colleagues' workflow, appraising traffic conditions, and, on the fly, suggesting when two people might interface. In our own crude way, that's exactly what Matt and I did that Friday night. We traded more phone calls and made more vague commitments about when and where we would meet. We finally gave up and vowed to get together another time. I couldn't help but think that if we didn't have our cell phones, we would have just stuck to our word. Sipping whiskey is far better than talking about it. Berman covers the Internet for Business Week in New York |
