The reconquest of dead time

Get a grip. man. You'll be talking yourself out of a job at Business Week, which is all about offering and exploiting these things you're decrying. You're welcome to look out at the passing mountains. The second or third time I've seen them, I might just opt for my iPod. And maybe there I'll listen to a book instead of reading it because, you know, those bumps while reading can make a person carsick. I'll absorb the same knowledge and ideas. And maybe the guy next to me is sleeping -- or we don't speak the same language -- but with the social networking I suggest, maybe I'll meet an anthropologist in the back of the bus and strike up a conversation and a friendship and find a good story idea. There's nothing wrong with having technology and choices available. There is something wrong with cutting off those choices because somebody else thinks I should be staring at those damned mountains again. The issue isn't available technology but the choices we each make. Keep going like this and you'll be decrying consumerism and forgetting that that's exactly what built the building you're in.

Jeff, I'm sure you're right. But just because you spend your career in something and enjoy it doesn't mean that you don't or can't OD. I still bet that there will be (or probably already is) a booming business in selling us dead time.

It's not only about technology. It's also about a compulsion of our age to believe that you should always be "doing" something. We no longer experience the space between the rocks, only the rocks themselves.