When technology isn’t fun

Despite being knee-deep in technology in general and IT in particular, making a living out of it, and — all things considered — definitely loving it all, there are days when people’s misuse of the amazing tools we now have is just too much to handle.

We know that only people are to blame for misusing things, concepts, ideas, the law, or in the present case, technology. Per se, it surely cannot be a bad thing. It’s never a minor debate and it reminds me of the big one in the USA about guns politics, freedom, the right to use guns for self-defence and the Second Amendment to the American Constitution. “Guns are neither good nor bad, it’s only what people do with them that matters” is the typical, often heard argument of those against restrictive guns control. Can we really look at high-tech the same way?

Six weeks ago I was at a local conference in Amman. The number of attendees taking pictures with their smartphones was way above the average you can reasonably put up with. Most of them would carry on with the shooting session throughout the entire event, with arms raised up high enough to prevent you from seeing the panel of speakers. You wonder why they had to take all these pictures. It was not only visually distracting, but most of these click-happy photographers hadn’t even taken the trouble to turn off the phone’s sound associated with taking the picture, probably thinking we would all appreciate the audio subtlety.

Talking about audio, that day even the otherwise sophisticated sound system was not helping. The engineers were using a new, totally wireless, definitely high-tech system. Unfortunately there were dropouts, sudden spikes, ear-piercing high-pitch feedback and every sonic nuisance in between. Someone had forgotten to read the user manual that day. You wished they would just use good old cables and microphones.

The cabin where the interpreters were doing their job was not sound-proof and you could hear them talking loudly in a couple of languages, while at the same time you would listen to the speakers talking in their native language — an interesting but headache-inducing mix.

And of course, those who were listening to the language interpretation through headsets made sure the sound was loud enough so that you, sitting right next to them, would also hear it, though you never asked for such a favour in the first place.

Needless to say that the audience were also treated to an incredible number of loud, exotic phone rings by those who had “forgotten” to turn off their mobile, not to mention those who actually did answer the call and carried out with the conversation as if they were by themselves in the conference hall."

When I came back home my spouse asked me how the conference was and if the topic was interesting. I just couldn’t remember the topic at all. I wonder why.

Long ago good social manners were referred to as etiquette. In the 1990s, there was a question of netiquette. The portmanteau neologism was concocted with net (i.e. the Web, the Internet) and etiquette. Perhaps today the concept should be extended to something like IT-quette, in a broad manner, and more importantly, be taught at school.