After reading Carl Horne's book in the summer about slow movement I decided that I would write my last chapter on slow movement and more specifically slow technology, how people should slow down and live the good life rather than the fast life.
I sent an email to Carl asking him a few questions.
I decided to give him a call and ask him a few questions over the phone.
Here are his responses:
What I
found interesting about your book is the first chapter where you talk about the
one-minute bedtime story with your son, having an actual publication in your
hands and taking time out of your day, rather than being on media devices.
What is
your opinion on slow technology? What does slow technology mean to you?
Do you
think that technology and publication clash or complement each other?
My view is
that in a way its hard to know exactly where we are going with publication, we
are in the middle of a time of immense up evil and its not quite clear how it
is going to shape out. What is clear is that the old model (print publication) isn’t
as sustainable anymore, especially when you think of things such as newspapers
they just can’t make money because they’ve lost all that advertising revenue
also peoples habits have changed. I see that in my own life, I’m a journalist
and I love newspaper and I have always brought them all my life, but I don’t buy
newspapers anymore I read news online, I have the app for the guardian, the BBC
is my homepage on my laptop, so those are my two main sources. I read other
publications online that I would have never been able to get anyway such as the
New York Times. I’m not against people reading things online, I just think that
what we will probably end up with and certainly what we should aspire to is to
have a mixed eco system, where some publication is delivered through a screen and
ones that are most appropriate to that will find themselves coming through
pixels.
Do you
think digital and print can complement each other?
Yeah, I can
see that in my own life, I spend a lot of time reading news. I read the right gratification
quarterly, I write for and I read Kinfolk which is a beautiful magazine, I
enjoy that offline cagoule experience, a different type of reading, one that is
richer less distracted and more layered than we will ever get online because
online Is too jumpy, too nervy, so many hyperlinks pulling us off in different
directions. The drive with online publishing is that someone its not enough to
give people text, you’ve got to give them video, audio. I don’t ever read a
screen for pleasure, I reading it because it’s the simplest, easiest delivery mechanism.
When I’m reading for pleasure, when I read a book especially and I’ve got to
read a lot of books for researching, I will never read online, I will always
buy the hard copy because its just a different experience reading, the sensual
pleasure of the book the feeling and weight of the book and pages and that’s
got a nostalgic tactile appeal to it, a different type of reading goes on.
There is research showing how people interact differently with information,
getting more of an experience with it when there is something tactile going on.
Taking notes on a laptop, it turns out that people don’t register the information,
they don’t absorb it as well as they would when writing with a pen and paper.
Its that thought process. Typing is too quick, its too seamless. I think the
same thing happens with reading, people read more superficially online, and you
see that as well in the way that people write, there tends to be a blogging
style of writing. I think we are going to end up with a range basically two
types of delivery, essentially you will have screen based publications which
will have a different kind of approach, it will be very useful and valuable,
and then you will have he offline printed paper. There will be more and more
magazine going for real quality, with really good paper, turning that delivery mechanism
of the magazine or the paper or the book into something that is beautiful it
self as a physical artefact, seeing more and more beautiful high end
publications and books, publishing novels with letter press all that kind of
stuff, I think it’s a response to the need and the deserve to have that other
form of reading.
With
children growing up with all this technology do you think they are going to get
sucked into the screen and miss out on real life?
There is a
danger, I’ve spoke to parents that work at google, Microsoft and Apple what are
they doing with their own kids they are not giving them iPads and iPhones they
are giving them books they are sending them outside to play as there are plenty
of screens in the classroom. Children need to have books as they are tactile
they are physical, there’s a whole layer of working. The screen is not a
learning curve, its just one thing that is flat, there’s no layers to it. We
learn physically, we learn by moving and touching especially children. There’s
something so precious and universal about printed books and in fact.
The printed
word is powerful. People are looking for something that is real and unique to
them.
What do you
think that makes people realise that they are spending too much time on technology?
I think
there is a few things, one is eventually they start to realise that a lot of other
things have got dropped, so if you are spending seven/eight hours online all
the other stuff that you used to do before you went online, like seeing people
face to face, cooking etc they would just stop happening. So at some point you
realise you’ve lost all the things you used to do, then if you so the arithmetic
you realise its gone into Facebook and Twitter. It’s a common thing now people
just waking up one day and thinking ‘this is insane’ they lose control of the technology
and become a slave to it. It’s just nice to switch off. Many people now are
doing digital detoxes and restricting the amount of time they spend online. It
comes down to the feeling of dissatisfaction and the promise of technology. I
do think that technology is great we just have to use it wisely. If we don’t
use it wisely we become addicted to it and it almost becomes like eating too
much fast food
Do you
think technology is making people lazy?
Lazy, yes I
think it has, I think it is definitely making people socially lazy, because
real relationships take time and they can be uncomfortable and there’s silences
and you don’t know what to say, where as It is so so easy and frictionless
online, and I think it is a cop out often to be doing all of your relationships
online, because there is more heavy lifting face to face, a more complex rich
experience. Online is one channel of interaction, one layer of interaction and
it’s easy, its an illusion its not a real connection. It makes us physically lazy
and can make us lazy even intellectually, we are moving to a culture that is
very much about a superficial understanding of the world, we know a lot of
little things that maybe we don’t make the deeper bigger effort to connect the
dots of understanding. We know all the headlines we know the tweets, but if we
actually dug deep into that story and got to grips with it I think often it’s
the illusion that’s formed, its just information, information is not the same
thing as understanding, understanding takes effort and time and when you get
lazy you stop the understanding and just go for the information.
I gained some interesting responses from Carl and I will be using his opinions and knowledge within my dissertation.
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