Tech fears go beyond being a slave to email

The general malaise in the technology sector at the moment has produced an interesting, if increasingly tiresome, side effect: the neo-Luddite journalist eager to bemoan the impact of technology on work and life.

Last week, on a trip to New York, I came across two articles in the same week in which various writers complained that their lives are now lived in thrall to various types of communication devices.

One was an opinion piece in the New York Times, written by a participant in last week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Another was a lengthy essay in the American women's magazine Redbook.

Each piece reflected a theme I have stumbled across more frequently since the dot.com shares came tumbling down - a nostalgia for the unwired days when we weren't all tethered to our mobiles, PDAs and computer terminals.

Now that we can be found anywhere, anytime, we are all on call anywhere, anytime.

The New York Times writer noted that he found the little iPaq computers issued to all Davos participants an annoyance. They added another layer of complexity to an already-complex event.

In Redbook, the young female writer, a former employee of a New York dot.com company, wrote about how she had decided she needed to flee the technology that increasingly defined her life.

Off she went to work on a dude ranch in Montana. Winsome pictures of the newly rustic author on horseback accompanied the article. Unfortunately, she ruined the effect by confessing that her stint was only a break of a few months, and she was now ready to return to her Internet company life.

I think such articles reflect a general technological angst that many were unwilling to voice during the then-affluent, Nasdaq-drunk times.

It's easier now to be cranky, particularly for those who never felt they were invited in the first place.

However, I think most of these hand-wringing pieces miss the big worrying issues connected to the creep of technology into our lives.

Typically, they turn into self-indulgent lifestyle pieces bemoaning the aspects of technology which are most easily controlled.

Take mobiles. Why do people feel they must answer them? Simply turn the thing off. The beauty of a mobile is that it functions as a portable answering machine.

Most people can safely be unreachable for quite a long time without the world crumbling. The truth is most people are perfectly happy to live at the beck and call of their phones and e-mails.

Inevitably, the people who complain about the invasive nature of technology are the same ones that leap to answer a mobile over lunch, in a museum, on the street, in the shop. They're the ones who have to check their email constantly.

They don't create any space for themselves in which they shut off access. They refuse to simply say no to these electronic requests for their time, and decide on a personal policy of availability. Then they write articles about the tyranny of technology, its co-option of their frantic lifestyles.

Mobiles, e-mails, WAP and all the rest don't bother me at all; indeed, I find most of these things extremely useful.

I save my low-level panic for larger-scale concerns. For instance, in a world of massively powerful, interlinked computer networks, I worry about the violability of my personal information - not just the availability of details such as who I am and the address, phone numbers and e-mail addresses at which I can be reached, but my insurance, health, tax and financial records.

I am uneasy about the many ways in which such information could be collated, analysed, leaked, stolen, bought, sold, distributed and controlled. I am wary of the growing ease with which networks can be monitored and placed under surveillance.

I'm not at all sure that I want to be instantly locatable because the exact position of my mobile phone can be tracked by satellite. I am exasperated by the fact that someone can send millions of unsolicited commercial emails to unwilling recipients and make it appear that it came from one of my e-mail addresses by a little digital tweaking.

By comparison, a ringing phone in a restaurant seems a pretty minor issue.

Klillington@irish-times.ie