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For instance, maybe I'm in class, and I get an extremely important email and need to send an immediate reply. Maybe I'm a working-adult student and my babysitte
by tjr 12y ago
For instance, maybe I'm in class, and I get an extremely important email and need to send an immediate reply. Maybe I'm a working-adult student and my babysitter has just IMed me. Maybe I manage the campus newspaper's website and someone just sent me a report of a critical bug that I need to deal with right away.
This isn't strictly a reply to jawns, but it's on a related topic that I've wondered about.
Fifteen years ago, such instantaneous, ubiquitous communication was very rare. I went through college without having instant notification of anything whatsoever, as did pretty much everyone I knew at the time.
Babysitters ran into issues fifteen years ago; there were bugs in websites fifteen years ago; there were critical emails being sent out fifteen years ago, but nobody expected constant, instant feedback because it was implausible, and everyone was okay with that.
Are our problems today really that much more urgent than they were then, that we truly need to be constantly connected? Or is this imaginary, and since we in theory can respond instantly, people now expect that we must?
- TTPrograms 12y agoI don't think the issue is if we need to respond urgently, but rather if we want to respond urgently. Sure you can wait an hour until the end of lecture, but maybe you want to develop a capability and a reputation for putting out fires quickly. Do I really need to justify the value of this to the professor? The question is if I'm paying for a lecture is it reasonable for them to mandate my own non-disruptive activities in lecture. I don't think so. We also need to consider that professors are egotistical creatures (as all humans are), so they're going to oppose anything that detracts from the perceived value of their work. What's the balance here between improving student welfare and making professors happy?
- nknighthb 12y agoA few hundred years ago, nobody expected to go anywhere faster than a horse could take them there, why must we go faster now? Life changes. If people don't like that, there are still some very nice remote forests they can go live in.
- tjr 12y agoA good point! After my comment above, I started thinking, well, a hundred years ago we expected response times in days or weeks via mail, rather than within hours via telephone or email. With the introduction of the telephone, there may well have been some people who felt communicating that quickly was needlessly rushed. I guess I still retain the wondering, though; with possible response times reduced to effectively instantaneous, are we losing anything? Is it good that anything we are doing can always be interrupted by something else?