CUBICAL DWELLING IS NOT GOOD FOR THE SOUL

James H. Sweetland, North American Convenor

A number of science fiction writers in the 1940s and 1950s wrote of societies in which everyone lived underground, often in self-contained apartments. Generally, the point of these stories was that people in the society were reluctant or afraid to have direct human contact, preferring to deal with others only via television or similar systems. Most of the stories presented this situation as a very bad thing - in fact often the plot line showed a breakdown of systems which forced people to leave their units, but in which they died, or the machines were not fixed because few were able to leave in time.

We may, about fifty years later, be seeing the beginning of this society, once presented as in the very far future. Consider the following:

• There are several businesses which teach basic manners, such as not to chew food with your mouth open, how to shake hands with a person, and the like, to middle management. Many firms apparently have found that their highly skilled technical people really have never learned how to interact at the most basic �polite� levels.
• At least one high school of my acquaintance has found that many of its students have never eaten in a restaurant which serves the food, and permits paying later - all of their experience has been with fast food operations like McDonald�s.
• At least one undergraduate programme in the area of information studies has considered offering a formal college course in applying for a job - how to write a cover letter, how to interview, and the like. They apparently have found that many of their graduates, while being technically proficient, lack basic social skills.
• There are reports now and then of psychiatrists who have observed something akin to addiction to email and the Web - people who will postpone meetings, revise schedules, miss family outings and the like for fear of being too far from their computer connections.
• A speaker at a recent Wisconsin state-wide meeting about the economy claimed that he expected employees to work from 13 to 16 hours per day, in part because his firm supplied them with high speed Internet connections. (He did not comment on what this might do to family life).
• The present writer, having kept a diary for the last six months, finds that he averaged six hours or more a day at a computer screen.

Perhaps, as we constantly invent new things to put on the Internet, and on other computer systems, and as the training in many schools of information-something-or-other (at least in the USA the �L� word has been eliminated from nine former library schools), we should also either try to keep something human in the curriculum, or perhaps we as information managers should put a limit on the number of hours we will permit anyone to be online. Or perhaps the human race as we know it is dying out, and this is a good thing?

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