Our Personal Time is as Meaningful as Our Work Time
Anil Dash opens his post titled
The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition with,
“The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.”
It’s an excellent post and commentary, focused on the failure resulting from what I call the technology schism, where both enterprise and consumer product developers each view their constituency from whatever their own, one dimensional viewpoint happens to be.
Anil demonstrates that an integration of viewpoints is essential to the development of any truly useful technology by saying,
If you create a tool as powerful as instant messaging, for example, you won’t be able to stop adoption in the enterprise — you’ll just need to add enterprise features.
Who bears the primary responsibility for the ‘abdication of potential’ that obviates the creation of powerful tools? Is it really Apple or Microsoft or IBM? Each of these entities is, after all, a corporation, the stewards of which are responsible for staying on track and delivering on their promises to their shareholders. That is their first priority, and, no matter how high social responsibility ranks on any corporation’s priority list, it can never occupy the top slot.
The conflicts that arise between benefiting non human entities and individuals are considered and dwelt upon on the personal level, where individuals are (to a greater or lesser extent) recognized as essential to an entity’s endeavors, whether as employees or customers. Yet the societal context is largely flattened or even entirely missing from even the more developed and enlightened of these viewpoints.
Nowhere do I see the emptiness of abdication growing as widely and deeply as in the gap between large scale and constituency applications of technology. Increasingly, tools and development for communities and small businesses lag further and further behind in sophistication and innovation, as primarily the development of consumer products with mass market potential is pursued.
The deepening gloom in this expanding chasm is, imo, the most unfortunate aspect of technological development to date. Societal formation, relationships and responsibilities, are weakened here, yet this is the place where our personal time and our work time intersect, the area that should be the heart and soul of this extended dimension.
I believe that commitment of time and resources to development in this area would also result in tremendous benefit to private enterprise interests as a direct result of benefiting the communities, and that we as individuals and in groups should be collaborating in such development for our own collective benefit, as well as that of our institutions and other civic bodies.
Our personal time is as meaningful as our work time. The full scope of this, from a personal perspective, a business perspective, and a community perspective, only becomes visible when these perspectives are all considered together. The better we enable our goals and activities in each and with one another, the more of that meaning we can all realize. Anil’s post addressed the lack of attention to a balanced entirety of personal activity and endeavor. It is through the collaboration and communication conducted within enabled and growing communities that I believe that valuable attention is created.
