Information addiction

I don't know, I may have already blogged about this. Or not. And yes, this is quite a cliché, but it's just so true. Many people say that when you finally turn your mobile phone off and cut yourself out of the information distribution loop altogether is luxury and something to strive towards. I call bullshit. It's not true, at least not for me. I don't know if it's because I haven't been able to detach myself for a long enough time, but I find that I have to know that I have at least the possibility of getting my hands on information at any point of time with little work.

The mobile phone is turning into a more and more important part of my daily life. This itself is something that I would have been fairly skeptical of just a few years back, but oh well. I mean, firstly it's a phone that I can carry with me all the time (well, duh! and the SMS capability). Then I can get my work emails pushed to it, which is nice. I can synchronize it with my Google calendar that's online. I can browse the web, I can type blog entries on it (painful), I can send pictures, location data, presence data, set up an SSH connection to another box so I can check IRC and my personal emails, etc. And that's just with a phone. The interface is a bit of a pain and it's slow, but I can do that. Then there's the computer, which brings the entire multitasking dimension to the equation. RSS feeds, music, blogging, reading web pages, IM, emails coming in, etc. Everything open all the time. It's when you silence all that that I get sort of annoyed. Think about giving up coffee, for example. Or I would imagine cigarettes would be an even better example. Although I don't really see that many negative effects in being tuned into the information flow as long as you are able to manage it relatively easily. It just takes some time to sort routines out, but afterwards it's fairly nice.

I don't really even want a vacation, in fact. I mean, sure I'd like to travel, but just cutting all the lines to my daily life, that's something I don't want to do. So if I do travel somewhere, I'll sure as heck have my laptop and phone with me. It gives an entirely new dimension to life and increases efficiency. Where to eat today? Let me just quickly check some reviews from this site or possibly use this location-enabled feature to see what's close by. It's not fairly romantic, I'll admit that. And that's quite possibly the biggest issue with all this.