Conference Call
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POSTERMINARIES
Conference Call Life grows inexorably more complicated. Because of our increasing workload, we divide our time into smaller units as we try to give attention to larger numbers of projects. (Well, some of us. Perhaps, if we are careful, we can still protect our postdocs and graduate students from attention fragmentation.) The speed of the digital age drives us to do more, more and more quickly, as we no longer have the luxury of waiting for things coming in the mail. I miss those mailing delays, and the time to reflect that they imposed on every process involving a document. The very existence of modern communications technology demands that we use it, and it seems almost criminal not to make full use of the efficiency that is available to us. Every interstitial moment can be used, as we engage in multitasking or whatever the current term may be. I confess: I am writing this on a laptop computer, during a meeting, and most of MRS BULLETIN/NOVEMBER 2001
the other attendees are clicking away, too. I wonder who is paying attention to the agenda.
We have now passed through the age of doing two things at a time and are on to the age of true parallel multitasking. A typical day at the office used to be characterized by serial uni-tasking—we did one thing at a time, and worked at it until it was finished, we could go no further, or it was time to do something else. We have now passed through the age of doing two things at a time and are on to the age of true parallel multitasking. I can be on a conference call and simultaneously
work on e-mail without giving too much offense (at least in this pre-videophone age), but I can also deal with visitors to my office through judicious use of the “mute” button on my hands-free phone, and can even sign a few forms while I am talking with a visitor. Attention to each individual task is a problem, of course, but we seem to have learned to cope with the compromise of quality in return for speed. This is where we are: We can mess up much faster and more effectively than ever before. Which of you has never sent a sensitive message out to the wrong list of e-mail recipients? And yet greater “advances” are in the offing. I hardly ever go to the library anymore. That is a virtual activity these days, and in one way, the library I “go” to is much bigger than the ones I used to visit. Online information sources are improving daily, but my incidence of serendipitous finds among the current periodicals has 959
POSTERMINARIES
markedly declined. Soon I won’t have to go to the lab, either, with telepresence increasingly available in our laboratory equipment. I’m not so sure about this one, though—I suppose I am old-fashioned, but I like to twiddle the knobs on my electron microscope. So, I can increasingly do all of my work without leaving my desk. How much longer will it be before I start to attend meetings online, too? The technology is certainly available, though the Internet bandwidth is still a little skimpy for an effective meeting with a serious number of participants.
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