What I Learned
on Change Islands:
Reflections on IT
and Pace of Life
Phoebe Sengers
Cornell University | sengers@cs.cornell.edu
March + April 2011
interactions
Our role as IT designers is to imagine and create the technologies
of the future. In doing so, we are
taking part in an ongoing cultural
process of modernization that, since
the early 20th century, has emphasized values such as expanding
choice, productivity, and controlling
one’s time.
I am writing this article over what
is nominally my Christmas holiday.
Although the university is closed,
work-related email messages regularly pop into my inbox from colleagues back home, reminding me
that a professor’s work is never done.
If I don’t feel like handling them, I
can always spend time cleaning out
my personal inbox, which is backed
up with friendly email and notices
from Facebook I haven’t had time to
deal with in the busy weeks of wrapping up the semester. Although I am
4,000 miles from home, I am taking care of my chores and errands
online. Even if the local stores are
closed for the holiday, there is still
a world of e-retailers I can peruse
to find the best goods at the lowest
prices. In the always-on, always-accessible world of online activity, there is always more I can do.
Although I take advantage of these
opportunities, I am not convinced
this is a good thing.
Though computers are attuned to
it, they did not create this world; the
cultural drive to continually use our
time productively and to expand
our range of choices predates computers. The modernist worldview
that arose in the late-19th and
early-20th centuries, inspired by
scientific and technical advances,
espouses the use of rational choice
and means-ends analysis to optimize our activities and control our
lives. This orientation is reflected
not only in the technologies that we
develop but also, and more insidiously, in our everyday habits as
Westerners, and perhaps especially,
dare I say it, as Americans. Though
I understand it only imperfectly, the
set of everyday strategies to optimize time use that have driven my
career have become so much a part
of me that I no longer experience
them as such. Disciplining myself
to work quickly and efficiently, continually seeking to fit more into a
given period of time, and seeking
out more information that will help
me optimize my behavior and my
