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| Work Overload | NetSlaves | Burn Rate | Data smog | |||
"Technostress" (computer-related stress) is a combination of performance anxiety, information overload, role conflicts, and organizational factors.
Craig Brod, Technostress: The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984]
The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits
Based on 7 reviews.
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 Excellent Read! Better Than "Margin"., March 2,
2003
For example, in "Margin", you are over 1/3 into the book before Swenson gives a clear and comprehensive definition of the term "margin". In "Overload Syndrome", Swenson spends the first 50 pages describing overload syndrome and the last 150 giving prescriptions for the problems. Therefore, more text in "Overload Syndrome" is spent giving solutions. Granted, in our time and age we want a quick fix to our problems without delving deeply into the problem. However, Swenson's prescriptions are not the quick fixes we may have grown accustomed to and are profound in their simplicity. For example, some of Swenson's excellent prescriptions include
how to: Practically everyone who reads the book struggles with one or
more of the above areas and will greatly benefit from reading
"Overload Syndrome"! --This text refers to
the
Paperback edition
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Good for the mind AND the heart, June 16, 2000
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- Prudloe Vensigian from Deep Run Mobile Home Park, Maryland , November 1, 1999
- Slashdot Book Reviews NetSlaves -- pretty naive review, but good discussion
- If you read newspapers, books, or follow Net-business coverage on TV, you might well think work on the Net is mostly about the billionaires who found Hotmail or Yahoo or Netscape, or the clean, benefit-laced, campus-like work environments they provide. You'd have no way of knowing the much more pervasive and unnerving reality: for every one of those there's a zillion companies that come into the world still-born, fail miserably, make and sell crummy stuff, and hire countless miserable, exploited, harassed and burned-out programmers, techies, geeks and nerds.
Baldwin and Lessard are combat veterans of the Net, both in terms of writing and personal experience. They are also long-standing Truth Tellers.
In addition to writing about computing for a number of magazines and websites, they also run the guerilla website NetSlaves, a running testimonial to real life for many in the hi-tech workplace.
"NetSlaves" is a terrific extension of the site, one of the few books to come off of a website that really works as a book. Lessard and Baldwin have a powerful story to tell, and they do it with a lot of punch. "NetSlaves" ought to be handed out to every graduate of every tech school, and given to every new employee of every Net company.
Baldwin and Lessard say their grand "pre-alpha" statement about the Nature of Net-Slavery is this:
"Technology has changed, but human nature hasn't. Whether it's the Gold Rush of 1849 or the Web Rush of l999, people are people. More often than not, they're miserable, nasty, selfish creatures, driven by vanity and greed, doing whatever they can to get ahead, even if it means stepping on the person next to them, crushing the weak, and destroying themselves in the process."
The authors don't have a particularly high regard for many forms of Net work, which they lambaste as the New Media Caste System, but they care about Net workers, and the book is curiously affectionate, even loving about them, as well as a hoot to read.
Both concede that one of their purposes in writing "NetSlaves" is to have the book serve as a quasi-historical, quasi-anthropological reflection of a particular moment in the culture.
Although the tone of "NetSlaves" is informal and funny, the point is pretty serious. "NetSlaves" has done what legions of reporters and authors have so far failed to do: paint a truthful picture of about the new nature of work in the techno-centered world.
For all of the media blabber about Net commerce and hi-tech startups, life in this fast lane can be brutal - insane hours, almost no employee-employer loyalty, greed and moral cowardice, help-desk geeks driven mad by enraged customers, back-stabbing, savage pressure, competiveness and the many resultant neuroses from all of the above.
Baldwin and Lessard make no pretense of objectivity. They write with almost ferocious authority and persuasiveness. They describe themselves as "two angry, cranky bastards out for blood" on behalf of their exhausted selves and the countless burnouts, geniuses, thieves, opportunists, workaholics and losers they've encountered along the way.
"NetSlaves" gives us a whole new language for the villains and back-stabbers who make up the hi-tech workplace. Particular venom is reserved for the "Fry Cooks," the "get it done at all costs" project people of the New Media Caste System. (There's also the "Garbagemen," the workers who have to get servers up and running when they crash).
My favorite chapter is about the "Cab Drivers," the haunted and hunted itinerant Web freelancers who design sites, followed closely by "Gold Diggers and Gigolos," a scathing portrait of the ambitious, night-crawling, hard-partying, butt-kissing movers and shakers and wannabees of hi-tech work world.
"Most Web sites are designed by itinerant, restless young people who have given up the constraints of working for one company in particular, in exchange for the self-determination of pursuing their own path. The rationale is that they can earn a higher hourly rate and pick and choose their projects.
"The reality, however," write Lessard and Baldwin, "is that these Cab Drivers have to constantly hustle for work and their passengers, or clients, who are also cash-crunched, are notorious for skipping out on their fares. Added to this is the lack of health benefits that Cab Drivers face - a plight which has forced many to simply neglect themselves." This is a world in which workers are terrified or despondent when forced to take a few weeks off, convinced they'll fall behind forever.
"NetSlaves" succeeds wonderfully in its goal to tell the truth about a particular culture at a critical juncture in time. It is, in fact one of the few telling looks inside the new kinds of workplaces springing up in the hi-tech, global economy. Workers beware.
Michael Wolff / Paperback / Published 1999 Our Price: $11.20 ~
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A reader from Dallas, Texas , August 21, 1999
Simple, targeted revenge for mistakes he made in business
I struggled to force myself to finish this book in hopes that somewhere, maybe even on the last page there would be a reason for having ever purchased this book. I was wrong.
I felt like the entire purpose of this book was to make others look worse than the writer, and thereby raise himself up in the process. It didn't work.
The internet has only just begun, yes there were early days, but it's a fast growing medium that, unlike any other medium, the masses can control. There are big players, there are major corporations in the game, but people still have control over what they do. Arrogant editors and writers & VCs miss the point.
The medium is about people, community, tribal aspirations, connections, ideas, concepts or the simplest truth of them all.......the internet is a campfire, pure and simple enough for even this author to somehow have understood from the earliest days of his internet struggles. I enjoyed reading AOL.COM, had high hopes this book would be in that class, it was/is not.
A reader from Pune, India , August 20, 1999
Among the various books available on the topic of startups, etc, this book most closely and frankly puts across the relationship between the Founder of a startup and the VCs who finance it.
Also recorded the life and death of a internet startup. At times, the author seems almost aplogogetic, but that is always better than cockiness.
A very good buy!
A reader from Indianapolis , August 11, 1999
Business Blinders
Michael Wolff's attack on the the Internet Business world is interesting, but he makes the one mistake every business person seems to make: there is more to the world than making money. There is more to the Internet than how it is commercialized. If there are NO businesses on the Internet in the future, it still is going to be important.
Since Wolff never get's beyond Television asumptions, he overlooks some of the most interesting things that Internet has to offer in Many to Many communication: the regular guy is just as accessable as the huge corporation.
The regular guy can probably make money EASIER than the big corporation. There is more to life than being the organization man...
David Shenk / Paperback / Published 1998
From reader reviews:
The book starts off with a good analysis of the problem -- society's dependence on computers and the rapid evolutionary pace of technology (and the slow evolutionary pace of human beings in absorbing this glut of information). However, a large portion of the book focuses on the effects of technology on politics. This is not very useful for someone who is trying to survive the information glut in everyday work and home environments. Then it ends with simplistic solutions, which are ways to reduce data overload
The author does a good job describing the problem and effects of information overload, and I find myself nodding at many of the anecdotes. I share the author's dismay at the Polyannas of media and at the sheer task of keeping up. The book gets weaker when it goes beyond a description of the problem and its effects, however. Some of the ideas and suggestions for keeping info at bay seem vague or inappropriate, especially when it comes to his suggestions for the role of government. This book would make a fine present for your insanely busy boss whose confidence you want to undermine.
See also Coping With Information Overload Too much of a good thing can hurt your job performance.
Paul Saffo, a director with the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., told Information Week that it's not the information glut itself that causes problems, but rather our inability to process information. "Information overload is not a function of the volume of information out there," Saffo says. "It's a gap between the volume of information and the tools we have to assimilate the information into useful knowledge."
Yet the solution is an old-fashioned one, contends Emory Mulling, president of the Mulling Group, an Atlanta-based executive coaching firm. In fact, it predates e-mail, the Internet, and voicemail.
"People still must recognize they have to prioritize and winnow," he says. "Just because we may have access to all the information in the world, it doesn't mean we can process it all. In fact, far from it."
Trapped in the Net : The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization; Gene I. Rochlin
arthurc@crl.com from San Francisco , October 20, 1998 ** A grouch book with no solutions This book belongs in the genre of what I call Grouch Books: extensive laments about costs and consequences of technology, but with no attempts at syntheses or solutions. At every turn, the author paints a "no exit" vision of the internet: if it's freewheeling and unregulated, it's "chaotic" and "disorganized"; where it's centralized, it is overbearing and freedom-robbing. The author makes it seem as though the people concerned with hardware and software development are thoughtless, greedy, naive, or some combination. Any hint of libertarian ideals in the shakers and movers of digital culture is dismissed by Rochlin as naive and illusory, and every tendency of this culture is, in his vision, toward loss of humanity and the replacement of art with artifice. This book is single-track thinking at its worst. And to anyone who has experienced the benefits of digital culture and design, the complaining tone grows tiresome and monotonous. On those very rare occasions when he begrudges some possible benefits of the internet, Rochelin immediately qualifies them out of existence. The increased information made available by the internet, for example, is seen as all right for those who use it for "social development," but not for "conversation and entertainment" -- as if mere conversation had nothing to do with social development. If readers want to read about the costs and consequences of technology, they would be far better advised to go through a book such as Neil Postman's Technopoly. While just as grim in his assessment of the current state of affairs, Postman has a much greater range, and at least has the intellectual stamina to propose a solution.
Neil Postman / Paperback / Published 1996 Our Price: $9.60 ~
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For Postman, the survival of public education rests upon its purpose. He suggests that early purposes of education such as democracy, the melting-pot concepts, and Protestant work ethic have been lost. In addition, the "gods" of consumerism and technology have also failed. He suggests that the reader consider his five purposes for education as a means for its survival. These include his belief that education should exist so individuals become responsible for the planet earth. Another is that educators must enable their students to view knowledge in terms of a past and a future. Students must learn that mistakes are a source of learning rather than a fatality. Another is to extend the notion of the "American experiment." A love of country must be taught, and the foundation and arguments upon which this country were built should continue. Schools should teach and respect diversity; diversity should be a point of unification, not division. An understanding of language and its creation of a worldview is another purpose of education. While I found his purposes interesting, I question their being embraced and actually upheld by educators across the country. Nevertheless, Postman presents an interesting perspective!
Another reader
Neil Postman's book is more than just refreshing. He makes a clear distinction between teaching as a kind of engineering feat--through books, transparencies, film, computers and whatever the latest delivery system is--and teaching as introducing the student to himself or herself and to the world. This book is about teaching diversity, in the real sense of the word. And this book is about the problem of education not being so much "how" we teach or "what" we teach, but that we lack a substantial goal. We lack a metaphysic. If you do not understand what it means to lack a metaphysic, then this book is for you. It is one thing to lose something and know that we have lost it (a wallet, for example), but if we lose something (such as a sense for what a metaphysic is) and we don't even know it is lost, we will not even know enough to look for it. If we have lost the sense of our lives being ordered toward some end, then indeed we are permanently lost. And we are just teaching randomly and learning randomly, as we try to become better producers and better consumers. Is that what we are? Neil Postman says no. We are much more. I encourage every teacher who cares about teaching to read this book. I encourage every student who has wondered why we have to study so many unnecessary things, to read this book. It will help the teacher reorient his or her teaching and it will help the student articulate the pain and fear he or she feels upon entering a classroom, and the reasons for his or her boredom in the face of what ought to be adventurous learning about the world and about himself or herself.
Here is opinion of yet another reader
Postman I think makes a good case for what has been wrong with education (too much emphasis on facts rather than narrative or epistemology, creeping cultural sensitivity, and inculcating consumerism). Still, this books ends up, for me, becoming more a defense of the status quo rather than a polemic for radical change. We risk, in our dissatisfaction with the current system, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Education is best when it socializes children into the obligations of a citizen, and immunizes us against the snake-oil seductions of consumerism. Postman believes the seeds to our salvation, to harnessing the prodigious energies and good will of the young, are in finding powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives. And I wholeheartedly agree that teaching this has nothing at all to do with whether our children learn that via multimedia Pentium machines, traditional pencil and paper, or even clay slates, for that matter. The book's title, Postman tells us, is a deliberately ambiguous prophecy, meant to make us question why we have public education, as well as warn us that it may be on its way out. But along the way, Postman always lays out his arguments with entertaining examples, and an irrestistably dry wit which almost, I hope he pardons my using the term, amuses me to death. I think our culture is richer because of Postman; I just wish more people paid attention to him
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate; Steven A. Johnson
Interface Culture examines the state of computing from the perspective of its 29-year-old author, Steven Johnson, co-founder and editor of the Web 'zine Feed (www.feedmag.com)
Where Johnson really shines (and I admit a personal bias for the topic) is in his discussion about hypertext and the poor job that silicon valley has done in really pushing it to the limits of it possibility. He presents a picture of an industry that continues to try to bring television to the web (real video, real audio, flash) all attempts to bring movement and animation to a naturally solid state-dynamic environment. The real power of the web is in the link, in the ability of authors and users to "create their own story" - to navigate through the content as they wish, not necessarily how the author intended. Johnson uses Dicken's stories as examples of thinking that incorporates the sense of disparate ideas - all connected into one story - the kind of thinking that Johnson thinks needs to be used to harness the power of the link.
Theodore Roszak / Paperback / Published 1994 Our Price: $11.96 ~
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Douglas Rushkoff / Paperback / Published 1996 Our Price: $9.60 ~
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Copyright © 1996-2008 by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov. www.softpanorama.org was created as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) in the author free time. Submit comments This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is placed under the copyright of the Open Content License(OPL). Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
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Last modified: February 28, 2008
Unplug to Avoid Overload, December 27, 2001