Is there such a thing as too much connectivity?
This is the question I asked myself after reading Andrew Keen’s post entitled “The message is the master” at The Great Seduction. And if you ask my wife or some family members, you would get an answer of an emphatic ‘yes’. It is more the norm lately where I hear some variant of “wow, you are always online” or “is that computer attached to your hands?” So maybe there is something to be said for being too connected.
It used to be that you had to be conscious of maintaining a good work/life balance. Now, more often it seems like there is a shift to online/life balance. And this becomes exceedingly difficult as more aspects of life and managing one’s life move to the online medium. Not necessarily Second Life online life but other variants like email, FreeCycle, craigslist, eBay, networking sites, news, video, the list goes on and on.
And it becomes even more pervasive with the continuing emergence of mobility. Take a look at Fred Wilson’s post, Life Without My Laptop where he feels he can do everything now including blogging directly from his blackberry. And after all, it is a point within itself for the simple fact that I’m writing this post on the train as I head into NYC for FAST’s Future of Media meeting and as my Treo buzzes incessantly as new email hits my inbox.
Andrew links to a fantastic Forbes article wittily entitled Can You Hear Me Now? which discusses quite well how connected we all are now and the effects such devices and non-stop connectivity has on us. Perhaps we should think twice about the emergence of offline/online applications as I discussed in a previous post about Adobe Apollo. Should we create yet another new place to be “almost online” or “almost connected”?
To close, as more of life (and life management) moves online, we should always remain conscious of the simple fact that for all the great things emerging on the web, just as much great life and experiences remain just as they did before the coming of the web. Baseball, reading, simply sitting outside in the sun and relaxing are just a few. Perhaps that is why I recently purchased the Belkin N1 Wireless router with such fantastic range that I can use the computer in the backyard! 
Your closing example reminds me of my first laptop. I bought it when we were living in Singapore. It was an Apple PowerBook 170, which I had purchased when I realized that it had enough power and space to run Apple Common Lisp. I took it along on a vacation we spent at a resort on Borneo, and my wife probably still has a photograph of me working on Lisp code at a poolside table! This was a great object of derision for her until, several years later, we were both attending the same conference in Hawaii; and she was preparing her PowerPoint slides on her PowerBook! More recently, she wanted to shop at a particular gourmet-food outlet along the road during another vacation trip. It turned out that the place had a coffee bar with WiFi, so I pulled out my ThinkPad and took care of mail and RSS news while she did her shopping. That kind of connectivity can sometimes make for a happy marriage!
True, there are definite benefits. But just yesterday I experienced first hand what the Forbes article was talking about. There I was at lunch with four colleague sitting at the table in the restaurant. Two of us on email (one on blackberry and me on the Treo), one colleague sitting there and one checking voicemail. We had to agree to put our devices down and leverage the opportunity to talk. Pretty interesting.
I remember hearing Jerry Yang talk at a Cable TV convention. He described going to a restaurant in South Korea. At the next table were about half a dozen guys, all of whom were watching television on their cell phones! It makes you wonder why they bothers to go out to eat together!