Please don’t remove the off switch

There was a time when email was dealt with Monday to Friday in the office. Hard to believe there was a time when people were not easily contacted re work outside of office hours. There was a time when you had to be on time for social gatherings – because there was no way to catch up if people had moved on to the next venue.

There was a time when you visited the public library (or a book shop), found the book you were looking for and made a mental note about a few other books you noticed while there. Also you may have decided to read a book or go to a movie because someone you knew recommended it to you. Or because you read a good review in the newspaper.

Seems the recommendations machine has taken over. We are now networked to hundreds/thousands of ‘friends’ making recommendations. We have sites like google which claim to know what we would like to read or what we would like to view. Ticketmaster supposedly knows which concerts I want to attend.

Much of this is self inflicted – providing information on your preferences in order to receive relevant (or likely to be relevant) proposals.

But there is a risk in all of this – being bombarded with suggestions/ recommendations – that we may lose the spark of creativity, the possibility of thinking outside the box.

Nice piece by Joel Delmon on this very subject. We need to keep the space and the time to think for ourselves.