Multitasking and digital diversions

click photo to enlarge
It's often said that women can multitask but men can't. Whether that's true or not, it seems to me, isn't especially important because it ignores a basic underlying truth that has been repeatedly proved down the years. Namely, that when you multitask none of the jobs are done as well as if you do them separately. That's why, among other things, you are prosecuted if you are seen texting while driving, and why serious consideration should be given to banning the use of any mobile telephony by drivers (even hands free) because it has been clearly shown to impair their reaction time.

Apparently today's university students multitask during lectures, often sending messages to friends or playing computer games while taking notes about the business at hand. Moreover, such students believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that they can manage to do all these things with no detriment to their learning, that it is a skill they have learnt and have improved over time. I recently read an interesting piece of research showing that students who do this, and who make these assertions, are invariably WORSE at multitasking than students who have less confidence in their ability to do so.

The advent of phones, computing and music that are usable anywhere has brought many benefits. However, it has also homogenised and degraded the experiences of people who are constantly plugged in, constantly checking, constantly multitasking. The simple act of walking through an historic town such as Newark (above) becomes less of an experience if you are constantly poking your device, instantly responding to a communication or have your head full of music. Moreover that communication and that music are not experienced and appreciated as well as they might be either. If you want quality in your life there is much to be said for focusing all your attention on one thing at a time, doing things serially rather than engaging in multitasking that involves the latest digital diversion.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 10.4mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Benches, phones and bleak modernity

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In a couple of blog posts I've commented on the lack of comfort of much public seating, observing that it veers towards either the "artistic" or the "indestructable" (and sometimes both), qualities which rarely do anything for one's posterior. A few days ago I came across a bench that, in my experience, surpassed all others for the torture that it inflicted on my backside. It was made of wood and had no back, but what made it especially painful was the spacing between the "slats". In fact there were only 3 slabs of wood each about 4 inches (10cm) wide. But, presumably for aesthetic reasons, the voids between them measured exactly the same. Thus, it was impossible to position yourself without part of you slipping through the gaps and coming up against the sharp edge of the wood. It made eating my sandwich a much less pleasant experience than I'd have wished!

The location of this bench, should you wish to avoid it, is Fisher Square, Cambridge. This is one of the few determinedly modern squares in Cambridge: elsewhere classical and gothic buildings provide the backdrop. It is tacked on to the shopping centre of Lion Yard, and has been furnished with the usual contemporary trappings - uncomfortable benches (of course), block paving with patterns, solitary "specimen" trees, steel railings, steps, and in the middle the mandatory modern sculpture (with uplighters), in this case an incised granite boulder by Peter Randall-Page called, "Between the Lines". All in all it is as bleak a bit of Britain as you'll find anywhere. It's a fairly recent development but already the sleek lines are being mottled by discarded chewing gum.

However, such locations often provide photographic opportunities, and as I munched on my ham and tomatoes I spotted one that captured my depressed mood. Across the square a man was pacing up and down, animatedly talking into his mobile phone. As he stopped and gesticulated - seeming to want to make his point more forcibly to someone who couldn't see him! - I composed this shot and pressed the shutter. The discomfort coming from my backside, combined with the depressing environment, seemed to converge and produce an image that summed up a dismal aspect of modern life!

Tune in tomorrow for another cheery blog post from the front-line of amateur photography ;-)

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.66 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Looking and thinking

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Recently I was talking with my wife about what people used to do in the days before mobile phones. Today, it seems, many people spend a large amount of their walking time either talking on them, texting from them, or checking them. It's impossible to go down a street these days without passing people speaking into their phone, or poking its buttons. So, the question that arose in my mind was, "What have people stopped doing, as they walk about, that they used to do before mobile phones filled so much of that time?" And the answer I came up with was, "Looking and thinking."

Now you might argue that many people were doing very little with that sort of time in the past: that walking around a town was dead time, because the imperative was to get from A to B, and the mobile phone now fills it with something more meaningful. However, I don't buy into that theory. The snippets of conversations that I overhear are mainly chit-chat, the passing of the time of day, so not deeply significant. Moreover, people who engage in this kind of talk by mobile phone are likely to do it face to face too. So, the ability to chat anywhere at any time must have increased the amount of this sort of casual conversation. And that is likely, I think, to have been at the expense of looking and thinking.

One of my favourite Henry David Thoreau sayings (that I've quoted before) is, "What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?" And he might have added, "and reflecting on it." In our busy world, where everyone wants a slice of our time, the ability to look and think must be jealously guarded because it helps to make us who we are, and to make sense of our world. There are so many people, politicians, media, advertisers, etc. who tell us what to look at, and what to think, that the ability and time to do these two things for ourselves is something we should cherish. If the mobile phone deprives us of that time then perhaps it needs putting in its place.

I guess today's reflection marks me out as one of the older generation, to which I plead guilty. However, one of the benefits of age is perspective; the ability to see recent developments in context, and to make more informed judgements of them. Well, that's my defence anyway! Today's photograph was taken as I was looking and thinking in my sister's garden. I peered into this plant, felt like I was looking into infinity, and took this shot of it!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Phones, water and addiction

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The Tanaka Business School at Imperial College on Exhibition Road, London, is an interesting building completed in 2002-3. Foster & Associates' skin of white framed glass, wraps around an existing building, houses lecture theatres, and acts as an atrium entrance to the college. Its glazed curtain wall reflects the rows of pedimented windows across the road. It was these reflections that caught my attention and prompted my photograph. To give some scale and additional interest to the shot I waited for a couple of passers-by to walk into the frame.

However, when I came to review the image it wasn't the photographic qualities of the shot that grabbed my attention. Rather, it was what the two people happened to be holding. One has a bottle of water, the other a mobile phone. Unwittingly I had captured the two most omnipresent objects that people seem to carry in the first decade of the twenty first century. Had I been taking the shot a hundred years earlier it might have been walking sticks and bags. Fifty years ago a cigarette would surely have featured. But today the mobile phone stands supreme as the "carry around" object of choice, with bottled water not far behind. When people come to date anonymous photographs in the future these will surely be things that will help in determining the time to within fifteen years or so.

Both the mobile phone and bottled water seem to me to be objects of habit not unlike cigarettes. Each is addictive, each incidental, inconsequential even, but to the user is felt to be essential. And both are used to fill moments in the day with something and nothing. Or so it seems to me. As you might gather, I have little use for either. In fact I view bottled water as a significant environmental problem of the age - see my views on it here, and on mobile phones here. I do own a mobile phone, and sometimes (to the despair of my children, only sometimes) carry it, but I use it infrequently - perhaps half a dozen times a year for essential calls when away from home. It must be my age!!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm (80mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On