Fujiko Suda: Worklife

The finding from 9 years of cyberwork experience

Jan 25, 2007 08:27 am / Add a comment

What I mean by 9 years of cyber­work expe­ri­ence is the time I worked using e-mails, web, devel­op­ing cyber personality.

Cyber­work is means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. But unless one con­trols the degree of use of this com­mu­ni­ca­tion, one ends up with just words, and images. It is sim­i­lar to that of watch­ing tele­vi­sion before the arrival of www. A lot of infor­ma­tion both real and made up, but it was just that.

My find­ing is that com­mu­ni­ca­tion is vital, but the value of cyber com­mu­ni­ca­tion is worth 1/1000 of real com­mu­ni­ca­tion or 1/100000 of real expe­ri­ence. Look­ing back, no mat­ter how much e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tion we do, ideas that really worked came from real expe­ri­ence, prod­ucts or real things made came from work­ing with peo­ple face to face. Friend­ship stayed … just friendly online. Ideas stayed just ideas online.

More sen­si­ble peo­ple had known this, so they lim­ited their time on cyber­space to min­i­mal, spend­ing more time work­ing, gain­ing real exper­inece using their hands, body. Exam­ple of this would be archi­tects and design­ers who cre­ated real things with real impacts. Cyber­world would cel­e­brate these real work, but what­ever the time one spent on cyber­world, one helped to make silent buzz, which soon faded into just silence. I par­tic­i­pated rig­or­ously in the cre­ation of this silent buzz for years. Then grad­u­ally, it didn’t feel good any­more. So I spent less and less time online, but found that through real travel and real activ­i­ties with real peo­ple, I was get­ting incred­i­bly more out of every day, every hour.

I can feel the shift of val­ues within me. The won­der­ful cyber­world has become mas­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion entity that doesn’t offer solu­tion. It’s a library. I surely don’t want to spend major part of my wak­ing hours day in and day out, just at the library.

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