Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

How fast behaviors change: Effects of “information security” phobia

Jun 11, 2006 00:33 am / Add a comment

When we had a dis­cus­sion about it, my friend mused, “I won­der if that’s the way the rest of the world [devel­oped coun­tries] are going.….” That would cer­tainly take the world into some­thing totally missed by many of the futur­ists who pre­dicted the world becom­ing one big glob or village.

A year ago, peo­ple work­ing on their lap­top in the pub­lic were all over the place in Tokyo. The num­ber of them is dimin­ish­ing at such fast rate. I for one now wouldn’t dare pull out my lap­top on the sub­way any­more unless it’s in an absolute emer­gency to get some info out of it. And when I work in busi­ness club, I keep look­ing around to see if any­body is look­ing into my lap­top screen.

It’s because now the busi­ness con­tracts I sign explic­itly talk about respon­si­bil­ity in keep­ing any and all project infor­ma­tion secure on tech­nol­ogy devices. And with one major com­pany after another ban­ning their employee to take lap­tops out of com­pany office site, I just feel uncom­fort­able being seen by busi­ness acquin­tance open­ing up lap­top in public.

Read­ing e-mails on mobile will prob­a­bly become less and less too, since lots of com­pa­nies ban their employee to have e-mails trans­ferred to mobile phone e-mail.

This has been very easy to become used to. If my clients are behav­ing that way, that means I just match my behav­ior by slow­ing down my work. Maybe we were just so tired of being ON all the time, we were look­ing for a grace­ful way out of the IT slavery.

So with our release from the e-mail shackle maybe the true humane infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy age has arrived? It could also mean the fur­ther dis­tin­guished divi­sion between var­i­ous types of groups, espe­cially in business.

 

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