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.
FUJIKO SUDA 