I think the notification is the worst idea ever. I think it's something that arises out of business

necessity and, you know, like the calendaring app and like a lot of the other features of these things,

they're predicated on a model of life that was appropriate to the developers. You know, they have

jobs and jobs are structured and jobs require that the day be

parsed up in such and such a way. We agree on the calendar to be at meetings, and we need to be

notified of these things, so we're good workers. A pattern that's appropriate to a knowledge

worker in a multinational corporation becomes the model for all of us.

I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself,

where I explore how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient, all through the simple act of slowing down.

My guest today is Adam Greenfield, the author of the Illuminating New Book, Radical Technologies,

which is essentially a field manual for how digital technology is transforming our everyday lives. I first stumbled onto

Adam's work through an excerpt from his book called A Sociology of the Smart Phone, in which he

elegantly breaks down all of the fundamental ways in which the smartphone has utterly changed

how we move through the world.

And in this conversation, Adam and I use the smartphone as a jumping off point to move into a deeper dialogue about living in a world in which we're always connected.

How there are always tradeoffs, and in the case of our phones, how we accept the anxiety of constant

accessibility in order to gain the joys of convenience.

We also discuss the dematerialization that necessarily accompanies the adoption of digital

tools, how the photos we used to carry in our wallets or the iconic gesture we used

to make to hail a cab have vanished to make way for the increasing sameness of interacting

with just another app. It's a conversation about stepping back and reframing the way we see

our relationship to digital, and to understand

...