Should men leave technology to women?

I can’t listen to the radio, eat breakfast, AND talk to my family at the same time. If I’m listening to music, I can just about manage the mechanics of walking but making intelligent routing changes is always a challenge. And if I’m on the phone, all other systems effectively shut down. My wife, on the other hand, appears to view dealing with complex financial accounting online, chatting on the phone, monitoring our small daughters, and preparing supper all at the same time as an entry-level multi-tasking problem. She is a wonderful woman & I’m in awe of her.

Curiously, however, I feel I can write a blog, check facebook, shop for a new cycle jersey online, and download a free album all at the same time, albeit inefficiently. So it seems that I can multi-task after my own fashion, so long as it is all through the same portal. I don’t think that I’m particularly unusual in my simplicity, and I mention this not as a plea to other men out there to back me up by admitting that they too find reading and eating mutually exclusive activities, but because of a growing unease I feel about how communications technology is affecting the sexes.

Tanya is the very lovely lady who cleans our offices. She usually has her mobile phone tucked into her headscarf, and for two or more hours she chats with friends as she goes about her business. For her, communications technology adds a layer of richness and entertainment over an otherwise routine job, and enhances the experience. It opens the world up to her, and the people in it.

I leave the office and get on the tube. Many people about me are plugged into some sort of device or other – a number of them with ill-fitting earphones, and I secretly fantasize about a society in which I could cut their cords and get away with it. Or even if could do it anyway, and the aural relief from the tinny spluttering beat would encourage my fellow commuters to back me up in the ensuing fracas. Looking about, I come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t, and not just because it would contravene tube-rule one of never consciously acknowledging any unpleasant ’incident’*. No, the real reason is that I happen to be in a male-heavy area, and most of them are already so engrossed in their blackberry / DS / iPod-Pad-Phone that the real world has shrunk and contracted to a few square centimetres of bright colour which they caress obsessively. If they’re largely oblivious to their few female companions, likewise physically engaged with their technology but still valiantly attempting to maintain real-time human conversation with their Neanderthal grunting colleagues, what possible hope would I have?

The contrast with Tanya is complete. And although this is a slightly extreme distinction, taken in conjunction with my own experience, it does lead me to wonder whether communications technologies shrink male horizons & engagement with the here and now, whilst expanding the same for women. And if so, what will the implications of that be in a world where digital communications are constant and ubiquitous, where we’re always ‘on’, and where the clamour for competing attention is only going to get stronger? What will it mean for social interactions between the sexes as men retreat further into digital domains whilst women get the best of both worlds? And should we be seriously rethinking when & where we consume communications, recognising that unconstrained connectivity is a dangerous thing, especially to men?

* Even, and this is where true mastery of the tube rules comes in, when you have your nose unpleasantly crushed into said ‘incident’s’ armpit, and your foot has gone to sleep under the vast briefcase of the halitosic man nuzzling your ear.