Digital disruption is changing us for better and worse
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Staying with leisure, who hasn’t passed many pleasant hours watching You Tube? Or spent hours on Facebook – still the only commercially significant social medium – thinking how much more exciting their friends’ adventures are compared to their own, or how better-looking or happier their grandkids are.
Mobile phones and social media have given us much more frequent contact with family and friends – although I agree with social commentator Hugh Mackay that digital contact is greatly inferior, in terms of emotional satisfaction and effective communication, to face-to-face contact.
We spend so much of our lives staring at screens, which seem to get smaller when we’re on the go, and ever bigger when we’re at home.
Indeed, I sometimes think there can be few white-collar jobs left – from chief executive to office kid – that don’t consist mainly of sitting at a desk in an office, staring at a screen. As a consequence, many jobs have become more office-bound.
Reporters, for instance, use up far less shoe leather. They “attend” a media conference without leaving the office. The hearings of the banking royal commission occurred mainly in Melbourne, but my colleague Clancy Yeates listened to almost every word by staying stuck to his desk in Sydney.
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