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Communication technology is increasing the speed and reach of our connectedness every day. We all know this, and some of us are painfully aware of it; particularly those of us who work in and with the media. Working to deadlines has always been a reality of the news and information trades, but what is changing now is the expectation that we are connected to work and social media 24/7. Particularly with that social media connection, business lives and private lives are seeping into one another more than ever. Fifty years ago, it may have seemed annoying if your boss went to the same church or talked to you about work in the supermarket, but now we are encouraged to publish every detail of our lives on Facebook for everyone to scrutinize.
Of course, this connectedness gives us the potential to meet and collaborate with people we may otherwise never have had access to. John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas has never had a more fertile environment to thrive in. But while John Stuart Mill had weeks and months of porch-sitting waiting for replies to letters, we now get anxious after a few minutes.
At the recent PR News conference in San Francisco, PR professionals had a unique opportunity for (quite) frank discussion with USA Today’s John Swartz. “If my editor doesn’t hear back from me in ten minutes, he thinks there’s something wrong with me,” John said about his own increasing connectedness. John’s advice to PR professionals was to remember that reporters are people too. As PR agents, we might get annoyed or discouraged if we strike out in media pitching, but it’s rarely personal. Reporters are humans, and just like us they are beginning to struggle just to keep up.
The bottom line is that we have the same old biology, brain processing power, weaknesses, hopes, and fears as John Stuart Mill did (and as the Cro-Magnons did for that matter), but we are under pressure to communicate constantly. In constant communication mode, there is increasingly dwindling time to just have a good old-fashioned think. Einstein famously claimed to have conceived his theory of relativity while riding his bicycle, and Newtonian physics was born on a lazy afternoon in an orchard.
The importance of unplugging is discussed a lot these days, but there is more to it than simply preventing burnout. If we are really going to do our best work, we must set aside some time to be pointless; time to do nothing at all. At the PR News conference, curiosity was identified as the top “skill” for media professionals in 2014. We must give ourselves the space to be curious, because that is often when the best insights bubble up to the surface.