Julia Hobsbawm, Bloomsbury, £20/£11.69 e-book
Very few people believe our level of addiction to technology is an unadulterated good, but even so Julia Hobsbawm has some particularly testy warnings for the always-on generation. Connection, she complains here, “is like early industrialisation… and it has its own belching factory smoke. Humanity is beginning to choke on the fumes of excessive connection.”
Everyone with a job is, in the view of this super-connector – the world’s first professor of networking and a regular commentator on the topic – dangerously overloaded, which has led to a full-blown wellbeing crisis among employees.
Digital detox, our preferred method of stepping back, is a wholly unsatisfactory solution to ‘techno spread’, a world where our devices invade even our sleep, not to mention work, exercise and social life. We must, argues Hobsbawm, attend to our ‘social health’ to break our desperate need to build digital networks, many of them with limited real application. And businesses have an important role to play by resisting the rush to digitisation and re-emphasising the power of human connections.
Fully Connected has an amiable way of describing a disease we will certainly all recognise – and it’s playful at times, as Hobsbawm draws on her own digital breakdown and subsequent recovery as rich source material.
It should, perhaps, be read alongside more academically focused work on the topic, since much of the book is personal observation rather than scientific fact, and it’s relatively late on before the author talks about how we might break free from our smartphones, one of the more rewarding parts of the book. But it is, just about, worth disconnecting for a while to engage with this book – and maybe that’s the point.