Catégorie : Techno/gizmo

Donnez-nous notre wifi quotidien

Dans La Presse d’aujourd’hui:
Les risques sanitaires du Wi-Fi sous étude à Paris.

Ed a participé volontairement aux tests parisiens à plusieurs reprises lors de notre visite. (Ci-bas, il profite de la générosité divine et de son wifi libre devant l’église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, à 2 minutes de notre hôtel, qui lui, demandait beaucoup trop cher pour se brancher à Internet.)

Depuis notre retour, il n’arrête pas de vouloir manger des croissants, de mettre du beurre partout, de boire du vin le midi et de dire du coup à toutes les trois phrases. Je crois que c’est un des effets secondaires du wifi parisien. Faites gaffe lors de votre prochain voyage. On ne sait jamais l’effet que ça pourrait avoir sur vous.

________

Blague à part, en épiant les conversations des gens dans les cafés, j’ai été surprise par la fréquence d’utilisation de l’expression du coup par les Parisiens. Je connaissais cette expression, bien sûr, mais je ne m’étais jamais rendu compte avant qu’elle était aussi populaire. On l’entendait à toutes les trois phrases dans un récit, un peu comme les Québécois disent tsé ou comme. Du coup, j’ai eu envie d’en apprendre plus et j’ai fait une recherche. J’ai trouvé ce commentaire sur le blogue d’une écrivaine française qui veut tordre le cou à l’expression:

Observez l’emploi de ces mots : vous constaterez qu’ils permettent de faire l’économie d’un raisonnement, de rebondir sur l’absence de contestation, pour se prévaloir d’une légitimité à penser ou à agir.
Pour ces raisons, ce sont les personnes qui ont la plus haute opinion d’elles-mêmes qui abusent de cette expression.

Ah! Du coup, ça explique sa grande utilisation par les Parisiens. ;-)

How distracting

It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the problem was intermittent. I ignored it the way you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. When I was in the middle of a project, distractions weren’t really a problem. It was when I’d finished one project and was deciding what to do next that they always bit me.

Another reason it was hard to notice the danger of this new type of distraction was that social customs hadn’t yet caught up with it. If I’d spent a whole morning sitting on a sofa watching TV, I’d have noticed very quickly. That’s a known danger sign, like drinking alone. But using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.

Eventually, though, it became clear that the Internet had become so much more distracting that I had to start treating it differently. Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox.

Read the rest of this post titled Disconnecting Distraction at Paul Graham’s Web site. Thanks to Mare for the link.

When Karl (on s’ennuie) was living in Montreal, he used to escape to the coffee shop at Chapters on Sainte-Catherine every afternoon because they didn’t offer wifi. He claimed to have gotten a lot more work done this way, and I always admired him for his will power. (Then again, he might have substituted meeting women for using wifi, so I don’t know how much he actually got done by « isolating » himself in the bookstore ;-)

Maybe I should do what Paul Graham suggests in his blog post. Maybe I should use my laptop for going online, and keep the iMac for offline work. I suspect it would drive me insane pretty quickly, but it’s worth a try, if only for a week.

Technology gone backward

« What? » she said. Their connection was bad. He heard three short beeps and then they were cut off.
He called her again.
« Are you in a spaceship or something? » she said. « You sound all… futuristic. »
« Taxi on Lex. Is that futuristic enough for you? »
Again he heard the series of beeps, and again the connection failed.

It was as if technology had gone backward. In the old days, when a telephone was a bulky thing that stayed plugged into your wall, you could actually hear the person on the other end of the line. Now you could take your phone anywhere, but you couldn’t actually talk.

But he had come to like cell phones for just this reason. The phone cuts you off and you don’t have to call back. It was as if the capriciousness of the cellular phone had enabled us to admit that we don’t want to talk to one another at all.

From the novel Breakeable You, by Brian Morton.