Counterproductive connectivity

Let’s hear it for Volkswagen at the start of 2012. The German automaker has responded to demands from its works council by agreeing to stop the email server to its Blackberry-using employees a half-hour after their shift ends, only restoring it 30 minutes before work begins the next day.

The agreement for now only affects about 1,150 of Volkswagen’s more than 190,000 workers in Germany, but it’s a start in encouraging employees to switch off, curb the twitchy reflex to check email every couple of minutes, and take a look out at things — like family and the big wide world — without the distraction of a blinking red light.

Now I know we’re all supposed to be grown-ups and switching off should be a simple enough decision, but the fact is addictions to Blackberries and other hand-held devices are powerful and nobody expects addicts to self-administer the right medicine without some help. The Volkswagen decision reflects growing evidence of stress-related burnout tied to employees’ inability to separate their working and private lives now that devel- oped societies live in a 24/7 paroxysm of connection. ...

Connectivity aids productivity. It can also be counterproductive by generating that contemporary state of anxiety in which focus on any activity is interrupted by the irresistible urge to check email or texts; whose absence can in turn provoke the compounded anxiety of feeling unloved or unwanted just because the inbox is empty for a nanosecond; whose onset can in turn induce the super-aggravated anxiety that is linked to low self-esteem and poor performance.

Inhabiting one place — that is to be fully absorbed by and focused on one’s surroundings rather than living in some diffuse cyberlocation composed of the different strands of a device-driven existence — is a fast-dwindling ability. This in turn generates a paradox: People have never traveled as much but at the same time been less able to appreciate the difference between here and there.

— New York Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, Jan. 2.