Technology designed to help people work faster and be more productive is actually slowing them down, according to an article on C|News.

New technological advances often claim to help us get more done in less time. Who could forget the promise of “the paperless office”?

But research shows the reverse is true:

Expectations that technology would save time and money largely haven’t been borne out in the workplace, said Ronald Downey, professor of psychology who specializes in industrial organization at Kansas State University. “It just increases the expectations that people have for your production,” Downey said.

In 1994, four-fifths of workers claimed to finish at least half their tasks for the day. Last year only fifty percent said they had achieved half their daily work.

On average workers received 46 emails per day.

The survey of 1,000 workers also found that last year employees spent an average of 16 hours a week in front of a computer, compared to 9.5 a decade ago.productivity, technology, work, email, not getting things done

The Copy Chief at Wired News Tony Long has written an acidic attack on the role of technology in the decline of writing standards.

It is technology — IM, text messaging and email — which he argues is (mostly) to blame:

“it doesn’t matter whether you are reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone’s inane blog — the quality bar is set lower than ever.”

Whether or not you find his argument persuasive, you will enjoy the verbal imagery.

It runs the whole gamut from poetic (“[Email's] speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.”) to the more direct (“… it’s not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It’s important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well…. It’s important to think before you write.”)

I want to believe him. Goodness knows there’s some barely legible stuff out there. But are things really more badder?

I couldn’t shake a niggle from the back of my mind. Then I remembered what it was:

…Two evils, Ignorance and Want of Taste, have produced a Third; I mean the continual Corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely Remedy, will suffer more by the false Refinements of Twenty Years past than it hath been improved in the foregoing Hundred.

— Jonathan Swift, “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue”, The Tatler, 1710.text, email, IM, standards, punctuation, grammar, the good old days, language, technology, Jonathan Swift