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Correlation Between Stress and Technology?
marshman113 asks: "I'm an undergraduate Cognitive Science major at a famous public university and currently enrolled in a Stress and Disease course. Being somewhat of a techie myself, I've decided to write my term paper on the relationship between technology and stress. I'm sure all of you hard-working Slashdot readers experience a fair amount of stress, on a daily basis. Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful? If so, how? If not, why?"
Stress has existed down the ages! Just because a study shows an association between technology and stress this does not mean much. Any decent statistics student will tell you that CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. This is a simple fact, and one that is often overlooked.
tim
Other people cause stress. So the mail server goes down, big deal. Unless people, like your boss, get all worked up over it.
Stress is a function of living beings, not machines.
KFG
It's always a balancing act, in my view. Yes, I get frustrated with hardware problems, software problems (stupid Office...crashed on my 3 times just last night on an otherwise rock stable box) and the like, but I also realize that I am a lot more productive and entertained, even if there are distractions. I am always entertained by people that talk about how much time the computers take and then they say something silly like "back when I was on a typewriter, blah, blah, blah" and I usually retort that they are usually doing the jobs of 4 or 5 staff people because of the computer, including graphics design, secretary and assistant.
At the risk of oversimplifying, the one constant that I see affecting stress in my job and those around me is expectation.
As technology improves, the expectations placed are higher. Even if the facilities aren't there to achieve them, I'm being asked more seemingly insurmountable tasks.
Then again, being asked to "secure" a network....*grumbles*.
*unplugs internet connection*
+++
NO CARRIER
You cannot rightfully make a broad, sweeping generalization about stress and computers because of the limitless range of their uses and functions. For most Slashdotters and geeks, computers are a hobby and a way to relieve stress. For secretaries, journalists and others who depend on computers solely for work, computers can be a source of horrible stress.
Many people play games on their computer to relieve stress. Others find new stress by trying to get their computer adjusted so that it can play games.
Computers have introduced a new kind of tool to the human race; one that can be used for a broader range of applications (in the old sense) than anything that came before them. Computers do not cause stress; people cause stress for themselves or allow outside forces to enhance or reduce their stress. To blame a machine as a source of stress is as stupid as blaming your dinner for a lack of taste.
-JemTechnology encourages stress: Sitting on the office chair in the cubicle in front of a monitor is not the best way to let those muscles relax and blood flow through your body. Unfortunately, if I am in the middle of working on some problem or complex stuff, I am too involved to stand up and take a walk or something.
Technology relieves stress: During natural breaks through my workday it's easier for me now to go to TheOnion, Google News or Slashdot and just take a mental break. Instant messaging is yet another distraction that can be bothersome sometimes, but generally allows you to communicate with a bunch of people you know and feel like you're in the middle of a friendly conversation.
Before email was widespread outside the academia, most of the interaction with your customers would be by phone, which if you're a developer can be a PITA, cause when the phone rings you have to stop whatever you're doing to take care of that immediately.
Nowadays I found myself dealing w/ customers thorough mostly email and (sometimes) IM, and it is so much easier to ignore it while on a coding rage and say deal with it once every hour. Customers still get a quick feedback and I can organize myself better.
Pretty interesting topic you have chosen, and one that not many people even think about. I know that I have not thought about this, or at least, not in this sense.
/. of course.
As any normal individual, I have a certain level of stress in my life. Both at work with a boss that refuses to recognize my contributions, and at home dealing with the teenager of the house who refuses to accept my authority.. for the most part, I would say that the technology in my house (3 servers, 1 desktop and 1 laptop, all mine!@#!@$) relieves some of this stress and tension. I love to sit down in front of my computer and play xpatience or pacman after an argument, and at work, I love to spend my day reading
So even though in these scenarios computers help relieve the stress, there are situations where the technology creates a lot more stress than we need, such is the case when things don't work as advertised.. or when that hardware keeps failing but you cannot duplicate it.. or maybe when no matter what you try, you can't get that program running/compiled..
So I would think that depending on the type of work that you do on your system, it is either a stress reliever or a stress source..
---
Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
This isn't the evolution of technology in the workplace. It's the evolution of stupidity in the user. At least what you mention about GUI apps for people who can't follow directions and web applications for people with broken browsers.
Well, since I've been working in computers the whole time, computers themselves haven't made my life any less stressful. But some of the advances have helped.
For example, back in college, I supported a computer lab that didn't have a LAN or any hard drives. All of the original PCs had boot disks, and invariably, some student would take the boot disk, remove the little piece of tape off the write protect tab, and save their term paper to the boot disk. Then, they'd wonder why they couldn't find it a week later, on a different computer. Nowadays, those people are all in management at major software companies, mostly in the American southwest, but they can keep their files on shared drives, so they don't lose them, except when they click on attachments in Outlook.
The main technology that has made things less stressful has been quality search engines. It used to be really hard to figure out if a student had plagerized a paper - now, I know they all have. But seriously, now I can just type a few words in a search engine and figure out where they got their ideas.
A counter example: cell phones. Back when they were expensive, had short battery lives, and lousy coverage, I could actually go to a movie, a park, or a religious service without being called. Sure, its nice to be able to sit on hold with AAA if my car dies on the highway, but I could do with being a little less accessible the rest of the time.
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
New information technologies only add to stress. The more up-to-date information you have, the more you are requested to be up-to-date. The mails have a tendency to arrive at the same time, and you are considered rude, or worse, improductive, if you leave them a long time without answering. The more ways you have to comunicate, the bigger are your chances to be interrupted at the worst possible moment (think cell phone). The easier the communication is, the easier it's to consider that you can work everywhere, home, plane, traffic jam...
The demands on your time and attention only grow with technology, and so stress grows. It's a bit of an edge example, but I've been a stock investor for the last 20 years, and it was much more peaceful when I only could check the quotes once a day in the morning papers.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I have been recently promoted. And I am now doing less technical stuff and more organizational stuff :) Guess what? Technical stuff is much less stressful... You are just doing your stuff and that is it.
I had someone pass me a copy of a magazine article once that described how much computer support (tech, web, etc) staff actually dislike taking vacation.
Why? because it's one of the few jobs where the work stacks up so much, that 5 minutes after you get back from vacation - regardless of how relaxing or fun it was - you're right back to the same (or greater) level of frustration and work stress that you had before you left....
After having been in the computer tech and internet world (support, as well as development), I can honestly say that I agree with this - especially for tech staff that are in smaller companies or offices where there isn't anyone to really cover your work while you're gone....
Worrying works!! 99% of all the stuff I worry about never happens
If it works, it's invisible. Nobody's stressed out by indoor plumbing or electric light.
Our lives are full of technology that doesn't work. Stress is when you're on deadline and the copier breaks down.
Computers, as currently implemented in the most widespread configurations, are a nightmare.
I'm a unix sysdamin for a living. Most of the stresses in my life are directly related to technology, largely because I'm responsible for making the technology do what it was supposed to do when it doesn't.
When I get home, I fire up my PC with its whizzy net connection and surf or play Enemy Territory... or perhaps I see what Tivo watched for me, or pop in a DVD.
When I have time off, I like to travel-- car, airplane, boat, whatever.
It seems to me that technology may be the main cause of my stress, but it's just as large a reducer of stress in my life. What fun would a vacation be if I couldn't go somewhere else and see it? (and shoot pictures of it with my digital camera?) How insane would I be by now if I couldn't come home and blow off steam by blowing up your command post?
But then, what's technology, anyhow? Sure I enjoy a good book now and again, too. But even that took mass-production of paper and electric lighting to do... Does that count?
Technology has the potential to modify our expectations in almost every area of our lives. It changes our thoughts about safety. It changes our relationship to time. It changes how we expect others to communicate (whether we communicate that way or not - we are frequently hypocrites) What's more significant, is that it does not do this to us alone, it does it to everyone around us as well, so that our employer expects different things, our spouses, our schools, etc. Many times, the expectations that change are not reasonable at all.
Case in point:
I remember when I was growing up (12-16 years ago), my family lived in a very rural area. On Saturdays my mother would go into town for groceries and general shopping. She would be gone for about 3 hours. Occasionally, depending on how many places she went, how much she bought, if she went all the way into a town with a mall, she would be gone for 5 to 6 hours. She often forgot to tell my father she would be gone that long. On times like that, when she was gone for more than four hours, my father and I would step outside to look for her (this was irrational, as we could see about half a mile down the road, nevertheless we did it) and comment about how long she had been gone. We would look out the window more and more frequently as she was gone longer and longer. I know my father worried, but there wasn't much you could do short of getting in the truck and driving toward town. There were no cell phones (or if there were, we did not have one, and there were no cell towers around our house)
Flash-forward to today and you see a very different response to these "where are they?" situations. I've seen people dial someone's cell phone number over and over for hours trying to get hold of them. I've pretty much done the same thing myself, when I've been worried about my wife. When you do finally get hold of them, you are emotionally drained, relieved, and a little bit angry.
"Are you, OK!!!?" you demand of them.
"I had the cell phone turned off," they say, or, "It was in my purse and I didn't hear it ring." They even seem a bit puzzled by your concern. In your mind, they were stranded somewhere, or kidnapped, or worse.
My point (and I'm sorry for the long ramble) is that technology isn't exactly the culprit here, it's the way we let it change what we expect. The ability to reach out and touch someone no matter where they are makes us fear the worse when it ceases to be possible.
I think there are plenty of other similar relationships between technology and expectation, but I'll let someone else look at them, my lunch break is almost over.
--
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Managing people is stressful because - at worst - you're being bitched at by both your bosses and your subordinates the whom you're supposed to care about as a "good manager".
The owls are not what they seem
I don't worry about my next meal, or being the next meal of a predator.
.44 inch holes in him without breaking a sweat, then call someone miles away to collect the body without even raising my voice.
I never want for clean water.
I have clothes that will protect me from nearly any weather conditions I am likely to encounter.
I have a mode of transportation that can easily take me from place to place at 100 miles per hour, in total comfort.
I expect to live to fully twice the age I would expect absent technology.
In spite of my "unnatural" long life I expect my shelter to last even longer . . . unless the land becomes more valuable than the building on it.
If anyone comes into that shelter to take what I have I can poke
I like technology. Makes life much less nasty, brutish, and short.
-Peter
PS: I anxiously await a counter-argument about car accidents, chemical food preservatives, and chemical warfare.
An extra point if you refrain from mentioning President Bush. Half a point if you mention him, but manage to refer to him by a proper name and/or title.
-P
Public surveys are nothing new, especially when it comes to higher learning.... When you get right down to it, education is about getting more done with less effort. No matter which path this researcher takes, either in private study or through public survey, his results will be inconclusive. When results are inconclusive, why bother with theory and intense study? I'd phone this one in too, if I were him. Or, perhaps, choose a different topic.
There's no question that contact with living things is a stress reducer. Plants, animals, and even other human beings. Machines can't really do that for me.
Granted I only mean physical contact. Having to deal with the needs of said living things is another story.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Often I'll look up from one of my screens and realize that my entire body is tense and I haven't taken a full breath in what must be a couple of hours. Between sitting at a computer all day, listening to the radio in my car, and turning the t.v. on at home, I can often spend an entire day under technology's spell. Every now and then I'll come up out of the technotrance and just sit or putter around for a couple of hours with all of the post-lightbulb inventions switched off and feel myself returning to the real world.
It seems I must unplug myself for at least a few hours a day to recharge.
As far as IT is concerned, it is *not* stressful.
Nobody dies when you foul something up. It doesn't affect a whole lot, maybe some company's profit margin, or delivery of some merchandise.
Try being an airplane mechaninc, where you are held criminally liable for every corpse related to something that breaks if you've signed off on it.
Maybe a fire fighter, where when you don't do your job correctly people die.
Policeman, when you fail to do your job, you die, innocent people die...
Compared to these, IT is a cakewalk.
And yeah, I know that IT has a strong influence in many of these fields, but it is abstracted from the first-hand death inherent in each.
Truth be told, I find the human part of technology to be more stressful than the technology itself. The gadgets I have around me are tools. The people I have around me are demands. "Get this done by the next trade show! Long term impact of this be damned!"
Maybe I'm oversimplifing a bit. I just find the tappity tap at my keyboard parts of the day to be the most serene for me. Boy do I hate when the phone rings...
"Derp de derp."
Sounds like you have stress due to a shitty job, not due to technology.
I have three computers here, a couple projects, customer calls and am in charge of network security. Yet I don't have any stress. I have priorities, and I follow them. I too sometimes work overtime, but on my own terms...if I can't work overtime, I just say I can't. Obviously if there's so much work that they need you to stay late to do it, they need you, period.
A lot of stress is caused by poor coping skills. You can say "no," you know. In fact, in my experience the ability to say "no" is important. All my managers have had that skill, and that's how they got their jobs. People respect a helpful worker, but they hate a "yes" man. Just be sure to say "yes" enough to make yourself useful, and there will suddenly be less to bitch about.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Because, in a serendipitous coincidence, on slashdot's front page, you'll find and article titled Timeshifting: Cram More into Life.
If you read the description on the front page, you'll find a person who's seeking to use technology to its fullest to push out all the "dead space" in his life.
Eventually, there's nothing that technology can't provide. That is, the only thing technology can't provide is nothing.
I'd argue that, on occasion, people need a little nothing -- quiet, distractionless, reflecting time that you could call 'down' time -- and we're getting less and less of it.
In fact, we are so used to getting no down time that we don't even know what we're missing. All this distraction is like a diet of fast food: tastes good at the time, but nutritionally deficient, if not outright destructive.
But maybe I'm just old fashioned.
"It's an erotic, spectacular scene that captures the thrusting, violent, vibrant world Bohemian spirit..."
Assuming you were driving and your cell phone came on and you were suddenly drawn into a conference call, your lack of attention to driving (and possible slowing down to avoid an accident as attention is divided) your apparent change of attitude in driving is observed by other drivers. The change lanes to get around you, or sit there and put up with it (possibly stewing over the situation) other drivers shift to accomodate, and so on. Perhaps time at work, to keep your job, places stress upon the family and how they interact with others. And so on.
It does seem that KISS has been thrown out the window, to make life easier for someone, somewhere, but a lot of people are being put upon to make that happen. Maybe someone is suffering because they've slaved away under stress to give you the tools and devices you depend upon. Is more actually getting done, or is technology simply a circular treadmill with several people on it at once?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So your stress level has gone up because the company you work for has decided to lower the stress level of their customers, who wanted GUIs with on-screen help, intuitive interfaces, and the like. So the company has decided that the people who pay them should have less stress, while the people who they pay can handle a little more.
Sorry, but it seems pretty reasonable to me.
- The Amazina Llama
Microsoft thinks you are less intelligent than a nematode worm.
No. MS thinks that their program is so complex, the average office user could use a mini-AI to help them figure it out.
And they're right. Most folk who use office don't care about the program's features--they just want to get whatever they're doing done.
For instance, you assume that everyone who ownas a computer is completely capable of using it. This really isn't the case. I know relatives who are completely literate, good people who use clippy to quick search help things. (1/4 times, it ends in a phone call to me seeing if I can help.) But, just because YOU are insulted by Clippy doesn't mean he doesn't help thousands of other people (and save me dozens of questions from my non-computer savvy uncle and grandparents). It says nothing of their intelligence, just their familiarity with computers.
I disagree. This issue is likely more related to the expansion of the user base. I think it's unreasonable to expect every technology user to become an expert; especially considering the proliferation of technology in our everyday lives. For a technology tool to be useful it must also contain a certain amount of intuitive capabilities. Intuition is generally derived from past experience. Since developers and systems designers typically have control over what and how information is presented to the user it is not always practical to expect the user to just "know" what to do next. Perhaps they could burn time reading the poorly constructed directions that the developer created but the reality is usually such that the user just needs to get a task accomplished. Not to become an expert in the technology?
btw...a broken browser is a relative observation. Firfox is "broken" to me when I view certain pages that work fine in IE and Netscape.
Technology is not limited to computers and electronic things. Technology by definition is the practical application of knowledge. It's the shear number of "practical applications of knowledge" that have me feeling overwhelmed, stressed and out of control. So many applications of technology have left me feeling naive and ignorant despite my best attempts to keep up and the fact that I once was considered to be on top of these things. Now I have to be even more concerned with the possibility that what I learned and applied yesterday being considered foolish and flawed tomorrow.
Stress is a reaction to an environmental pressure. The proliferation of new technology certainly has increased mental and physical environment pressures. Someone or something will be affected and therefore stress will always be an absolute consequence of new technology.
This is still an example of how job choice affects stress, not how technology affects it.
I should also point out I took a pay cut to take my current job. Last year, even with the extra income from Webslum I made 10% less than I did in 2002. But I had SO much less stress, a better relationship with my wife, and a much more positive outlook. No more shitty black metal poetry in my journal! I'm even starting to save money again.
In summation: I'm sorry your job sucks, but you're the one who took it. Even in a bad market, there are stress free options, but many of them require hard decisions. Like telling your CEO that a product can't be kludged together without becoming unmanagable and requiring a massive amount of work a year down the road. Which is, of course, the sort of thing a good architect tells his boss up front, rather than slipping dates and looking like a fool.
BTW: Even if they eventually want custom features, most of the time, your clients will be perfectly satisfied with what you have now, FOR now, and you can slowly work desired features into the main codebase. This is the ONLY way I've seen customer driven software work. Otherwise, you're stuck supporting multiple code bases, and custom hacking EVERYTHING from here on. Besides, I guarantee your client will need a few weeks (or months, depending on the product) to learn and utilize the current features. In that time, you could engineer a great solution, as opposed to delivering a crappy one right now.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It's not just the fact that people cause stress regardless of technology, or that they are stupid. Technology creates stress through people by forcing them to rely on complicated things--things more complicated than they can understand. So when your boss screams at you for not having the server up, it's not because he only thinks he can't get by without it, he actually can't get by without it.
That reliance on complex, unnatural mechanisms is a breeding ground for stress because, hey, complex, unnatural things are more prone to breaks. And unlike more physical things (say, compare a piece of paper to outlook), what you can expect to break changes with each version of the program, operating system, computer, and user.
Complexity does cause stress. People are just doing the best they can. The technological enviornment people work in, however, causes them to appear stupid.
And, of course, some people actually are just stupid.