Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

As the Rainy Day team prepares to celebrate its first blogging anniversary (Thursday, 1 May), the time is right for reflecting on what we've learned during this past year of daily diarying. Our thoughts at this point are very much influenced by the ideas of Fabio Sergio, a design theorist working in Milan.

In an essay he wrote back in January called "always-on people", Sergio examined the forces, positive and negative, that drive the networked society. Central to the piece is the difference between "information anxiety" and "interaction anxiety". The former can be defined as the constant desire to find that final piece of the data puzzle that makes sense of the whole, while interaction anxiety, on the other hand, is rooted in fear of being cut off from the network, and is related to the stress of managing our interactions with family, friends, content and devices.

Terms such as "multi-tasking", "continuous partial attention" and "cyber serfdom" crop up in Sergio's essay, prompting this observation:

"As our needs for faster and faster PCs drove producers to develop chips that could do more things at once, no one probably ever thought that the day would come when we would be expected to constantly do the same. Even though I will gladly admit that human beings have always been great at multitasking, as any mother will easily attest, what has changed now is the speed and frequency at which we are required to think and act, and not necessarily in this order. We have adopted a multi-tasking-oriented mindset because the message constantly whispered by the devices that increasingly mediate our social relationships has ended up permeating our very own way of thinking."

Because always-on devices make for always-on people, Sergio is concerned about "the disappearing boundaries between work and play, between our professional and personal life." What happens to relationships, he wonders, when they move from being episodic to always-on? Nothing good, he fears.

"Will we end up living our social lives between applications, like a SETI screen-saver, using the time left by our exceeding processing power? How long will it take to build trust, or even love for always-on people? How will we over-clock our social processors? How well do you already know the names and numbers stored on your devices?"

Now, to blogging, the subject that gave rise to this post. The dangers of living lives that are a "continuous partial effort", can be seen in how blogs are evolving, says Fabio Sergio:

"Their evolution these days seems to follow a path that I would dub "from Thinklogs to Linklogs". To make a long story short, quite a few influential Webloggers have lately started stripping the links contained in their posts of all the linguistic tissue that used to hold them together. Read: their ideas. Some keep the most updated links in a "special post" that gets frequently republished. Others have been looking at ways to automate the way links are published on their pages. I've also noticed a number of people who often post to themselves, increasingly relying on connectivity to freeze in time all that they can?t possibly read on the fly, or remember afterwards. Some have just started to show signs of weariness."

Sergio has an enviable knack of coining phrases, and his "breadcrumbs to nowhere" is a gem. With it, he leads into the essay's conclusion:

"Just like anyone else maintaining one of these pages I will attest to the effort it takes to update regularly and meaningfully a Blog, but once more the real value in this case is in the path and not in the destination. How much care and time-consuming dedication does it take to ease others into unknown lands rather than just pointing the way and letting them find their own? Will we still have the time to be guides, travel mates?"

Rainy Day has taken the time to blog and Fabio Sergio has taken the time to assess the impact of such actions. Together, we're attempting to make sense of our world in the hope that those breadcrumbs lead somewhere.

Diarist of the day: Sir Hugh Casson, 28 April 1980

"Invalid Children's Exhibition by Norman St. John Stevas. A moving and desperate occasion. One of the prize-winners, sitting in his chair like a piece of crumpled-up paper thrown into a wastepaper basket, emits regular whoops of (I hope) pleasure. The pride of the parents, teachers, helpers in the achievements of their charges brings tears to the eyes."