The other day I came across a new (to me, anyway) expression: “declarative living”. You can find a quick explanation of it on Squidoo. The example of this to which I was introduced by Kelly is Twitter.

Let’s say it again: “declarative living”. I’m sad to say I’ve never heard so many round things in my life. And me who is so often a second-wave early adopter of new technology too. I really cannot see the point, with a passion. Please someone explain to me the purpose of living in the pockets of someone the other side of the globe who I’ve never met (and likely never will meet) 24/7?

It seems to me this is all about depersonalising and dumbing down everything — the modern opium for the masses — and selling us crap we don’t want or need to keep us occupied and not thinking or meddling with what the “great and the good” want to get up to next. (Iran, anyone?) It is false progress. [There’s a whole new topic on “false stuff”, but that’s for some other time.]

What worries me (possibly even more) is that in the last few months I seem to be turning into a Luddite like my father before me. Only father (who died last year at the age of 86) started being a Luddite before the age of colour TV. [How he never had apoplexy I don’t know as I discovered going through his papers after he died that he had belonged to an organisation against the introduction of digital computers — and this back in about 1970! Then I went on take my career in IT.]

Don’t get me wrong. I love things like flickr, weblogs, conferencing (ah the good old days of bulletin boards; been there since before PC was born!) and IM. I just don’t get this “let’s wear our whole lives on our sleeves all the time” stuff. I mean, why am I interested in real time that Kelly is cooking spaghetti or looking for her boots? Why would anyone be interested except Kelly and maybe the dog? Where does all this stop and privacy start?

But debating this with Kelly and others on her Kellypuffs weblog has made me think more about this. Indeed that is the good thing about the passion being expressed: it does make us think about what we are doing, what we really believe in and what is actually important. And each one of us will come up with different answers to those questions — none of which are intrinsically right or wrong; they’re just right or wrong for us at this time.

I guess where I’m really at is: just because we can do it, doesn’t mean it is worth doing or that we should do it. Developing the technologies may be an interesting (even useful) research exercise, but that doesn’t mean it has to/should be unleashed on the great unwashed as if it were the next best thing to sliced bread.

For me it would be more to the point if the effort the IT industry is putting into all this pseudo-progress-stuff was focused into something actually useful for humanity rather than just generating more CO2 to no purpose.