PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

A column in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, Freedoms from an Age of Non-Stop Botherers, got me to thinking about the pros and cons of today’s technology.

The columnist, Joe Queenan, worries that technology bothers him nearly all the time.

“American society has now turned into the house I grew up in,” he writes in a reference to his father who always bothered him. “People never stop invading my mental space. In a restaurant, the waiter keeps popping by to ask if everything is all right ‘so far,’ ominously implying that something is lurking inside the chicken parm that could make things go south in a hurry.

“On the flight to LAX, the pilot constantly interrupts the movie to announce that the plane is cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet and should be able to make up the 15 minutes wasted on the runway.

“Bogus outfits constantly call, purporting to raise money for veterans, cops, political prisoners, rain forests. Telemarketing robots check in to see if I want to repair my devastated credit-card rating or escape the clutches of the IRS. Cultural organizations phone to ask if I’m aware that ticket prices cover only a fraction of the costs of running the Philharmonic, the art museum, the Amazon. ‘I am aware,’ I reply. ‘You just called 20 minutes ago.’

“The internet, invented to facilitate the flow of information, now merely facilitates the flow of interruption. The time has come to add new ‘freedoms’ to the admirable list of four offered by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Jan. 6, 1941. His were freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear.”

Here’s Queenan’s list.

Freedom From Algorithms

Freedom From People Who Make Annoying Noises For a Living [Like leaf blowers or Jim Cramer, the trash-talking stock purveyor on TV.]

Freedom From Pop-Ups

Freedom From Emails Announcing Not-to-Be-Repeated 36-hour Sales on Dirt-Cheap Flights to Atlanta, Duluth and Houston

Freedom From Scams That Insult My Intelligence

Freedom From Follow-up Inquiries by Third-Party Sellers

Freedom From Disconcerting Error Messages

Freedom From Newsmaking Tweets. [Yeah, you know who we’re talking about here.  Just stop. Take a day off.  Let the rest of us breathe.]

Technology, of course, carries a host of benefits, as well. To counteract Queenan’s concern about “bothering,” here is my partial list of pros that benefit my lifestyle.

• You can read a host of material on-line, including newspapers, though, as a former reporter, I still like to hold papers in my hands.
• You can get important alerts quickly, including, for example about adverse weather or bad traffic.
• You can engage in more interactions with friends, or even expand a list of friends, by using Facebook, Instagram or Linked-In. [This must be done in balance so it does not get in the way of personal contact.]
• You can get access to huge trove of information on local, state and federal governments…if you want such information. [As a now-retired state lobbyist, I would have loved to have information on line, including, for example, for the thousands of pieces of legislation that are introduced every legislative session. As it was, we had to maintain huge filing cabinets of all the paper. It was just near the end of my tenure that the Capitol in Salem gained wi-fi service, which made work much easier and quicker – and even meant the end of our Salem-based office.]
• You can use hand-held I-phone GPS capability in your car to navigate your way around unfamiliar territory instead of getting lost or relying on handwritten notes.
• And, for me as dedicated golfer – read the intro to this blog – I and my friends can sign up on-line for tee times, which is much easier that it used to be with many phone calls.

So, who is right? Joe Queenan or me. Well, both. If used properly and in balance, technology can be more than a bother, though interruptions occur for all of us. For me, I prefer to focus on how technology can be an aid to a more organized lifestyle.