Telecommunting and White Collar Conservatives

 Telecommunting and white collar conservatives? Say what? If you are a boomer, you've seen some very interesting cultural phases in your time. Most people don't recognize the term 'white collar conservative'. You will see the rise and remarkable cultural shift of telecommuting too. In its day, 'white collar conservative' was the popular tag for the 'business class'. Some of us actually remember the offices with white collar shirts only and that stirring moment when someone actually dared a different color. Yes ties were still required and hush the very thought of 'business casual' which would not appear for yet another twenty years. However this was also the time of another primitive device called a 'typewriter'.. whose days were numbered even as the wonder of the new back space erasing key saved the lives of many a stenographer. Yes culture, and lifestyle, and behavior can be quite unpredictable with our random brew of technology, emotions, and information. Occasionally our shifts in living do follow environmental needs and do respond to cultural norms. Who would have thought after our fifty year experiment with 'urbanization' we might actually have neighborhoods where you can buy some fresh vegetables just down the street? Or buy a jar of peanut butter within a short walk to the store? Or... 'gasp'.... visit a small clinic, in your neighborhood without depending on a thirty minute drive? What does this have to do with telecommuting? A lot. As we change our work habits, as we implement new technology, as we all regularly contemplate in our collective unconscious the foreboding weight of national deficits, dwindling energy resources, environmental challenges, and terrorism, we all know only tremendous change can make the necessary difference. Telecommuting will make a tremendous difference in ways we simply can't imagine. If one single cultural shift allowed us to reduce our energy usage by say, thirty percent, and this same cultural shift reduced our emissions by thirty percent, and this same shift let us spend thirty percent more of our time doing our jobs instead of cursing one another in rush hour traffic, arriving at work ready to do battle instead of work within a team framework to create new ideas and improve our efficiency; if all these shifts occurred, then cultural miracles could occur. That's quite a list, quite a list for telecommuting but we have before us challenges and pitfalls that our current way of managing the planet simply don't address. We can't continue living the way we do now without sailing over the edge so to speak. The host of changes that will happen together are upon us now, yet some hold back. How can people work together if they 'telecommute'? How will there be any discipline if they never see each other? In most offices, workers rarely see each other anyway. With phones and email and 'teleconferences', we already telecommute, we just spend a couple hours of the day driving our cars to and from the office first. The same discipline that anyone exercises to get his or her job done without having a manager sit by their side will be the same disciple used when working from home. At the end of the week, the same accountability is in place. Yes, the same boomers who giggled at the 'Jetsons' talking to one another over their video, can now purchase their 'televideo' for Christmas this year... and search it with Google! Have that, Jetsons! Already when we watch the news, we realize the several people we see having a conversation and explaining the world to us, are actually hundreds of miles apart. This Christmas, we can do it too! It is impossible to predict culture and exactly how changes appear. The telecommuting solution could easily manifest local 'stations' where needs of day care and the predominately 'two worker family' of the boomer generation embrace. It certainly won't create a life where everyone works from home... but we do know one thing. We do know we can't continue living the way we do now... and wouldn't it make Henry Thoreau turn over in his grave if our 'high tech' solutions, and dramatic cultural experiments, were simply a return to a simpler life style, self-reliance, and living within our means. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5540566