Upfront
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
Not all like it hot BY
Amelia Lester
A
D R E A M D E S T I N AT I O N
Swell Lodge CHRISTMAS ISLAND, AUSTRALIA
Located inside the national park on the west side of Christmas Island, this remote eco-chalet features floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the vast Indian Ocean. Guests can take a guided walk along a freshwater stream through a deep green jungle to an ocean panorama with a natural infinity pool. When the tide is right, the ocean rolls into the rock pool, tumbling over the edges and bubbling back up, creating a luxurious natural spa. Sounds pretty swell. Tatyana Leonov
DOMINIC LORRIMER; ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON LETCH
E AT / D R I N K
YOU DON’T have to be an expert in Sri Lankan cuisine to have a good time at O Tama Carey’s Lankan Filling Station, which is open all day for snacks, meals and drinks. Just tick the boxes on the do-it-yourself menu that features hoppers (bowl-shaped crepes of fermented rice flour and coconut), a chicken curry and these beef pan rolls ($7 each), crisp-crumbed pancakes rolled around sweetly spicy beef mince, with fermented chilli on the side. Jill Dupleix
L ANK AN FILLING STATION 58 RILEY STREET, EAST SYDNEY LANKANFILLINGSTATION.COM.AU
S WE all know, the best scientific studies are those which confirm our existing biases. Red wine makes you live longer; dark chocolate is a health food; exercise is overrated. That sort of thing. And now, a recent Harvard University study has proven what anyone who has ever worked in an open-plan office already knows to be true: they’re terrible! What happened was this: 52 employees at the global headquarters of a Fortune 500 company were outfitted with microphones and a “sociometric badge” which recorded their interactions before and after the office transitioned from cubicles to open plan. The employees’ email and instant messaging use was also monitored. The results were stark. When there were no cubicles, participants spent 73 per cent less time in face-to-face interactions. Meanwhile, their use of email and instant-messaging apps increased by 67 per cent and 75 per cent respectively. Summing up the results, the researchers wrote: “We may be surprised to find a reduction in face-to-face collaboration at work even as we architect transparent, open spaces intended to increase it.” So much for spontaneous brainstorming sessions by the coffee machine. For anyone who’s cocooned themselves with noisecancelling headphones to drown out a noisy co-worker, or avoided an awkward public conversation by sending an email, these findings aren’t much of a surprise. If I were being cynical, I might wonder whether the hullabaloo about open-plan offices enhancing co-operation was merely a smokescreen for cutting costs. What the Harvard study affirms is that privacy is valuable, even necessary. Not because you’d like to gossip about your co-workers all day, but because a semblance of personal space is a reminder that you’re a human, not merely a cog in the corporate machine. Our fundamental need
for privacy has been sacrificed in other realms, too. In parallel with the rise of hot-desking is the way we’ve been encouraged to develop personal brands on social media – and to generate content which companies use to turn a huge profit. (I say this sheepishly, as someone whose wedding had an associated Instagram hashtag.) For a long time, those of us lucky enough not to have extensive Google trails have been seen as fishy, rather than fortunate. There’s a sense that people who seek privacy, online or in real life, have something to hide. But attitudes may be changing. Certainly there’s a backlash to open-plan offices. In the British mockumentary series W1A, which satirises the BBC’s slick corporate culture, hot-desking is exposed for its absurd impracticality. In the
Personal space is a reminder that you’re a human, not merely a cog in the machine. crowded newsroom, there’s never a conference space available, so executives take meetings in over-designed common areas on extremely high stools, or in booths named after war zones. In the brightly coloured dystopia of the modern BBC, doors have become quaint relics of an extravagant past; walls are going the same way. Just as there’s a revolt against open-plan offices, users are also sharing less on Facebook, and leaving Twitter to the trolls. We may be witnessing the advent of a more closed internet – a return to the days when usernames, rather than real names, dominated. The early days of the world wide web were marked by a paranoia about its powers. Think Sandra Bullock in the 1995 film The Net, in which a mysterious floppy disc seems to bring about the demise of her colleagues. Perhaps we’ve come full circle in realising that sharing isn’t always caring, after all. n
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