Managing Technostress in UK Libraries: A Realistic Guide

Abstract

Stress has become the defining malaise of modernity. Until around twenty years ago, the term was used exclusively to refer to the fight or flight mechanism in a specific medical context. Today, however, the word has undergone radical semantic widening. Like nerves in the nineteenth century, is now used by individuals to explain a huge number of maladies and by journalists, advertisers and cultural pundits as a convenient hook upon which to hang any number of social ills. In short, the enemy is everywhere. The social ubiquity of stress is reflected in our everyday parlance: is now commonly used as a verb as well as a noun, as in the popular injunction: don’t stress.