Let’s start with the origin of the evangelist, which is a religious term that describes a person that preaches the word of God and converts people to Christianity. Similar to a Christian Evangelist, an Technology, or Technical Evangelist spreads the word on new technologies and tries to make people use them.

The first technology evangelist was Guy Kawasaki, who worked then for Apple Computer. The role of this often unofficial job is to pursue people in buying and using new technology, along with creating cult like fanaticism over a certain product.

Now that you’ve understand what a Technology Evangelist does let’s see what you show know in order to become one. Besides the ability to convince people you need sales and training abilities, because Evangelists are not used only to sell something but also to encourage people inside big organizations to do things in a new way, abandoning old methods.

If you want to know more I recommend you Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or Ideas-And Make a Difference-Using Everyday Evangelism, a great book by Guy Kawasaki, the man who started it all.

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• How computers affect our health

All this sounds ok, but I’m guessing you don’t know what health problems we are exposed to if we use computers too much. A few weeks ago I’ve came across a short list of health problems caused by a geek lifestyle, but I didn’t had time to tell you about them, till today.

So, let’s take them one by one:

• Sleep disorders – insomnia or often awakening during the nights. Cause is frequent use on PC or laptop right after you wake up. Resolution is pretty simple, don’t lay in bad working, just do something that doesn’t stimulate your brain too much.
• Headaches – often caused by improper environment surrounding computer use. Check your screen position, room lighting, chair, glasses.
• Back pain – caused by improper chair sitting position and prolonged absence of back muscles exercises
• Poor attention span – that’s very interesting. We are used to do multitasking, working with different programs at the same time and being concentrated on several points on the screen, when feedback is expected. When we are facing only one task, we get bored faster, we can’t concentrate enough on the singular task. Meetings, when you have to be focus on the discussion is a killer. There isn’t too much you can do to correct this, as your brain takes longer to learn another work pattern.

As you can see, I’ve said “we” several times, as I consider myself an intensive computer user, with more than 10 hours a day of online time. Maybe future will solve those kind of health problems, but I’m not counting on it. I’m now trying to figure out a lifestyle that gets me enough time with my beloved computers without putting my life in danger. What do you think? Do you manage to escape the terrible force of online existence?

Update: if you’re interested in health issues related to computer use you can check this book about How to Be Pain Free and Relieve the Symptoms of Computer Stress Syndrome.

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