How long do you think that you spend looking at some form of screen every day?
Television? Laptop? Mobile phone?
According to the New York Times it’s likely to be longer than you think:
In fact, adults are exposed to screens — TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices — for about 8.5 hours on any given day, according to a study released by the Council for Research Excellence on Thursday. TV remains the dominant medium for media consumption and advertising, the study found. The data suggests that computer usage has supplanted radio as the second most common media activity.(Print ranks fourth.)
That’s right 8.5 hours a day.
Even excluding TVs that’s a lot of time, spent on screens at work. So why do we spend so little on the actual screen itself? It’s the primary tool that we use.
I’m constantly amazed when I go around offices to see the way that people are using and abusing the screen that they use all day, every day.
I’ve already written about multiple monitors. If I could communicate one thing to people that I know would radically change their productivity it would be that. But there is more to it than that.
In most organisations that I know screen purchases are tightly controlled. You have to be really special to have anything more than the standard screen. In many ways this control is completely disproportionate to the value that a good screen gives and the relative cost.
The number of people who have cracked or severely scratched mobile phone screens never ceases to amaze.
There are times when I feel like going around with a cleaning cloth and revealing to people the wonders that lurk beneath. Go on, I dare you, clean a screen today.
I’ve spoken to a few people about social networking, and many of them really struggle to understand the “business value” of the types of interactions that social networking technology allows. The following video has some interesting insights for the changing interaction between organisations and customers.
Probably the most interesting quote comes from Scott Monty of Ford:
“We’re not interested in advertising on social networks. It’s about getting in there and interacting with people. Now, more than ever, people can self publish, put up their own content and be there own publishing houses, they have a voice and they expect to be heard. And when a large organisation pays attention to them and starts conversing with them it really lifts the lights for a lot of people”
That’s quite a powerful statement about customer’s changing expectations. The part that struck me, though, was to think about all of the customers that we all have.
I work for an IT service organisation and we are definitely seeing this shift in expectations. It’s no longer acceptable to have a service desk that people phone into, people want to take the relationship much further than that.
I love the TED talks, they are great way of hearing thought provoking ideas presented in a way that is always engaging.
This morning I listened to Stuart Brown talking about why play is vital – no matter your age.
Speaking as a British person, we have a strange relationship with play.
We have invented some of the worlds most popular sports and continue to create new ones, but business is a serious business. And yet, there’s still a lot of business getting done on the golf course.
We all grown when someone asks us to do an “ice breaker”, but I’ve seen people turn into children as they do.
I quite like the concept of the wearable meeting – you’ll need to watch to find out.
There are also interesting thought here for people who work from home and only interact with people on the phone.
What I tend to do is put the TED videos onto my iPod and listen to it in the gym. The audio is often enough, but you also get to sense when there is something interesting to see and can go and have a look.
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