Category Archives: Social Networking

Turn off your smart-phone: Reduce stress

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I’ve believed for some time that many of us are causing ourselves harm by the way we are constantly connected, and also constantly working.

RydalA new report by The British Psychological Society says that we need to be turning off our smart phones to reduce our stress:

The study established the existence of a helpful-stressful cycle; it found that a device is typically acquired to help an individual manage their work load. However, once the individual starts to use their smart phone the work load management benefits are displaced by the pressure to keep abreast with their new expanded virtual social life. The more an individual becomes stressed and worried the more compulsive behaviours such as checking will occur.

Richard Balding advises organisations to consider this problem seriously:

“Smart phone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking. Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people’s temptation to check their devices.”

Back in 2009 I wrote about My New Fear of Working from Home which highlighted a similar cycle.

My smartish-phone is set to turn itself off in the evening and I try my best to leave it that way.

Via Lifehacker

Teenagers still prefer face-to-face

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In an age of highly connected teenagers you’d think, according to the popular stereotype, that young people were living their lives as bedroom recluses unable to be parted from Facebook.

GraffitiA recent study by Ericsson ConsumerLab of US teenagers paints a different story:

In an era of online social networking, it may come as a surprise that teenagers’ preferred form of communication doesn’t rely on technology. Asked what form of communication they would miss most if it were taken away, the vast majority of respondents replied “face-to-face.” Less than half as many said they would miss texting the most, putting it in second place. Meanwhile, Facebook use came in as only the fourth most popular, after talking on the mobile phone.

Graphically it’s quite stark:

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The report goes on to say that although teenagers have a huge array of communications available to them they see them as tools to create real-life interactions. I quite liked the diagram of how Ericcson envisaged how these tools fit into the Teenage Dating Timeline:

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Speaking as a father of a couple of UK teenagers it correlates quite closely with the way that I see interactions happening around here.

A fuller summary of the report is here.

Your updates aren’t that important

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I have a rule, I’ll stop talking the moment someone looks at their device.

In Search of JimmyAs soon as I’m aware I’ve lost their attention I stop. If someone starts tapping on their screen or keyboard I’m likely to leave the room.

Let’s face it, most of what people say on social media isn’t so important that it can’t wait for a few minutes, so why do people feel such a sense of urgency about it?

The simple answer is that they’re not really thinking about what they are doing. They’re just carrying out a learnt response to a stimulus. The stimulus is the beep or vibration, the response is almost automatic.

The real problem comes when the learnt response isn’t just rude it’s dangerous. I’ve watched pedestrians take out their phone half way across a road. I’ve witnessed people drawn in while driving and cycling. I’ve dropped items I was carrying to respond to the calling. Clearly I’m not the only one thinking about it as an issue:

Writing Less to Write More

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Has anyone noticed that I’ve written less recently?

Has anyone noticed that I’ve written more recently?

Grandad takes a bathDepending upon what you read you may have noticed different things.

I took a look at the amount of time I spent writing interrupt driven content on Twitter and Facebook and decided that it wasn’t the best use of my time.

I found that I was spending a significant amount of time checking for updates so I could respond to updates. All I was doing was feeding my ADT.

I decided that it was time for a bit of housekeeping. My aim was to replace quantity with quality. Rather than writing hundreds of 140 character interactions, I want to write more considered, longer interactions of a higher quality.

So I’ve taken a few simple steps:

  • I’ve removed the Facebook and Twitter apps from my BlackBerry.
  • I’ve hidden Tweetdeck on my laptop, so I have to go and consciously choose to start it.
  • I’m limiting myself to one session on Twitter and one on Facebook a day.
  • I’ve made a conscious effort to maintain a list blog topics to improve the quality of what I write there.
  • Facebook and Twitter are banned after 8:00pm
  • Although Google+ looks interesting I’ve resisted the urge to add to my list of interruptions.

The result is that I’ve written a lot more on my blog and managed to calm down my ADT quite a bit. A bit like a reformed smoker, I’ve started to notice how bad some people are. I’ve read a lot more. As well as being more productive on my blog I’ve been more productive in a number of other areas too. I’ve also been sleeping better and increased the amount of exercise I do.

Not surprisingly, the number of visitors on my blog has grown significantly too, but that’s not why I’m doing it.

Privacy and Attention Dimensions: Groups

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"If you want to control privacy and attention – just put them in a group" seems to be the answer that most of the socials media (and other) sites are moving towards.

Visiting Vernon StumpyEach of them has a subtly, or even dramatically, different way of implementing groups, but fundamentally they are all trying to do the same thing.

The basic philosophy is that we can put people into different buckets and the bucket is then linked to different levels of privacy and attention.

The main reason for the buckets is that they provide a way of simplifying the administration of the system.

In most instances the group configuration that most people use is quite simple. Flickr, for instance, doesn’t even let you create your own groups, it gives you three – contacts, contacts that are friends, contacts that are family – that’s it. People need to fit into one of these buckets if you are going to control what pictures people can see. Google+ has circles which are nicely animated, but basically do the same thing. You can have as many Circles as you like, and you can put people into those circles in order to control what people see and what you see about people. Twitter’s notion of a group is the list, but they only help attention management, they don’t do anything for privacy.

There are a number of challenges with this situation.

The first challenge is the most obvious issue – there is no way to manage groups across the various services. If I want a family bucket on Flickr and Facebook I need to create it, and administer a group on Facebook and another group on Flickr. If you really wanted to get organised about the groups that you use you would spend a significant amount of time administering all of them.

Another challenge, and the most fundamental one, is that socially a group is quite a fluid thing, and the fluid has different densities. My example here is an event with a group of friends. The group for the event starts off as the group of friends who are invited. The group related to the event doesn’t stay like that though, as people choose whether they are coming, or not, the group changes, but it doesn’t change in the same way for everyone. Some people who are not attending may still want to be told about the group as the event occurs, others don’t want to know anything. If we are running the event for the group of friends we will know the difference between the people to keep in the loop, and the people to leave out. The members of the group have changed, but so has the type of connection that people have with the group.

Groups might help us in administration terms, but I don’t think that groups really give us what we need.

Also see: Privacy and Attention Dimensions

Privacy and Attention Dimensions

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I’ve found it quite interesting recently to watch as a number of social media sites, Facebook, Flickr, G+, have introduced changes in the ways that privacy is controlled and attention is raised.

Grandad wonders whether the old computer will run VistaMost of us have an instinctive approach to both privacy and attention. We tell certain things to certain people, and not to others. I doubt many of us could, in most instances, describe this instinctive privacy by a set of "if…then…" statements. Most of us have a similarly instinctive approach to attention, we know which messages require us to raise someone’s attention directly, and which are just noise.

There are, however, a set of people for whom this instinctive approach doesn’t work. All of us suffer times when we get the privacy and attention approach wrong. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have passed on a piece of information I thought was public to find that it’s pure gossip. But there are also a set of people who’s privacy and attention framework doesn’t work the same as the rest of society, for some people this manifests itself as autism.

Today’s online communication mechanisms are a bit like dealing with an autistic child. So many things that are shouted in public should really be said in private. There are certainly things that aren’t said as loudly as they should be too. One of the major complaints of any online system is the amount of noise they generate trying to get our attention – "no I don’t care that you’ve just bought a sheep".

We try to apply a set of physical world metaphors to our online privacy but the current approaches still require us to think about who we want to see what when we post it. I think we still have a long way to go before online systems get closer to being aligned to our privacy and attention instincts.. 

There are a whole set of dimensions to privacy and attention that I don’t think we yet really understand, and we certainly haven’t done enough to codify them yet.

It was with that in mind that I read about the new capability on Flickr to create geofences. Geofences enable you to define a privacy level for pictures taken in a certain location. This is a new dimension to the privacy debate as far as I can tell. I have, as an example, set pictures that are taken near my home to be private to Friends and Family only (no that’s not the location of my home):

It might be a new dimension, and add to the toolset available, but it’s still not really how I think my privacy instincts work.

Facebook has always had an attention problem which most people don’t realise you can adjust already by turning off certain notifications. There latest approach to tackling this problem is the new lists feature. I say new, but it feels very much like the way that Google+ works, although I’m sure they’d argue differently. Again, it’s another dimension to breaking down the attention problem, but I still don’t think that my personal attention instincts work that way.

One privacy dimension where I think we are nowhere near codifying our real world experience is in the area of memory. I think that we are only just reaching the point where we are realising what a good thing our ability to forget is. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like the internet to forget certain things about me.

Naked on the Fourth Plinth

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In London’s famous Trafalgar Square there are a set of plinths with sculptures on them, there is also another plinth – known as the fourth plinth – which doesn’t have anything permanent on it.

Jimmy and Granddad visit Alnwick GardensThis fourth plinth has, in recent years, been used to host all sorts of art projects and installations.

The installation that gained, probably, the most public interest was Anthony Gormley’s One & Other.

In this project people were invited to apply for a sixty minute slot on the fourth plinth. The intention was to “create a collective portrait of humanity”, this translated into people doing all sorts of things for their sixty minutes of fame. Many people chose to carry plaques with a message on them others performed an activity, all of them were videoed.

The people who gained the most fame were, not surprisingly, the people who chose to spend some, or all, of their time naked.

I sometimes ask myself the question when I’m posting something to Twitter or Facebook or even this blog:

If I were stood naked on the fourth plinth and the whole of London were watching would I still be comfortable saying this?

There are a lot of people who could do with a similar checkpoint before they write and post.

(The reality of posting to Twitter or Facebook (or any other ‘social’ site) is actually a whole lot scarier than standing on the fourth plinth with a plaque but for some reason the scariness doesn’t translate into caution)

Micro-celebrity

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The other day I wrote about Social Currency and some of the ways that we could potentially be measured for our online presence.

BorrowdaleOne of the things that I’ve been pondering while playing with these different tools has been the social impact of these changes.

This kind of change always has extremes and today I’ve been reading about some of those through an article by Danah Boyd (apophenia) called “Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization“.

This article comments on an article in Rolling Stone about a 14-year-old teen in Florida who has created an online persona called Kiki Kannibal.

You’ve probably never heard of Kiki Kannibal but she’s created quite a stir in her sphere of influence, but it’s not all been good.

In many ways she’s created a level of online celebrity without any of the protection that wider celebrities often receive and the internet can be a very unforgiving place.

Danah makes some really interesting observations about the growing “attention economy” and our ability to deal with “micro-celebrity” and in particular the social and cultural capabilities available to us:

Widespread celebritization is the flipside of the “attention economy” coin and I think that we have a lot of deep thinking to do about the implications of both of these. Both are already rattling society in unexpected ways and I’m not convinced that we have the social, psychological, or cultural infrastructure to manage what will unfold. Some people will become famous or rich. Others will commit suicide or drown attempting to swim in these rocky waves. This doesn’t mean that we should blockade the technologies that are emerging, but it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them.

I agree.

We have a long way to go before we understand what we are doing to ourselves in an online world and how we deal with it.

(Charlie pointed out Klout as another way of measuring your social connectedness. It’s interesting to see the score of people I connect to)

Social Currency

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I’ve been playing with a couple of tools recently, both of them focussed on assessing someone’s social value.

Williamson ParkThe first one is Empire Avenue which is an online market game where you can buy and sell shares in other people’s social media presence.

My share value is currently running around 25 eaves up from a starting price of around 17 eaves. Not a bad profit Smile.

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Your value is influenced by a number of things but primarily by your online social interactions.

I’ve now got 8 share holders too who’ve made some good eaves out of my share price rise. My portfolio is doing quite well too.

The other tool is My Web Career which seeks to measure your online presence in terms of a ‘Career Score’:

A Career Score is an indication of the strength of an individuals career brand, professional accomplishments, and relationships.

Here’s my current score:

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It would appear from this that I’m not doing too badly at creating an online presence Smile.

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There’s also some really interesting visualisations of my connections which have been quite interesting to nosey around. Who knew that they were connected to them?

Both of these tools raise some interesting questions about the value and the perils of the read-write web and social media.

We all need to remember that our online presence is available around the world and to millions of eyes.

We each need to decide what kind of presence we want to have online.

We also need to realise that our online presence is a differentiator in the workplace with both our customers, employers and potential future employers. It’s a social currency.

(If the truth be known – I thought twice before I wrote this post because I wasn’t sure that it was a good thing to write)