Does the bullet point enhance the story, or destroy the story – the choice is yours.
Many things are best communicated through humour and Rowan Manahan has a great way of communicating the absurdity of much of what I see every day.
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I’m not one of those PowerPoint bashers who blame the tool for the things that people create with it. People need much more help than they currently get with presentation skills. In the hands of a good presenter the tool can make the experience wonderful. I sat in a breakfast session on Saturday morning where a friend amazed us with an overview of the sun. It might not sound like the most exciting subject, but believe me, we were all transfixed. The experience simply wouldn’t have been the same without the wonderful videos and picture, there wasn’t a bullet point in sight. The point that people miss time and time again was that the presentation was complementary to the story, enhancing our experience.
(I suspect my friend wasn’t using PowerPoint, but using Keynote instead, the point still applies though. I’ve seen some pretty dreadful Keynote presentation too)
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.
A 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
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.
A 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:
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:
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.
We have so many choices for communication that it’s easy for us to communicate in the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
I doubt I’m unique in the variety of places that I interact. When I write something I try to think about the different groups that I’m wanting to communicate with and to hone my message to fit that group.
At a high level the groups fit a bit like this:
I think that’s most of it, but if you want to know more my about.me is a reasonable place to keep up to speed with what I’m contributing to.
I wondered whether other saw things in a similar way so I’ve talked to a number of people and many of them seem to be seeing themselves having similar persona to these.
With these broad collections in mind I’ll target different places based on what it is I am writing.
I also make assessments on the length of what it is I am going to write. This isn’t very elaborate, most of the time it’s a simple question – short or long? If it’s short I’ll try and constrain it down to the 140 characters of twitter, if it’s long it goes here on this blog. That is, unless it’s really one-to-one communication and that’s what I use email for, still. I don’t see that we have a suitable alternative to email for this type of communication just yet.
Communication is such an important thing that we do I think it’s vitally important that we do our best to communicate in the best possible way.
I seem to have written a lot about communications recently:
I live near to a place called Fernyhalgh Lane and after more than 25 years I am still none the wiser as to the correct pronunciation for it. Even people who have been born in the vicinity pronounce it differently. One thing is certain though halgh is not pronounced halgh. This got me thinking about all of the other places that are pronounced in a different way to the way that they are spelled.
A few years ago we went on holiday to the North East of England and stayed near to Alnwick which is pronounced without the l and without the w. I’ve listened to countless America tourists struggle with the word Worcester. Then there’s Magdalene College at Cambridge University which is pronounced Maudlyn.
So I wondered how many places and things there were that required some level of local knowledge to aid you in the correct pronunciation. After a little bit of searching I came across what is possibly the longest Wikipedia entry I have ever seen:
List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations
How does anyone stand a chance of getting it right?
I thought I would connect together two things that are in the news this week:
Symantec highlight that SPAM has fallen to 70% of all emails.I’m not going to give much more comment than to point out that if in any other arena 70% of something was clear rubbish (and much of the other 30% was less than valuable) we would be up in arms.
And that’s not even accounting for all of the inappropriate use of email.
This is the point where I have to admit to a classic email mistake last week which, to a certain extent, just demonstrates the brokenness of email.
We run relaxation days at work where someone comes into the building, takes over a meeting room, and provides massage and other relaxation services. We get invited to these events via email.
For some reason I clicked on reply-to-all rather than just reply.
This resulted in me sending an email to the whole of the building, several hundred people, with the immortal words:
"have you got any slots left for back, neck and shoulder massage?"
You can imagine my embarrassment.
I’m with Thierry, let’s find better ways of communicating.
Following on from my popular post – Your updates aren’t that important – I really liked this cartoon:
From Bonkers World
From a personal perspective I don’t regard anything posted on Twitter as being there for the long-term.
I have a rule, I’ll stop talking the moment someone looks at their device.
As 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:
Has anyone noticed that I’ve written less recently?
Has anyone noticed that I’ve written more recently?
Depending 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:
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.
"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.
Each 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
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.
Most 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.
One of my favourite blogs is Talk Normal.
I work in a business that has a wonderful ability to use and abuse words. Tim Philips’ work is a wonderful antidote to the rubbish that assaults my ears every day.
He’s recently published a podcast which everyone who works in the IT industry should list to and take stock.
On answering a question about how this has become a problem Tim has this answer:
When the Internet came along there were all these exciting companies, run by people who really had never lived in the real world, but they were presented as the business innovators for the next generation, so we liked to copy them.
He then goes on to link this observation with the rise of email and other IT communication technology to produce the perfect setting for the plague of word abuse to spread.
Perhaps we should also be the ones to take up the challenge to talk normal?
http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22276469&g=1&color=ff7700&show_comments=trueTalk Normal Podcast 1 by Abby Coften
Update:
Episode 2 and Episode 3 are now available also.
http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22276507Talk Normal Podcast 2 by Abby Coften
http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22276651Talk Normal Podcast 3 by Abby Coften