I thought we’d start the first week of December with some statistics on social media from 2012.
There are some interesting ones in this particular infographic:
+350 millions users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome
Not sure what that is then perhaps you should read about the Bergan Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS).
Following on from my post – Relating to the machines – do you see yourself in this infographic of The Social Media Sickness.
I must admit, I do have a tendency to be a bit like The Constant Checker:
Daniel W. Rasmus has started an interesting series of blog posts on the design of meetings, or more specifically, the design of meetings that use collaborative software. He introduces his first post in a series with these words:
How to Design a Meeting: Lesson 1
We all run meetings like we know what we’re doing. We have been to so many meetings we just know how to run them. What we really know is how to model and perpetuate the poor habits and practices of our mentors and coaches, managers and colleagues. In the era of collaboration software our meetings need to be redesigned so they are driven through the collaboration environment in real-time, as the meeting takes place. Stop all the e-mails and document duplications, or even worse, handouts and get people to engage in a collaborative way through a meeting environment that captures all of the content, the tasks and the decisions in one view (not necessarily, as you will read, in one place).
The other day I finished work exhausted. As I sat and considered what I had achieved that day I realised that I had spent most of it in meetings, but what had I achieved? Honestly, precious little. Why was that? Well, and this is where I might be getting a bit too personal for some, boredom tires me out, and I’d spent much of the day bored.
I’m not saying that meetings are boring, but I am suggesting that many of the meetings that I attend are boring. Sometimes meetings need to happen that are in their very make-up dull, the context and the subject makes it difficult to make them interesting. These are the minority of meetings though, many meetings with interesting content are made colourless by the way that we run them. We spend so much of our time in meetings we should care that they are effective. If a meeting is effective it, at least, has a chance of not being boring.
I need to hold my hands up here and apologise for the drab meetings that I’ve run too, there’s a lot I need to learn, relearn and unlearn. Daniel has provided an infographic of where he is going with the series, I’ll read with interest:
This is probably more than one post, but all of the thoughts came at the same time and they kind of fit together so here they are as a single stream:
I have a rule, if I’m in a conversation with someone and they start to look at their mobile device or laptop I stop talking. I used to just sit there until the person came back, but after a couple of occasions where I’ve sat for a few minutes waiting for the person to come back I’ve modified my behaviour and I now leave. I give them a little while to come back, but if they have clearly left the conversation I will leave too.
Previously I’ve written about being In the same room, but not together when observing the interactions in my own family. At this year’s TED Sherry Turkle gave a talk on Connected, but alone? She has some very interesting, and worrying, things to say about our relationship with our devices:
Our little devices are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are.
She makes a much better job than I did of explaining the worry that I was expressing in my post Post 1000: Thinking about thinking, the brain and information addiction.
She goes on to say when talking about the way that we flit between being present and being somewhere else:
Across the generations I see that people can’t get enough of each other if, and only if, they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control. I call it the goldilocks effect – not too close, not too far, just right.
In other words – we are desperate to connect but we want to do it on our own terms and in a way that provides immediate gratification.
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If you watch the recent Project Glass video posted by Google you’ll notice many of these same characteristics in the interactions that they envisage. Notice how long it is before the person wearing the glasses interacts with a real person and how many opportunities he had to interact that were replaced by technology.
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In a report from August 2011 Ofcom highlighted our changing attitude towards technology and, in particular smartphones:
I wasn’t sure about the statistic on usage in the toilet until the other day when I went into a toilet and noticed the gentleman (teenager) at the latrine next to me had one hand dealing with normal latrine activity while texting/tweeting with the other.
In a recent InformationWeek article Cindy Waxer describes 6 Ways To Beat IT Career Burnout and what’s #6:
6. Take a week off. Seriously.
"By off, I mean off," says Russell. No smartphone, no email, no telephone calls.
It’s been interesting over the last couple of week talking to colleagues returning from an Easter holiday break. Some of them have said something along the lines of "it was great i completely got away from it all" while others have said "I stayed on top of my email while I was away so the return was much easier". To the second set of individuals I’d like to ask the question – "what was the person you went on holiday with doing while you were staying on top?"
Most of my posts have a conclusion on them, but I’m struggling to work out what it should be on this post. We need to start to understand where we are letting the technology take us to, but what does that mean? We need to work out what our relationships are going to look like in the future, but how do we do that? We need to understand what the new etiquette is going to be, but how? I think, though, I’ll finish off with Sherry’s words "it’s time to talk".
"Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation." Mark Twain
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.
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.
Graham Chastney 