Information Addiction – Page 2

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS)

Are you addicted to Facebook? Do you know someone who you think is?

A group of scientists at the Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, Norway have been developing a scale to measure levels of addiction:

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS).—This scale comprised 18
items, three for each of the six core features of addiction: salience, mood
modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. Each item is
scored on a 5-point scale using anchors of 1: Very rarely and 5: Very often.
Higher scores indicate greater Facebook addiction.

The full report is here.

This scale is specifically aimed at measuring Facebook addiction as a special case inside the broader class of Internet addiction that others are also studying. They’re not using Facebook as a metaphor for all forms of social networking, they are directly looking at people who are addicted to Facebook. That’s a scary thought.

The Independent reported it this way:

It gets into your blood, consuming your thoughts and inducing panic attacks if the next fix is not in sight.

On a good day, it might offer a harmless escape from the troubles of the world.

But on a bad, it can turn into a monstrous distraction, rendering you unable to concentrate on work or studies.

The drug is Facebook, and if you fear you may be an addict, now is the time to find out.

Researchers tested a scientific scale on 423 students which measures how hooked users are.

They found women are more at risk of addiction because of the social nature of the site.

The Norwegian team found ambitious types are less likely to become addicted as they take advantage of the site for their own purposes, such as work and networking.

My favourite line from the study report is this one:

People scoring high on narcissism tend to be more active on social network sites, as social network sites provide an opportunity to present oneself in a favorable way in line with one’s ideal self.

Does this remind you of someone you know?

"Be with your friends who are here"

There are a number of situations where I would quite like to do this:

Conversation, Connection, Communication, Rudeness, Isolation, Etiquette and Technology

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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Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?

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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Project Glass: One day…

In a report from August 2011 Ofcom highlighted our changing attitude towards technology and, in particular smartphones:

The majority of smartphone users (81%) have their mobile switched on all of the time, even when they are in bed.
Teens, in particular, are likely to have high levels of addiction to their smartphones, with 60% rating their level of ‘addiction’ to their phone at seven or higher. Teen girls are more addicted to their phones than boys.
There are indications that smartphones are encroaching upon ‘traditional’ social interaction, with 51% saying that they ever use their phone while socialising with others and 23% using their smartphone during a meal with others. Twenty-two per cent of smartphone users even claim to use it in the bathroom/toilet.

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

We haven't quite figured out filtering yet

The other day I wrote about information filtering – "There’s no such thing as information overload only failure to filter”. This post was linked to by The Social Organisation who makes some really interesting points about filtering and the hoarding instinct:

A few years ago I wrote a post about scarcity and abundance and I still think this is the fundamental issue at play with information. Humans are driven to hoard because our impulses were built for an environment of scarcity. We are worried that if we don’t read everything – particularly if passed on through trusted social connections – we might miss something important and that makes us anxious. We mistake the available and accessible for the valuable.

I’ve never been much of a hoarder but I only have to look out across my back garden to see a house where someone clearly has huge issues with hoarding, and you don’t have to walk around many offices to realise that lots of people have similar issues when it comes to folders of paper. That’s all before we deluge people with electronic information.

While I was writing the post I was reminded of a cartoon which I couldn’t find at the time, but came across it again today:

From Bonkers World

"There's no such thing as information overload only failure to filter"

In a recent article John Gaudiin from Cisco recounts how, at a conference one of the attendees half jokingly said:

"There’s no such thing as information overload only failure to filter."

I’ve heard this view before, and probably used it in a few situations myself. I am an avid filterer myself. Of the hundreds of emails I receive every day the number that make it to my inbox is quite small, but I also think that it’s an overly simplistic view.

One of the problems I have is that this statement places all of the responsibility on the person receiving the information and the systems transporting it. It places no responsibility with the person or system sending the information.

I can filter all sorts of things if people or groups of people behave consistently, and the technology can do the same. The problem comes because people are not consistent, and groups of people are even less consistent.

Taking email as an example, it can be categorised in all sorts of ways, but the category is set by the person sending the information and their view of the category is probably different to mine. Just because an email is marked as urgent doesn’t mean that it becomes urgent to me, my idea of urgent and theirs are rarely the same. If I’m added as a cc: doesn’t mean I can always ignore it because sometimes I should really be at the heart of the activity. In some ways categorisation makes it worse, because people believe they are communicating something that I’m likely to ignore.

The other challenge with filtering is that it’s secret. The person who has sent me some information has now knowledge of whether I have let the information onto my field of vision or not. There is only room for a certain number of players on the pitch so a lot of people have to be happy to be a spectator, but current filtering systems don’t even tell people whether they’ve made it into the team, the reserves, a spectator or have already been ejected from the park.

The final challenge with current filtering systems is the scope of context. Current filtering systems work within their context (email, IM, etc.) they understand very little about each other’s context. They definitely don’t collect all of the context – voice is an obvious omission. The email system has no way of knowing that someone has phoned me to tell me to look out for an important or urgent email, if it did I would want it to tell me.

That leaves me in the situation where the ultimate filter has to be my eyeballs.

My approach to filtering is a version of the zero inbox approach. It’s only going to get worked on if it’s in my diary or it’s in my ‘to action’ folder. It only gets into my ‘to action’ folder if it’s not been deleted by a filter, or I’ve moved it there from one of my other filter folders like ‘newsletters’, ‘expenses system’ or ‘travel system’ which is highly unlikely, or if I’ve personally filtered it in there from what remains of what remains in my inbox. At some point in every day my inbox is empty. By using different automatic filter folders I am able to apply a different approach to reading in the different folders. In the ‘expenses system’ folder I’m only looking for one thing and that’s the ‘rejected’ word, everything else is noise. In the ‘newsletters’ folder I filter on title, if the title isn’t very interesting it gets deleted.

I don’t filter on individuals although I have seriously considered putting some people into a ‘too chatty’ filter to let me filter them separately.

While filtering items I also operate a 30 second rule, if I can respond completely in 30 seconds I will. The important thing is that I can respond completely if I’m not sure about something or I only have half the answer it goes into the ‘to action’ folder. I don’t send ‘I’ll get back to you tomorrow’ type emails, because I don’t see any value in them and they just annoy me when people send them to me.

Most of the time this works very well for me and I rarely feel completely overloaded.

My filter regime for other systems isn’t anything like as sophisticated primarily because the technology isn’t yet there.

Do you get that overloaded feeling or is your filter system working?

David Allen: "It's really cools stuff, but there's as much frustration with it now…"

In this short video from Bloomberg Dave Allen talks about technology and productivity.

I know a number of people who blame technology for all sorts of problems, but Dave Allen has a different take:

The medium itself is neither good nor bad – it’s neutral.

It’s a message that many of us need to hear, to a certain extent, it’s not email that’s the problem, it’s how we use it. I say ‘to a certain extent’ because my own view is that email, as an example, is only neutral in the same way that alcohol is neutral. That might sound like quite a strong comparison to make, but the parallels that I am trying to draw out are these. Alcohol might be neutral until used, but it’s effect on people, once used, differs dramatically, and people aren’t always in control of their response. The same is true with email, and other technology media. Also, like alcohol, the effects aren’t always immediately evident and for the technology media we are a long way from understanding all of the impacts.

We need to do a much better job of helping people to understand what the impacts of their actions are when they use email, for instance, and to use it far more responsibly.

Things are changing and Dave Allen highlights this in the interview:

It’s all really cools stuff but there’s as much frustrations with it now as there is "wow this is neat".

The GTD methods that Dave Allen teaches, and other similar methodologies, are becoming very important.

The other day I read an interesting article when someone was paralleling the emerging Productivity Industry with the Diet Industry. It’s a similar parallel. (Annoyingly, for some reason, I didn’t bookmark it and now can’t find it.)

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Because it's Friday: Visual News

Back to the regular Friday them of how we make things more visual, today’s example is – the news.

Newsmap has been around in beta for a little while, but I’ve never written about it. Here is the news for today (4th November 2011 at 8:20) for the UK in visual form:

It’s not the only visual news site out there, but I like this one.

I have to admit though, it always makes me slightly sad, while many of these things are really important, some of the things that get people attention are not important at all.

On a lighter note: It always manages to highlight something I hadn’t seen, and that’s exciting for an information addict.

Dilbert on Multi-Tasking

If you think you can multi-task you are kidding yourself and Dilbert has it summed up wonderfully today:

I must state my apologies for every occasion when I have been the pointy-haired boss in a meeting.

Work – Life Balance

There are times in life when we can see our life clearly, at other times we need someone to remind us of the reality of a situation.

Nigel Marsh’s TED talk on the subject was for me a great reality check.

Some quotes that struck me:

Certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being being meaningfully engaged on a day to day basis with a young family.

There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet desperation.

Governments and corporations aren’t going to solve this issue for us.

If you don’t design your life someone else will and you might not like their idea of balance.

We need to avoid the trap of “I’ll have a life when I retire”.

Nigel is passionate about his subject and rightly so – it’s a significant issue for our society.

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In the same room, but not together

I recently confessed a whole set of things that I’ve noticed myself doing within a work context that are, quite frankly, rude.

Another day, another conference call, another set of instant messages, some SMS messages and lots of rudeness.

I would like to confess that today I have:

Joined a conference call without introducing myself.

…

At work is one thing – but what about at home!

Today I was interested to read an article in the New York Times titled – Quality Time, Redefined. This article starts by describing a scene that could, on many occasions be my house:

Ms. Vavra, a cosmetics industry executive in Manhattan, looked up from her iPad, where she was catching up on the latest spring looks at Refinery29.com, and noticed that her husband, Michael Combs, was transfixed, streaming the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament on his laptop. Their son, Tom, 8, was absorbed by the Wii game Mario Kart on the widescreen television. Their daughter, Eve, 10, was fiddling with a game app called the Love Calculator on an iPod Touch. “The family was in the same room, but not together,” Ms. Vavra recalled.

The sites and the technology is generally different, but the comment “The family was in the same room, but not together” certainly rings true.

At a quick count there are at least 12 different screens in the household – and there’s only 4 of us. There are occasions when each of us has retreated to one or more of our screens and our level of interaction with the rest of the family is minimal. We might be physically in the same place, but our heads are in completely different places.

It’s a really interesting article with thoughts from celebrities, academics and medics alike:

Joanne Cantor, a professor emerita and a director of the Center for Communication Research at the University of Wisconsin, suggests it’s almost as if adults and older children are reverting to a form of “parallel play,” the developmental stage when toddlers sit beside each other in silence, playing with toys of their own. Even in the very recent past, when family members would be watching TV together, she said, “We all had conversations during the commercials, even if it was just to say, ‘Wasn’t that stupid?’ ”

It’s not all doom and gloom though, there are lots of thoughts on how this type of interaction might be a good thing.

Here’s some of our experiences, good and bad.

We have texted the children to get them to come down from their rooms for dinner. It’s a whole load easier than shouting around the house trying to communicate through the various other noise distractions.
On a number of occasions we have Skyped our son (while he’s away at University) from a laptop in the kitchen. We place the laptop in a corner where he used to sit while we made dinner. It’s not a full intensive face-to-face conversation, it makes the chatting much easier.
I have IMed one or other member of the family, when they were in the same room, in order to get their clear attention.
On a couple of occasions we have missed phone calls because we were each so deeply engaged in our thing that we hoped someone else would answer it.
We quite regularly participate in “have you seen this” conversations around one or other screen. This includes discussing and parallel commenting on Facebook.

Like many of these things the challenge is to keep the technology in balance. We don’t allow any technology at the dinner table and, whenever possible, have dinner together. Only last night we decided to watch a movie together and it felt great.It took us ages to agree what the movie was, and we streamed it, but we all watched the same movie.

I still think, though, that it’s going to become a huge issue for society to deal with as people try to come to terms with a situation they haven’t been trained for. One of the biggest challenges is going to be addiction including Information Addiction.

I’m interested to know what others do. Do you have some rules that help you to keep things in check?

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