Distraction Culture

Bowling Alone

Despite the extraordinary and rapid advances made by the Internet and mobile telephony, television remains the most successful mass medium yet known to man. Yet it has had some powerful, and I believe detrimental effects on society. Perhaps these are hard to see because at its best telly is, well, fun. After a hard day it is just so tempting to throw off your shoes, grab a drink and let the sofa take the tension, while TV takes care of your mind. It certainly doesn’t seem evil. How could we think ill of the technology that brought us the Clangers, Miss Piggy and Monty Python?

In 2000 American social theorist Robert Putnam published a remarkable and important book. The “Bowling Alone ” of its title refers to the collapse of bowling leagues in towns across America during the last 50 years, but Putnam is only using this as a metaphor for his central theory that social capital has declined drastically in the USA in the same period.

What he means by social capital is the invisible bonds that tie communities together – “the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding and shared values and behaviours that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible”. Important features of this are reciprocity – people doing things for each other, either implicitly or explicitly sure that those favours will one day be returned, and trust. Intrinsic to the concept of social capital is the idea that social networks have value in themselves.

Most people who are not diehard misanthropes will recognise the existence of social capital, even if it may be harder to measure than say, physical capital. At a family level it’s called doing the washing up without expectation of immediate return. Among neighbours - where it still exists – it may be putting the cat out or watching their house while they are away.

Putnam pulls together an extraordinary array of data to support his theory that social capital is in free fall in the US. He uses indicators such as political participation, membership of clubs, engagement with associations such as the PTA (parent teachers association), church attendance, trade union and professional association membership, social visiting/entertaining at home, family dinners, card playing, charitable giving (measured against real income). In every one the decline is dramatic, statistically proven and clear – and usually starts from the early sixties.

There are contra-indicators: for instance increased membership of non-governmental organisations such as Greenpeace and the American Association of Retired Persons. But it turns out that where the trends are up either there is a generational difference in attitudes (i.e. it’s old people who take part) or the demands on participants are characteristically low. Engagement might be represented by an annual donation, the receipt of a newsletter, signing a petition. People are prepared – with their greater disposable income – to join, but not to do.

Overall there is a shift to more temporary communities with less grip or stickiness. Quoted by Putnam, sociologist Morris Janowitz called them “communities of limited liability” – suggesting beautifully how a group sense of responsibility is being eroded. According to Putnam “large groups with local chapters, long histories, multiple objectives and diverse constituencies are being replaced by more evanescent, single-purpose organisations, smaller groups that “reflect the fluidity of our lives by allowing us to bond easily but to break our attachments with equivalent ease ””.
I’m not aware of any similar study in the UK – but I’d be prepared to bet it would show similar results, allowing for some local quirks. Especially given Putnam’s analysis of why this is happening.

He carefully narrows it down to four factors:

• Pressures of time and money
• Suburbanisation, commuting and sprawl
• Electronic entertainment – chiefly TV (most of the statistics he uses are pre-Internet)
• Generational change

The last two are interlinked: the younger you are, the more likely you are to be affected by electronic entertainment. He estimates that the combined effect of TV and what he calls the TV generational difference is responsible for maybe 30% of the decline in social capital.

Can TV really have had such an influence? After all, there has been a never-ending debate about screen violence, and we are regularly assured by its champions that it has never been shown that TV makes children, or society at large, more prone to violence.

Putnam’s analysis of the role TV has played begins with two generalised observations on the effect of mass media, telecoms and entertainment. The first is the trend to more individualised news and entertainment. Music is a good example: from live concerts, to recorded discs to MP3’s we have moved inexorably towards much greater choice determined by the individual at an ever more microscopic level. News web pages can be personalised, satellite subscription packages specified. Secondly there is a distinct shift to personal and private rather than public consumption, from the concert hall to the Apple I-Pod. Television in particular moved has theatrical entertainment into the privacy of our own homes.

Now for the facts.

By 1995 viewing per TV household was more than 50% higher than it had been in the 1950’s. The average American watches three to four hours a day – estimates vary. Television took almost 40% of the average American’s free time in 1995, an increase of almost 1/3rd since 1965. Again – these figures do not take into account the rise of the Internet and there is evidence that TV viewing has declined because of it, since the mid 1990’s. However the Internet is still an electronic screen based medium.

Between 1965 and 1995 Americans gained an average of six hours per week in added leisure time, and spent almost all of them watching TV. “Time diaries show that husbands and wives spend three or four times as much time watching TV together as they spend talking to each other, and six to seven times as much as they spend in community activities outside the home.”

The amount of television viewing done alone has also risen. “At least half of all Americans usually watch by themselves, one study suggests, while according to another 1/3rd of all TV viewing is done alone”. Among children the figures are worse. Less than 5% of TV watching is done with their parents.

A very important distinction is between habitual viewing (leaving it on in the background or switching it on just to see what is on) and intentional viewing (switching it on to watch something specific and pre-chosen). One could just as easily call the habitual form distraction viewing. Guess what? Habitual (or distraction viewers) are much less socially engaged. “Selective viewers are 23% more active in grassroots organisations and 33% more likely to attend public meetings than other demographically matched Americans. Habitual viewing is especially detrimental to civic engagement. Indeed the effect of habitual viewing on civic engagement is as great as the effect of simply watching more TV”. In case you are thinking, ‘well hey its just the Slobs and I’m safely middle class’, note the key definer – “demographically matched”. In other words this affects all strata of society. Selective viewers, even in the later 1970’s outnumbered habitual viewers by more than three to two. This has now been reversed.

Putnam believes that once other factors that might affect civic engagement are accounted for, on average each extra hour of TV viewing per day reduces activism (going to meetings, membership, letter writing) by 10%. He shows clearly that there is a link between the amount you watch TV, and how much you are likely to do for society in general. For instance in one study 39% of light viewers attended a meeting on town or social affairs in the year, compared with 25% of heavy viewers. 29% of light viewers had played a leadership role of some kind in a local organisation, the figure for heavy viewers was 18%.
Just to ram the point home, among this group of well educated working age Americans, there were nearly twice as many heavy viewers. Dependence on TV for entertainment is the “single most important predictor” of civic disengagement.

So what you may be thinking. It is certainly easy to be cynical: at times Putnam comes close to conjuring up a possibly mythical land before the sixties when everyone earnestly helped each other and played together – modern ideas of fun don’t seem to enter into it. In British terms, do we really wish to return to a dull but worthy land of boy scouts, Women’s Institute jams and Rotarian dinners?

But his social capital is not only about institutions but also about our social connectedness. “People who say that TV is their ‘primary form of entertainment’ volunteer and work on community projects less often, attend fewer dinner parties and fewer club meetings, spend less time visiting friends, entertain at home less, picnic less, are less interested in politics, give blood less often, write friends less regularly, make fewer long distance phone calls, send fewer greetings cards and less e-mail, and express more road rage than demographically matched (my italics) people who differ only in saying that TV is not their primary form of entertainment.” I know which club I want to be in.

Of course this does not on its own prove that TV is the culprit. It is certainly associated in some way with the decline of social capital – could it be the cause, or an effect? It’s hard to be sure but here are some pointers.

All the indicators for civic disengagement begin to flicker alarmingly in the 1960’s about ten years after the widespread availability of television – i.e.; just as the first TV generation began to hit the workforce and make an impact (or not) on society.

Canadian researchers in the early 1970’s found a trio of remote towns, one of which (they christened it Notel) had no television, sited as it was in a wrinkle of the landscape. As TV arrived here, they compared levels of civic engagement using the two other similar towns which already had TV as control cases. They concluded that there was a direct link between TV and a lessening of social ties. Studies in other countries have had similar results.

Never alone?

Here we are - in a world where digital has created a parallel sense of space where we, and everything else, are always on. It’s very distracting. TV, the internet and now mobile phones bring the digital world into our own space and fill it. Emptiness is hard to achieve.

Marshall McLuhan understood the potential of the phone in “Understanding Media” .

“In the 1920’s a popular song was “All Alone by the Telephone, All Alone Feeling Blue”. Why should the phone create an intense feeling of loneliness? Why should we feel compelled to answer a ringing public phone when we know the call cannot concern us? Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension? Why is that tension so very much less for an unanswered phone in a movie scene? The answer to all of these questions is that the phone is a participant form that demands a partner…it simply will not act as a background instrument like a radio.”

The phone is very insistent – we cannot leave it alone. This is partly explained by McLuhan’s theory that the phone demands a partner and partly because we all wish to feel wanted. In fact it is entertaining, involving and two way. Calls, text messages and e-mail satisfy that need.

Thanks Tom

Tom - your comments on the previous post are good. So I need to exan d this argument.....

The reduction of everything to strings of digits is at the heart of the issue. I believe it is a property of digital that it has an inherent tendency to strip out context wherever it can. Why is this?

One set of reasons lie around bandwidth and capacity. There is a finite amount of storage space on devices – that is PC’s, storage media (zip drives, CD’s, smartmedia etc). Bandwidth, which is the capacity of wired or wireless connections to stream data from one place to another at any given moment, has also usually been scarce compared to demand. A bit like the M25 motorway, whenever another lane is added, we invent ways to fill it.

The answer has been compression technology. This takes the strings of zeroes and ones, and cuts out the unwanted bits which make no difference to your enjoyment of the content when you come to consume it. Again no argument that it’s a great invention which allows huge quantities of stuff to be digitised, copied and distributed at speed.

The second bundle of reasons is that digital things tend to remain precisely what they are and no more. Time and place have almost no effect on them. They pick up little on their travels across networks, do not decay, are not smelly – in short are differentiated from the outside usually by file names or numbers. The result is that at its worst, which is the norm, digital content lacks charm, magic and depth. In fact digital things usually only appeal to one or at best two senses, constrained as they are by the ability of technology (so far) to replicate taste, touch and smell.

Thirdly the digital world, at least in theory, allows a very high degree of precision for locating things. A web site address takes you straight to the place you wish to be. If you don’t know it, you can Google it. OK – so search engines don’t always deliver terrific results, but considering the scale of the challenge they are remarkably accurate. Today Google claims that it searches billions of web pages. I’m glad not to be doing this in an archive of 8 billion sheets of paper. Additionally the technology allows users to create precise pointers to things in lots of ways. On your PC you can do this with the command ‘Create Shortcut’, or for a Mac user ‘Make Alias’. Web links are pointers. So are the telephone numbers stored in your phone’s address book. Paradoxically digital both de-emphasises context and makes it easier to connect to other things.

Lastly, digital technology makes it very easy to copy things, because all the technology has to do is to replicate the content (zeroes and ones) exactly. This has lots of effects. It is a nightmare for the music and film industries with which they are still grappling. The flip side is that it has fuelled the phenomenon known as peer to peer file sharing. It allows anyone with a PC to cut and paste, and they do. An interesting news item can be shared with friends and colleagues in ten or so key strokes and mouse clicks. (Frequently it loses the context of the web site from which it was taken, even though it may be useful to have the context that an article comes from a trusted source, for example, the BBC.) Many content web sites have embraced this issue by adding the functionality to allow users to send their content to others – usually it’s a link. Of course they have done this as a form of viral marketing for their wares, and a link, if pursued, takes the user to the source where at least the context is fuller. In addition, because a digital copy is always identical to the original, digital artefacts rarely feel unique.

Less family time?

It's a constant theme for me (both here and in my life) - but here is more evidence that there is an opportunity cost to digital communication and that people see it.....

Internet service provider PlusNet found that one third of people in the UK feel that their relationships with friends and family have suffered, because they don’t physically talk with each other enough.

The study into communication habits revealed that although email has become the most popular method of communication with friends and family, with 81% of respondents using it, 41 per cent of people would prefer to receive a phone call.

Neil Armstrong, head of marketing at PlusNet, said: “When you’re busy, it’s tempting to send an email or text, rather than pick up the phone. While there’s time and place for each of these methods, undeniably it’s a personal phone call that keeps friends and family together”.

And yes Neil is selling us voice over IP services ;-)......

The Demise of Paper

At least according to no less than Bill Gates, interviewed today in the Guardian.

Magazines and newspapers would eventually become redundant in their existing form, with interactive, personalised content delivered to handheld devices. "A lot of the reading that's taking place, the richness to be able to call up anything will take over," he said.

Mr Gates pointed to students as an example of how the world would shift from books to bytes. "Within four or five years, instead of spending money on textbooks they'll spend a mere $400 or so buying that tablet device and the material they hook up to will all be on the wireless internet with animations, timelines and links to deep information. But they'll be spending less than they would have on text books and have a dramatically better experience."

Hmm. I'm not convinced.

In The Social Life of Information, authors John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid describe a research trip one of them made to Portugal. In an old archive he had to read correspondence from the 1700’s. The dust raised by opening each of the old letters triggered asthma attacks. One day a fellow historian came in and to his astonishment pored over another box of letters in a very unusual way. “He read barely a word. Instead, he picked out bundles of letters and, in a move that sent my sinuses into shock, ran each letter beneath his nose and took a deep breath, at times almost inhaling the letter itself but always getting a good dose of dust. Sometimes, after a particularly profound sniff, he would open the letter, glance at it briefly, make a note and move on. Choking behind my mask, I asked him what he was doing. He was he told me, a medieval historian (a profession to avoid if you have asthma). He was documenting outbreaks of cholera. When that disease occurred in a town in the eighteenth century, all letters from that town were disinfected with vinegar to prevent the disease from spreading. By sniffing for faint traces of vinegar that survived 250 years and noting the date and source of the letters, he was able to chart the progress of cholera outbreaks.” I’ve yet to come across the e-mail I could smell.

Distraction dissected

Paul Ford examines here the distraction the web can weave in precise and well argued language. For example

I figure there are two different kinds of distractions: the wide kind and the narrow kind. The Internet is the widest possible distraction because it lets you wander so far afield that getting work done if you are, like me, the distractable sort of person--getting work done is almost impossible. I'm not the sort of person who can read a book with footnotes and ignore the footnotes. I have to read every footnote. I often prefer the footnotes because they point in so many directions. But when wide distractions are available I avoid the narrow distractions, and those are the useful distractions. Let's say you're thinking hard about a concept--say, kittens. Kittens are young cats. They have paws and they are sometimes friendly. Your stepmother, you remember, didn't let you have a kitten. Why was that? Was she allergic, or did she really just hate you? Now, that's something worth thinking about. A concept worth exploring. That's a narrow distraction, a good distraction.

But with a wide distraction you think about kittens and all of a sudden your email pops up and you're thinking about Viagra, and about how horrible the world is and how it's filled with rapacious greedy spammers. You're not able to think about kittens any more so you check out the news to find out that China has a manned space program. Click. And that peak oil is a real problem and we might be living in an age where electricity becomes prohibitively expensive. Click. And that Apple just released a new iPod again, and everyone is all aflutter. There's really no way to bring all of that back to kittens. You've been broadly distracted. You might as well play some solitaire and go to bed.

Mob Happy

Mob Happy is an excellent and opinionated blog about mobiles and the mobile industry. Today Carlo Longino there has reported that the Sun is claiming that in the future women will have MP3 players embedded in their breasts. See my comment there also. I know I'll go to bed thinking about this one.

Also Russell Buckley there is promiting an initiative called Carnival of the Mobilists - to which I've contributed the piece on the new Orange interface below. There's a lot of thoughtful stuff at the Carnival.

Change resistant old git?

Orange interface

I’m big fan of Orange but its new interface overlay has really annoyed me. I’m trying to figure why out loud (if a blog entry counts as out loud).

For some time now, handset manufacturers and operators have been looking at making more of the phone’s information and functionality available at what I call the surface level, or the industry terms the idle screen. Orange has introduced a new idle screen mode across several handsets, including Nokia Series 60 devices (like the 6630 for instance). I smashed the screen on mine last week and got a replacement from Orange. Great customer service as usual. But it was not a like for like swap. Now down the left handside of the idle screen I have a range of icons (contacts, call list, messages, calendar, camera, mobile internet) which expand to text sub menus (ie call list gives you missed calls, received calls and dialled calls). If there is any information as a detail to this: for instance a missed call number, it shows this too.

So – lots of information now visible on the surface. Sounds great – why do I dislike it?

1. Change. I’m probably getting cranky and conservative with a small c, like most customers. No-one warned me, it’s different, I have to learn new routines (granted, not very taxing).
2. Clicks. It now takes six clicks to read a newly arrived text message. Rather than one as previously when the alert opened the text with one click. Four clicks to see a missed call detail.
3. Clarity. The text detail is so small it is pretty hard to read, and the non selected items are grayed out which makes them even harder. It really is not that clear that you have a missed call anymore.
4. Camera. A joy of the 6630 is the picture quality. Orange’s interface has changed the screen proportions, forcing them to resize any photo that you set to be the background, with a huge drop in quality. Which sort of takes away one of the small joys of being able to personalise one’s phone.

That said, it is a good effort. They’ve worked hard to make it discreet. It is easy to understand and get to grips with. So why am I moaning? Because it is not an improvement overall, so in the end as a user I feel my time is being wasted learning a new interface for no appreciable gain. The gain, perhaps, is a corporate one (Orange phones develop their own USP). And is that a customer focused strategy? Orange used to be masters of that.

Nine hours with a screen

If you spent nine hours a day in front of a screen.....how much time would that leave you for face to face communication, sex, eating, taking exercise, travelling and sleeping? I realise that many of these can be combined but nonetheless it is shocking to read (in the ever excellent the Register) that Americans spend nine hours a day watching TV, on the internet or using a mobile.....(according to research from Ball State University).

Apparently 30% of this 9 hours they spend on two devices at the same time! Distraction on a grand, and expensive (in time) scale. What does this do to society is not a question it takes long to ask faced with stuff like this......

I'd also be interested to know if the time spent on the internet really is that - or just time in front of a computer at work....from what I can see here it looks like it is all computer usage on and off line.

Mobile street theatre

Matt, who I work with, just told me that he was walking down the street just now where we work (Soho), and sees a bloke walking towards him talking to himself. At first (he relates) "I thought he was using a bluetooth headset, but no, he really was a nutter".

Using and losing

Lazar Dzamic, Head of Planning at London based digital agency Underwired, sent me this today, in reference to a story I tell in the introduction to the book. The point of the story is that technology brings gifts, for sure, but sometimes we lose old skills when we take the bait......

"it reminds me of my encounter with a Russian scientist in the Max Plank institute in Germany: when he joined them after escaping from the communist Russia (SSSR, as it was known at the time) he never use the calculator before: all his maths was being done by pen and paper and basically in his head. No surprise then that his spontaneous mathematical abilities were far beyond anything his colleagues could produce; they had to grab a calculator to solve a problem (quicker, yes, than him), but without it, they were lost."

Reality Check

Fantastic! According to Reuters via Yahoo, we (in the UK) are unsure of the difference between dogging and blogging, and are more likely to know about happy slapping than pod casting.

A survey of taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers -- often seen as barometers of popular trends -- found that nearly 90 percent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 percent had never heard of blogging.

"When I asked the panel whether people were talking about blogging, they
thought I meant dogging," said Sarah Carter, the planning director at ad
firm DDB London.

Dogging is the phenomenon of watching couples have sex in semi-secluded
places such as out-of-town car parks. News of such events are often
spread on Web sites or by using mobile phone text messages.....

"Our research not only shows that there is no buzz about blogging and
podcasting outside of our media industry bubble, but also that people
have no understanding of what the words mean," Carter said. "It's a real
wake-up call."

A blog, short for Web log, is an online journal, while podcasting is a
method of publishing audio programmes over the Internet -- a name
derived from combining iPod, Apple's popular digital music player, with
broadcasting, even though portable devices are not necessary to listen
to a podcast.

DDB, a unit of New York-based advertising group Omnicom, said the survey
results indicate that agencies may be pushing their clients to use new
technology -- that is, to advertise on the new media formats -- too
quickly.

"We spend too much time talking to ourselves in this industry, rather
than getting out there and finding out what's really going on in the
world," DDB's chief strategy officer David Hackworthy said.

That last bit is true enough. However, I've been to some of these research get togethers of "real people" (aka hairdressers and taxi drivers) and they are rarely very large and in truth one vocal respondent can influence the rest. Also - the sheer numbers reading and writing blogs suggest that this is far from a "media industry bubble". Fun headlines, shallow content - again.

Phone manners

The Register reports a T-mobile survey that "proves" what we've known for a while: mobile phone etiquette has yet to catch up with the technology, and there is a gap between what we say we should do, and what we do.

The figures are interesting - the survey had a sample size of just over 5,000, and found that

62 per cent of Brit workers endure bad "mobile habits" in the workplace, eg: colleagues answering calls or reading texts in meetings. Sixty-one per cent of respondents admitted to this particular outrage, oblivious to the 87 per cent who said taking a call in a meeting was poor form, and the 80 per cent who reckon reading or answering a text in the same context is just not on

Also

Seventy-three per cent of (media industry) respondents said their employer "does not offer guidelines on the use of mobile phones at work". It's scarcely better in the IT industry, where 65 per cent recorded a similar lack of advice. Forty-one per cent, meanwhile, voted in favour of such guidelines "hoping to raise the standards of mobile manners".

It's a major theme of mine: we need to develop accepted rules of self regulation around technology usage....

Nosy Swedes

Distraction appears to be something we worry about in others - at least in Sweden

Taxi media

Coming home from a lovely night out in London (Mon Plaisir....wonderful traditional French restaurant I first went to with my parents maybe 30 years ago, still does great onion soup) last week, we jumped in a taxi which had a video screen and and remote controls on either side. For the record it had a variety of content, including BBC Comedy - which we chose. Little Britain was a good as ever. 25 minutes later we were home.

Then we both realised that we hadn't talked - which we normally do voraciously in the back of cabs, or looked at the teeming streets and squares of Westminster, so incandescent at 10.30 on a September night. We just watched sketches we'd seen before.

Also - you can't turn it off.

Stupid really.

Not moaning

One of my contentions is that new technology usually (almost always actually) demands what Ursula Hews calls "consumption work". You buy some kit, and then get bogged down servicing it (working out how it works, filling it with content, transferring old content, making it talk to other bits of kit, backing it up etc...... I'll post some more on this shortly.

A friend of mine recently commented to me that I was overly pessimistic, and that eventually technology found solutions for the problems that it creates. Well my scepticism was dumbfounded by an experience I had this week. I replaced my four and half year old beaten up Apple G4 laptop with a brand new iBookG4. I'd been putting it off because I didn't want to go through the trial of transferring settings, music, work files, personal data etc...

So I switch on the new computer. And immediately it asks me - do I have another Apple which I've been using, and do I want to transfer everything across.  I said yes, not believing it would be so easy. It told me to connect by firewire, I did. It told me it would take 18 minutes. It did. And everything came across - all my stuff, but on a new faster (and cleaner) machine. After years of wandering in the deserts of tech frustration it was like an oasis of easiness and calm.

Hats off - not for the first time - to Apple. More like this please, and we get time back from technology, and move away from distraction.

Challenges to our mobile future

Marko Ahtisaari, design director of Nokia, has published a very good piece on the social issues surrounding mobile usage.

I loved this as an attention grabber....."How will we explain to our children that before, when you wanted to call someone, you needed to stand against a wall?"

And this as insight...."The last, and often overlooked, feature of the mobile industry is that it was based on a shift from a familiar collective object - the family phone - to a personal object, the mobile phone. The idea of a personal phone simply did not exist in the popular consciousness 20 years ago."

Given the premise of "Distraction", I was especially interested by his thoughts on "always on", an issue that I've been talking about for some time now as social not technological.

"Sometimess Off vs. Always On

Time is the ultimate scarce resource in the information age. It is the subject of endless pop song wish lists ranging from turnin’ it back to makin’ it (or dis moment) last forever. The desire to stop time has always been with us and the conveyor belt lyrics of today have a deep ancestry. Witness the recently deceased Pakistani master singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan:

Throw out the clocks, My lover comes home, Let there be revelry. My lover comes home, Let there be revelry.

In this excerpt from a characteristically moving qawwali "Mera Pia Ghar Aaya" (“My Lover Comes Home”) Nusrat interprets the same theme. As is often the case in sufi qawwali the object of love remains ambiguous between the divine and the human. Either way, we’d like the clocks thrown out.

The same could be said of the ubiquitous mobile devices that connect us. In Finland the everyday word for mobile phone is kännykkä meaning “extension-of-the-hand.” “Because we carry our always-on cellular prostheses,” Derrick de Kerckhove notes, “it is the world itself that has become always on.” These technologies have become so embedded they are invisible. Almost. These technologies still interrupt us. They make us in principle always available. In the rush to connect we have not designed what it means to disconnect, to tune out.

The challenge: How do we design to be sometimes off in a world that is itself always on?

As a side comment, WH Auden in Funeral Blues (made more famous by Four Weddings and a Funeral) says this

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Media Week

and a review, courtesy of Media Week - here...good to see!

New Media Age

...has printed today a commentary piece about Deep Media. It's good to get the thinking (a chapter in the book) out there. I owe Mike Beeston who I work with for drafting this based on all our discussions.....

More on too much

Learning how to deal with over abundant communication is not easy. Research in 2004 by the University of Surrey found that more than half of those surveyed thought it was bad form to use IT equipment of any kind while in a meeting or talking to someone at work. Over 80% thought it was rude to send or look at text messages while with others . If this is the case then what we think is good behaviour (in theory), is not what we do (in practice). Looking back over the last ten years I can trace my own responses, good and bad. During the 1990’s, as volumes of e-mail grew, so I found myself changing my behaviour. At first it was a novelty, to be glanced at now and then in the off chance that someone had sent me a mail. As the odds increased that new messages would be waiting in my in-box, so I began to check its contents more frequently. At the time it never occurred to me to analyse why I did this: if someone had asked me I would probably have replied that it was in case something urgent was there. I now realise that there is ALMOST NEVER anything truly urgent in an e-mail inbox. A wise acquaintance once taught me that a useful question to ask when life throws stressful situations at you, is ‘what is the worst thing that could happen in this situation?’ Usually the answer turns out to be nothing so very bad after all. The same is true of e-mail: not reading it rarely turns out to be a genuine problem.

At the time I did not see this. By 2000 I was receiving about 200 e-mails a day. On return from a fortnight’s holiday it could take up to two days to clear the back-log. By then I was also using a mobile as my chief telephone (I was travelling a lot). Most days it would ring several times per hour. Because Razorfish was global, and so was my job, the hours that it rang extended well into the evening (I’ve found that Americans in particular have an under-developed sense of international time zones). One day I found myself discussing this with a colleague and realised to my horror that some part of me was proud of the volume of correspondence I was receiving. Digging deeper, I uncovered the discomforting idea that I thought it told me (in a very rudimentary way) that I was important. When I heard other people make similar boasts I began to question whether this was a valid measurement of self-worth. In fact it made me feel more than a bit foolish.

I began to observe other issues. Messages unopened bothered me. They seemed to represent incomplete tasks. Tackling them (opening, replying, storing, deleting) gave me a sense of achievement, made me feel like I was doing my job. In a sense I was – by this stage a large part of the job did involve reading and responding to mails, picking up the phone and taking calls. But there are associated risks. Not only does dealing with mail confer an imagined sense of achievement because one can see it has gone from the screen, it is often much easier than the effort of conversing with someone. I began to think that at times maybe I was prioritising digital communication over face to face. Moreover reading and responding to mail was the first thing I liked to do in the morning. Yet I also knew that to be effective it is better to start the day with the job you least want to do – which in my work might have been a difficult conversation or composing a complex document. In comparison to these, mail was easy and I could say to myself ‘well done – you’ve cleared your inbox – now you can get on with rest of the day’.

Superficial scanning

Matt Jones provides a nice piece about usage of Blackberries. His point, drawn partly from an observation by John Hagel is that e-mail tends to translate poorly to small devices where we scan rather than absorb messages. Which means that we pay less attention to more content doesn't it? I think this is an issue that goes beyond the transition of formats to the sheer quantity of incoming we have to? choose to? deal with.

Hagel wrote a wonderful book with John Seely-Brown called "The Social Life of Information" in 2000. I can't recommned it highly enough.

First review of the book

is here...

Skype distraction

Voice over IP arrives at a desk near me. Watching Jo wrestle with it (he may object to this term), I'm struck by the hassle factor (when Skype rings he reaches for the headset, puts it on, adjusts it, finds the mouse, clicks a few times, says some phrases that suggest he's not sure he has connected). The calls also get dropped, and sound is iffy. It's all a bit "come in Moscow, come in Moscow" early radio ham, but I guess for the extraordinary price it is worth it and I am in no doubt we are all going there. But with less hassle I hope Right now, it looks like another case of technology consuming time.

Design with a sense of humour

Some time ago I met a pair of designers who go by the name of 3eyes. Recently for their degree show at the RCA, they exhibited their lap juicer. It's very very funny even if slightly limited in use. The world needs more humour in design, digital or not.

Typos

A thank you to my father-in-law (to be) for bringing various typos on this site to my attention. He'll think I am being ironic but I mean it. Especially because it made me wonder if this was a generational thing. Actually I don't like them either, but of course I sometimes post here in a bit of rush like many do. Isn't that what blogs are for? You can be long and considered, short or sharp or a mix. And if it was a diary, would the odd spelling mistake matter? But then, a web site looks so structured that perhaps we expect higher standards than jottings in a notebook. We expect typographic perfection from the media, and if this blog is a medium then maybe we are simply extending our expectations.....

Is the same true for photography (see my previous post...)?

Anyway - as we increasingly mix content from people and organisations, we should anticipate mixed quality in the detail.

Continuous partial attention

Thank to Celia at work, this is a very very good piece on the problem of digital media reducing our ability to focus effectively. It speaks for itself, so I will not try to summarise: a small quote though....

For almost two decades, continuous partial attention has been a way of life to cope and keep up with responsibilities and relationships.  We've stretched our attention bandwidth to upper limits.  We think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.

With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.  Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities.  We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we're connected.  To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.

We've been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time.  Speed, agility, and connectivity at top of mind.  Marketers humming that tune for two decades now.

Now we're over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled.

Look carefully

The BBC are now building punter's commentary seamlessly into their on-line sports reporting: look here for the e-mail and text contributions lower down, during the run of play at today's Ashes 3rd test

Personal content - paid for

Fascinating development in personal content - a new company Scoopt are offering to act as agents for punters who capture newsworthy photos. So now personal content can make you money! And it is surely another major sign of the growing proximity between "ordinary" people and big media that photos taken by us are accepted as part of the news/entertainment output.

Scoopt are having to mount a PR defence against those who say their move is cynical and against the spirit of digital media. There was a good piece in Media Guardian (you'll have to register, but it is free)) quote:
......What all this suggests is that despite the net providing people with a revolutionary way of becoming journalists, it does not answer the central dilemma of journalism itself: what is it for? Democratisation has burgeoned alongside the "free" market economy that encourages people to believe that everything, including information, has a price. Is that really so great an advance?

Personally I think journalists can get a bit pompous when considering these issues, but Scoopt does not help its case with its home page which suggests that Concorde crashing is the sort of thing they are after....

Media Monopolies

As Matt (again) points out - this is three years old and still a good read.
Seth Godin on why media monopolies are undermined by digital.

Distraction choices!

This afternoon Matt in the office suddenly laughed long and deep. He was watching, over the web, BBC News footage of a woman who had been caught up in the bomb incidents yesterday being interviewed. Sometime into the interview her phone rang. In the middle of being broadcast to millions of people she chose to answer it with the immortal line "excuse me, its a friend". Faced with fame or phone, she chose the latter.

If I can get the link from Matt I'll put it up here.

Crackberry OD

OK - I know I'm late to this news item (it was in the Economist two weeks ago) but in case anyone has missed it feel the need to report.....that Blackberry (handheld e-mail and phone devices) users are getting symptoms of over-dependancy. Perfect distraction stuff.

One man admits that his wife "has threatened to flush his blackberry down the toilet. Meanwhile bosses grumble that no-one pays attention in business meetings any more, because they are so busy doing e-mail under the table".

The Economist cheerfully suggests that it is just a matter of time before people learn to adapt. Perhaps - but I'm not so optimistic. Incoming messages are addictive and suggest a level of social importance (somebody out there wants me!).

Several years ago (when I was at Razorfish) I was leading a meeting with a very well known technology company. An agreement had been made globally that Razorfish should partner with them. Our meeting was to discuss how this would work in practice in Europe. During the usual hiatus at the start while coffee was made and people settled down, all the people from the partner company opened their laptops, plugged into the internet (in our meeting room) and began to check their mail. Which was fine, except they continued to do so after the meeting had begun. Some of them were taking and sending text messages too, one actually had whispered phone conversations on his mobile. Not only was this completely dysfunctional behaviour, it was making it very hard to conduct a focussed event. I decided to make it clear that this had to stop in the interests of good, clear communication – so asked that everyone switch off their mobiles and shut down their laptops. This did not make me popular. In fact I had to repeat the request several times to the phone whisperer, with increasing insistence, until he reluctantly complied.

Telling this tale now I realise that for many familiar with big (and some small) corporations it will not come as a surprise – though it would surely be a huge shock to an executive time traveller from 15 years ago. Since then I have seen the same behaviour in many instances – often in very well disciplined companies . Perhaps it is endorsed and encouraged by those at the top.

A friend of mine who works in an IT services company says it happens all the time. He also observed that the cause is often people being in the wrong meetings.  Stuck in a dull meeting, if someone decides that they have nothing to contribute or learn, then it is tempting to turn to other tasks if the opportunity is there. The answer to that problem is surely to ensure that people don’t waste time attending pointless meetings. This of course is an age old organisational conundrum, and not the fault of new communication technologies. One might argue that it is better for them to use time answering mail than pretending to participate. However what of those people who go to meetings, but decide that only bits of the day are relevant. Can they too selectively duck out until the time is right to pay attention? How do they know which bits to listen to? And what of the signals this sends to other participants? Charles Handy in “The Hungry Spirit ” tells of the head of a large consulting group who complained to him that “her people are now spending so much time listening, reading and responding to their incoming communications that they have ceased to think. Efficient? Yes. Effective? I’m not so sure”. Actually I’d question the efficiency too.

London times

Spent some of yesterday wondering what difference digital media will make to the London Olympics in 2012. Spent today reflecting on what we do with digital media now, in a London ruptured by the anger of bombs. I've got nothing profound to say - just to observe that my mobile sang and bleeped at my constantly during the morning and afternoon from as a far afield as Pamplona and Houston as friends and relatives rang to check I and my colleagues were OK. Emails came from LA and Helsinki. The touch was reassuring in a frankly slightly disorientating day.

I watched the news unfold through the web - though it must be observed that for lengthy periods of time access was slow or non-existent, due I guess to demand. Colleagues found the same on the mobile networks. Eventually we switched on the radio and absorbed crackly non-stop news on old-fashioned am.

Is too much interaction possible?

Researching the idea of bluetooth dating, I came across this piece. Ignore the awful word "proximal" (what are technology thinkers doing to English?) and look at what Mark Granovetter (a man who has been a leader in thinking about social networks) says about the idea (of bluetooth dating).....

“Some worry that as these   technologies become more common, people will become overloaded with networking requests and start to ignore them.”   And Cameron Marlowe, a social networks researcher also at MIT warns that it would be a constant distraction. “You wouldn’t want to switch it off just in case.”

Indeed.

Distraction Live

Picture Carnaby Street yesterday - an unseasonably cold June day, pissing with rain. Standing on a corner is a man dressed as the devil, replete with black stubby horns, a tail and red face and tights. He has a stand with painted flames and the legend "Devil Brollies". He shouts "free umbrellas" at soggy passers by. A few incautiously take them, and of course walk off and open them up to shelter from the rain. The joke is that each one has a word written in large white letters on the black canopy, obvious only if you are behind the owner who is ignorant of it. The first says ANUS, the next TWAT, the third I see is ARSE. Of course - there's the bloke with the video capturing all this, presumably for TV. It occurred to me that no-one stops to look at a man with a large video camera these days. We're all at it, making content. Years ago, they'd have had to hide the cameraman in a van. Now he's just part of the street furniture because the whole world is a theatre of content.

Damn, I wish I'd been quicker with the camera phone.

The politics of media

Adbusters (Culture Jammers) is an interesting organisation worth taking a look at. It's a branch of the anti-globalisation movement who are particularly annoyed by advertising and branding, and take action over it - a sort of Naomi Klein Red Brigade. Some of the ideas are great. Some of the thinking woolly. Typical of the output is here where the subject is Media Environmentalism, a phrase I especially like as it is close to what Distraction Culture is about - but then it's partially spoiled with a "they are trying to manipulate us" approach - personally I just don't subscribe to conspiracy theories like this. The truth we face is caused by all our actions, not just a few wicked and manipulative companies.

Satire or reality?

This piece in the Onion suggests the ad industry has begun a campaign to advertise advertising. Very funny - the only problem is that I can't convince myself that it might not be true....(thanks to Mike Bayler for sending me this).

Mapping

A major point of my book is that our concepts of space are changing. Douglas Rushkoff makes the point too, here. What he says:

Although modern mapping systems depend heavily on computers, some of the most fundamental maps we use daily are drawn and redrawn on an ongoing basis by our own wetware. From the moment we become aware of spatial relations, we begin a complex process of constructing personal thematic maps. Maps of our mommies, daddies, bottles, favorite albums, movies, books, food, friends, pets, conversations and experiences -- anything to which we can attach associations, meaning and relationships. But these maps live on an almost subconscious level. My map of, say, the best shopping in Stockholm or the spiritually resonant zones of cyberspace, may look very different than yours.

What I say.....

You cannot travel into a fresco because it remains a point in time and space, even if it does tell a story spread over the whole chapel. You can follow a film through a limited amount of time, say two hours – but in most circumstances only in one direction. Virtual reality however gives you – potentially - infinite space you can explore in your time. The idea of this has passed irretrievably into public consciousness. Once again, this changes the way we relate to each other and the world, and will have largely unpredictable consequences.

We can however already see one spatial change that digital media has brought to us: and that is the degree to which we are now implicitly and explicitly connected to each other. Mobile phones do this more than anything else, because now our connectedness travels with us everywhere we go. This is the profound force that is re-shaping us. The network of our connections is becoming woven into our physical lives. We had thought that a new digital landscape all of its own was springing into existence, one which existed in “hyperspace”, which had its own map. This was William Gibson’s vision in Neuromancer. To some extent via the Internet it is true. But now we have to factor in mobile too, and it looks like mobile is actually mapping the virtual on to the real world.

Rights part one and the BBC as hero...

I've been thinking a lot about rights recently: partly because it is central to some work we are doing on mobile TV and partly because publication of the book has been delayed as I seek permission for some longer than normal quotes. There is a lot more to say about this issue in the digital age, but Cory Doctorow praises the BBC here for their gung-ho approach to digital content and understanding that personal content provided by ordinary people is a blossoming of the media environment. Note his comments about the big Hollywood studios trying to grab control over the equipment we use to obtain and view digital content. Conversations I've had with content owners recently have opened my eyes to the degree that unrealistic thinking permeates these organisations. But is it greed or fear? And when we add our content to theirs, who then owns the rights?

"Intertainment"

Douglas Rushkoff comments on the rush to entertainment and content on the phone....and reminds us that it is prinicipally a social tool used for connecting us to the world.

While it may be more challenging to develop business models for user-generated social, artistic and self-expressive experiences, I think we have to accept this dilemma of our own making. After all, here we are declaring that mobile really is something new: a tide change worthy of massive investment, speculation, consumer interest and cultural attention........and this means developing new approaches to mobile experiences, and finally evolving a two-thousand-year-old understanding of showing people a good time. The new rule of thumb, so to speak, may be to create experiences that do not contain the user but rather give the user a way out.....wireless intertainment doesn't involve people interacting with data; it's about people interacting with the world or, at best, with one another. It's time for the entertainer to end his song and dance, and make room for the next era of players.

Technology seeking solutions

Catching up with articles on the always informative The Feature.com I hit this from earlier this year. To quote:

"If you're in the middle of a push-to-talk conversation and both parties become much more engaged, the system could suggest a transition from that tentative instant message-like mode into a traditional telephone connection," Aoki says. The users could tune their preferences so that the shift happens automatically, he says, or perhaps a key might illuminate to offer the option. That way, either party could decline the transition without forcing the participants to awkwardly announce their decisions or interrupt the conversation.

During their research, the scientists loaned college-age students two-way push-to-talk handsets to study how they used the service. While the participants appreciated the IM-like nature of the technology, it became clear to the researchers that "push-to-talk" is not always suited for the subject matter. For example, Aoki explains, you may be chatting with a friend in push-to-talk mode. As he becomes emotional while filling you on his relationship troubles, push-to-talk falls short.  The "uh-huhs" and other earnest cues that someone is truly listening to him are lost. Ideally, the push-to-talk mode would seamlessly shift into a full-duplex telephony channel.

To identify engagement, the software listens to the acoustics of the conversation. Features like the tone of the speaker's voice, the rise and fall in pitch, and the pauses between utterances are continuously analyzed using statistical algorithms. No training is necessary. The result is a pretty good estimate of the speaker's engagement in the conversation. Even a very early lab prototype of the system was accurate more than 60 percent of the time.

Some alternative thoughts occur to me. People could

• learn to listen to each other carefully
• not take part in tele conferences if they have nothing to gain/offer
• adapt behaviour to newish technologies like push to talk (I'm not convinced by this one - push to talk - at all)
• negotiate subtle social forms of conversing

All of these take some effort but build social capital. And may be better than technology solutions to technology problems.