Distraction Culture

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’.