Distraction Culture

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".