What's in a Message?

It's a Saturday morning, and I've been lying here on my sofa updating Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Classroom 2.0, and doing a bunch of things that make me feel connected with my peers and wider communities. In the meantime, a guard's walkie-talkie has been blaring from near the gate to our compound, and I was wondering whether I should complain about it. But isn't the guard just doing exactly what I'm doing - keeping a line of communication open to his version of a social network? Just like Twitter, I'm sure that our compound guards mix a combination of work and play into the stream of communication that's circulating around our buildings.

There's something primal and essential about the need to send and receive messages, and it goes beyond mere functionality. The messages that we send and receive are collectibles; affirmers of worth and desirability, and sometimes we elevate them to esteemed positions in our mental trophy cabinet: "I got a message from X today!"/"Y friended me on Facebook!"/"Z is following me on Twitter!" (we take the social value of person X/Y/Z and add it to our own intangible social value). There are even those who believe that one's 'network worth' can be calculated as an algorithm. Our own messages and compositions may be revisited and rexamined for their 'essence' when they seem to have resonated with others (replies and comments to blog posts; direct responses on Twitter; cheery 'reply alls' to that witty quip you included in a work email).

The flow of our messages is like a flow of energy or currency. When communication slows down or ceases, a relationship is either likely to 'power down' or to join a parcel of obsolete connections that you've had in the past. It may be revived again, but it will likely require additional energy or extrinsic motivation in order to potentiate a reconnection. Messages are the lifeblood of relationships, and they're part of our deep-seated insecurity as human beings - and our need to be nurtured within a community. The communications industry may need to restructure itself at the moment in order to manage itself in the face of disruptive technologies, but it will never die.

Why do you send that text message that costs you money, when you could have waited to send a free message via email? Why do people feel the need to broadcast themselves live via Twitter, UStream, live blogging, or whatever format they're embracing? Why do we consume time on the phone, on email, Facebook, watching the television, browsing websites, talking, listening? Our communication isn't just about the functionality of life - it's about the art of life! The personality of our communication and the media that we choose to channel our thoughts is a deeper expression of an energy and a vitality. Messages are 'the ties that blind' - within the visible there are always layers of undeconstructed invisible psycholinguistics and personality - they are always open to interpretation, although they are rarely 'fully opened' when they're interpreted.

At school we passed messages on hastily folded slips of paper under our desks, and behind our teachers' backs. These days we're designing backchannels for classrooms so that we can actually siphon this desire into something positive. Messages can be exclusive, and messages can be inclusive. Messages can open doors, or they can close entire countries. Messages can be sent into space, marked as unread, deleted, imprisoned in spam folders, or on occasion they can become wildly popular memes that mutate and come back next month dressed in snazzier graphics and a brand new font.

A message can end as soon as it's written by being crumpled up and thrown in a trash can, or it can live on through millennia. A message can encapsulate a seriously bad idea, or it can be the catalyst for a revolution.

So if we know all of this then why aren't we building more social networking into our classrooms and into our communication with colleagues?

Message image by cindiann.

Microbugging - Time to Filter!

Today I experienced an adverse reaction to overly-prolific social networking - the kind where it reaches a point of being unhealthy, and you just need to step back and take a break from someone's comments for a while. Sometimes social networking starts off as a perfectly healthy relationship between you and a member of your international peer group, but what if the person you're connected to turns down a path that you're too busy to follow?

I prefer to surround myself with positive, balanced individuals. I'm not interested in receiving a 'stream of consciousness' relay of someone else's every thought, doubt, or question. It's time for us to filter - both in terms of output, and in terms of input.

Today I 'cut off' some of my Twitter connections because their relays were interfering with my personal thought processes, and my ability to function as a positive, focused individual. Within several hours I received messages asking why I'd severed these links, and I attempted to state (where possible) that nothing is permanent, and that I needed to make room for other peoples' comments.

One of the problems with the modern ability to publish is that if you're going to choose to publish a poetic journey through your each and every thought, then you may want to look at which channel/forum/genre you choose to do this with. I'd like to introduce a new word into the discussion of microblogging: "microbugging" - a proclivity to share every thought with one's social network, as opposed to actively editing one's thoughts in order to relay and collect useful communication.

Response: Andy Torris at "Sentiments on Common Sense"

Related post: It's not complicated - it's just emotionally difficult.

Image CC Denis Collette.

It's not attention deficit - it's evolution!

My colleagues accept the fact that I'm nearly always attached to some sort of digital prosthetic device - whether it's a laptop, a smartphone, or whatever I'm currently experimenting with. I take these tools with me to meetings to take notes, to check/verify information on the fly, and even to communicate with others in the meetings via backchannels.

We are changing as participants, and it's only natural that our previously-segmented digital participation (which used to occupy discrete, concentrated moments) is now merging with our physical participation. So why is there so much resistance from educators, who should be celebrating this as an revolution in thought and participation?

This morning two colleagues discussed their boredom and disengagement in meetings and presentations with me. The first revealed that he sometimes fiddles away with calculus to keep his mind active during meetings, and the second shared that she needs to keep her fingers busy in order to stimulate her mind. Both of these people are high-functioning, high-achieving professionals, but to the 'untrained eye' their 'fidgety proclivities' might look like the kinds of problems that are frequently narrowly defined as 'low attention spans' in children. In fact, one of my colleagues shared that she entered a meeting last week and was specifically instructed to close her laptop - presumably so she could focus on the meeting.

I have never been so stimulated and engaged in a 'passive' presentation as when I observed Julie Lindsay at Learning 2.008, and it was primarily because she not only trusted her participants, but because she activated a moderated back channel - and gave her audience something to do while listening. The challenge of 21st century learning - and meeting - is not how to banish tools that are becoming '2nd nature' to users, but how to capitalize on them, and to focus use so that we're working with technology instead of against it.

Social Notworking - Digital Refugees

The recent troubles over at Twitter have created a mass of confusion in what previously looked like a self-organizing social networking system.  As in the real world, it takes time to settle into a new neighborhood and to discover how you fit into a community.  However, Twitter's lack of ability to scale to its ever-expanding user base has resulted in an explosion of digital refugees who are now wandering through cyberspace in search of new homes.  

Recent networks d' jour have included Plurk, which offers a new graphic spin on microblogging; identi.ca, which is gaining popularity due to its open source origins, and Ping has also entered the arena as a solution to centralize users' updates from a single location.  On the flipside, FriendFeed is there to collect everything that you've been doing on multiple blogs, and to tie it all up in a neat little... mess.  Of course, aggregating feeds is nothing new, and aside from standard RSS readers, other sites like Suprglu and Multiply  have been doing this for quite a while, but adoption rates seem to be sluggish.

Therefore, we have tools to take a single message and to amplify it and reproduce it so that it colonize a series of locations across the web, and we also have tools to distill our scattered thoughts into a single point of convergence.  We have the ability to broadcast a virtual presence to many sites, however, we are still lacking tools to maintain our connections and conversations within these communities.  

We can discover past contacts within emergent social networking communities, but then we can just as easily lose them as they migrate due to the push-pull factors that exist within physical cities.  We've taken a physically global community that is already transient, and we've created a hyper-global layer on top of it, where people exist in and shift between virtual spaces. 

As we move towards increased choice (and let's face it, we've been ramping up to this for centuries - this is not a new phenomenon), how are we going to identify and select the best options as individuals?  There is always the potential for engineers to write new scripts so that we can simplify complex networking choices, but is it more logical to just simplify and take calculated risks to begin with?  

Time-shifting Communication

The intention of this post is to use a new 'scheduled post' feature in Blogger to demonstrate the possibilities of time-shifting communication. For example, I can prepare my post now, but then five hours later it will appear online and give me the appearance of being scholarly and nerdy, when, in fact, at the time this is being posted I'm actually at a rooftop BBQ on Taipa island... and I'm nowhere near a computer.

It's about time that we saw more active implementation of time-shifting (or at least time-delaying) features in our communication platforms. When I have that insomnia-induced brainwave at 1am, I don't really want to reveal to my colleagues that I'm not in the middle of a healthy cycle of sleep, do I?

So developers, developers, developers... please bring on time-shifting features in our email and blogging clients. If I am capable of doing things ahead of time, then why shouldn't I get the benefit of a 'phantom presence' after the fact?

The Renaissance "Man" in I.T.?

Computerworld recently published Hot Skills, Cold Skills as part of a 'special report' on predictions for the I.T. industry in 2010.  Specifically, author Stacy Collett claims:

The IT worker of 2010 won't be a technology guru but rather a 'versatilist.'

Essentially, the article predicts that "more rounded" skills, particularly those which center on acquiring and managing business, are going feature more prominently as the industry matures.

Social Networking Blues

Here's another article in the current wave of not particularly insightful but interesting nonetheless articles on social networking: Facebook, MySpace Reveal Hidden Messages.

The thing that bothers me about this kind of journalism is that it's once again stating the obvious,  i.e. if you constantly change your Facebook/MySpace status then you're probably doing some attention-seeking.  Do we really need a journalist to point this out to us?

People do all sorts of things to get attention:  they dress and style themselves, they surround themselves with 'defining' possessions like cell phones and cars, and if you watch truly gifted networkers at a mixer, then they don't hesitate to approach someone new out of the blue with some sort of an "opener."  Chatty people chat.  Twitterers tweet.  Status updaters update their status.  So what.

I think it's fairly obvious that we're exposing ourselves emotionally over social networks - this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  The only thing I'm really worried about is whether more advanced data analysis is going to scour my online emotional trail one day to create some sort of semantic-emotional graph.  A potential employer might not need to analyze my biological DNA if they have access to the emotional 'strands' that I've left online as behavioral fingerprints.

Useless Tech Tips 101

I've noticed that some of the 'tech tips' web shows have recently started offering micromanagement tips for personal computing. One example (that I will not link to) is a popular 'daily' show where the hosts introduce methods to 'control' browsers, such as 'how to make your browser display over 40 open tabs on the screen at once'. However, it may be time to adopt the time-honored approach of "use the telescope, not the microscope" and to step back and look at some of the overarching principals of personal/time management, instead of learning how to juggle so many balls at once.

One of my friends wrote to me yesterday claiming that she was trying to get her email inbox "under 1000", so I humbly refer you to a useful site that offers some excellent advice on adopting principals and strategies that might help you avoid getting into these 'mass tangles' to begin with. Prevention is usually better than the cure.

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Enablement in the Workplace

"Enablement means giving employees the wherewithal—organizational structure, information technology, and other resources that lead to confident decision-making—to do their jobs well. According to an online survey and interviews conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for a study commissioned by Microsoft, 87 percent of respondents rate enablement as important to employees’ sense of pride and confidence in their work."

Download the study here

World Community Grid

Grid computing is 'always on'

Distributed computing is an excellent example of how an 'always on' culture can realistically contribute to positive change. I support BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and groups that I've contributed to include:

• SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
• Folding @ Home - computing valid candidates for medical treatments
• World Community Grid - search for solution to diseases such as cancer and dengue fever
• Climate Prediction Net - developing models of worldwide climate change

I encourage any of you who have computers that are sometimes just sitting around idling to participate in community projects such as these - there are scores more to choose from.  All it takes is the time to set the software and accounts up, and the will to 'loan' your computing power to a variety of worthy causes.  

Riding Technology's Wake

All hail the pioneers of the new frontier! A toast to the early adopter - that glorious breed of cyberwarrior who parts with his time and money for new products and operating systems, and then battles each bug and glitch as if his honor was at stake. And to those of you who felt like it was your mission to test blog on every new website and service... R.I.P.

It's one thing to be 'ahead of the curve,' but it's a completely different thing to be 'spinning out of control.' There are those of us who will choose to try absolutely every new service, experiment or 'toy' on the Internet in order to find the next big thing, but then we might find that we're simply among the other thousand (or million) people who were doing exactly the same thing - and providing free testing and reporting services for those who were hoping to reap the rewards of free labor.

Choose your missions and your battles wisely, and remember that sometimes the people riding the wake are ultimately having more fun than those who are battling the wavefront.

Photo by jkprime. CC licensed.

Psychological Mining: The Genius of Facebook ‘Games’ and Quizzes

There’s an eerie brilliance behind some of some of Facebook’s seemingly innocuous applications. The most insidious genius that I have encountered thus far is the “Likeness” application, as it preys upon so many levels of hope and fear, and then supposedly ranks users against each other, then ranks/matches them with people who achieve similar scores to them.

I need to dig deeper into their privacy policy before I can make any sort of overarching judgement about whether or not this kind of application is data mining for targeted advertising, but I see absolutely no reason why this kind of data collection isn’t a form of targeted advertising tool – if I input all of my preferences and fears, with the idea that I’ll then be ranked against my ‘peers’ (and all of the other characters that start to randomly pop up within the system), then why shouldn’t I suspect that this is not a new kind of collective litmus for psychometrics?

If I’m given a choice of the kinds of attributes that I most desire myself, with the promise of discovering those in my contact list who have similar desires, then why on earth would the developers not be feeding this information back to subscribing marketing divisions? How on earth do they make their money without ad support?

An example: “Choose the things you’d want more of first: intelligence, creativity, friends, money, beauty, money, beauty, confidence, athleticism, fame, respect, time to yourself.” Surely if I rank order these fields then advertisers and marketers will be able to sequence both my priorities, and those of everyone who completes the sequence, so that they can direct products at me that will supposedly fulfil my needs and desires?

My suggestion is that the new wave of social ‘games’ that we’re being presented with are not only highly amusing, personal, and engaging, but they may also be leading to targeted product development and advertising that will supposedly fill our needs. Is it all harmless social fun, or is there a quiet wave of extremely careful targeted advertising that’s about to start arriving in our Facebook accounts?

Blogging the live fantastic

Along with the preponderance of 'ubiquitous' wireless technology, we've witnessed a shift in the way that information can be shuttled around the planet. Predictably, a shift in methodology is resulting in a metamorphosis of the products of reportage.

Liveblogging is the new, hot phenomenon - in much the same way that everyone had to rush out and sign up for a YouTube account last year if they didn't already have one. Post-"broadcast yourself" we've moved into the next phase: "broadcast everything." For the past several years I've, sadly, sat up late at night and followed some tech conferences as lines of text would drip listlessly over my modem. For me, liveblogging was the opportunity to be somewhere "live." Alas, I wasn't really a part of these conferences. Moreover, I knew I could wait until the next morning, when I'd be able to just watch a video of the said event.

This year, however, conferences like Macworld supposedly 'crashed the blogosphere' because so many people decided that they would now be the liveblogger du jour. One has to wonder whether a thousand voices are really necessary when they're pretty much saying the same thing? In the past we had radio commentary for political and sports events, because we weren't able to see or hear them live. The art of commentary evolved into television, as words to accompany wordless actions, like a ball flying toward the crowd, or a wedding procession, or an inarticulate F1 vehicle hurtling towards a hairpin bend. But liveblogging is not limited to discussion of wordless actions - it can actually be commentary superimposed on commentary. Even time-honored institutions like The New York Times are now experimenting with the form for events such as the Democratic Debate.

With the mass activation of legions of citizen journalists, is the face of reading and writing changing? Although liveblogging may appeal to the desire for narrative and immediacy, could it also be a less efficient, less articulate method of acquiring information, when so much infobloat already exists? Any middle school student should be able to tell you how to take narrative or sequence, and fold it back up into summary and synthesis. But liveblogging isn't about synthesising - it's all about capturing the moment.

Obviously there's a place for liveblogging in 2008, but I have to wonder whether having it as a discrete stream of information, divorced from what it's commentating on, is really where liveblogging is heading. If I actually had a live video feed of a political debate with a liveblog superimposed with additional information it might be more compelling - or more relevant.

However, maybe this is where I've missed the relevance of liveblogging, because its current potential might be measured more accurately by what's accessible, rather than what's possible. Several years ago I chatted with the Kelly brothers, creators of the Internet TESL Journal, in Nagoya, Japan. Their website looks like something from the dawn of the Internet, but they explained this to me in very simple terms - no unnecessary graphics, no unnecessary bloat, because their prime concern was ensuring that the content was accessible to as many people around the world as possible - regardless of bandwidth.

It's so easy to forget that not so many years ago our laptops were tethered to physical wires, and that our access to the Internet could be mind-numbingly sluggish. As usual, the information rich have forgotten that the information poor are not playing by the same rules. So despite your cable TV and your broadband Internet, liveblogging is still the closest thing that someone, somewhere can get to some very real experiences.

Image by Sue Richards. Some Rights Reserved.

Exiting the infocrack crowd

Lately I've been pondering the benefits of the 'always on' approach to infotech, but maybe it's time to shift the focus to 'getting off the crack' and optimizing our time.

In the spirit of Tim Ferris's bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek, I'll try to keep this post short, especially for those of you on a low information diet.  Keep in mind that Ferris would actually like to disrupt the current trend of information overload, and to terminate our movement toward being an 'always on'  culture!

Pareto's Principle (the 80/20 principle):

20% of your actions will produce 80% of your results

Parkinson's Law:

Batching tasks - letting similar tasks accumulate, then batching them, eg. only emailing or responding several times a week.

Ferris's advice for trying to break non-productive cycles of using information technologies?  Ask yourself this questions 3 times daily:

"Am I being productive, or am I being busy?"

Image by megadem.  Some rights reserved.

Inside, Outside, the Cloud: New Ways to Express Primitive Emotions

First came cave painting (inside), then graffiti (outside), now the Internet (the cloud).

Image by mharrsch. Some rights reserved.

Several days ago I became annoyed at one of the announcements that Steve Jobs made at the MacWorld conference, so I promptly left a small, yet public trail of dissatisfaction along some of the pathways I frequent on the web.  Essentially, I was experiencing a form of "post-decisional dissonance," which I recently heard Michael Britt talking about in an older issue of his podcast, The Psych Files.  Britt was discussing the rapid sharing of opinions which I've commented on previously.  In my case, I became frustrated with a purchasing decision I'd made, and disappointed by a large corporation's decisions, and I felt compelled to share my dissatisfaction.  When we talk about sharing via high-tech methodologies, we possibly forget that quite often the sharing is the result of a much more primitive machine - namely the fear-driven, knee-jerking reptilian legacy of our brains that like to occasionally brim with negativity and anger.

So why is it that negative opinion spreads so quickly in our online worlds, and why is there so much of it?  At first it might seem like this is just a reflection of mainstream media, where 'bad news' is the norm, but it may also be due to the fact that so much online interaction is about problem solving (eg. making a purchasing decision, finding a hotel, filling in information, fixing a dysfunctional product).  The fact that corporations are now employing people to scour the web for these kinds of comments is a reflection of their own form of problem solving.  We, the consumers, are very vocal about products and their problems when we encounter them, and we sometimes resort to searching for parallel instances of our problem, in the hope that we'll find a solution.

However, not all negative expression seems like it's about problem solving, and much of it can (or can't) be understood as something much more primal.  On networks such as YouTube, there are thousands of examples of non-constructive, negative comments on people's videos.  Those who are frequently negative are sometimes called, "haters."  Is their commenting one of the newer forms of public graffiti?  I wonder whether we see more of these comments made because there's a psychological distance between the offender and those they affect, or whether there's something deeper at work - emotions and ideas that have been with us long before technology gave us the means to "hate" from a distance.  A message left on a forum or as a comment on a video is like a marking on a cave, or even like a territorial pissing.  So in an indirect way, sometimes seemingly meaningless angst online may be an attempt to solve a problem - the right to exist, to be acknowledged, and to be recognized.

As the population swells, both physically and digitally, everyone needs to feel like they're not being swallowed up into insignificance.  In some cases, seemingly destructive acts might actually be poorly-conceived attempts at expression.  For some, being a member of a virtual 'tribe' will suffice (eg. an advocate of one operating system vs. the others), as this sense of belonging-meets-rivalry meets the needs of some.  Isn't this the same kind of instinct that plays into team sports?  Others may be seeking acknowledgement as individual worth, but essentially we're all looking for acceptance as both an individual and a group member.

Pamela Livingston recently made her own 'painting' on the wall of this cave-blog (ie. she left  a comment) that sums up all of these ideas quite neatly:

Sometimes a little ego here and there but we all have egos.

The next time you see someone expressing an idea that's mediated through 'high technology,' maybe it'll be worth wondering whether the message is actually a manifestation of basic emotions and needs.  Maybe a hateful comment is an expression of self-loathing; maybe an angry comment is really an expression of regret; maybe a critical comment was meant to be constructive.  A little bit of empathy never went astray, but of course it's difficult to think of everyone as a bag of biology when we're connected via silicone and plastic.  

Sometimes it's not all about the technology.  The medium is not the message.

Twitter - Frivolous by name, not by nature

I recently sat through an edition of Cnet's Buzz Out Loud podcast during which senior editor Molly Wood decried the concept of individuals pumping up their egos by documenting their lives on blogs, or by using tools such as Twitter. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common misconception - that Twitter is basically just like a 'frequent flyer' version of a Facebook status update. Little do they know that the suggested question, "What are you doing?" is largely ignored by vast networks of professionals who use Twitter as online knowledge laboratories.

Within my own (rather small) Twitter network I can easily step into live conversations between scores of teachers, largely from the edublogging community, as they participate in perpetually evolving conversations about pedagogy. Colleagues across the world drop hints and tips about resources, leading to extremely dynamic sharing. I am also connected to the thoughts and processes of members of the software development community, so it's possible for me to observe the construction of the software infrastructure on which our thoughts travel and our collective knowledge is managed. Utilities such as Twitter and Jaiku enable increased connectivity for personal and professional networks, and fuse the functionality of instant messaging, chat rooms, and forums.

The power of Twitter lies within its simplicity and its dynamism: unlike previous generations of forums, topics are set on the fly and they don't dwell in linear pathways. The cap of 140 characters per 'Tweet' enforces brevity and encourages prolific spontaneity. Conversations within Twitter could be construed as 'messy,' consisting of fragments of dialogue between people in your network and gaps, but this can encourage users to focus on the individuals that they're 'following,' and to open up contact and possibilities to expand your personal learning network.

The lesson here is that new tools offer new possibilities, and that end-users will frequently ignore the suggested use of a tool in order to explore how far they can exploit it (ie. get practical use out of it). Twitter is the closest technology to telepathy that we have right now. It seems strange that even people in the technology industry fail to grasp its potential.

Choice Control: The New Connectivity of Opinion Networks

It would seem that a number of bloggers & Twitterers/Tweets are converging on the Pew Internet & American Life Project at present, and its manifesting itself in various articles and reports that are appearing on Cnet's news blog.  It's also interesting that technologies such as Twitter allow people like me to discover fascinating components of reports that I'd previously sidestepped. 

As an example, several days ago I read fragments of blogs that referred to statistics that claim that girls are driving the blogosphere, and I'd also followed links to the Pew project site. However, today a Twitter reference from someone I've never met who 'attached' themselves to me as a follower posted a link to a Cnet report, Girls blog, boys post video, which is recursively prompting me to go back to the read more deeply and to investigate the claim that "Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation" (according to the study).

As fascinating as the topic of gender domination on the web is - and I'll definitely be looking at it more in the near future - the means are sometimes just as important as the end, and I'm referring to how I actually got to this information.  In my 'old world' interactions I might choose to read a certain subject or specific piece of literature because of a conversation at a party, or because I attend a seminar and a speaker sparks some interest, or because I read a positive review.  This is, however, changing, and at least from the sources and influences that I have, it seems like the culture of recommendation and approval is becoming increasingly active.  We have 'opinion centralization' sites such as Digg, but we still have the chaotic, unbridled means to distribute opinion and approval in our social circles.

This week I've been led to a video on the psychology of nightmares via a group email from a friend in Shanghai; the report I just referred to was via some I've never met but am 'socially' linked to via Twitter; a book was recommended to me from a friend in Hong Kong via Facebook.  I keep lists of my recommended books and music on Facebook; recommended websites via del.icio.us, and leave impressions of my recommendations and choices in all of these places and via these means.  The ability to mine this kind of data for social/market prediction and commercial gain has created new forms of business.  

There are a few questions I have about the power and potential of these new forms of recommendation and opinion transmission:

• What happens to those who aren't enmeshed in these networks?  There are those who are concerned about the 3rd world and their lack of access to information, but how different are we becoming from those in our own neighborhood who don't live within the Metaverse?
• How good are we at managing the deluge of increased connectivity?  Does it lead to attention deficit, lack of focus, lack of specialization, or are there other possibly detrimental consequences that may need to be addressed?
• Where does education and media literacy fit into all of this?  Critical analysis and deconstruction is a component of most modern education programs, but how many K-12 school programs focus on information management and time management.  I don't think it's good enough to just recommend a 'healthy maximum number of hours spent on a computer per day.' 

Ultimately, we have new 'power' to choose and to transmit our choices to others.  However, as the number of choices we have increases, decision making/time management will also become more complex and more demanding.  The potential benefits of increased connectivity are staggering, and the social discovery of knowledge is already 'enhanced.'  However, as we move forward let's remember that there is a "burden of choice," and that an upgrade in one domain (ie. access to and transmission of information and opinion) may demand an upgrade in another (ie. critical literacy, decision making, and time management).  

Choices, choices.

Image by Greefus Groinks.  Some Rights Reserved.

Sleep-talking to 15 Minutes of Shame

Clive Thomspon's recent article in Wired aligns with what Always On Culture is endeavoring to explore.
Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity.

The idea that we are being transformed into our own PR managers is a concise way to sum up what's been described to me by some people in much simpler terms, "Facebook can get messy." Cnet's Tim Leberecht also wrote an extension article on Thompson's piece: Pew study says Internet users are becoming their own reputation managers, however, both of these articles focus primarily on management of reputation in the real world, as opposed to errors that people are likely to make online.

It's easy enough to predict how your associates may respond to you if a drunken photograph of you appears on someone's blog, or even within the slightly more 'walled' environment of a Facebook account, but what are the implications of the actions we actually take online? I am not referring to explicit/obvious examples of posting offensive material in a public forum, but the ripples and side-effects of more subtle actions, eg. accidentally sending a stupid application to all of your contacts, sending messages to friends' walls before proofreading, and all of the those 'silly, forgivable, harmless' actions online that may lead to social or professional consequences.

This is the where the "Always On" culture's rubber really hits the road. Visiting hours are never really over, as the impressions we leave in cyberspace are there even when we're sleeping. The only problem is that when we wake we may not necessarily be aware of the reaction of the person/people we've communicated with. I've learned the hard way that occasionally a sarcastic review left on a seemingly obscure forum might be one of the first things that people see if they search for me. Everything you post online represents you, and it will come back to haunt you - oh yes, it will - even if it's just in the form of weird targetted SPAM, but that's a topic for an entirely different post!

How to Grow Up in Virtual Worlds

Yesterday I read this article from the New York Times with curiosity:

Web Playgrounds of the Very Young. The article highlights the fact that many adults are probably still not aware of what's going on in terms of a shift from passive forms of media, such as TV and movies, to more interactive forms of media. As DVD and box office sales continue to disappoint, companies such as Time Warner, Disney, Mattel, and Lego are all preparing for increased demand:

"Get ready for total inundation,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer, who estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today.

While various adult worlds like Second Life sit amuse adults briefly, but then fail to attract return "business," kid-oriented sites are generating healthy revenues, and the companies behind them are preparing to expand their offerings with movie and physical product tie-ins.

The fact is that many adults aren't able to relate to the experience of virtual reality, and they don't necessarily see how it mixes with their 'real life.' However, if a child is introduced to the concept of virtual reality from a very young age, then might we assume that those children wouldn't necessarily sense a 'disconnect' of experience? Groups such as Disney are currently developing a scaffold of product experiences (in exactly the same way that they've done traditionally), in order to draw children into their virtual magic kingdoms, even as they grow older. In much the same way that children can begin with stuffed toys, and then advance to building blocks, and so on to more sophisticated toys, they will so be introduced to to age-based virtual worlds.

Online worlds can provide children with opportunities to problem solve, and to receive feedback that they wouldn't receive on their own - even if the feedback is based on 'artificial' intelligence. These worlds can be innocuous, fun, violent, money-grabbing, educational... or all of the above! The choice of a safe environment or 'world' for children to play in may be an initial decision for parents, but it probably shouldn't stop there. Actually talking to children about their virtual environments, and occasionally 'walking you through' their private universe is an essential way to link the physical to the virtual.

A concept that seems to be missed frequently is that the online worlds that children play in are not entirely virtual: they consist of an initial layer of programming, and then a complex interactive layer of real people sitting at their computers or their game consoles. Children who know each other in real life often explore virtual worlds together, and they discuss their worlds in real life - I've certainly heard kids talking about their adventures in Starcraft, Runescape, or World of Warcraft. Shared experiences can act as cultural touchstones to bridge from virtual to physical interaction - which is also where some of the risk lies.

The smarter companies in the gaming world have instituted safety technology, and they also employ staff to monitor the safety of their 'digital playgrounds.' However, as an extension of this, I wonder whether truly smart companies can give parents even more of what they want - not just 'parental controls' that give kids access to the Internet or 'safe sites' for a limited time each day/week, but 'smart worlds' that automatically give kids time outs, or vary their experiences, or provide them with educational opportunities on top of the gaming.

It's not healthy for anyone to be stuck inside a pattern of taking care of a virtual pet...or a family of SIMS beyond a reasonable length of time, therefore, I hope that the gaming industry is thinking about building 'automatic variability' into their computer-mediated experiences.

Internal Disconnection

Previously I've focused upon the idea that the type of blogging tools you use can effect the way that a blog might be constructed or maintained, and that now instead of keeping physical 'shoeboxes' of ideas and memories, we're moving towards hyperlinked memory:

Scraplogs and the Worldwide Shoebox.

However, I'd like to zoom out from individual blogging tools to consider a more important question: is blogging not only changing the way that we communicate with others, but also the way that we communicate with ourselves?

The art of keeping a private diary or journal has been a tradition that's lasted for centuries, although I'd suggest that it may be a dying (or at least faltering) art. A private diary is not only a powerful tool for recording personal histories, but the nature of its privacy also led to explorations of hopes, dreams, fears, and secrets. In a diary, angst can be expressed, demons can be exorcised, and the freedom exists to build elaborate dreams that could seem ridiculous to even close friends.

However, as our modes of schooling and working shift to the digital domain, both children and adults have been endowed with new tools and new methods of expression. Although we as adults write about ourselves and how our lives have been impacted, it may be worth considering that technological shift is never immediate, and that just as previous generations had no idea how we'd turn out, that we really don't know how new generations will react to growing up in a predominantly digital environment.

So does anyone out there still keep a diary? I know that one of my friends does, but it's a pure pen-and-paper affair, and it's a habit she developed a long time ago. However, she's also from a particular demographic - she's competent at business computing, but she doesn't post her photos online, she doesn't have a blog, and she doesn't have a Facebook account. Both my wife and I have private blogs that require passwords, but we don't really use them very much. I would guess that most people who start a blog aren't starting to make something private - they're doing exactly the opposite: claiming their own place in the global village fair where they can wax prolific.

Hence, there is a shift from private diaries to public journals. When I record my history it's now written for the possibility of a public audience, as opposed to be solely for my own amusement. This may improve the 'quality' of my writing, or my attention to technical accuracy, but what now happens to the emotional asides, the flights of fancy, the crazy poetry, or the strange sketches that might have accompanied these records if they were written in a closed diary? As technology advances we're seeing the return of sketching/doodling, and other expressive elements are being added to our journals, like video, animation, and mashups where there previously might have been a collage or collection of magazine clippings or concert and movie tickets. The ability to express creatively hasn't been diminished, but the desireability to express openly and to explore yourself internally has been, I would suggest, altered by the new media.

Cutting edge educators are very excited and proud to be among those who are providing their students with the tools and skills to go forward into the digital age. I've been excited about being able to give those kinds of utilitarian skills to my students, and I've certainly been caught in 'connectivity fervor' more than once. And why not? It really is something to be celebrated - there are now so many possibilities for communication, for connecting like minded people, and for sharing our expression and creativity with the world. However, with a focus on increased connectivity with the external world, there's a possibility that there's decreased connectivity with our internal worlds.

Solution: I believe that it begins with education and the early formation of habits and patterns. Instead of suggesting that everything is in the public domain and up for peer review, it would be advisable for teachers to maintain the privacy of some student work. Instead of just celebrating blogging as a public tool, it could be introduced in classrooms as a more flexible concept - one which has the ability to record private ideas.

Image by Paul Watson. Some Rights Reserved.

Always On

This blog begins just before dawn. I've been lying in bed wondering about how technologies are changing us as human beings, and how the recent jolt of 'always on' culture has altered us as a species forever.

We now have an exhilarating level of connectivity, but we've also lost our privacy in so many ways. I'd like to explore this space further - from the impact that it has on us socially and emotionally, and to also investigate methods and techniques that can be employed so that we can control our technologies (not vice versa).

As a child I knew that there was a limited window of access to the information and entertainment I could get from my TV. Television stations would start broadcasting in the morning, and then they'd stop broadcasting around midnight. The remainder of the time I could look at my TV, but all I'd see was a test pattern. A letter could take weeks to deliver. I had to wait for the latest albums to arrive at the record store. People went from door to door selling encyclopedias. Telephones were attached to cords, which were attached to walls. It all sounds positively archaic now.

But now I can wake in the middle of the night and access vast libraries while streaming video and chatting to someone I've never met. I can explore a virtual world surrounded by characters which are the manifestations of real people. I could participate in an online war with a mass of other live participants. There are so many benefits, but there are also side-effects.

Blackberrys and phones that interupt dinner or steal attention away from physical interactions. Status messages in our email clients or social networking sites that reveal our presence to others. Personalized ring tones that transform public spaces into impersonal cacophonies. Private phone calls that are blurted out into the 'publicsphere' without an regard for the verbal and psychological assault on others. An Internet that's always on, so that I can wake up in the middle of the night and start a recursive blog about it as I am right now, with the possibility of you stumbling across it and reading it, even though you and I have probably never met, and probably never will.

Our new 'always on' culture is as much about evolution as it is about revolution. These new superpowers we've been endowed with are both incredible and complex. Previously we were told, "The pen is mightier than the sword," but now the pen is online and it's on steroids.

Image by Egvvnd. Some Rights Reserved.