Hey, just noticed I haven’t written anything here for almost 2 months… just thought I’d say “Hi!”
Two things:
Cheers!
From:
All by 8:30am. This is what it means to live in the information age. Crazy times.
This is utterly amazing and frightening at the same time.
If this ever took off, it would be very cool.
As I’ve previously maintained, I think the term “social media” is a misnomer because you’re not social when sitting in front of the computer - you’re antisocial. This is more than just semantics; it points to the fact that maybe it’s not a good thing to spend so much time on the computer, and building a business around using the internet as a “social” platform, a place where people interact, is at best not smart (because people like to be face-to-face), and at worst creates millions of zombies who can only communicate via twitter.
On Friday I listened in on a webinar hosted by FASTForward Blog in which Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport duked it out over Enterprise 2.0, whether it’s even a meaningful term and how successful it is or isn’t. Pretty interesting stuff and I encourage anyone interested in knowledge management and Enterprise/Web 2.0 stuff to give it a listen. As a result of this and other discussions I’m really starting to see all the 2.0 stuff not as something completely new, but just old stuff done much better and easier. Collaboration has been possible for a long time, it’s just that today it’s much more usable. AJAX had been around since before the term was coined. So any talk gushing about a new era of “socialness” is missing the fact that we’re just witnessing a different stage in an evolution, not something “never-before-seen.”
Which brings me to the point of the post. Instead of “social media,” we should more aptly say “advanced asynchronous communication channels,” asynchronous being they key word here. Writing online is like graffiti on walls: someone may read it, maybe not. Is it social? No. Unless you want to water down the word to the point of meaninglessness.
I will never drink again.
Found this picture on Flickr of a Clemmer family reunion. On the far left, market number 24 is one Lee Clemmer. Funny.
Bring the tyranny by your inbox to an end: slash your incoming email and organize the ones you’ve got and get. If you’re chained to the computer and depend on email in any kind of serious way, this is key. You may want to start by reading my earlier post on this topic or the excellent post over on zenhabits: Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox.
Speaking of Zen Habits, it has just posted a yearly roundup of its best of the best in this, its first year. Moreover, it has gone from 2 to 24000+ readers in just a year… I’m turning green with envy. Browsing the list of titles it really comes as no surprise, however. Merging of computers and humans is no longer science fiction (just think of all those goobers running around with phone pieces in their ear, looking like androids), and HCI, or Human-Computer Interaction, is indeed an academic field all unto its own. It would stand to reason then that the need for zen practices - or let’s call it living-in-harmony-practices - concerning daily life should emerge; daily life marked by the ubiquitousness of the computer.
So zen out man, zen out.
Thought of the day: as much as people are hootin’ and hollering about the “social” internet with its “communities” and “groups” and “collaboration,” I think one might make the argument that whenever you’re sitting in front of a screen and hacking away at the keyboard, you are most definitely not being social. What does the word really mean anyway? From Merriam-Webster’s dictionary:
Main Entry: so·cial
Pronunciation: ’sO-sh&l
Function: adjective
1 a : tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of one’s kind b : living and breeding in more or less organized communities <social insects>
2 : of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society <immature social behavior> —so·cial·ly /-E/ adverb
Clearly it doesn’t state here that being social is a face-to-face kind of thing, but “living and breeding” kind of implies that. Also, when it comes to “interaction of the individual and the group,” you’re not really interacting with anyone other than yourself when sitting at a computer; in other words, you’re socializing only with the computer. Yes, the computer is a tool to transmit communication from one person to another (if you read this), but at this very moment that I am pressing the keys down to type this word, I am only communicating with myself, since no one else is reading this right now other than me. So, am I being social right at this moment? No, in fact, right now I am being anti-social for being pasted to the screen.
In a sense we are degrading human communication with all the technology at our disposal. The more time we spend communicating with any of our various tools, the less time we actually spend interacting with the humans immediately in our environment. Ultimately our personal relationships have to suffer. I would say that whenever people talk of the internet as “social,” it should come with a big fat asterisk; dorking out at your laptop is not being very social, asynchronously communicating or not. For nerds and geeks (like myself), it might be comfortable to communicate behind the wall of the computer screen, but real, valuable, juicy interaction happens face-to-face.
Is the internet really fulfilling its promise to bring everyone together in one gigantic Martian mind-meld, or is it really alienating us further and further from each other, making us less social and disrupting real, live communities?
Update: This Google fellow seems to have similar views.
Update 2: Relevant article published by the American Psychological Association almost 10 years ago: “Isolation increases with Internet use.”
Update 3: Could social media be addictive? Here’s a fellow who thinks it’s time for social rehab.
This was originally posted as a comment on a post on subtraction.com.
Hi, my name is Lee. I am a smoker.
While I can appreciate non-smoker’s aversion to cigarette smoke, and the banning of smoking from public places, what really gets my goat is the general Judge Von-Holier-Than-Thou attitude that is usually exhibited when speaking of these smokers “who deep down inside know that it’s killing them.” I live in this world. I know all of the reasons not to smoke, and as a smoker, probably even a few more. Unfortunately this does not - yet - outweigh my love and joy of smoking, bad as it is. But non-smokers love to judge smokers, because it’s such an easy target.
I’d like to propose an analogy that I would hope could curb some of this nasty judging. I propose a ban on trans fatty acids for preparing foods available for public consumption, i.e. in any restaurants or cafes. It makes people fat and kills them, and I will no longer stand by and be subjected to witness such gross behavior as eating grease dripping steaks or food court Chinese food. I also propose banning bars altogether. Car accidents by drunk drivers are just not worth the pleasure of being in a bar. There will also be a lot less fights in all likelihood. We should also ban cars, they’re much too dangerous. As a pedestrian, I’ve been hit by a car once and have come close several times thereafter.
My point here is that once you start looking at public behaviors that are dangerous and deadly to you and society at large, it’s not just smoking. In fact, you might have some habits yourself that aren’t safe for you and those around you. Instead of talking about these smokers as an alien species beyond understanding, think about all of your own bad habits; you have them, own up to it. So before judging too quickly, “grab your own nose” as we like to say in Germany.
And that’s my rant for the day.
The episode of the Bubble video has been quite interesting. Because, and only because, the video gained such popularity did some of the photographers whose pictures were displayed start raising an issue. I have a hard time seeing the Richter Scales making much money off of this video, so if nothing else, the photographers in question were smart and got some free promotion for themselves.
That’s not really what I find interesting however. It’s more about what’s happening in society at large. The thought occurred to me some time ago in an Italian-themed restaurant. In Italy, restaurants are Italian because that’s just where they’re located. Over here, restaurants are “themed” and try to evoke some kind of feeling artificially. I also see this trend in music. I believe part of the reason that older music has had such a resurgence of interest and popularity (just think of all the band reunions of late), is that modern music just sucks for the most part. It’s not original, just a faded copy of the original. Collectively there’s some lack of creativity happening.
Movies are another great example. It seems like a majority of movies are remakes nowadays. What about creating original movies that will be the basis for remakes in the future? Then there are the sequels. It’s just the same stuff over and over again. On the web we have a word for all of this: mash-up. Like rap songs that take old music and put it on loop and drop rhymes on top.
I suppose one could say that anything and everything is just a rehashing of the past. But today, this seems truer than ever. A collective emptiness has given rise to the remix. In the future, will what we do now be remixed? I doubt it.
For some time now, a year in fact, I’ve been toying with the idea of shaving with an old-school razor. It bothers me to some extent that I am “hooked on” and locked into having to buy expensive Gilette razor cartridges over and over. I remember when I received my first Mach3 in the mail for my 18th birthday: “Free razor, cool!” I thought to myself. In retrospect it was just a great marketing move by the razor company to keep me hooked for life. In case you’re wondering, Gilette (from what I recall) actually “invented” the practice of creating a product that had refillable parts so that you become a life-long customer. SwifferJets, printers, and many other products operate on the same principle: make money on the refills. Kind of disgusting when you stop to think about it.
Well, apparently I’m not the only one who’s thought of going old-school on shaving: “The Zen of Shaving: How a Double-edge Razor Can Change Your Life” is a great post on the advantages of traditional shaving techniques and how to actually go about it. Here’s another one: “I Shave the Old Fashioned Way - Classic Shaving 101.”
Now, as with so many other things, I just have to start being about it, not talking about it. Uh.
So in the spirit of yesterday’s rant, I’ve now disabled:
My inbox is already looking much “cleaner,” that is, populated with emails that actual people actually intended for me specifically. What a concept. I can only recommend.
Lately I’ve been having an allergic reaction to the internet. More and more I feel less and less. I’ve been noticing a trend with me: I’ll start doing something, get sidetracked and go down a rabbit hole of information, only 15 minutes later to remember to do what I had set out for initially.
For example, in thinking about writing this post, I planned to link to a post by Tantek that I found in the comment thread of yet another post by Zeldman. So I open my homepage (iGoogle page filled with feeds), and see that he just posted a new entry and proceed to read it. I finish. “Ok, right,” wanted to find the link to Tantek’s email reduction post. Find it. Go there. Briefly skim it. See something about filtering. Go to my Gmail account to set up a few filters for emails that I don’t want to unsubscribe (like my bank statements), but don’t want to see in my inbox either. Finish with that. Open my site. Remember that I want to turn off the del.icio.us links that get automatically posted. Do that. And only then do I finally sit down to write this (and I catch up with myself right… here).
This has been happening to me more and more recently, constantly getting sidetracked, and sidetracking from the sidetrack, looping over and over through heaps of information related by nothing more than a link, a bare thread stitching the web together. At work it’s very similar, and I see the same problems with others: Outlook is popping up, demanding at least part of my attention to process what email just arrived in your inbox (I’m usually inclined to open it right away), followed by an IM from someone with a question about something, getting back to doing some actual work, getting another email requiring immediate and more intense attention, until I get back to what I was doing originally, when someone stops by the cubicle to have a chat. And then it’s time for another meeting.
I’m experiencing precisely what Kathy Sierra wrote about almost a year ago to the day: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve. The constant interruptions are keeping me from getting into a state of flow:
Worst of all, this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow. Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our knowledge and skills, and that’s quite different from mindless tasks we can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely we are to ever get there.
A year later, Scott Karp writes in Why I Stopped Using Twitter:
But the noise to signal ratio is WAY too high. And the temptation to Tweet for the sake of Tweeting is WAY too high.
Granted both of these examples single out Twitter (which I just can’t get into), but I feel that it’s a larger problem, a problem of being too connected. Which brings me again to Tantek’s email reduction post.
He lists a number of ways to reduce the size of your inbox traffic, but I am now experimenting with a much simpler goal: reduce emails to personal emails (for my personal email account anyway). That means absolutely no auto-generated emails, even to notify me that someone sent me a message via MySpace of FaceBook. If they were really my friend, they’d send me an email, and the message can thus wait till I get around to checking back in. No newsletters of any type. I find that while they may initially be interesting, they become oppressive after a while. Get rid of them, they won’t be missed. There will be exceptions, of course; I’d rather get my banking statements via email than snail mail. When I buy something online I’d like to keep the receipt. But for these exceptions filtering and archiving them immediately will provide me later access without unduly begging for my attention.
I think the defining factor between the kind of information that I want to have pushed vs. pulled is the audience of that information. If I or a very small group I belong to is the intended audience, I’d like to get an email (have the information pushed to me). On the other hand, if the audience is very broad and there’s no real personal relationship (and by that I mean, I’ve actually met the person), then by all means make the information available, but don’t beg for my attention. Feeds are a great way to accomplish this. It’s easy to set up a page pulling the latest information from whatever information sources I’m interested in, and I remain in control of when and where I consume said information.
It’s all about unconnecting so you can be more connected. What I mean is that by being tuned in all the time you’re not really tuned in to anything at all; paying shallow attention to many things you gain no deep understanding of a particular topic. When I was younger I could sit down and draw for hours. The time would just fly by and I wouldn’t notice. I was in a state of flow. Nowadays it’s hard to get into a prolonged period of concentrated attention.
Maybe the real challenge is to try to leverage technology in ways that don’t waste time creating white noise but to aid in creating a state of flow. To quote Kathy again: “this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow.”
That’s what it should be all about: happiness.
Chloe gazing upon herself gazing upon herself chasing the laserpointer.
Rant time. Sitting on the El, I just emerged from the tunnels and into the daylight. Daylight. I get up just before 6 and am on the subway by 6:30. As of last week, I was able to see the day slowly awake as I made my way to work. Now the magic is gone.
What’s even worse is that by the time I leave work to wait for the 104, its nearly pitch black. I can already see the bus missing me altogether as I huddle beside the pole and watch headlights rush down Westchester Pike. It’s so arbitrary anyway.
Theoretically we the people come to an agreement to do this, but in reality its someone in government making the call. And of course this year the dates for falling back and springing forward were both delayed a week or two, requiring, if nothing else, computer patches to fix the problem. How annoying, and what for?
I’ve heard that here in the US there are pockets that don’t observe DST. More power to them. It seems like one of these outdated things that perhaps made sense once upon a time, like voting on a Tuesday. But not any longer. Perhaps the best reason against DST is the fact that, well, it doesn’t save me daylight, and wasn’t that the point?