
Author: Paul (Page 10 of 146)
Yes, I am of the 27 whose views of Chapel Hill are included in the new literary anthology, 27 Views of Chapel Hill, from Eno Publishers. The official publication date is September 1, but there are already copies in the Bull’s Head Bookshop (here on the UNC Campus) and at Amazon.com.
A kickoff reading/celebration is planned for September 24th at 2 pm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. If you buy your copy there, you can meet many of the authors and get your books signed by us.
I’m represented by a poem, “In the Poetry Section of a Used Bookstore”.
The latest Pew Internet study on smartphone highlights the strong generational differences in how we access and use the internet in America. Only 19% of the respondents over 50 had smartphone compared to 52% of those between 18 and 29. Of those smartphone owners, 99% of those between 18 and 29 had sent or received txt messages, but only 78% of those over 50 had participated in txt communication (I’m presuming that those who did were communicating with people 18 – 29 ;->). The difference in accessing social networking sites was even greater with 76% of the younger group being social on their phones compared to 32% of those over 50 years of age. The groups were closer when it came to email access on their smart phones 82% to 62%.
What to make of these numbers? First that owning smartphones, using them for txting and mobile social networking are normative for the millennial generation. For the Boomers and beyond, owning a smartphone is far from normative and mobile social networking is quite rare.
My claim in the #noemail project is that communications were becoming more mobile, more social, valuing the fast more integrated and brief — and will include location awareness. The Millennials are not only leading the way but have made those behaviors a normal part of their everyday lives.
In a research report, “Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement,” to be presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management (San Antonio, August 14-16) Don J. Q. Chen and Vivien K. G. Lim of the National University of Singapore deliver a message about the good and bad of “cyberloafing” which includes personal web browsing, texting/chatting, and email.
The report discusses the results of two studies, one experimental and one a survey.
The experimental study found that “cyberloafing” in the place of conventional (non-internet) rest time between tasks increased productivity by 16% — and by over 39% over workers who merely changed tasks and took no breaks at all.
In the second study, a survey of randomly selected alumni of a business school, the participants were asked to differentiate between surfing and email while discussing their “psychological engagement with their work, and their positive and negative affect, or mental state”.
The findings of this study include:
— Amount of Internet browsing is significantly and positively related to such upbeat mental states as excited, interested, alert, and active, and inversely related to such negative mental states as distressed, fearful, hostile, and jittery.
— Amount of e-mailing activity, in distinct contrast, is significantly related to negative mental states but not to upbeat ones.
UPI reported on the paper under the headline Cyberloafing, the pause that refreshes. Just don’t check e-mail. on Sunday, August 14, 2011.
And NO to most everything else!
Martin Marks writing in the humorous Shouts & Murmurs section of the New Yorker last October anticipates ShortMail, various email manifestos and even the #noemail project. Marks dives headlong into funny excess of rules and restrictions and denials. Recommended.
Dear Friend, Family Member, Loved One, and/or Business Associate:
Thank you for your e-mail, which, if it is under three (3) sentences long, I have read. Owing to the large volume of e-mails I’m receiving at this time, please note that it will sometimes take up to fourteen (14) calendar days, though sometimes longer (and sometimes much longer), to respond to your e-mail; in the interim, please rest assured that I am attempting to address, resolve, or think about the matter you have described, unless, of course, I’m avoiding the matter entirely…
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/10/25/101025sh_shouts_marks
Also recent and recommended in the same section:
The Pope’s Tweets
God’s Blog
and the fiendishly funny Text Slang for Baby Boomers
- Very nice and brief #noemail mention in UNC University Gazette along with bits about important work being done by my talented colleagues here at UNC.
- Excellent column by JayKayDee for Txchonlogist on #noemail TO: Corporate America SUBJECT: Email is Dead, Embrace Social
- Ellen Henderson of Geek Mom Blog writes about her “Three Month Odyssey of Unsubscribing” a painful travail that leads at least to #lessemail.
- Nation Hahn of One Nation New Media reflects on yesterday’s New York Times Style article in “Battling Social Fatigue” Brief and refreshing.
- DrLaura at The Well Prepared Mind allows me into her dreams as she writes about “The Tyranny of The Screen”.Excerpt: [T]here were a number of peculiar items scattered about, which Paul had been manipulating in a thoughtful way. Seems like a regular day in the life to me. I say thanks and quote Bob Dylan: “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.”
- Very nice infographic at GOOD based on Pew Internet research studies which shows that Online Social Networkers are more social and network more. They are also more likely to trust you. The comment stream has several corrective and hard hitting critiques and is worth a read.
- Folks ask me: How would I get started doing #nomail? Here’s the earlier article that may become a page: Getting Started With #noemail
First this and other postings over the past year in the NYTimes Style section about the digital interface with life or somesuch show that social media has grown from technology and business into social phenomena worthy of sharing the page with essays on skirt length, fall colors, weddings and the like. I don’t mean this to be snide, but to underscore what Barry Wellman asserted — most strongly in the title of “The Internet and Everyday Life” — that the digital is life as we know it and not separate from the other parts of our lives but deeply intertwined.
But rushing ahead from that, “For the Plugged-In, Too Many Choices” describes the chaotic world of choices for digitally enable social interaction or as the URL says: Digitally Fatigues Networkers Try New Sites But Strategize To Avoid Burnout (.html).
Varieties of managing multiple networks and setting priorities are mentioned through anecdotes and vignettes including considering talking to your dinner partner rather than posting that you are at dinner on FourSquare. The particularly heinous habit of queuing up postings for timed release throughout the day is suggested!
One bright spot is yet another testimony for Fred Stutzman‘s wonderful Freedom which takes you off the net (only for laptops and desktops but not for phone or tablet) for up to 8 hours.
What does this have to do with #noemail? Just look at how email is mentioned in this article:
According to Nielsen, social networking is now the most popular online activity, ahead of sending e-mails, searching the Internet and playing games.
“I already feel like I’m experiencing slow death by e-mail.”
“Everyone is still talking about filing e-mail bankruptcy”
The only thing worse than social overload is… email.
If you think the other NCAA rules are confusing, they are clearly based on something somewhere but the messaging rules aren’t.
According to the New York Times, coaches may contact players by Twitter direct messages, but not by TXT; by Facebook Messages, but not by Facebook Chat — and public Wall posts are out of the question. Email and phone calls are allowed, but the prospective players won’t take those — afterall they are under 25 (see studies earlier in this blog).
A trusted resident expert in this house claims that the unifying theme is banning public communications while allowing private ones. The exception for SMS aka TXT, he says and the article supports, is because the person receiving the TXT also receives a charge if unlike most TXTing teens the prospect doesn’t have an unlimited TXT plan.
One hole in his, or more likely in the NCAA’s, logic is the difference between Chat and Messaging. Both are private and with the new Facebook Mobile Messenger app both are unified and merged in the same inbox. The trend as seen at Facebook and in Google Plus is to unify the inbox and the activity streams into a personally manageable environment.
That’s what the players are telling the coaches. We don’t take calls. We don’t do email. We want communications mobile. We want them short and interactive. Twitter is TXT without the NCAA restrictions. Facebook Messages aren’t email.
But the NCAA is in a ball of confusion.
If trends mean anything, the analysis by the pollsters at Pew miss the point of their own data. Whilst the title for the report is “Search and email still top the list of most popular online activities”, the use of email has remained flat — dropping 1% really, but statistically insignificant — since 2002. Searching rose from 85% to join email at 92% (since 2002). But social network use, which was not even measured until 2005, begins at 11% and is up to 65% by 2011’s survey.
Email fans shouldn’t get all that excited by the report as the data underlying the report show communications trends that will move us all from email even in the immediate term. Note also that email alternatives were not measured giving some confusion to the frequencies of communications.
One critique of #noemail is that any messaging system is really email. Of course, I don’t buy that. But that does show that messaging of all kinds is conflated with email and could be here as the alternatives are offered. This becomes clearer when we look at the racial differences in email use by adults. “White online adults are significantly more likely than both African-American and Hispanic online adults to be email users on a typical day (63% v. 48% v. 53%, respectively). “ Another Pew study released in June showed that Twitter use by Whites, African Americans and Hispanic adults is the reverse of the email patern (9% v. 25% v. 19% respectively).
Facebook acquired the mobile messaging company Beluga back in March of this year. Since then Facebook has been working on their competitor to Google Plus Huddle which provides a similar service — easy quick group messaging. Since Huddle isn’t available on the iPhone as yet, Facebook took the advantage today as it announced Beluga rebranded with some improvements as Facebook Messenger.
The release is interestingly coincides with reports that use of RIM Blackberry BBM has outstripped the use of Facebook and Twitter — in the London riots (only).
I’ve had Beluga on my phone but not done too much with it (running txt thru Google Voice to save charges ;->). Looking to download Messenger now. Let me know if you’ve found and are trying it. At the moment, https://www.facebook.com/mobile/messenger says “Messenger will be available soon. Please check back later.”
In most of this interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010 conference last fall, Mark Zuckerberg talks about replacing email with Facebook Messages — why FB Msgs isn’t email and why email is broken hopelessly — and how the Facebook Social Graph changes everything.
This talk and Sheryl Sandberg’s earlier talk convinced me that Facebook, not Google or Microsoft or Yahoo or others, would be the ones to succeed in creating better data portability, better messaging and activity streams. Interestingly, much of what Zuckerberg talks about concerning user control of data are addressed in Google + Circles, Google Checkout and Google+ itself.
I particularly love the subtitles on this version above. For the full interview, see http://youtu.be/CRUOl03nZIc
Luis Suarez has been Living in A World Without Email #lawwe since February 2008 and blogging about his experiences and insights at Elsua.net. His latest entry Living “A World Without Email” … in Google Plus is a great review of Google Plus from the #noemail / #lawwe perspective. Luis also provides an important link to and brief review of Matt Hames’ post Google+ is not taking on Facebook; it is taking on email. Luis isn’t limited to the email challenge by Google+; he’s also interested in how G+ works for building social capital and business.
Plus One
Let’s go back in time. Not so far back, but back to 2008. IBM was making big changes in how their company worked and continues to work. These five predictions are credited to Mike Rhodin who was then head of the Lotus division and pushing Sametime and Sametime Advanced as IBM’s unified communications and collaboration platform and services to be used internally and to be offered to other companies. Even or especially keeping that in mind, the recognition of these 5 trends all point in the same directions as the #noemail project as described in the process of writing this blog.
We’re talking about #noemail in the marketplace (as one G+ commentor called his business), in serving customers (one reason that another G+er claimed he could not possibly even think of trying #noemail), and building internal communications (as Luis Suarez at IBM has been practicing and promoting since 2009 or earlier).
Here are the five trends, slightly abridged but described in full in this Fierce Wireless archived press release from 08):
- The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. By that IBM means that you’ll be carrying your work everywhere you are. Imagine working in a coffee shop! Or taking calls and IMing during off hours!
- Instant Messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. IBM wasn’t quite ready with something like Google Plus or even Facebook messages, but they are right about collaboration tools changing the way we communicate and work together.
- Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes We’ve seen this too. Most smart phone users I know are using more Smart than Phone. That is to say that the phone part has become more about connectivity than about voice messages. In business this has been true for a while. I confess: before I completely turned off my desk phone, I changed the voice mail to ask people to send me email instead — or finally to find me online
- Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. I like this and hope that it’s true. There is continuing evidence that things are becoming more open. But closed and non-interoperable systems persist. Android is gaining on the iPhone. Google Plus includes a Data Checkout option. But Apple remains mostly closed even as Microsoft is diminished in our communications sphere.
- New meeting models will emerge. Here IBM is pushing Virtual Worlds as meeting spaces. For whatever reasons, Second Life and others still seem too soon and too flaky. But Skype, and now Google Plus, have become a regular part of our lives in business and in private or social life.
Today, I paid the cost for #noemail. The cost was $7.00.
I was cleaning my office and picking up books that I’d checked out of the UNC Library. Among those books was one that was just out and so had some sort of truncated checkout time. Most books are available to faculty for several months. This book was only allowed to be taken out for a few weeks. Oops!
I trucked my books over to the Library. First as a negotiator trained at the Grand Bazaar, I tried to get credit for the books I was returning early to offset the few days that my one special book was overdue. No dice.
Then I was told that my fine was extra. Not because of my negotiation attempts, but because the book had been recalled even before the due date.
The Library robot had sent me email. Err, didn’t the Library robot or her minder get my message that I don’t do email? If they had, then there are many ways to contact me.
— Oh, we’ve set up the messages so that we don’t receive replies. But we do include a link in the message so that you can just click on that link and then we add your message to our database.
Doesn’t adding several links to an automated message pretty much assure that the message gets marked as spam?
— We never thought of that. $7 is the charge.
But is there any way at all that you contact people who choose not to use email? I mean, everyone fills out a lot of contact information and the UNC One Card is tied to the Campus directory. It’s not hard to find ways to contact people other than email. Hey, the robot could call or text just as easily.
— We only do email.
I paid $7. 1/20th the cost of a new Kindle.
Thanks to Victor of poofytoo.tumblr.com and @acarvin on G+
The tide turned and junk moved online. Talk of email addiction has changed to internet and social network and game and particularly Facebook addiction tracking the trends closely. Addiction? No. Over-fascination? Yes. The mechanics and contents are unchanged but the social and psychological relations between postal mail and email have switched places.
And with that switch, love forever changes.
Arthur Lee and Love – Forever Changes (London 2001)
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz (1988) “Conversing with Cage”
As you may know, John Cage is famous in part for his pieces that used silence especially in his 4’33” — not playing or performing but listening to what you would have missed had you been listening only to a performance. He seems then the right person to join Marshall McLuhan as a guiding light for the #noemail project.
What email means is as important as what it does and doesn’t do. That is one of the points of the #noemail project. There are better ways of communication. Those better ways should assist in relieving stress rather than becoming a cultural and individual symbol of overwork and stress.
This paper just out from researchers at Stanford and Boston University does a fine job of quantifying and explaining what email means. May require library access or subscription for access.
I note with some irony that the email addresses of the authors are included in the abstract and in the paper.
Of course, you can “Email This Article to A Friend” or better to an enemy.
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
Vol. 22, No. 4, July-August 2011, pp. 887-906
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0573
E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress
Stephen R. Barley, Debra E. Meyerson, Stine GrodalDepartment of Management Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
Department of Strategy and Innovation, School of Management, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
sbarley@stanford.edu
debram@stanford.edu
grodal@bu.eduThe increasing volume of e-mail and other technologically enabled communications are widely regarded as a growing source of stress in people’s lives. Yet research also suggests that new media afford people additional flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, this paper builds theory that unravels this apparent contradiction. As the literature would predict, we found that the more time people spent handling e-mail, the greater was their sense of being overloaded, and the more e-mail they processed, the greater their perceived ability to cope. Contrary to assumptions of prior studies, we found no evidence that time spent working mediates e-mail-related overload. Instead, e-mail’s material properties entwined with social norms and interpretations in a way that led informants to single out e-mail as a cultural symbol of the overload they experience in their lives. Moreover, by serving as a symbol, e-mail distracted people from recognizing other sources of overload in their work lives. Our study deepens our understanding of the impact of communication technologies on people’s lives and helps untangle those technologies’ seemingly contradictory influences.
Bascha Harris of OpenSource.com and I did an interview using Google Docs checking in after 8 weeks without email. Part of the pleasure of the interview is how nicely interactive Google Docs is and how well that environment works for interviews. The integration with Gtalk, the change tracking, the real time updates, the easy for adding comments and notes make for a painless way of collaborative writing — and a good, I think, interview.
Here it is: Eight weeks of #noemail (and the results are in)
If you are an engineer and don’t like #noemail and dismiss the change of the context and environment in which a message is transmitted and received — you know who you are the guy who comes up to me and says, “text is text. a message is a message. form and context make not difference.” –, you need to revisit Marshall McLuhan. Or if you have ten minutes, you would profit from listening to Benjamin Walker talk with Douglas Coupland, Eric McLuhan and others.
Especially interesting — to those of us who love the McLuhan books — is the story behind the title of his groundbreaking book, “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.”
See also Douglas Coupland’s thoughtful entry on McLuhan as seen today “Why McLuhan’s chilling vision still matters today”
Money quote from McLuhan via Coupland:
“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” McLuhan 1962
Happy 100th Birthday, Marshall McLuhan.
You Know Nothing of My Work (Annie Hall)
My next message will be a singing telegram.
Hard on the heels of today’s GetSatisfaction post, Daniel Beaver-Seitz alerts me to this graphic based on a week in the life of librarian Janie Hermann from 365 Sketches and revisioned by MastersInEducation.org as part of a larger graphic of a Librarian’s Worth. Working some of the math for you: Janie works 2,785 minutes in this week or 46.4+ hours of which 800 minutes or 28.7+% of her time is spent on email. According the 356Sketches, Janie received 73 (I assume post-spam-filter) emails and sent 182 emails during this week.
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