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It cannot be disputed that the technological advancements in the last decade have made life easier for a lot of people. We no longer have to wait for dial-up internet, and the thought of waiting more than five seconds for a web page to load enrages us. At the drop of a hat, we can use our cell phones to check what our friends are up to, check our email, search for the nearest gas station, or Google how big blue whales can grow. Ironically, our use of cell phones for email and text messaging has rendered the actual phone call obsolete.
As a child of the 90s, I should be used to all of this “new-fangled” technology. My earliest experience with technology was waiting for my mom to get off the house phone before I could use the dial-up internet on our only household computer to chat to my friends after school for approximately ten minutes. I realize that in the grand scheme of technological advancement, this is not an “early” memory. Yes, I should be used to this, but over the years technology has only made me more anxious and nostalgic for the days of face-to-face, or at least voice-to-voice communication.
A recent study discussed in Seattle Times suggests I may be the only one of my generation who feels this way. The study, conducted at the University of Maryland, required a group of college students to give up all technology for 24 hours. The students reported feeling anxious and withdrawn in the absence of technology; shockingly, one participant’s feedback described typically sending a text message every minute or so and being unable to go 24 hours without a cell phone.
The purpose of these two technologies begs the question – is it the technology themselves that is addictive, or is it the ‘ambient presence’ that they enable. (Ambient presence is a term coined in reference to the consistent, low-level awareness of our social connections enabled by the surge in communication-oriented technology.)
I for one love that these technologies can keep me integrated in the lives of my loved ones, even when we are separated by time and space. But, like the students studied at the University of Maryland, I can literally feel the drawbacks.
We are, by nature, a social species who find pleasure in communing…Having tools on hand that allow us to fulfill this desire in increasingly efficient ways, though, has elevated expectations of my connectedness to a level that I’m not sure I can keep up with. And so what are the costs of fulfilling these expectations? Constant communication pushes out opportunities for reflection and introspection – those vehicles for internal growth with which self-actualization is impossible.
And when these expectations turn into needs what then? I have found myself in an almost panic state on realizing that I didn’t have my phone with me. And what did I do? I went home, got my phone and immediately called my companion why I was running late for our date. He understood, naturally. The irony of the situation being, of course, that the very vehicle that is supposed to facilitate our coming together had actually kept us apart. So while I love the iPhone, too, it scares me a little to know that my relationship with it is somewhere between owning it and being owned.
Social networking sites are providing new datasets for understanding how people behave. One of the most fascinating (and entertaining) uses of this information is by the online matchmaking site OKCupid.
On the back end of their site is a mother lode of data about the desires and peccadilloes of its members, which they use at their blog to quantify the rules of online love and attraction.
Their latest post, “Your Looks and Your Inbox” ends with predictable results (the good-looking have a better shot at getting responses from the opposite sex), but in getting there gives great insight into how each gender views attractiveness in the other and what their expectations are for a mate. The entire blog is worth a look.
A lot of brands are still looking at social media and online communities as just another opportunity to broadcast their message. While many social media experts keep talking about the need to monitor how your brand is perceived online, they often don’t say what this means. My wife recently shared with me an extreme version of the conversation about a project being hijacked by consumers… The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk. The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk is available at Amazon.com a site known for its community of list builders, reviewers, and consumer involvement in building content.
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- The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk
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- Makes Driving and Working a Breeze
There are over 300 reviews for this product and most of them mock it. From pictures of 50 car pile ups to reviews such as:
I loved my Laptop Steering Wheel Desk so much I got one for my 90yr old mother. She is an avid crossword puzzle fan and now she can work on them while she is driving back and forth from bingo at the senior center. One cautionary note be careful of those jerks that stop at yellow lights, my poor mother rear ended one and the airbag drove the desk back into her stomach which ruptured her spleen, well after a short down time I’m glad to say she is back on the road and cranking out those NY Times crosswords once again. Thanks Laptop Steering Wheel Desk you have made my mothers life more complete.
While the product looks like it’s right out of the Onion and may have a life this Christmas as a gag gift, it’s important to remember that conversations outside of a brand’s control are taking place all over the internet. Listening to consumers is becoming increasingly important as they do more and more of the talking themselves and tune out or warp a brand’s marketing messages.
While Twitter is quickly rising in the ranks of popular social networking sites, it’s also igniting some cultural trends and transformations among the literary set. This week we learned that teens don’t Tweet, thanks to a slightly skewed Morgan Stanley Report with a sample size of one 15-year old boy followed up by a generous Nielsen Report measuring the size of the Twitter footprint among age groups. According to the report, the Twitter trend ranks low among tweens and teens but hits hard among adults ages twenty-five to fifty-four.
For evidence of the power of the Tweeting trend and how it just might infiltrate the younger generation, just look to the newly signed authors, Alexander Aicman and Emmett Rensin, two University of Chicago students who have written “Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less”. The book is emblematic of our contemporary world, where easily digestible bits of knowledge are the daily bread of fast-paced lifestyles and the hipster- aesthetic is easily condensed to coffee table cool. In an author’s note the two nineteen year olds question the social attention span asking, “After all, as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?”
The book is due at the end of the year on the Penguin imprint.
Online document publishing site Scribd has taken the next step in its evolution by going social. The site has added features that allow you to follow what others are doing, sharing, liking, etc. As our pal Mark likes to say, it’s all about getting people to do things together. A lot of what I’ve read online compares the changes made to the site to Facebook. I’m curious to see as more and more companies add “social networking” to their sites, whether surfers will suffer from social overload.
What’s interesting is that while this is going on, the news breaks that Facebook has purchased Friend Feed, the site designed to share your entire interwebs life with your friends. 
The interesting thing about Friend Feed is that it’s always seemed much more powerful and nicer looking than Twitter but not as widely adopted. It will be interesting to see how this acquisition unfolds and what it means to both services.
Interestingly enough, Friend Feed users are already complaining about the acquisition, just hours after it has been announced. Here’s hoping that Facebook will bring more users to FriendFeed and not just cannibalize its features into their own site.
So since Oprah has joined the ranks of Twitter, social networking has become more and more of a mainstream conversation. Many claim that social networking is a generational thing. Only today’s youth will really get sites like Facebook. Turns out, that might be the wrong way to look at it.
An article from one of the New York Times’ blogs points out that people have been involved in the Face Book fad since 1902. In reality, the idea of people getting together socially and then sharing tidbits of information and memory that they could take with them isn’t all that new. Bryan Benilous, the historical newspaper specialist who found this (along with a 1942 mention of Twitter and a 1903 mention of a pocket telephone) compared the old Face Book to the new version as “having friends write on your wall in a much less tech-savvy way.”
So what does this mean? As our friend Mark has said, shaping the behavior of an individual is hard, shaping the behavior of the mass is even more difficult. Maybe social networking hasn’t actually created a new craze but actually just given more people an opportunity to engage in a behavior that they’ve been doing all along. They can just do it in real time and across the great divides more easily.
As a former history major it makes me wonder (again), is anything really new?
