Category: Collaborative Age

Is the Smartphone Tax on our Time and Attention Worth It?

Following up from our previous post ‘How Mobile Phones Distract Us – A Real Life Example‘, Seth Godin speaks of the ‘Paying the smartphone tax‘. Because we are constantly distracted by the device, because we confound urgent and important, and because it seems that it only takes a short time to respond, our lives are deeply transformed. This is a tax on our time and attention. Is it worth it?

phone on trainWhat I personally find annoying is the amount of focus that smartphones tend to command when I am looking at something or interacting with it. It is extremely dangerous – even if I forbid myself to interact with my phone in clearly dangerous situations such as driving, I find myself sometimes in awkward situations because I was not paying attention to my surroundings (missed a bus or train stop looking at his phone anyone?). So the tax is sometimes very high.

Seth concludes “Like most things that are taxed, smart phones are often worth it, creating connections and giving us information when we need it. Perhaps, though, turning our phones off for six hours a day would be a useful way to cornering us into creating work we can’t live without”.

Our lives have become more interesting as a result of having a smartphone, but the tax we pay for it on our time and attention might sometimes not be worth the value. Maybe it is time to do an assessment and decide that there might be situations worth shutting the device down?

Share

Why Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing Matters

Mark Zuckerberg (yes, Facebook’s) analyzed the history of online collaboration on Facebook and concluded that the amount of information shared on the internet roughly doubles every year.

Zuckerbergs LawAnd this is not going to stop with the substantial increase of mobile devices and their ubiquity in particular in emerging and developing countries.

We generally underestimate the power of the exponential, but this is huge! This means that in a limited number of years the increase will be dramatic. The size of the data must even increase more quickly as videos tend to replace simple pictures or music.

Zuckerberg’s law matters because it describes what is really happening with the Fourth Revolution, better than laws focused on hardware capability. We are in an era of exponential increase of exchange and sharing between individuals. And this matters.

Share

How Mobile Phones Distract Us – A Real Life Example

A restaurant happened to analyze surveillance tapes from 2004 and compared to 2014 to understand some productivity issues (read Restaurant Watches Old Surveillance And Shares Shocking Results On Craigslist). The results are clear: nowadays, mobile phone distraction significantly uses up our time.

mobile in restaurant

Customers use time trying to connect to the wifi, taking picture of themselves and the food, which leads to much more time spent before placing the order and enjoying the food. Waiters’ time is also spent taking pictures of customers and helping them with their connection. And much more time is spent looking at stuff on the phone which adds delays in the entire process.

The issue here is not the impact on the restaurant’s productivity and turn-around (although that must be a huge concern to the restaurant owner because at the end of the day productivity is easily impacted by 20-30%), but this example shows dramatically how mobile phones use our precious time. And in the meantime we also kind of forget to connect with the people we have dinner with in the first place!

Share

Why Democratization Creates Commodities

When capabilities are democratized, handed over to anyone that wants to contribute, they become soon a commodity. This means that their price plummets (often close to zero), and this also means that institutions that were create to vouch for quality disappear.

Flickr - democratization of photography
Flickr – democratization of photography

A typical area is photography. It is now possible to produce great pictures with mobile phones. If you invest in a dedicated camera, all sorts of automatic settings will help produce pictures of professional quality. While press photography still exists in a more restricted sense, more and more amateur pictures are available and used.

Because amateurs don’t care so much about being compensated because they are having fun, the marginal price of photography is close to zero. Of course there is a lot more average pictures available but among the choice one can still find great pictures.

An ongoing area is education. With online Moocs the institutions that were created to vouch for course quality (universities) will have a hard time, while education will be more available to everybody. At the same time many courses may be more average, but who cares?

Hat tip to Christopher Penn

Share

How to Control our Posture When Using New Technology

Our posture when using portable devices is an issue. Not just regarding joint pain, but also when it comes to creativity and mood. In this excellent paper the NYT explains why ‘Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture — and Your Mood‘.

cellphone-posture“Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the iHunch”. And posture influences our mood like we explained in our posts ‘How simple is it to get positive emotions?‘ and ‘How we actually think with our bodies‘. So, as a result, because we tend to slouch when using portable devices, we are fostering negative emotions, such as “lower self-esteem and mood, and much greater fear”.

Stand up people of the Collaborative Age! And let’s hope that maintaining posture will be one of the key learning points of the schooling of the netizens of the future!

Share

Why the Internet of Things Will Lead to the Emergence of New Industry Giants

The Internet of Things is coming: more and more objects have sensors that can be connected to the internet. We are actually lagging behind the available hardware to invent applications. But the actual capability is now present.

iot-infographic-212-billion“The big game changer is that when all these physical objects can sense, analyze and interact on their own, it changes how and where decisions are made, and who makes them. The important thing to remember though is the embedded device by itself is not the game changer….it’s the combination of the applications, the people, and the processes around the ‘things’” (from IBM Center for Applied Insights).

Implementing the IoT will take time, and many trials and inventions. A good summary of the challenges in this ParisTechReview paper ‘From flowerpots to containers: a subtle anatomy of Internet of Things’.

We can already predict the emergence of new giant players that will master the applications in the Internet of Things, like Google and Facebook emerged from the first and the second version of the internet. And it is not a given that this time they will emerge from the Silicon Valley. The game is open!

Share

Are You Suffering from Nomophobia?

Nomophobia is the most common phobia nowadays: the phobia of being without one’s phone. (literally: NO-MObile-PHOBIA)

nomophobiaMost people are anxious when they misplace their phone (and most don’t spend one hour without checking it for updates!) – so don’t feel special if that is what happens to you.

It’s quite tough to remember the time when we did not have any mobile phone, and then we had a mobile phone that was dumb. Still, amazingly, people did live well and be happy at that time. It just required a bit more advance planning for appointments and navigation…

Anyway, here’s a link to a nomophobia test. Some questions as an extract – do you recognize yourself?

  • I am annoyed if I can’t look information up on my smartphone when I wantto do so.
  • Running out of battery in my smartphone scares me.
  • If I have no data signal or can’t connect to Wi-Fi, then I constantly check to see if I have a signal or can find a Wi-Fi network.

Be aware of your nomophobia – it starts to be a condition that is studied by psychiatrists!!

Share

How To Use Technology To Open More Possibilities

Technology is often seen as a threat – like Artificial Intelligence and the singularity where machines will become more intelligent that man. But technology is not too often mentioned as opening possibilities.

Since a long time technology is opening possibilities in the form of compensating for failing senses: pairs of glasses, hearing aids and other prosthetic help a lot of people live an normal life. Even more visibly for people with disabilities or who have lost limbs.

Neil-Harbisson
Neil Harbisson and his permanent cyborg implant

But technology also enables us to do things that we could not perform with our body alone: transport ourselves quickly, above ground and under ground, fly in the air… New technology will also give us the possibility to open new senses, in addition to provide support to our memory, allow us to understand foreign languages instantaneously, etc..

Some are already quite advanced in the cyborg world of increased senses such as Neil Harbisson, auto-proclaimed the first cyborg. As an artist he seeks to increase his perception by adding sensors that capture colors he can’t see and give him the information otherwise (through some brain wiring). Have a look at his TED talk!

In the future we should rather see how technology can expand our capabilities and support our creativity rather than shrink from a fear that it might replace us completely. But how we will operate with the new technology is still something that needs to be invented – a real revolution!

Share

How We Continue To Create New Neurons as Adults

Following on our post on brain plasticity there is new evidence that we continue to create neurons in our brains throughout our lives, and in particular in the Hippocampus, where our memories are stored.

neurogenesisA good summary is in this post ‘How Our Behaviors and Activities Control the Growth of New Cells‘ by Valeria Maltoni.

We do produce some new neurons. Not so many, but ‘Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institutet has estimated that we produce 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus. You might think this is not much, compared to the billions of neurons we have. But by the time we turn 50, we will have all exchanged the neurons we were born with in that structure with adult-born neurons‘.

The next question is then, how we could or should influence this creation of new neurons. The post referred to supposes it is better to foster the creation of more, but I guess that is still part of research.

In any case, this research is another blow to the Industrial Age theory or all theories around the fact that we can’t change significantly behaviors and memories.

Share

How Our Brain Remains Highly Plastic at All Age

I have been quite astonished lately to read a number of accounts of nerve rewiring that work. Nerve rewiring is about taking some nerves from a distinct region to rewire a region that has been cut-out for some reason. And suppose the brain will make sense of the change to regain functionality.

Prosthetic limbs operated by thought - the result of nerve rewiring
Prosthetic limbs operated by thought – the result of nerve rewiring

It starts to become a way to treat people with damage to their spine (like here) and also a way for amputees to operate their prosthetic limb (like here and here in the Economist in 2010).

I read the most bizarre account of such a possibility in Scott Adam‘s (the cartoonist creator of Dilbert) latest book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘. Scott Adams has been suffering from a condition called spasmodic dysphonia: his vocal cords did not respond in a normal manner when speaking in public. A very debilitating condition, and Scott Adams could not find any solution for years. The full account is also in this Wired post. Finally the solution was found when a surgeon proposed to reroute some neck nerves with other functions to his vocal chords. Suddenly after 3 months, as predicted, after his brain had learnt to use these new entry points, Scott was able to speak again, and after some exercise, regained his voice.

All these experiments prove that our brain is able to relearn and rewire at all ages, and keeps an astonishing plasticity to adapt. We need to stop believing these industrial age cliche that our brain is formed in our 20s’. It continues to evolve, and can even manage dramatic changes, any time during our lives.

Share

Why There Will be More Conspiracy Theories and Believers

Psychology shows that faced with uncertainty, we always desperately try to recognize patterns and explanations. And the more uncertainty, the more we seek patterns. This explains a lot of conspiracy theories: they are just a way for people to find order in the uncertain.

lots of conspiracy theories after 9/11
Lots of conspiracy theories after 9/11

Conspiracy theories flourish after each event that appears to be significantly out of sync with the normal: 9/11 attacks, the strange disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 etc. Everything we can’t explain directly, which appears to be weird in the order of things, is susceptible to a conspiracy theory.

Because complexity increases in our world, unexpected major events are also due to happen more frequently, and be even more out of sync with the average. Therefore, we can expect that more conspiracy theories will also come up as people struggle to find sense to what happens to them and the world.

There will be more conspiracy theories and believers because it is so hard to apprehend that complex systems sometimes show behavior significantly out of sync with the normal and average. Before believing in conspiracy, pause for a moment to ask yourself whether it would not just be the normal behavior of our complex world.

Share

How the Move to Mobile Highlights the Broadcasting Majority

Let’s be honest – I can’t create on a tablet or a phone. I can only consume information, or have simple interactions. I struggle to write an email that is more than 3 lines long. Thus when I read that mobile devices are taking over the traditional PC, I also read that most people probably don’t create, and if they ditch their PC, they remove the means to create the more easily.

passive reading mobile deviceI can’t create without my traditional laptop or PC. I need a keyboard to efficiently write my blogs and books. I need a mouse to create my powerpoint slides or work efficiently in Photoshop. In summary, I need some accessories to enhance my creative productivity that are absent from mobile devices.

The move to mobile is once again the demonstration that most people prefer just receiving broadcast and reading and viewing stuff created by others. That’s not an issue by itself, because that can be expected. It is an observation. It is also on what Facebook and many other sites and apps are counting on.

Just make sure you don’t diminish your ability to create. Keep the means around, like a traditional laptop.

Share