Interaction

Caught thinking in the rat maze of consumption

The shortest distance between a person becoming aware and buying – the act of exchanging currency at a higher rate than the service or product costs to produce – is the marketer’s benchmark. As such their motives should inherently be held suspect and yet we believe what they want us to believe.

Time is one of the key battles marketing message fight. Given enough time, anyone can sell anything (ideas or products), some better than others. People have been told time is money and usually that is true for the other person – your time is someone else’s money. Someone else’s time is likely yours. As such, marketing messages are short and repetitive – visually and aurally. It gets cleverer when the messages appear genuinely – products placed in unassuming ways that relate activity or quality to the product or service. Simplified messages attack the largest audience to force an action – thought or behavior. How much of what we know is fabricated?

Science and technology folks are all about details and complexity. One cannot fully appreciate wonders without understanding the complexity – one of the reasons we know less than we should. Scientists strive for truth or work with it to change it. Exactness is important. Any fudge work is noted and already calculated to be insignificant in the context of a more import result. They are biased, but their motives are purer. Of course corruption exists everywhere, so absolutes are tough to swallow. Scientific evidence is often positioned to accentuate the beauty but hid the wrinkles. We hold beliefs that are not always proven by a scientist or better yet ourselves-we call this faith. What do you have faith in?

I am not as interest in what people have faith in as much as that they do so readily. With good marketing, people believe and behave under the influence. People are generally anxious about mind control yet almost everything has been fabricated and more importantly specifically for you and people like you. As much as we are individuals we are actually more alike than not – scarily alike when it comes to what you think, what you believe and what you buy.

We are all participants in being under the influence

It is no wonder that so many people in the fields of communication, branding and marketing feel so powerful – their message in total create so much of the world. They start as the rock falling into the pond allowing ripples to hit us as they may. They drop more pebbles at the right times reinforcing messages, creating relationships and intimate richness. They are the origin and orchestration of the following conversation in what appears to be naturally occurring ripples. As individuals we faithfully internalize, reform and repeat – generating thoughts and actions that others listen to. These messages become defining attributes. Many people like fine wine, food, clothes, automobiles and the latest personal technology. Many desire upgrades to their current lifestyle in those ways and aspire for private jets, multiple homes in multiple countries and more. People consume what is made consumable. The rate of new content production for the individual is slower than the rate of content an individual produces based on someone else’s content. How much of what you think is new? When you talk, how much of what you say is something someone else said? How much of what you feel is yours?

Marketing messages create physiological changes in our understanding of reality – they are not artificial impacts. What is suspect is the initial message we chose to have faith in. If we inspected every message for such qualities we would crawl to a halt. It is not practical and, for better or worse, we are unavoidably consuming. This is excellent news for those who actually know how to communicate. The power to create the world’s thought and behavior is in the hands of those that strike clear and simple messages, rooted in fact and garnished in fashion.

Business / Creatvitiy / Culture / Design / Innovation / Innovation Management / Interaction / Invention / Leadership / Life / Participation / Product Development / Psychology / Social Networking / Technology / Technology Adoption — No Comments
25
Oct 09

The state of the art is falling short of dreams

Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.

Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.

In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.

There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.

Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?

Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.

What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.

Behavior / Communication / Community / Consciousness / Culture / Education / Identity / Interaction / Life / Psychology / Relationships / Reputation / Social Networking / Web2.0 — No Comments
12
Apr 09

More vocal and alone. Sext me?

Last month I finished authoring a chapter submission on how social artifacts mediate the deluge of content a social network consumes and how diversity of participation is an imperative to keep us from French inhaling our tweets. We are living in a time of content explosion – this was news back in 2003 when a UC Berkeley study summarizes the prior year’s information detonation:

1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years [1999-2001].

3. Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet – contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls – including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

How much information? 2003, Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

All of which is insanely outdated considering YouTube alone was only founded in 2005 and yet the community produces and views more content than all the commercial production houses – consider in 2008 10 hours of video per minute were uploaded to the site. Since the 2003 study of 2002’s information explosion, we can safely say it has only grown in magnitude since. The eruption of information could easily bee seen as an individual’s need to communicate, which brings us to the modern day where a considerable amount of content is being created, vetted and spread by social networks.

Aric Sigman authored an interesting article in the February issue of Biologist titled, “Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, where he presents various findings and side effects of our social affliction.

Britons now spend approximately 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people (ONS, 2003). Couples now spend less time in one another’s company and more time at work, commuting, or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic media devices.

The Office for National Statistics has just reported that “over the last two decades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group.

A study by the Children’s Society recently found that television alone is displacing the parental role, eclipsing “by a factor of five or ten the time parents spend actively engaging with children”. Another ongoing study reports that 25% of British five-year olds own a computer or laptop of their own. In particular, the study noted an enormous increase in ‘social networking’ among younger children which “has overtaken fun (online games) as the main reason to use the Internet”.

“Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, Aric Sigman, Biologist

All of this is shown to affect health and for that matter society. Family is a historically critical element of survival. It is the embedded network that should be active for life. Yet, we see that even among married couples there is less interaction even when sharing the same physical spaces. Consider that population of 25-44 year olds that are living alone and likely having less long-term intimacy and as such fewer babies. One could see this as an expression of independence. Either way, it is an alarming trait. We are expressing more than ever, constructing our identity, in some cases identities, and yet are physically more alone than ever. The Internet equals social equals the primary content of our youth, bypassing the parental input that has developed generations prior.

One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them.

Teens’ nude photos get unexpected results, Irene Sege, Boston Globe

It is not surprising that teens would use their devices to express their sexual curiosity and interests. The porn industry paved the way for almost all commercial transactions, streaming video technology and collaboration tools. Scary, but true. Mobile devices make it easy for our pervy teens to be more out there than ever. If you can see it on FaceBook, you know the real material is floating over the mobile network. One might conclude that this level of openness is part of a generation change and thus a societal shift. There are likely others hoping our virtual fetish means teens are not having sex, clearly not the case. Sigman (the guy who write the article for the Biologist) was making a point, that it is not common for a physician to advise on a patients sex life, and yet he feels that is exactly what needs to happen. As we grow further apart, we lose some of what keeps us healthy (sexual intimacy being part of that). Teens sext, teens have sex and yet as a society we have less meaningful relationships. What exactly would Sigman have to say about this? Maybe we need to do a study on our youth, as they are the future of the world, we just get to help avoid self-destruction a while longer.

The information explosion and social networking storm are replacing the therapeutic and developmental tools of the past. Instead of parents and therapists, people are in a constant creation and editing of their identities through new media. If the online world is the safe place to explore one’s self, then why has it become a destination to a better reality? What is fascinating is that our growing immersion into a hyper-virtual-reality, where we mentally masturbate around all things “me”, is removing us from our social reality where our developed selves act and all the while, evolving into a sexually explicit twittified frenzy. Forgive me, I missed the sexting revolution, I was too busy typing on my BlackBerry, what was that?

Behavior / Books / Communication / Culture / Identity / Interaction / Participation / Relationships / Social Networking / Technology / User Experience / Web2.0 — No Comments
5
Apr 08

Getting the brain to swell

Clippinger turns to Robin Dunbar and colleagues to show that there is a correlation of neocortex development (thinking and problem solving) and membership size in social groups.

…the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens can in large measure be attributed to its ability to manage complex social relationships.

Page 57 from A Crowd of One

Clippinger pulls a great passage from Dunbar that describes the notion that what challenges an individual animal is tracking the societal groups in which it partakes. Dunbar then offers another view that maybe it is not the quantity, but the quality of the relationships. The following page explores the famous statistic that people successfully organize informally at groups of 150-200.

This book continues to have botox on the brain moments with the occasional brilliant series of pages. It is as if Clippinger started with a fantastic 80-page paper that inflated to fill a book. Regardless, the gems make you want to commit concept to memory.

One behavior that continues is the incessant friending activity on social sites, regardless of the site’s purpose. Sites even suggest other people you might know and connect. As interconnections grow, the network inherently diminishes in quality. The notion of identifying a connection with another person, community or organization is a simple enough activity. Maybe adding the need to classify those connections beyond a binary state was an inhibitor to adoption. Was this something FaceBook noticed, or was it simply that the creators never had higher intentions?

Moving beyond high-level classification, the next useful articulation is quality – how connected are we? There is plenty of work and math that can analyze these issues, however it all presumes having access to the data. Moreover, are my behaviors in online social spaces reflective of connected I am to my network? The data analysis is inherently reliant on the accuracy and relevance of the data. Might I love someone dearly that I hardly interact with online? Again, this level of analysis introduces yet another step to organizing our view of the societal graph and might be prohibitive to adoption.

On a related but separate note, some interesting user experience work is being done in the MIT Media Lab around visualizing and managing the adhoc face-to-face social network. Check out the project called Snap N’ Share by Nadav Aharony, Andrew Lippman and David Reed.

This brings us back to the point that humans are able to execute each of these tasks – identification, classification and qualification – without trouble. Short of disease, it is safe to assume that forgotten people accurately reflects their status on our societal radar. The hope of the articulated social graph being leveraged by technology is that maybe we will finally see what we are missing.

What is beautiful about the notion that humans have been so successful because of our ability to manage relationships is that it is startlingly not about being an individual. At an individual level, it is the quality of the relationships we create, but it is the group that benefits. What would we even do with an optimized view of society and is that discussion really absent from society?

The success of social spaces rests in their ability to create and support meaningful relationships. The proliferation of week ties in the social graph is noise in what could be a high fidelity signal. In the end, meaning is embodied in the people and the technology is just an enabler. What might these spaces be like if the only goal was to support meaningful connections?

Behavior / Communication / Consciousness / Culture / Developmental psychology / Identity / Interaction / Participation / Relationships / Reputation / Social Networking — 2 Comments
13
Mar 08

Do you trust who I am?

Philip Zimmermann’s Pretty Good Privacy was a critical platform for educating the world on secure communication. PGP encryption is so good, that even the most determined agencies can essentially go pound sand–it is pretty good privacy to be humble, not to disclaim. An impressive concept with PGP is the public and distributed nature of key management. Often, Public Key Encryption systems rely upon Public Key Infrastructures where there is a central authority. The genius of Zimmermann is in the notion that keys have an associated trust level. That your personal key can be trusted by you, implicitly. Your friend’s key, depending on how you came into position may have a high level of trust associated with it, that this key is in fact his or hers. Furthermore, you can sign other people’s keys, an endorsement of the validity of that key. You see, public keys are what the system uses to encrypt secure messages that only the key holder knows how to decrypt using their private key. By introducing the notion of trust and the digital signing of keys, Zimmermann started what has to be seen as an early social web–a social graph of the people you could not only securely exchange email with but a social confidence of the key itself and by extension the individual’s digital identity.

In A Crowd of One: The future of individual identity, John Henry Clippinger starts working through how much society defines good and bad. Simply put, one person’s radical is another person’s hero. The examples are uncanny and for each of us there is one with which to resonate. If you make it past the prologue and the bulk of chapter one, you will be delighted by page just prior to chapter two, which lays out where you hoped the book would go. There are heavy-eye moments in chapter one where you think Clippinger is too smart for you and his messages are going to be far too academic to appreciate–page 24 turns it around.

Clippinger talks about how biological evolution is particularly challenging in that generations of “sexual selection and reproduction” need to pass to accomplish the natural order. Societal evolution on the other hand can happen quickly and most participants in the modern world can attest, things they are a changin’.

Furthermore, it will become possible to have governance by algorithm—that is, have computer-based rules assign reputation scores, rate the performance of members of a social network, identify and expel free riders, and maintain the requisite checks and balances between competing interests.

We’re largely digital, we just haven’t appreciated what it can tell us about ourselves.

Both quotes from A Crowd of One, Page 24

Participation is often a key aspect of reputation in online venues where almost everyone is anonymous. An active forum participant rises through the ranks having established a history and dedication among participants accruing digital karma. E-Bay and Amazon have similar reputation models where the number of successful interactions connotes some degree of comfort in interacting with strangers or new products. Other social spaces like FaceBook display social graphs, implicit endorsements. Almost all of these cases either require a human to judge the content or trust in very week measures of past interaction. Regardless, as participants we leave an endless trail of social data, something Google is more than happy to store forever and bring together. Our infatuation with the social graph and the affiliation with social spaces is rooted in the quest to see our own reflection. Other people help manifest our identity (or identities) and in reflecting on our connection, attitudes and culture we participate in societal evolution. We are largely digital and while we have not yet appreciated how much of our web teaches us, we are far more ignorant of what it could tell us that we cannot see or do not know.

Some cultures have teachings of how painfully alone we are as beings, that we are very much isolated, despite our unquenchable desire to connect with others. As children moving through years four to six, we develop self-consciousness at a very specific point in time – at one point it is another child in the mirror and then suddenly we know it is us. Humans are unaware of themselves and then once aware struggle to manage their identity. We construct much of our reality as a means for creating our identity and look to others to reflect and locate how far we have come. In a digital world where the social network is out in the open, how does a more sophisticated notion of trust, identity and security come about? Is it the culmination of all I do online? Who is I? Which email address? Which identity? How many social connections do I need before I am trusted? At what cost do we ascertain identity?

Zimmermann was on to something–decentralizing authority, driving validation into the network and ensuring confidentiality. Clippinger brings us full circle, showing us that our digital fingerprints and the systems that judge us will be equal actors in constructing who we are. If the rest of this book is as good, we are in for a treat!

Behavior / Communication / Design / Industrial Design / Interaction / Relationships / Technology / User Experience — 2 Comments
10
Feb 08

Messin’ with the iPhone

People are sensitive about technology they bond with and the iPhone is a recent example. Infoesthetics picked up Edward Tufte’s comments and critique of the iPhone and the reaction of Christopher Fahey, the information architecture practice lead at Behavior. You need not imagine the cat hiss of the commentary that follows either blog post, a quick glance reveals the emotional charge often experienced when pointing at people wearing t-shirts that read, “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Tufte drops some gems at the end of his video commentary:

To clarify add detail.

Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information they are failures of design.

If the information is in chaos don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Something he credits the iPhone for doing while critiquing that some applications leave the user in what I think of as a Jelly Bean Land. Things look great, smooth, glossy and colorful, just like the high polish of Jelly Bellys. In a wonderful call back to the ways of academics, Tufte pulls together some readily available visuals to illustrate his point – quite likely the work of his protégés. Messin’ with the iPhone is dangerous and exactly why someone needs to do it.

The two examples are the market view and the weather application. In short, each could offer higher data density, leveraging the characteristics of the high-res screen of the device, consistently reinforcing the uniqueness of the iPhone, not just relying on the improved touch screen, which will eventually be everywhere. However, people like Jelly Bellys and that is a tough argument. Many people like high fat, high-cholesterol, high sugar foods, but then are upset at their obese kids. Just because we like it, or that no one is complaining, is not a valid argument that it is right. In fact, there are plenty that agree, Tufte’s points are worthy, but his visuals leave too much and too little to the imagination.

His stock example is illustrated with a printed page (possible a portion of a printed page). The point is, see how much information could be displayed? Visually, it was awful. Everyone reveres the point, his text on sparklines and data density is biblical.

Lesson 1: When messin’ with the iPhone, offer visuals that are as esthetically pleasing as the ones in which you refer. It reduces the need to overcome the dissonance.

Tufte’s weather example actually draws upon lesson 1 (good job to whomever mocked up the improved weather experience). While not perfect, it demonstrates the added data density while maintaining some of the luscious visuals of the original weather experience. He adds a high-resolution weather animation below. It is a bit too large and reminds the viewer of low-def TV signals on a high-def, high-res TV. Conceptually fine, dangerously too real and hence offensive to those understanding it less as a direction and more as the solution.

Lesson 2: When messin’ with the iPhone, stay consistent in your accordance or violation with lesson 1. Again, it reduces the dissonance that the viewer has in understanding the presentation – consistency is highly explanatory.

Humans are fascinating creatures forming meaningful relationships with inanimate objects, often the ones that are soon perceived to be extensions of the self. Apple’s contribution to society is some of the best experience and industrial design ever, exactly what they are selling. Technically, it is all the same and yet they invest where people’s hearts are. A deeper reflection on Buddism and materialism reveals that there is no requirement to shed physically all material objects, but it is your ability to enjoy and simultaneously be indifferent of an object’s presence. Our appreciation for our present situation and detachment from it being so very necessary leaves a healthy mental balance. Many people will be buried with iPhones, but none of them will need them.

Art / Behavior / Business / Communication / Conference / Culture / Education / Interaction / Participation / Relationships / Sharing / Social Networking / Software / dux07 — 5 Comments
1
Nov 07

Socially critical thinking

Social software maps the networks we already know. Presumably, the goal is to have the systems we interact with enable or inform us about something or someone we do not.

Recently I have been beating a drum with a colleague on the lack of critical thinking people bring to bare, regardless of environment – digital or real – and how we might support more thoughtful interactions. The disturbing trend is that people communicate critique through disengagement and silence. Anyone who has enjoyed a college-level art class can affirm that the most humbling and beneficial moments come from open critiques.

Your work, something you sweat over for hours, is hanging up against a wall along side those of your peers. Artists hang their work on the wall, stand back and review in hopes to see what they might be missing. The things we like and dislike about art often thought to be subjective, that taste is something unique to us. If this were true then more people agree than disagree on esthetically pleasing artistic expression. Go to an art critique and watch as people judge both on the technical execution and on the way the piece makes them feel. For the artist, it is likely the first time anyone has interacted with them around their art; it is the beginning of a dialogue. When there is agreement, the artist has communicated something so well that everyone remarks. If the reaction is not in-line with the artist’s intention, then it is an opportunity to learn and adjust. Art is, at least in part, communication. For whatever reason, we do not ask our peers to hang Power Point slides up on the wall and reflect. Ask a developer to be honest about their anxiety of participating in a code review. We have created a culture of quite, passive, secret thoughts.

People need to be more critical. Not negative, critical. We have an opportunity every day to contribute to the reality we share, if even only to compliment. Why withhold so much in fear that we might offend? Try starting with what you liked and then follow up with your suggestion. Venture out and express how you feel the next time someone asks you for your thoughts. Do not just say, “looks good,” because that is the same as silence.

When you organize jour [sic] social world solely around affinity, then you get an endless hall of mirrors. – Adam Greenfield, Author, Adjunct Professor at New York University, from an interview with Zachary Jean Paradis, Sapient, interview.

Social spaces are about the participants and their connections. If they are unable to show us something other than what we know, they have failed. Collecting the list of people we know is an ego game, whose meaning is short lived. Part of addressing this challenge is in valuing the diversity among us – go beyond gender, race and include thought. Love the person who disagrees with you, because you have the opportunity to learn something new. Be more critical of what you see. Find others that are willing to be more critical of you. Decide that a hall of mirrors, while familiar, is not as interesting as what other people are showing.

Behavior / Culture / Education / Interaction / Life / Participation — 2 Comments
28
Oct 07

Jump in before all the water is gone

It is amazing when the comment section of a blog post is longer than the post. The barrier to post is high enough that most people don’t. The comments I refer to are the ones that equal in quality and value of the original, twitter sized posts need not apply. This barrier is true for many online social interactions for at least three reasons:

First, “what’s in it for me?” goes unanswered. What is the incentive to participate? If you write a blog, it might be part of your life interaction model – comment and catalog in your space while linking to the inspiration. If you bookmark, it might be in hopes to remember and revisit. In general, there are relatively few obvious benefits. One answer is to be heard – just remember to have something worth saying.

Second, the efforts of a few benefit many. The vast majority of information is unvisited, untagged, unrated and uncommented. For those who participate, thank you. The time you take to read, understand and evaluate (even if imperfectly), makes finding information easier. That someone takes the time to “touch” something interesting adds value for those who come behind it. The fact that many are willing to join in, leaves well-worn and lasting marks.

Third, contribution takes time. In our information congested, attention sliced, multi-tasked world, taking a moment to contribute back costs too much, especially when considering a well thought out, well-written comment.

Yet, more of the world is growing up in time when participating is commonplace. Enter stage right: YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg, Twitter and Facebook. The question is, are we saying something worthy of further thinking? There are certainly professional circles that are interested in mining the social data created, but what is it that we are contributing? This is all, very much, a social experiment without the vague beginnings of a thesis. However, it is the world we live in and for an increasing many, the only world they know.

One of Michael Wesch’s anthropology classes at Kansas State pulled together another three minutes of visual delight expressing the current state of the student.

With an average class size of 115, only 18% of their teachers can recognize them and call them by name. Let us be generous and say a given student has 10 teachers, that means two know them from another. Eighty percent of the time, students are anonymous.

This is good, because they only complete half of the assigned readings 70% of which are irrelevant to their life. You can just feel the low grown from all the humanities majors, especially those from Ivy League schools. Makes you wonder what they missed in the other half of the readings or what it means to be relevant. The good news is that they read! The eight books per semester average seems insignificant to the time and attention devoted to the 2300 web pages and over 1200 FaceBook profiles. I am still stunned that they read! The level of real literacy is astounding. I digress. The interesting part of this is that the books and assigned readings have been hand selected by highly educated people. The web pages and FaceBook profiles are self-selected. With the undisputed fact that we exist in information chaos, the idea that students would skip 50% of the hand-selected literature is amazing. Furthermore, the content of the websites and certainly the sophistication of FaceBook profiles is not quite that of the New York Times – most college reading is, at least it use to be.

Students write 42 pages for class in a semester and over 500 pages of email. Apparently, there are 105 days in a semester at Kansas State, which means a student on average writes one page for class every 2.5 days and in that same amount of time will generate 12 pages in email. Are we asking students to do too much? Certainly, writing for class is harder than writing email, but when they enter the work force, most of the emails, papers and presentations they will give should approximate the level they develop for class work.

At one point in the video a young lady holds up a sign saying that when you total all of the time they spend on things in a day it goes over 24 hours. Brilliant! Soft productivity measures are often captured in “time saved.” Many joke that we save more time than there is in a day by introducing and improving business solutions. In the next scene, a student holds a sign saying they multitask, because they have to. We all do or we cannot competitively produce results. Those 24 hours need to contain the productivity of a much longer day. The busiest among us seem to deprive of sleep, regular meals and personal time to accomplish their goals. The students say they get seven hours of sleep, which is good, because sleep is important for a healthy mind and body. Well-rested people are more productive than their non-stop counterparts are over time – a simple Google search will show you all the ways skimping on sleep hurts. The multitasking skill will come in handy as they cram more than a days activity and get countless hours back from corporate IT to fit it all in.

Generations of students are being built by systems that fail to fully educate. As a society, we communicate academic achievement by single, standardized measures, not more fundamental values around identity, society and global impact for example. We fail to consider the fundamental changes in our children (e.g. read about millennials) as relevant input to evolving education. We alter the standards by which we set and measure expectations by allowing students to proceed with no correction – they too will become teachers, doctors, business-folk and what will they value? If we are what we eat | read | think | express, then what does it mean when your reading and writing is so FaceBook, Twitter and email focused?

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Messin’ with the iPhone

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