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Texts and the Texter

10/25/2011

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 “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” Winston Churchill observed about the symbiotic relationship between our architecture and ourselves. The same may be said for how we interact with our technologies.

Take a look at texting. The numbers seem to grow all the time but as of the Kaiser Foundation Study published in January 2010, young people were sending on average 3000 texts per month and were spending four times the amount of time texting than they were actually talking on their phones. And texting has created has influenced communications in several ways:

First of all, because people text on their cellphones, most must use a virtual keyboard on a touchscreen (Blackberry owners get to use the tiny physical keys, which is slightly more user friendly, I suppose.). In either case, the keys are much smaller than the average computer keyboard’s keys, so it’s easy to make mistakes. Plus, using the virtual keyboard also creates another level of awkwardness because you have to shift to a second (and on some cellphones a third) view to access all the characters on the QWERTY keyboard. In addition texting has the “short message service” limitation of 160 characters.

Then there’s the speed at which the communication is sent. Texts are delivered pretty much instantaneously. This leads people to think that they must respond at roughly the same speed. Delaying a response seems for many to imply that you’re ignoring the person contacted you.

The combination of a virtual awkward keyboard, the limited length, and the pressure to rapidly respond engenders the kind of shorthand of contracted words (Xlnt for excellent, rite for write), pictograms (b4 for before, @om for atom), initializations (N for no, LOL for laughing out loud, CWOT for complete waste of time), and nonstandard acronyms (anfscd for and now for something completely different, btdt for been there, done that, hhoj for ha, ha, only joking. Notice how the shorthand becomes more and more cryptic and we haven’t even talked about the emoticons—those variations on the ubiquitous smiley face using strings of punctuation

I know I’m old—way over thirty—but texting seems to me like the new pig Latin—another code designed to communicate secretly and to exclude others. In the case of pig Latin, the aim was to exclude parents. And for some ages the same may be true to today’s texting. It’s a silent and secret form of communication one can do in one’s lap under the dinner table. So essentially the technology of sending written messages via cell phones creates private languages.

Texting can be a convenient way to quickly notify someone, but the effects, especially for younger people, can be more far-reaching and burdensome and hardly convenient. Sherry Turkle met with one sixteen-year-old named Sanjay during her research for her new book Alone/Together. He expressed anxiety and frustration around texting. He turned off his phone while he spoke with Turkle for an hour. Turkle writes: “At the end of our conversation, he turns his phone back on. He looks at me ruefully, almost embarrassed. He has received over a hundred text messages as were speaking. Some are from his girlfriend, who, he says, “is having a meltdown.” Some are from a group of close friends trying to organize a small concert. He feels a lot of pressure to reply to both situations and begins to pick up his books and laptop so he can find a quiet place to set himself to the task. . . . “I can’t imagine doing this when I get older.” And then, more quietly, “How long do I have to continue doing this?” Sounds more like he’s facing a prison sentence rather than the joy of continuous connection  . . .

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What Robots Can Tell Us about Humans

4/12/2011

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One of the most disturbing stories about human-robot interaction I’ve come across lately is recounted by Sherry Turkle in her new book, Alone Together. It is the story of a fifth-grader named Tia, who has spent some time with robots called My Real Baby and AIBO, both of which were first built and introduced around ten years ago. The baby doll robot could mew, respond to being fed, ask for more to eat, and in general create a fairly realistic simulacrum of a baby. AIBO was shaped like a small dog and was designed to develop from puppy-like behavior to adult-dog behavior, learning and reacting based on how the person treats it.

As a psychologist, Sherry Turkle is of course most interested in how people respond emotionally as they interact with robots. Fifth-grader Tia thinks about what might be possible: she believes robots might someday be advanced enough to be babysitters. In this role, they would be more “efficient and reliable” than people. It seems that Tia knows, as did so many other fifth graders whom Turkle interviewed, that people can be unreliable and unpredictable. You can’t always plan on their being there. Tia herself talks of being at home alone with her pregnant mother when her mother suddenly went into labor and the immediate issue became who was going to take care of Tia (fortunately there was a grandmother nearby). Still, Tia had been frightened by the uncertainty of the situation. A robot would always be there in case it was needed to take over the tending of children. “Having a robot babysitter would mean never having to panic about finding someone at the last minute,” Tia said.

In this sense observing the interaction between humans and robots becomes more of a Rorschach test. It can be less about what actually happens to a person emotionally when in contact with a robot and more about what surfaces about what is missing in a person’s own life. Turkle found that, like Tia, many of the fifth-graders who spent time with robots focus not about immediate reaction to the robot but to other deep-seated  concerns. Turkle observes: “Children talk about working mothers, absent fathers, and isolated grandparents. There is much talk of divorce. Some children wonder whether one of this robot’s future cousins might be a reasonable babysitter; something mechanical might be more reliable than the caretaking they have.”

For the many children Turkle interviewed who spend time alone in empty homes after school, a humanoid robot is an attractive companion—far better than the television or computer they usually resort to when alone. Like so many stories of the elderly using robots for companionship, the story of Tia is a story of loneliness and fear of abandonment. But is building better machines to mask, or even to mitigate, this basic human loneliness really the solution we want to advocate?

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Tweens Use Media 30% More than 5 Years Ago

2/17/2010

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New Kaiser study shows dramatic increase in all media use except print

TV still dominates, contradicting popular image of proactive youth

Heavy media users especially unhappy

In the Kaiser Foundation’s third survey of media use among 8- to 18-year olds, researchers found a dramatic increase in media use in the 11-14-year old group as opposed to the 8- to 10-year old group. Eleven- to 14-year olds spent almost 9 hours using media. The number of hours for that age group rises 12 hours per day when multitasking hours are counted twice to fully reflect total media exposure. For all 8- to 18-year-olds, the average use, which had been stable in the studies conducted in 1999 and 2004, increased this time over an hour to 7 hours and 38 minutes, about the time adults spend at work.

Texting: 118 per Day

The media tracked by the study include iPod/MP3 players, video game consoles, computers, cell phones, television, radio, and printed materials. (Reading printed materials was the only activity tracked that decreased in the amount of time devoted to it.) The study did not include computer use for school work. Nor did it cover texting and cell phone calls, which for 8- to 18-year-olds averaged one hour and 30 minutes and 33 minutes, respectively. The number of texts sent was surprisingly high: 118 was the average.  If you add texting and cell phone calls to other media use, you get an average of 9 hours and 40 minutes per day, significantly more time than students spent in school and on homework.

The So-Called “Fun” Generation

Many books and articles have recently trumpeted the creative, interactive ways that the younger generation interacts with new media, including mashups and YouTube videos. Some writers explain that, after all, something must be “fun” for this generation to have any interest in it. But of course. The impression you get is that youths are constantly and joyfully experimenting with new technologies and reveling in new social connections. But among heavy users, those who use media more than 16 hours per day, 60% report being bored frequently, 32% admit being sad or unhappy often, and 33% report that they get into trouble a lot.

Life as Sound Bites

Those numbers about youths and negative moods directly contradict the popular image of youths as socially active, energized tinkerers. In fact today’s youth, especially those most involved in media use, may simply be seeking to escape their boredom or unhappiness. The compulsiveness of youths who send 118 text messages per day also suggests a chronic underlying loneliness in spite of all the gee-whiz access to information, technology, and friends. Could it be that those mediated, truncated messages and the constant media use just creates a lot of background noise, trivial diversions, and mind-numbing entertainments? Isn’t tweeting, after all, just another example of enforced brevity, the sound bites of our contemporary life? These youths think that they have happy outer lives, proclaiming by large percentages that they have lots of friends, get along with their parents, and are generally happy at school, but when asked about their inner life, the picture becomes considerably darker and more complicated.

TV Still Rules

The other surprising fact in this study is the ongoing popularity of TV in the media use of youths. This too contradicts all those who celebrate the brilliant creative use of new media by youths. Watching TV remains the number one activity for 8- to 18-year-olds—about 4 hours and 30 minutes per day, up an extra 40 minutes from five years ago. The 11- to 14-year old spend 5 hours per day watching TV. One reason for the increase is broader access: Kids can now more easily record shows, view them on demand, and watch TV on their laptops, smartphones, and iPods. There are also more TVs than ever in teenagers’ bedrooms, a situation that naturally increases TV time. In addition 37% report that the family car has either a TV or a DVD player.

A Vicious Cycle?

The Kaiser study notes that there is no clear cause and effect relationship between low levels of personal contentment and heavy media use, although the correlation remained constant when tested for age, gender, race, parent education, and single- vs. two-parent households. The researchers note that the cause/effect could go either way—or both: Children who are bored, unhappy, etc. may seek out more media to escape their angst. On the other hand, heavy use of media, especially television, does itself create boredom and unhappiness. It seems likely that time spent watching TV and boredom, unhappiness, and/or sadness actually form a vicious cycle, reinforcing the very negative moods that youth are trying to escape. It seems to me one of the saddest images of our empty modern life is that of a teenager watching some inane reality show in his room and texting his friends (or tweeting to the world) about the inanity he is watching.

Twitter Babble

Pear Analytics recently conducted a study of Twitter content and found that 40% of all tweets  are “pointless babble”:



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See also
Kaiser Foundation Report

Books about Generation M on Amazon
Digital Natives: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives  by John Palfrey and Urs Glasser
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott 
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