Contemplative Computing

Four months a year on email

Jordan Weissmann at the Atlantic catches a new report on office work:

There's a good chance you spend more than a quarter of each week reading and answering those emails.

That factlet comes courtesy of the McKinsey Global Institute, which broke down how so-called "interaction workers" spend their days. They describe these as people whose jobs require "complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and access to information." I'm interpreting it as consultant speak for "office stiff."

The upshot: we spend 13 hours a week, or 28 percent of our office time, on email. Assuming two weeks vacation, that multiplies out to 650 hours a year.

Put another way, four months of every working year-- 16 forty hour weeks-- are devoted just to email.

Of course, without reading the report, it's not clear if this 650 hour number is good or bad. Office workers spend more time on email than they did 50 years ago, but are there things that they're not doing that they should be instead?

Obviously some of that time is spent doing inbox management, main new folders, trawling through old messages for some suddenly-essential fact, but some portion of that time is spent... working. Telling people important things. Making plans.

Fortunately though, McKinsey has a solution: it "suggests that by moving to social media-based information platforms -- think some of the more recent versions of Microsoft Sharepoint -- would make workers 25 percent more productive." Because nothing solves a technology-generated problem like more technology.

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Frogs do NOT mindlessly boil to death if first put in cold water: A note on tech addiction

Alexis Madrigal sighs, "Another day, another New York Times story about technology addiction." He's pointing to a Matt Richtel article about concerns about technology addiction-- right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The concern, voiced in conferences and in recent interviews with many top executives of technology companies, is that the lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving that can hurt productivity and personal interactions.

“If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death — it’s a nice analogy,” said Mr. Crabb, who oversees learning and development at Facebook. People “need to notice the effect that time online has on your performance and relationships.”

Three things.

Okay, first of all, yes it's a nice analogy, but the whole "frogs in pots of cold water don't notice that they're boiling to death when the heat goes up" thing is wrong. Try it yourself. See what happens.*

Second, where the Hell else is this kind of concern going to manifest itself? The people who are going to be worried about the downsides of being plugged in are… wait for it... people who are plugged in.

Everyone I interviewed for my book chapter on digital Sabbaths is an engineer, a professor, a writer, a consultant, a Web developer-- in other words, people who are seriously wired, and need to be to work. (They also, as Madrigal would point out, tend to work in industries that value overwork, and the perception of busyness). You wouldn't expect Buddhist monks to worry about these issues. (And indeed they tend not to, but because they have a very sophisticated, self-empowering view of attention and distraction. See chapter 3 of my book, or my TedxYouth talk.)

Third and finally, let me just quote this article:

In an era when the boss wants us available 24/7, and when the high priests of the new economy bombard us with ubiquitous marketing messages, some burnt-out survivors are taking another look at their cell phones, pagers, home satellite dishes and "constant connectivity" to the Internet….

"We seem to have no way to put a human handle on our ingenuity," he says. "Between 80 and 90 percent of the messages we get every day are marketing messages, designed to make us feel incomplete. This is having a terrible effect on our inner landscape."

This is from 2001. It's the first instance I can find of the use of the term "digital sabbath." Which is not to say that this conversation is unimportant, but that we've been having it here for some time.

*Spoiler alert: you'll end up with a terrified / pissed off live frog and water all over your stove.

Jack Cheng on the Slow Web: "Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information."

James Fallows points out a great-- no, not great, really fantastic-- essay by Brooklyn-based designer and writer Jack Cheng, on the Slow Web:

The Slow Web Movement is a lot like the Slow Food Movement, in that they’re both blanket terms that mean a lot of different things…. Slow Web describes a feeling we get when we consume certain web-enabled things, be it products or content.

The critical difference between the regular Web and the Slow Web is one of time: the regular Web, in its obsession with "real time" (something I talk about in my book as, ironically, ever-changing and impermanent), puts the emphasis on interacting instantly, for fear of being left out or left behind.

via flickr

The Slow Web, in contrast, is about timeliness, not real time: about getting nudges or texts or interesting articles at the appropriate time (whenever that is for you), not the instant they're available.

Another difference is that "Fast Web is destination-based. Slow Web is interaction-based." There's an important consequence to this difference in orientation:

Fast Web companies often try to rack up pageviews, since pageviews mean ad impressions. Slow Web companies tend to put effectiveness first.

Or, as iDoneThis puts it, the Slow Web goes for "Behavior change, not growth."

via flickr

Finally, the Fast Web is about information, while the Slow Web is about knowledge (or self-knowledge):

Timeliness. Rhythm. Moderation. These things dovetail into what I consider the biggest difference between Slow Web and Fast Web. Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge. Information passes through you; knowledge dissolves into you. And timeliness, rhythm, and moderation are all essential for memory and learning.

It recognizes that good ideas need time to develop: that, as Rebecca Blood notes, the Fast Web's emphasis on speed comes at the expense of depth. 

via flickr

So to sum up: the Slow Web is

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

He ends with this great bit, which which I'll quibble:

Fast Web companies want to be our lovers, they want to be by our sides at all times, want us to spend every moment of our waking lives with them, when sometimes that’s not what we really need. Sometimes what we really need are friends we can meet once every few months for a bowl of ramen noodles at a restaurant in the East Village.

Here's my quibble: when I read the first sentence, I immediately thought of the magnificent Ranier Maria Rilke line: "I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other." That, I would maintain, could be a better description of the Slow Web: it's unobtrusive, moderate, knowledgeable-- and protects your solitude when you need it.

Cool contemplative technology: Buddhist chant boxes

I just found out about these:

Buddhist chant boxes are small sound loop players sold in Buddhist temples, monasteries, and markets throughout Asia. The idea is that without enough monks and nuns chanting mantras, playing recorded mantras is the next best thing. Dharma gadgets.

Most Buddhist chant boxes contain two chants or more chants. They come with a headphone jack and/or a speaker, and they run on batteries or external power. Definitely low-fi and low tech but that’s part of their charm.

Some pictures are here. They're often very simple, low-power devices, and that's part of their charm. There's a modern version, the Buddha Machine:

A small, plastic, battery-operated device resembling a cheap AM radio, the Buddha Machine contains nine brief ambient snippets that loop endlessly. It is described by one of its creators as “essentially an ‘instant’ sound installation.”

This interview with Christiaan Virant, co-creator of the Buddha Machine, s pretty good. Part of what's interesting about the Machine is how people respond to the physical device (in contrast to the iPhone app):

The Buddha Machine’s loops sound different under different circumstances, and its heft and utilitarian packaging are part of its pleasure. Toss it on a bed, and hear how the direction of the speaker, and whether or not it is muffled, alters the sound. Play two or more side by side, matching or mixing loops, and appreciate the interplay. Place units throughout an apartment and experience a sound experience somewhere between wallpaper and incense.

It is the sound-art world’s equivalent of an artists’ book. An artists’ book is an object unto itself, in which not just the printed words and images are of concern, but so too the very construction of the book. The Buddha Machine is a medium-specific release, much like a cassette tape that takes advantage of its extended playing time, or a vinyl LP consisting of locked grooves, or a CD or MiniDisc containing dozens of short musical segments intended to be listened to at random.

According to digital media artist Zach Poff,

They are usually given away in Chinese temples to assist in meditation. Short musical phrases are encoded on a microchip and played continuously when the player is turned on. Some have a track-switch button (like an old 8-track player) and some have only a volume knob.

I am interested in how the technology within these boxes guides the perception of their intent. At first blush, a digital device that “prays for you” seems a bit Orwellian but Buddhist chanting is not prayer (as in mortals communicating with their gods). It is a blend of oral tradition and meditation: a way of teaching religious texts where the repetition of the message encourages a spiritual state harmonious with the meaning of the text itself.

Texting while walking is a bad idea

The other day my wife showed me a video of a woman who falls into a fountain at a mall because she's distracted by texting. This isn't the first time such a thing has happened. Earlier this year, another woman stepped off a pier and into Lake Michigan when she was texting. (And of course there was the guy who nearly walked into a bear while texting. Public authorities are starting to create fines for walking while texting.

Fortunately, there's an app for that. The TXT'N'WALK app "promises to let you see where you are going while you are looking at your phone." It

will use the camera found on the back of your phone to show you the pavement in front of you while you access your email or the web on your phone.

"We found that lots of people look at their phones while they are walking", said a spokesman for the company Looflirpa who makes the app. "This way you can do so without the fear of walking into someone - or a lamppost".

Likewise, the similarly-named Type N Walk app "displays a transparent viewport of what's directly in front of you. This combined with your peripheral vision is just enough visual information to help you avoid obstacles -- like walking face-first into a tree!"

The idea that you could stop and text appears to be too simple to even consider. Far better to have a technology that gives the feeling of solving the problem. And seriously, it is a problem, not just a potential source of embarrassment and an hour's entertainment on Digg. Stony Brook University researchers conducted a study on talking and cellphone use that found that rather than being "natural and easy,... it could be dangerous and result in walking errors and interfere with memory recall." Awesome.

 

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Reflections on writing

Some thoughts about book writing as a team sport.

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Version 2.0

I sent the revised manuscript to my editor on Friday.

via Flickr

I cut about 15%, and got it back under 100,000 words. Most of the cuts were stylistic, tightening up the prose, eliminating redundancy, and taking down what I think of as scaffolding-- the signposts, the repetition that is an artifact of writing in chunks, the stuff you write in order to figure out what really matters.

via flickr

There are about 20 pages I just cut wholesale, and can become its own article. There's always the temptation to say everything you can in a book, and it's an impulse I have to resist. You have to remind yourself that this is not the last opportunity I'll have to talk about this set of issues, and it's important for the book to have a narrative coherence. Better to tell one story that people will remember, than try to tell five stories that will leave people muddled.

via flickr

So with luck this'll be the last substantial round of revisions, and it can move on to the next stage.

via flickr

While I'd like this to move along, I also have the strong feeling that this is not my last word on contemplative computing, but just the beginning. There's going to be a lot more to say, in a variety of different channels.

Quote of the day

These days he spent very little time surfing the web, which now seemed, on reflection, a giant collective conspiracy to waste time. Given infinite freedom of intellectual movement, it turned out that what people mainly want to do is look at pictures of Kelly Brooks's tits. (John Lanchester, Capital, p. 42)

Finally, a machine dispensing scalding liquids from your dashboard

In case you felt that Mitsubishi's idea of wraparound multimodal interfaces in cars wasn't going to be distracting enough, the Fiat 500L just announced its own entry in the "in-dash distractions" Olympics:

How often have you been on a long drive and wished that you had a hot shot of espresso to wake you up? Aside from the fact that spilling scalding coffee is a safety hazard, an extra appliance is a distraction, and drinking espresso will make you have to pee way more frequently, the concept of an in-car espresso maker sounds pretty good.

Fiat's 500L will be "the first standard-production car in the world to offer a true espresso coffee machine." The future is here, and it's highly caffeinated.

Awesome. For the record, this is how coffee should be enjoyed.

coffee in budapest, via flickr

 

"I did not find anyone who was absolutely off the grid:" Lucas Foglia on self-sufficiency

The Guardian has a short piece about Lucas Foglia's A Natural Order, a photographic essay about people in America who go off the grid. "I wanted to see if I could find the absolute, if there were communities or individuals who lived off the grid and were wholly self-sufficient," he says.

The results sound interesting:

"I found people who lived without money, who built houses from trees grown on their land, who drank fresh water from mountain streams," says Foglia. "But I did not find anyone who was absolutely off the grid. Many of them had cellphones, laptops, pickup trucks, solar panels with electric sockets. Even the communities that were so off the map that they did not have a postal address were plugged in in some way."...

The world Foglia depicts in A Natural Order is a constantly surprising one. A picture of a decomposing bear hints at the danger lurking in these other edens. A man working a 100-year-old plough pulled by a pickup truck speaks of the contradictions of the contemporary back-to-the-land movement.

"ill post-modern commentary-type s*** about the nature of gadgets and relationships"

I hope what I'm doing is more profound that this*.

Maybe I can crank up the Hunter S Thompson angle for the next book.

*This is my all-time favorite cartoon from the pioneering Webzine/site/whatever Suck.

Saturday editing

Finishing the smaller edits today. Then it's on to strengthening the conclusions.

via flickr

That is, if the dog lets me.

Final revisions

Carrying the changes into the electronic file....

via Flickr

 

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Internet addictions and vomiting monasteries

Damchoe Wangmo, a Canadian-born Buddhist nun living in India, pointed me to an article in Vietnam Nam News about Vietnamese temples offering programs for Internet addiction:

It is an early summer morning. It is so quiet that only the singing of insects and birds can be heard at Ha Noi's Sung Phuc Pagoda.

Bong . . . bong . . . bong! The ancient copper bell sounds its first summons of the day. A few minutes later, monks in their grey robes start filing into the sanctuary for chanting and meditation.

Among them are 11-year-old student Nguyen Thanh Thai and four other boys. Thai, who is wearing a robe far too big for him, is not a novice, but he takes up the meditation posture along with the others, legs crossed, hands on knees, head and back upright. His eyes gaze slightly downwards.

Sometimes, Thai gently stretches his legs and rubs his feet, his high forehead slightly furrowed. He must feel weary.

Thai, whose home is in northern Dien Bien Province, nearly 500km away, says: "I am not a Buddhist follower, but an online game addict. My parents let me spend my three-month summer in the pagoda in the hope I will overcome my addiction."

Being an addict meant being glued for many hours of the day and night, his sleepless eyes fixated on the laptop screen for hours on end. He missed many classes and forget about outdoor activities. Around him was always a litter of fast food containers from the junk food he ate while playing games.

At first I thought this was odd but not unexpected, given the power of mindfulness practices to deal with technology-sparked distraction. But after a little digging I realized that this story has another piece of context: the growth of an entire "rehab tourism" industry in south Asia (mainly Thailand), catering to poor addicts and wealthy professionals alike. There are monasteries that specialize in treating drug addicts, (Irish-born Paul Garrigan wrote a book about recovering from alcoholism in a monastery), resorts for London financiers kicking their coke habits, and of course Thamkrabok, the famous "vomiting monastery".

What a world.

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"the leading impediment to this project ever getting made would be our continued participation in it"

I recently stumbled on Stephen Harrigan's look back at his "career writing made-for-TV movies." It's worth reading in its entirety, but it takes off with Harrigan's description of the sale of his first script:

It was the agent announcing the news that the script had been sold to the brand-new theatrical wing of CBS and that Sydney Pollack—whose most recent movie had been the blockbuster comedy Tootsie—was attached to direct it.

First class flights to Los Angeles, rooms at the Miramar Sheraton, Larry’s speculations about how maybe we ought to buy a six-story office building that was for sale in downtown Austin because we would need a place to work. ... Our life as the hottest new screenwriters in Hollywood didn’t all come crashing down exactly, but it did become clear in our meetings with Pollack that we had been the beneficiaries of beginner’s luck and had no idea how to really write a screenplay. He wanted to know things like where the end of Act 2 was and what the character’s arc was. We didn’t know characters were supposed to have arcs, we didn’t know scripts were supposed to have acts, and in our guileless delight at having hit the big-time we certainly didn’t know that the leading impediment to this project ever getting made would be our continued participation in it.

I love that last line. It's the beginning of his understanding just how curious the relationship between his work and script, and the final product, could be:

It began to dawn on me during the production of that movie [The Last of His Tribe] that as much as I yearned to be part of the team, my real role was going to be that of lonely outlier. Screenwriters are less like actual filmmakers than like wedding planners: we work for months or even years making sure everything is ready, every detail is in place, but in the end it’s just not our party….

A screenplay is not a book, it’s not exactly a text, it’s not really even a thing. The physical form of a screenplay—120 or so pages held together by brass fasteners—is not to be taken seriously, because the script is in reality a sort of floating proposition, an ever-evolving set of instructions. The words “final draft” are eventually used, but since important changes are made all the way through the editing room, the idea of a final draft is notional. As a writer you are brutally reminded again and again that your script is not the end product; the movie is.

I don't think book writing offers quite the same experience, since the book continues to have your name on it, but there is this element of the thing being taken over and extended by others. The rise of self-publishing contributes to a sense of books as springing from the brows of authors, and of traditional publishers as doing little but diluting the vision of the author-auteur, and distributing piece of tree between flakes of dead cow (as William Mitchell once put it), and collecting outrageous rents for both. With movies, on the other hand, the work that others put into the film is a little more visible.

Then there's this great insight. So true.

You had to search and search until you found a story’s irreducible thread: a man on the run from a killer, a young girl growing into a woman, a victim seeking revenge. If the movie was about one thing, it could be about many things. But if you started out determined to make it about many things, it would be about nothing.

New study on phantom cellphone vibrations

Computers in Human Behavior has a new study of phantom cellphone vibrations. It's behind a firewall, but here's the abstract:

Phantom vibration syndrome, or perceived vibrations from a device that is not really vibrating, is a recent psychological phenomenon that has attracted the attention of the media and medical community. Most (89%) of the 290 undergraduates in our sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and they experienced them about once every two weeks, on average. However, few found them bothersome. Those higher in conscientiousness experienced phantom vibrations less frequently, and those who had strong reactions to text messages (higher in the emotional reaction subscale of text message dependence) were more bothered by phantom vibrations. These findings suggest that targeting individuals’ emotional reactions to text messages might be helpful in combating the negative consequences of both text message dependency and phantom vibrations. However, because few young adults were bothered by these phantom vibrations or made attempts to stop them, interventions aimed at this population may be unnecessary.

New AF447 crash report and the perils of automation

The Guardian reports that a new Bureau of Investigations and Analysis study of Air France 447, which crashed in a storm in 2009, "raises concerns about training for pilots flying hi-tech planes when confronted with a high-altitude crisis."

The crash looks like an example of the sort of "normal accident" that Yale sociologist Charles Perrow described: one in which the failure of a highly complex system that usually needs a minimal amount of human tending was exacerbated because of a special kind of human error. The complexity of these systems makes it difficult for operators to fully understand how they work, and people trained in their normal operation may not be well-prepared to deal with problems when things go wrong.

Central to this accident is the fact that when the automation failed, the pilots were presented with conflicting information which was obviously incorrect, said William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. But they were unable to look through this and understand what the aircraft was actually doing. "Pilots a generation ago would have done that and understood what was going on, but [the AF447 pilots] were so conditioned to rely on the automation that they were unable to do this," he said. "This is a problem not just limited to Air France or Airbus, it's a problem we're seeing around the world because pilots are being conditioned to treat automated processed data as truth, and not compare it with the raw information that lies underneath."

This is the downside of highly complex systems: when they work they may work great, but when they fail they do so realy spectacularly, and in ways that are hard for us to predict.

Essay on Janet Murray and Howard Rheingold books

Roy Christopher, a music and technology writer, has a nice short essay on two recent books that connect with contemplative computing, Janey Murray's Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice and Howard Rheingold's Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Interestingly, both books were published by MIT Press this year. MIT and Cambridge are unquestionably my favorite academic presses (my whole flirtation with Routledge was one of things that happens when you're a grad student). I'll have to publish something with each of them one day.

But not just yet. I'm currently working on the revisions to the contemplative computing book, and so thoughts of the next books must be kept far out of mind for at least a couple more weeks.