Blog Entry

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to the new decade!

This morning, I eschewed my usual routine of checking my email as soon as I woke up. I wanted to dictate how I kicked off the New Year. I wanted to be proactive, not reactive. So, I went for a run. It felt good. Now I feel strong and in control, and my mind is clear. I’m ready to take on this new year, this new decade, this ongoing adventure.

Maybe the next few days or even the next few weeks will be like today. Maybe they’ll be even better. Or maybe, I’ll return to my old habit of rolling out of bed and checking (and often responding to) my email first thing in the morning.

Martin Heidegger contended that technology was insidious because it made us forget our essential humanness. In this day and age, that’s an easy contention to understand.

Your Inner Circle

Back in 2008, my girlfriend told me that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. I thought a lot about that claim and whether it applied to my own life, and I was troubled. When I really thought about it, I was fairly certain I was spending most of my time with people I didn’t want to be spending time with.

I decided to take a look at some hard numbers. I used a tool called mail-trends on both my personal and work email accounts to see whom I was emailing the most.

I was reasonably happy with the numbers from my personal email, but I was distraught by the results of my work email. I interacted a lot with my clients, which was a good thing. (I love my clients!) However, I was also receiving an inordinate amount of email from people whom I didn’t want to be talking to. Worse, I was sending just as much email back to these same people. To top it off, I found that I often didn’t get around to responding to people whom I did want to be talking to.

It would have been easy to blame email for these woes, so naturally, I did. After all, email is designed to focus your attention on your inbox, and by default, it doesn’t place any barriers around that inbox. You end up ceding your attention to the people who email you the most, whether you like it or not.

One year ago today, I resolved to change this.

I did okay — not as well as I would have liked, but better than usual. Awareness made a big difference. I did some obvious things, such as emailing and calling people I wanted to talk to. I also made some structural changes. For example, I started the Blue Oxen Barnstars podcast, which was a great excuse for me to talk to people I wanted to talk to.

I also made some changes to how I managed my email inbox. I recently ran mail-trends again, and saw that my email situation improved a lot this past year. But it’s still not where I want it to be. At times, I wonder whether I want to be on email at all.

Tools As Space

A few months ago, Jelly Helm wrote a provocative post, where he said he was feeling “over” social media. He asked, “How does the screen/Interpipe enhance our humanity? How does it detract from it? How can it add more joy to our lives? When does it take away joy?”

Environment matters. We know this from situational psychology, which has shown over and over again that our surroundings can dictate our behavior. If we understand and acknowledge this, then one path toward transformation is to change that space. Life coach Martha Beck has suggested that your living space is a reflection on your life and that the room that gives you the most anxiety is an indication of the part of your life that needs the most work. Her solution? Revamp that room!

Digital tools are simply another form of space, but it’s a space that has magical properties. The notion of distance still exists, but its properties are completely different. When Chris Dent and I started Blue Oxen Associates, we spent a grand total of one week in the same room together over the course of two years. This past year, I spent more time with Philippe Beaudette than with anyone else, and he lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I like to work late into the night, and through the power of Identi.ca, I get to watch some of my friends half-way around the world wake up and start their day. I wish I could be in the same room as them, but these small, seemingly trivial connections make them feel less far.

Digital tools have magical properties, but unless those properties are properly harnessed, they are largely potential. Magic does not, by default, make our lives better.

As designers, we need to think about what makes digital tools meaningful spaces. Tools have affordances that encourage us to behave in certain ways.

Facebook is one of my favorite tools in the world. Many of the people I want to be engaging with — regardless of context — are on it. More importantly, most of these people are actually engaging on it. They are not simply passive participants. The typical long-tail curve of participation does not seem to apply on Facebook. At last month’s PARC panel on technology-mediated social participation, Facebook’s in-house sociologist, Cameron Marlow, said that the average Facebook user posts 25 comments a month. That is a stunning participation rate for an online community.

Good tools encourage certain types of behavior, but they don’t mandate it. They might make it very hard to choose, but in the end, we still have a choice.

How we choose to leverage tools so that they help make our lives more meaningful is up to us. Sometimes, it means walking away. I have friends who have chosen not to be on Facebook, and they seem quite happy with that choice. Jelly’s solution was to prune his list of Facebook friends. (I wonder if it helped?)

We still have a lot to learn about the digital medium and how it affects our ability to be human. I am not a determinist, but I am an optimist. I don’t believe that tools are inherently good or bad, but I believe that they can be marvelous, sometimes in transformational ways. I am excited by this possibility. But to harness that potential, we need to work at it, and we need to maintain a constant level of self-awareness. I truly believe that self-awareness is the secret to good living, and that this truth spans across time, space, and tools.

Categories: Stories