“According to research carried out last year by Professor Nada Kakabadse at Northampton University, a growing number of people are becoming overdependent on their BlackBerries, mobile phones and other digital devices.”

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“Clay Shirky says that the lightning-quick dissemination of news events via social media has heightened the role of emotion. The instantaneous manner with which users of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are inclined to pick up, modify and share messages favors excitement over objectivity.”

Watch video

Related links:
- Twitter meets mass hysteria
- Free Will: How the internet Is changing us (video)

My preferred pieces:

Skills: Business must learn from the new tribe
So-called ‘digital natives’ are bringing down the barriers to collaborative working, finds Jessica Twentyman
(If you read one article only, this is the one.)

Mobility: Flexibility is driven from the bottom up
But organisations must ensure employees are not slaves to mobile devices, notes Stephen Pritchard

Overcoming the fear of connectivity
Some organisations, fearful of untoward consequences such as reputational damage, ban social networking websites. Others embrace them enthusiastically and try to persuade others to do likewise.

Developing world: ‘Have-nots’ no closer to catching the ‘haves
Cellphones are nearly ubiquitous but internet access is still very patchy, says Paul Taylor

Case study: Text messages give shopkeepers the power to bulk buy
Stroll through South Africa’s villages – as steeped in ancestral tradition as they are deprived of basic services – and you will come across the convenience store, writes Tom Burgis.

Opinion: IT makes poverty a ‘curable affliction’
Olav Kjorven of the UNDP argues that innovative programmes in developing nations have helped people increase their choices and opportunities

Donor programmes: Sponsors can now view benefits online
Non-governmental organisations and government bodies can see exactly how their money is being spent, writes Danny Bradbury

Developed world: Those with no access miss out on opportunities
Jessica Twentyman examines the evidence that digital exclusion and social disadvantage go hand in hand

Connecting the world: Ubiquity will be a hard state to reach
Network access for all requires money but there are also significant technical hurdles, writes Stephen Pritchard

(Note that without subscription you can read only 10 FT articles a month. But you can double or triple that by installing more than one browser.)

“Adrian Simpson discovers the future of TV entertainment in Belgium; how the mobile phone camera revolutionizes healthcare in Kenya; the way in which government processes are facilitated through internet access in Mexico; and the political influence of SMS and social networking sites during the Obama election campaign in the US. But that’s not all – in the second half of 2009 Adrian will continue to travel to the corners of the globe, to find out how connectivity is impacting people’s lives from Austria to Zimbabwe.”

Currently the site has five 10 minute video episodes up on Europe, Africa, Latin America, USA and India (with China and Jakarta/Tokyo following soon). Each episode comes with clearly marked additional footage, plus interviews of Nokia Siemens Networks customers in those areas.

Mira Slavova of the excellent mmd4d blog that deals with mobile services for emerging markets, reports extensively on the African episode and its additional footage.

New York, NY, April 30, 2009 – ACM has launched a new Web platform to complement the print content of its flagship publication Communications of the ACM, the leading publication in computing and information technology that is read by computing professionals worldwide. The Website http://cacm.acm.org features exclusive news, opinion, research, and information as well as extensive content from the current issue, and the complete archived issues of Communications that span more than 50 years of in-depth coverage of the computing profession. The site also offers access to searchable content from the ACM Digital Library and from other sources around the Web, and hosts a robust blog section that is updated daily. Contributions from a continually growing community of bloggers representing leading industry experts are accessible by both subscribers and the general public. [...]

A two-tier blog structure has been created for the Communications Web platform. It includes a BLOG@CACM of on-site experts covering topical computing issues who encourage comments about their posts, and a Blogroll of syndicated bloggers that reflects the geographic and intellectual scope of the computing world with entries and related discussions off-site.

Among the featured bloggers are leading authorities from industry and academia, including Scott Aaronson of MIT on theory, Jason Hong of Carnegie Mellon University on mobile computing, James Horning of Sparta Inc. on security, Tessa Lau of IBM Almaden Research Center on Intelligent Interfaces, Greg Linden of Microsoft Live Labs on personalized information, and Peter Norvig of Google on search. The Blogroll includes postings from USACM on public policy issues; the ACM-W Council on Women in Computing; the Computing Community Consortium for fostering new research visions; a blog on the discovery and application of emerging technologies; high performance computing news for supercomputing professionals; and insights on user experience and putting people first.

Thank you, ACM.

Read press release

• Head in the Cloud: computing becomes virtual
  As the costs of sending, storing, and processing information descend, these services are moving into the fabric of the Internet.
   
• Can technology actually make us more human?
  Humans are tool users, and hi-tech tools can isolate us. But in the brave new world of connected communications, they can also reinforce who we are.
   
• Crowdsourcing and open innovation
  Businesses and institutions must now recognize that innovation is no longer confined within company walls.
   
• Blurring the virtual and the real
  Technology is increasingly connecting the real and the virtual, in real time- and making it difficult to tell the difference between the two.

Also of interest is this reflection on virtual communications by Valerie Buckingham, Nokia’s director of technology marketing.

Social media may have unforeseen limits
John Jordan, a pathbreaking tech consultant and academic, measures social technologies in terms of the notion of ‘network externalities,’ which posits that the value of a technology improves as it reaches a critical mass of users. He has nevertheless observed a phenomenon of diminishing returns among platforms like eBay and Craigslist, where user behaviors – scams, unreliability and false representations – have begun to undermine the functionality of the service.

A multifunctional Web platform will enable major social advancements
Tech-investor and blogger Jeff Clavier sees a platform combining the functionality of search engines, the nimbleness of micro-blogging, and the breadth of YouTube as a way to bring communities together to accomplish goals. By combining these functions on mobile phones and computers it’s suddenly possible to draw in people who share a common passion, but might not have met otherwise, from a massive network of potential members.

An editorial by Valerie Buckingham, Nokia’s Director of Technology Marketing, discusses the topic of authority in the context of recent developments in communications, particularly the social and democratizing elements of the Internet in the last 15 years, and the sheer number of new content creators:

“Amidst all this, Larry Keeley’s musings (video) on how young people learn to make decisions about what is true is particularly interesting to me. In this new world of communication types and authors, how do any of us decide which voices are worth considering? What kinds of standard assumptions ought we to be making about the intentions of authors? [...]
Keeley suggests that there is a lot at stake in questions like these – that the future of our democratic culture may well be tied up in how young people learn to negotiate these dynamics for themselves. [...]
Keeley’s words remind us that even as the technology changes, the need to bring a level of critical thinking to the implications of all new communication modes certainly does not.

And perhaps, as Andreas Weigend suggests (video), in his earlier contribution on IdeaProject.com about the role of metadata in the future of communication, technology has an important role to play in bringing clarity. Perhaps when individual reputation, expressed as reliable metadata, can more readily be connected in all communication, we’ll at least be on the road to providing better tools for the next generation to separate the truth from the crap.”

“In terms of IT, the three key priorities are mobiles, mobiles, and mobiles. As indicated earlier in this column, cellphones are now reaching far down into the bottom billion. At present, development solutions will need to be based around voice and text. But other possibilities are rapidly opening up.”

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The article is published online on the wonderfully redesigned Communications website.

The new site complements the magazine by providing an easy access point to all the content found in the magazine’s print pages, but perhaps more importantly the site extends beyond Communications’ current reach and helps bring us closer to fulfilling the flagship’s original promise as the primary “communication” tool in the field of computing.

Here is some more on the philosophy behind the new site.

We at Experientia are proud to say that Putting People First made it to the site’s blogroll, together with some other important players in the field. Here are some other articles that caught my attention:

Crowd control
Using crowdsourcing applications, humans around the world are transcribing audio files, conducting market research, and labeling data, for work or pleasure.

Reflecting human values in the digital age
HCI experts must broaden the field’s scope and adopt new methods to be useful in 21st-century sociotechnical environments.

Bookmark this site.

“Ericsson, the world’s leading provider of telecommunications equipment and services, and pan-African operator Zain have built a wind- and solar-powered site in remote northeast Kenya. Now with access to reliable and affordable mobile communication, villagers in Dertu can make calls, access health services and education and improve their economic future.”

Make sure to watch the video.

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Yochai Benchler has written for a long time about the internet and the emergence of a network economy and society. He has also talked about the organization of infrastructures, such as wireless communications. His most recent book is The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike license. He is also the recipient of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award in 2007.

- Listen to interview (audio)
- Read interview transcript

Related info
- Yochai Benkler speaking at TED 2005
- User ideas submitted on the Ideas Project site

Within the W3C workshop, the issues facing social networking growth could be documented and, in this workshop in particular, taking into account social networking on mobile devices/platforms with and without PC/broadband Internet services.

The workshop also explored whether it is worthwhile to consider the creation of an Interest or Working Group under the auspices of W3C to continue these discussions.

The discussions of the workshop were fed by the input of the 72 (!) position papers submitted by the participants, and animated by the Program Committee composed of experts from the industry and academics on this topic.

Companies that submitted papers include Atos Origin, Ericsson, IBM, Microsoft, Opera, Samsung Electronics, SUN, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Vodafone, Yahoo!, and YouTube, so the papers section definitely requires a quick scan. You can read the brief summaries by Libby Miller on each of them.

You can also read rough minutes of Day 1 and Day 2 of the workshop, download the slides of the various presentations (linked from the agenda) and watch videos of some of the sessions.

In a short article, the New Scientist focuses on one of the papers on the potency of mobile social networking in developing market economies (with the great subtitle: “The Revolution will be ‘mobil’-ised”), written by South Africa-based mobile social media consultant Gloria Ruhrmund.:

Western consumers are becoming used to the idea that the computing power of their phone is catching up with what is traditionally expected from a computer. But in Africa and some other poor regions it is phones that have all the computing power – mobile handsets far outnumber PCs and broadband connections.

As a result, innovative new uses of mobile connectivity are appearing in those developing areas first, possibly providing a glimpse of what the future holds for cellphone users in richer countries.

Two other Facebook groups could be of interest too: the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea group is for alumni in the broad sense of the word of the meanwhile defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea; and KashKlash provides you with insight, background and provoking ideas on the future of value exchange (and while you are at it, also visit KashKlash.net and fill out the questionnaire).

Mobiles and news gathering at Al Jazeera
Safdar Mustafa, head of Al Jazeera’s mobile media unit, describes some trials where mobile phones were used for news gathering in Chad and the Sahara.

Money, mobiles, micro-business
Jonathan Donner, from Microsoft, talks about the transformation that has been brought upon the way small/informal businesses function using mobile devices (specifically mobile phones). He provides an anecdote on one businessman he knows – a baker, whose business flourished due to the use of a mobile phone he acquired. Included in this video are examples of how this technology enhances the efficiency of product/service delivery by informal businesses.

No difference in how Zambian men and women use mobile phones
Here Kutoma Wakunuma discusses whether women how women are using mobile technology including what are the barriers and social implications. Dr Kutoma revealed that there is no difference in how men and women use cellular phones and also no difference in the socio-economic potential of mobile usage. She unveiled that mobiles phones decrease isolation among women in society and provide easy and fast communication, especially as the price of mobile phones is becoming cheaper by the day. She added that cellular phones encourage job creation for women who sell airtime and those who run public phone stations. They help in emergencies and danger and have made a major impact in health information as some people access counselling through mobile phones on an anonymous basis.

Measuring social impact of mobiles
Dr Peter Benjamin, the General Manager at Cell-Life, together with Patricia Mechal, the Millenium Villages Project advisor hosted a workshop at the MobileActive08 conference. The workshop, on Mobile Metrics and Evaluation explored the importance of investigating the social impact of initiatives that introduce mobiles into societies expecting the impact to be an inherently positive one. The workshop also dealt with how such initiatives tend to be ignorant of the negative repercussions such projects may have.

Microsoft launches ‘Midas’
Microsoft representatives Fredrik Winsnes and Ian Puttergill talk on the MIDAS prototype, a mobile survey application for developing contexts.
MIDAS is based on a Microsoft driven research initiative based in India, to develop an SMS application for improving the farmer’s access to timely and critical information.
The MIDAS prototype allows farmers to send an SMS query pertaining to details about the local crop market, and an almost immediate response is sent back with the appropriate details.
The project is about making farming efficient, and increasing availability.

Mobiles and citizen media
David Sasaki and Juliana Rotich discuss the role of Global Voices online and Ushahidi.com in leveraging citizen media during the post-election violence in Kenya.

Banking the unbankables
Jesse Moore of GSMA development fund facilitated a workshop at mobileactive08 which evaluated mbanking and mpayment and the evolution of these services within the market. The social impact these services could have on people who are not banking, how mobile banking and payments would work and the future of this service were topics addressed in the workshop.

Mymsta – a loveLife conception
Trina DasGupta, loveLife Mobile Marketing Specialist shares the process that went into creating mymsta.com. A youth website geared at guiding the youth towards making their move. Mymsta is about mobilising young people towards positive change. Its about giving them a forum to share their views, on everything from relationships to employment.

Gary Marsden, mobile interaction designer
Interview filmed at MobileActive08 in Johannesburg, featuring Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town.

Social SMS gets message across
Activists are boosting their social campaigns by piggy backing on “please call me’s”, flashes and beeps.
Please call me’s are free messages that cellphone users send to get friends and loved ones to call them back.
Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India) and Robin Miller (Praekelt Foundation) tell how to use please call me’s to maximise social campaigns and call-centre traffic.

Erik Hersman of whiteafrican.com
Interview with Erik Hersman from whiteafrican.com, shot at MobilActive08 in Johannesburg.

Freedomfone’s fresh look at radio
Mobile’s answer to radio is the Freedomfone. Freedomfone gives users access to dial-up information and services over their mobile. Dubbed ‘dial-up radio’, the service will be invaluable in societies where many people own cellphones but draconian governments have restricted access to newspapers and the airwaves.

Save sea-life with your cell
eMobile phones are becoming the latest gadget used for environmental activism. iVeri payment technology has developed a mobile system for the Southern Africa Sustainable Seafood Institute (sassi)where the public can text a query. The system then sends back a prompt short message reply informing the consumer who is about to make a seafood purchase about the sustainability of the sea life product and other health parameters.

Burma’s GenX activists
Digital Democracy 2.0’s Emily Jacobs and Marc Belinsky show how Burmese (Myanmar) youth use cellphones to communicate with the outside world on political issues that are suppressed by the government.

Mobile’s ‘Dark Side’
“What are the real risks of mobile surveillance?” Al Alegre, executive director of the Foundation for media alternatives has conducted research in 5 Asian countries to investigate the dark side and vulnerabilities in digital interactions and discovered there are threats both internal and external.

Mobile use in low income areas
The use of mobiles in South Africa has increased over the years in low income areas. Tino Kreutzer a masters student at UCT conducted a pilot study into how the youth in low income areas are using mobiles, what this data means and where can researchers go now that they have this data available.

Mobile phones in rural development and agriculture
Ugo Vallauri, David Newman and Jonathan Campaigne discuss small farm productivity issues which are key to economic growth and poverty reduction. They discuss how farmers are not effectively linked to the larger industry and therefore how mobiles phones can be used to help with this area. Farmers use these phones which allow people to enter markets and improve access to partners thereby improving their likelihoods and food security.

Here is the full list of videos

EIAA Mediascope Europe 2008 (press release – executive summary) tells you all you want to know about why people are using digital stuff. It is particularly useful if you want to know what 25-34 year olds are doing online. The 35+ are grouped into ‘other’.

Research released today from the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) shows that Europeans are deepening their experience of the internet by not only increasingly using it for leisure pursuits but to actively enhance and manage their daily lifestyles. Over half (55%) of European internet users are now online every single day, three quarters (75%) are using the internet during their evenings and 51% of Europeans (up 13% from last year) are on the web at the weekends. Freedom and flexibility are key watchwords for today’s consumers too with almost half (49%) of broadband users using wireless.

Almost three quarters (73%) of European internet users state that as a result of the internet they are staying in touch with friends and relatives more, 54% have booked more holidays or made travel arrangements and almost half (46%) are better able to manage their finances. In addition they claim that the internet has provided them with a greater choice of products and services and access to important information resources.

Ofcom’s International Communications Market 2008 report (press release – report downloads) is much more thorough and covers countries outside Europe. Make sure to check the “Key Points”.

This is Ofcom’s third report on developments in international communications markets. Putting the UK market into an international context is becoming increasingly important, as communications service provision globalises and as technological innovation breaks down traditional national market boundaries.

This report sets out the availability, take-up and use of communications services among seven main comparator countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada and Japan). Where data are available, we have included a further five European countries (Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland). We also consider separately the development of communications markets in the large emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

(via 50-Plus Marketing and Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog)

Covered are indoor positioning, location sensing, Traffic Works, Connected Home, personalised web widgets, MultiScanner, mobile journalism and NFC.

Apparently the old newspaper look, the accompanying bar soundtrack, and the down-to-earth working class accent by actor Ron McLarty have to “show how real some stuff that might seem unreal actually is” and to “plant new technology right into the palms of regular folks.”

Very gimmicky, if you ask me, with doubtful results. Who is this aimed at? Baby boomers? Kids? Working class geeks?

Well, according to Ross Lamont, one of the people behind the project, this “campaign is all about innovation”, with the main aim of “telling stories about the innovations going on inside Nokia”.

“Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.”

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Beyond the schlock of the new: eight strategies for design and foresight
by Kevin McCullagh
[For those from outside the USA: "schlock" is a play of words, referring to both the "shock of the new" and the "schlock" that this newness often incorporates. "Schlock" is an English word of Yiddish origin meaning "something cheap, shoddy, or inferior".]
When done well foresight can help designers make sense of a world in flux, bring clarity to planning, and help situate strategy within a future context in a way that can be communicated to senior management. Kevin McCullagh, director of Plan, presents eight good habits he learned to adopt when doing foresight strategies.

Conventional wisdom: eight ways to save design conferences
by Alissa Walker
Design conferences have become exercises in regenerated, wasteful spectacle. Alissa Walker, a self-described conference junkie shows us how to bring back the magic, also with eight ideas.

The rest of us can access some limited content online (three articles in the current issue).

Now that Interactions has become a highly valuable UX resource, thanks to the strong leadership by the editors Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko, this restriction seems out of date and self-defeating. At least to me.

Elizabeth Churchill and I wrote an article where we make the case for open access to the contents of Interactions Magazine, which has been published in the current magazine (and is also available online):

In their reaction, Richard and Jon leave the argument open and do not yet take a clear position on the matter:

Richard: I admire the thinking underlying both OLPC and agile development, just as I admire the thinking underlying the concept of open access to intellectual content, as discussed by Elizabeth Churchill. But just as OLPC and agile development have their limits, so, too, does open access. Indeed, I don’t see it as appropriate for interactions magazine, at least not yet.

Jon: The first two ideas are nonobvious attempts at solving obvious problems. The third – open access – might be a novel idea to a nonissue. It could be argued that interactions magazine should cost money because the content in it is worth something: The content has value. I suppose it could also be argued that the magazine should be free so that value can be shared by the masses. To which argument do you subscribe?

Richard: Neither. The content in interactions is worth something – it has great value, but that alone doesn’t mean that the magazine should cost money. And though you and I are working to broaden the scope and readership of the magazine, it isn’t intended for the masses, and it can be argued that we can extend the reach of the magazine more effectively if it does cost money. Open access to interactions content might become appropriate. Indeed, we’ve already begun to increase access in a couple of ways. My point is that wicked problems don’t have simple solutions, an argument Don Norman makes in this issue.

What about you? Please join the debate by adding your comments at the end of either one of the articles (yes, commenting is enabled!).

And if you can access the contents, make sure to read the rest of the magazine, which is again a treasure trove.

The Italian newspaper La Stampa reports on plans for a virtual cemetery in Turin to commemorate those cremated, apparently developed without public consultation (my condensed translation):

The project is not yet implemented, but is already subject of debate. The high-tech cemetery is not liked. Virtual tombstones and monitors with the names of the deceased seem to be in contradiction with the wishes of those who chose for cremation and not leave their traces in the earth. So, technology and prayer still seem incompatible concepts.

The Turin municipality plans to provide family members with a place where they can gather to commemorate the deceased. As of 1 November, there will be three displays at the entrance of Turin’s main cemetery. Two of them contain the names of the over 4000 deceased, those who do not even have a small box that contains the urn with the ashes. The third monitor is reserved to the virtual tombstones: each visitor can access, with a personal code, the page with a photo of their dear one, their date of birth and death, and an epigraph. A tombstone in other words. Or better, an image of a tombstone.

The idea made some people smile, others however cringed at the thought.

Ines Poletto approaches one of the four (stone) cenotaphs, makes the sign of the cross, and says: “Who has chosen to be in here doesn’t want a photo or an epigraph. It may be difficult to accept for those who remain behind, but we need to respect the wishes of those who are no longer with us.” Carla Costa, 52, whose father also preferred the cremation, is of the same idea: “Those who made this decision did not want visibility. Why put their name and photo on a screen? It is not right to put them in a box now, even though it is a virtual one.”

Margherita Bertin reacts ironically: “I understand the importance of the computer, try to stay up-to-date, and know how to send emails, but this thing about the dead on the internet…” The use of new technologies in this context doesn’t even convince the younger generation. Claudia Cicirelli, 28, thinks the idea of the municipality is “crazy”, because “connecting the memory of the deceased with technology cancels the emotional side of the loss.” A clear no also from Laura Garolla: “This is buffoonery. They are now also making a business out of the dead. If I want to see a photo of my father, I can always do so in a family photo album. I don’t like the idea of seeing his photo on a screen at the cemetery.”

“The real challenge is to move beyond basics to something much more fruitful, communal and, at times, visionary. The best brainstorms require a sense of being on the same side—and of the freedom to go to the very edge and even topple over it without fear of losing the respect of our peers. Let’s give each other that freedom—and let’s use it, and not hold back. If we were sitting with friends at a conference (or barroom) table, what exciting places could we take the discussion? What could we achieve? How can we inspire each other?”

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