This week I was invited to join a Facebook group called Six Degrees of Separation. (I didn’t.) Presumably, the idea is to see how many people will join if the invitations spread “virally”, where the underlying premise is that every human being on the planet can connect to every other one through a maximum of six degrees of connection (a fallacy… but that’s another story).

The Jewish Daily Forward?

I don’t see why you need a Facebook group, though. In the last six days, I have received the names and email address of 200+ complete strangers. Also the email addresses of about 50 distant acquaintances. Oblivious friends and family forward on a joke or a news item to 20 (or 30 or 40…) of their dearly beloved, putting all the addresses in the CC field instead of the BCC field.

Most of these tidbits have been forwarded five or six times without being pruned, expanding their populations in proportion. It’s lucky for my friends (and their friends, and theirs…) that I’m not a direct marketer trolling for contact information. It’s creepy for me to think that all those people now have my name and number.

Six degrees of email separation from everyone on the planet? Can you imagine the spam?

I hear a lot of predictions about the future of mobile user interface (not surprising: it’s my field). One that always hits me wrong is the prediction that “everything” will move away from the 12-key input pad to voice activation. This tag line, from Vlingo’s website, promotes that assumption (also not surprising: it’s their field): “Why tap when you can talk?”

SMS, the world’s most popular communication means by far (see below) embodies the polar opposite interface: everything is contained in layers within 12 keys.

SpinVox stakes a claim right in between Vlingo and SMS: they offer voice-to-text translation of voicemail messages and personal notes. The best of both worlds, so to speak; a combination of voice and text usage. SpinVox claims that it’s seven times faster to speak than to type. I don’t know what kind of tests that’s based on, but let’s accept it as true.

The real question we have to ask is, What do people prefer?

This semester, T-Mobile is tapping graduate students at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design for research insights. To investigate how people use their mobile devices, the students are staking out their local Starbucks and asking subjects to document their phone usage with digital cameras.

The project, which will last until May and could shape future mobile plans and phones, has already spawned one insight: Young people prefer text messaging to voicemail because it’s more direct. “It’s about how we deal with information … such a rich field for designers to explore,” says Associate Professor Vijay Kumar, who heads the workshop.

(from Innovative Cellphones, Forbes.com, March 19, 2008)

First major fact: No one input means is perfect for every use case. Forget what every input technology company website tells you.

Second major fact: 350 billion voicemail messages are left globally per year. (source: SpinVox presentation at MEX) I couldn’t find any numbers on the number of voice calls completed globally, but I expect it’s less than…

Third major fact: 2.8 trillion SMS text messages are projected to be sent this year. (source: Tomi Ahonen consulting) I’ll hang on a second while you go back and re-read that last statistic. Yep, 2.8 trillion.

Personally, it’s hard to me to imagine a case where I’d use voice activation of anything, with the possible exception of in a car. I’d hate it in the car, but might use voice control to keep my hands on the steering wheel. Even that’s a stretch. But let’s leave me out of it.

People do prefer text to voice in many situations. Why? Why tap when you can talk? Let me count the ways…

• Cost. SMS is usually cheaper per message than cellular calls are per minute.
• Privacy/Discretion. Often, you don’t want to be heard by your neighbors (eg, in a meeting). Or — sorry to break the news — they don’t want to hear you (eg, in a movie theater).
• Perceived time. I don’t know what the reality is, but people may consider texting (or emailing from a computer) to be less time consuming than talking by phone. Why? Partly because no time is spent on courtesy chit-chat; partly because time spent entering text isn’t registered the same way that time spent listening to other people talk is registered; partly, perhaps, it is an illusion.
• Insecurity. Call screening used to be considered anti-social and arrogant. Now it’s a normal part of life. But calling a mobile phone implies near-certainty that the other party will hear the call come in. What if the other party rejects your call? Even if the reason is a good one — he’s in a meeting, in the bathroom, sleeping, watching a movie, has his hands full — the sense is still that “something else” was more important than talking to me. Sending a text message alleviates the need to experience that little subconscious emotional tension while the phone rings. You send the message; the other party will respond within a reasonable amount of time (or won’t).
• Avoidance of intimacy. Having a vocalized conversation encourages a level of personal connection that isn’t necessary in a test message. There’s a protocol of “how are you?” and “how’s your Mom?” and “thanks for the update; I’ll get back to you.” People are often lazy, selfish, or not interested enough to invest that kind of energy when “im 10 mis l8″ will convey the required message.

• Burden of attention. Slightly different from the previous issue of the energy demands of intimacy, this has more to do with attention and focus. SMS allows you to interact as much as you want to, for as long as you want to, when you want to. You can limit your attention. In a conversation, you need to be “on”, to listen, to provide feedback — in other words, it takes attention.

If you are watching TV or reading emails or playing your PSP while the other person is talking, they will notice and be offended. In an SMS or IM exchange, you can only pay attention when you’re the one talking (and doesn’t that make for the most interesting conversations?). No feigning interest required. In that sense, SMS is the ultimate self-centered communication medium.

In fact, you might consider micro-blogging (eg, Twitter, Facebook status), which combines broadcasting with SMS, to be the truly ultimate environments for self-centered communication. That might explain their popularity.

And with this, I think I have a reasonable answer to the question: Why tap when you can talk?

Note that the currently posted Streets albums may be viewed at the following links: Tokyo, London, Seoul, Gibraltar, Barcelona, Andalusia.

In my recent correspondence:

“I’m confused… You go all the way to Tokyo and spend your time taking pictures of manhole covers and sewer drains? Am I missing something here?”

 * * *

“I didn’t know you like photography. Cool. What made you decide your particular focus?”

* * *

“What also struck me powerfully was how many of your photos were photos I’ve taken, if less artistically. I’m so fascinated by shapes and textures, and of concrete material goods that lead an abstract existence simultaneously.  Picking up on the geometry of the Seoul palace, walls, and pothole covers are all in my repertoire as well. […]

“A word about the architectural symmetry and how it spoke of the power and authority of the monarch. According to Confucian thought (which lives strikingly in Korea even more than in Japan or China), there is Heaven and there is Earth (including humanity), and it is the responsibility of the ruler to put Earth into order according to the divine principles of Heaven. What better way to represent the monarch’s ability to create order than to create symmetrical space?”

It’s time for me to talk a little about this manhole cover fetish fascination…

Lens focus? Interest focus? Nokia made me decide my particular focus, you might say — the pictures are all taken with my cell phone (not so amazing), because it’s there with me. I do take pictures other than streets (!) but I post the streets, because it is something different from the norm.

I am interested by a couple of aspects of “street design”:

(1) There is a conversation that happens on the ground. Sometimes it’s very loud, as in colored signs and lane markings, communicating between the city or an institution and the public. Sometimes it’s subtle, as in spray painted notations by city workers. I like eavesdropping on that conversation, and I’m interested in the communication and “language” that is used; the assumptions made about who is listening, and what they understand.

(2) Different cities have very different patterns and systems for infrastructure access holes — in some places, everything seems modular (a few standard sizes); in other places, everything looks pretty chaotic. Some cities seem to care a lot about the beauty of even the manhole covers; some really don’t. I think that says something about a culture and about feelings about the city.

(3) There’s design at work even on manhole covers — some are beautiful; others ugly. Some are very useful, and identify what’s in them very specifically; others are generic, or nearly so. That’s a form of industrial design that probably has scope for improvement, and seems interesting — identifying who needs to know? (the public? the maintenance workers? other repair people?) what do they need to know? how best to convey the information? what are the risks of making the information known?

Anyway… you’re getting an earful!

Best,

Sarah

A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That’s right: just holding your body in the right position means you’ll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you’re quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose. […]

Dijkstra’s team believes that the effect may be due to the way memories are stored in the brain: one theory of memory suggests that memories are composed of linked sensory fragments — odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions. Simply activating one or more of those fragments makes the entire memory more likely to be retrieved. In any case, if you’re trying to recall a particular incident in your life, putting your body in the right position might help you remember it faster and more accurately. The key appears to be your body position when the memory occurred.

[via Cognitive Daily — one of my new blog loves]

This is a really fascinating topic, and the first time I’ve seen it studied methodically.

What is the long term impact of our growing involvement in virtual life and digital communication?

If you see all movies in the same general context (on your iPod or computer screen), rather than surrounding them with a trip to a theatre, candy, theatre seats…

If your reading material consists of Word and eBook files, without the sizes, fonts and thickness of books…

If your letters are all emails or instant messages, without stamps, handwriting or envelopes…

If your conversations are all via SMS, with no body language or tonal cues beyond emoticons…

…and if all that happens within a very limited number of positions and locations (on the sofa, on a train, in the kitchen, at the desk), then what impact does that have on your personal internal journal of your life?

Is that why we need our cell phones to journal our [digital] lives, with automatic uploads of pictures to Flickr, video to YouTube, status to Facebook, and stream of consciousness to Twitter? Is it because we might experience life as a giant blur of digital events that in retrospect are difficult to tease apart from one another… or even difficult to call up as memories?

What does it take to make a digital experience memorable in the way a fully physical experience is? I doubt that color or even sound are enough. New trends in haptic and scent generation might help… but I suspect that the real trick is to tie the digital experience to the surrounding environment (or at least to a discrete digital environment) — tying the mobile ad to the location, to the store, to the time of day, to the people in the room, for example.

A whole new meaning for Location Based Services.

The whole question of using a married name versus retaining one’s “maiden” name is really interesting. There are so many levels of practical and political and emotional and interpretational meaning to a name that there may be no way to disentangle them from one another. The classic “practical” reason for retaining a maiden name would be career recognition: making yourself easy to find, and building on previous reputation, rather than starting over with a new name.

I’ve noticed that the “practical” reason has widened its net… if you want to be found by old friends on Facebook or any other social networking site (or via a Google search, for that matter), you can’t be found if the searcher doesn’t even know your name. Which provides a new incentive for retaining your maiden name, even if only for your online identity.

Identity, indeed. Quite literally.

It will be interesting to watch and to see if this apolitical influence has greater ramifications or impact than simply seeing two last names in social network profiles. Will there be a change in how women perceive their identities as conjoined or distinct from their husbands’? Will there be an increase or decrease in feminist affiliations? In respect for women and their identities as such?

Or will it be another meaningless blip in electronic evolution, made insignificant by progress in tracking and maintaining contacts and relationships online?

Facebook: It’s a totally different sensation. Browsing Facebook is unlike browsing the web in general. When you surf the internet environment, much effort has gone into creating the sense of anonymity. The effect is convincing, despite the fact that we all know that internet use is not really anonymous — quite the opposite.

“Given total privacy and a cloak of invisibility, many people become coarse. They do selfish things — things that they would never do if a friend (or a video camera) were watching. Pornographic online chat rooms would be empty if users had to type in their real names to register. Polluting the Hudson River would be a lot harder to do if you had to meet with neighbors and explain that it was your decision. (from Small Is the New Big, by Seth Godin; quote from here)

When you browse Facebook, you need to think before each click you make…  many of your actions will appear in your profile, or in your friends’ news feeds. It generates a tension, but also an awareness of one’s actions and how they will appear to others that is almost completely lacking elsewhere.

Facebook is truly about revealing your [networking] face — it is the opposite of anonymity.
Is this a good thing? Is the the dawn of an age of accountability?