This is my first blog post in 6 weeks, and I’ve just had a month ‘off’ social software (well, not quite – an addict is an addict is an addict, as they say…). In fact, the last post I wrote was never finished, but I’m going to put it here now as a reminder of the beneficial effects of getting away from technology and going camping….
“Skype has become integral to my existence and ability to communicate (just) in time with others. Many a work-related crisis been solved via a Skype conference call. Skype emoticons can say a thousand words... well maybe not. But you can at least reassure one another that after that rather tense conference call relating to finances you are still going to have a dance and drink when you see one another. You can tell somebody you love them; you can punch them in the face – the choice is yours.
But for many of us the tide is turning with Skype, the reason being that it has now become a major tool in our communication armoury, a tool which enables us to see when our contacts are online, even when they login (unless you turn off that setting, which I have done recently), and ‘demands’ an instant response. Or at least it did.
Once it reaches the stage when as soon as you login to Skype, at least 7 flashing blue boxes with the names of friends/colleagues/in-betweens appear in the bottom of your screen while you’re trying to deal with a mountain of emails and deadlines in between meetings, it begins to feel like the virtual equivalent of having 7 incredibly demanding toddlers pulling at your clothes screaming ‘ME ME ME’. Obviously this isn’t the case, but when you’re drowning in a sea of deadlines, papers and reports it has the same visceral effect.
Hence my recent adoption of the ‘invisible’ mode (oops, giving the secrets away now!), or if I’m feeling particularly sociable I’ll set it to ‘unavailable’. Terribly antisocial, and possibly rude (?) but one has to resort to desperate measures sometimes in order to try to negotiate some time ‘out’ in order to ‘put time in’.
I know I’m not the only person feeling this (and adopting the same practices). Only last week was I comparing notes with a colleague about Skype-overload and he pointed out that it’s highly probable that the most commonly-used Skype conversational opener nowadays is ‘are you there?’ – the reason being that more and more of us are ‘drowning in a sea of Skype’ and are adopting practices which cloud our availability to others. But now that everybody’s pretending to be invisible or unavailable, we all know that in all likelihood we are really there, hence the question. So its usefulness is almost rendered useless.
Another similar(ly annoying) phenomenon is that of emails from within Second Life. Oh yes, now that people have realised that if you’re not ‘in-world’ any instant messages that they send you will be forwarded to your email account, they don’t need to bother sending you ‘proper’ emails any more. Now while I don’t see any problem with this in principle (after all, an email is an email is an email….), it does actually render one’s inbox even more unwieldy when it’s already being bombarded by messages from the various SL groups you are now a member of. You then have to scan through to distinguish group messages from personal messages (I’m sure there’s a way around this but I’ve NOT HAD THE TIME TO EXPLORE!)
Which brings me on to the INBOX, oh, the inbox… now I love my inboxes, but it is rather worrying to realise that for the past year I constantly have in the whereabouts of 1500 unread emails. Obviously they’re not essential or I would have read them, but I find it hard to just dismiss them in case there’s something useful in there somewhere. Although I’ll never have the time to find out so I should just bin them (or at least mark as read).
The problem is that I am a member of these 30-40 newsgroups for a reason, and am loathed to leave. I just want to have the time to read the damn digests!
And then there are all the other minor emails that through a sense of (online) social responsibility and community membership I do try to answer – you know the ones. You’ve been ‘nudged’ (Explode – although I do think it’s great), someone’s commented on your Flickr photos (again, I LOVE Flickr), a new MySpace friend request/comment/message…
I must confess to being possibly the most antisocial member of MySpace. I only joined in order to download a tune. A friend set it up for me, and he friended me, and before I knew it I had real friends friending (fine, I love them), but then loose acquaintances, and then complete strangers and now buildings! (Ok, there’s a person behind it – but a building for chrissakes….). It goes without saying that I ignore them all and have a strict policy of visiting MySpace once a month to reply to the comments my real friends have made – although by that point it’s useless as we’ve seen one another and spoken F2F. But lots of them exist in MySpace being musicians and the like so I do enjoy some occasional peripheral participation BUT ONLY WITH PEOPLE I KNOW.
And as for Second Life, what can I say? What begun as an exploration into this hyped up virtual world soon became a (potential) research project. The problem is that there’s no time for real life anymore what with all this online social software malarkey, although I do manage to (just about) manage. But once you try to live a SL as well, where does the time come from? I’ll tell you where – sleep. Excursions into SL have to be scheduled into 'free' time, i.e. from 11pm until 3am during the week and entire weekends.
I know this is a whinge and I’m probably being a bit of a grump, but the whole thing’s just so exhausting. Trying to negotiate a myriad of physical and virtual existences, identities, roles and responsibilities is really starting to take its toll, and judging by many conversations I’ve had with colleagues recently I’m not the only one who’s starting to feel the burn (out).
And yet at the same time technology is so integral to our existence on so many levels (although as social software researchers perhaps we feel it more than most?), and while I’m currently drowning….”
See? Didn’t even finish the sentence (a friend arrived). But it’s interesting reading that back now as it positively OOZES communication overload. Unsurprising when you have somehow ended up with 8 email accounts, 2 SL avatars, 2 Flickr accounts (1 for RL, one for SL) 3 personal blogs, 5 research blogs, the list goes (went) on... it was like drowning in a sea of communication and collaboration, teaching and meetings being the only times spent away from a computer... let alone finding the time to read 'The Tyranny of the Moment'!
Ironically, although I adopted a strict policy over Easter of only checking emails 3 times per day, no blogging, no SL-ing, no Skyping, I became horrendously addicted to Flickr communities instead. And it’s such fun!
There’s definitely something seasonal going on here (for me). Personally I find Sept-Dec ripe for blogging. SL is great in January/February when it’s freezing cold and miserable outside; pure escapism. But Flickr lends itself to humour and moblogging (K800i specifically) and is just so much ‘sunnier’.
Well, whatever. The fact is that social software and online social networking is brilliant – whether for work or pleasure – and I can’t imagine life any other way.
Just need to remember to take a camping trip from time-to-time…
Keywords: Blogging, camping, communication, deadlines, emails, Flickr, identity, MySpace, online communities, online social networking, overload, peripheral participation, responsibilities, roles, Skype, Social Software, technology
Comments
I know exactly how it feels. One thing takes to the other and once you know you are involved in so many things and communicating with so many people (they call it networking, don't they?) that you have to "sacrifice" something. That something is usually sleep.
I now sometimes go invisible in skype, MSN and/or YM too. I feel bad about this behaviour of mine, but sometimes it's the only way I get any thing done! I get a lot of "are you there?" messages though.
It is just like when we started using mobile phones. Everyone would ring you up and the first thing they asked was: "where are you?", as we didn't have to be at home to be contacted through the phone anymore. Now everyone asks if we are there (online) as this is the new way of communicating.
But don't you just love it? I also had a computer free weekend over Easter, but came back to 2 loaded e-mails boxes and with a pocket full of ideas to post on my personal blog. I just can't get away from the online world!
Oh wow - the irony! We work in the same place/building/field... and yet only have 'time' to communicate virtually - i'm really looking forward to our train journey to the JISC event next week; 2 people who work in the same place (physically) finally getting the time to chat to one another f-2-f....!
Hi Sus!
Really enjoyed chatting with you and Anne about SL - very very funny... although I never did manage to find the Danish sausage stand...? Good to see you're back blogging again too!
Your post captures the several different things going on at once:
- information overload that is clearly a problem for many of us
- blurring of boundaries between work/ home/ play
- experimentation with new technologies
I liked the bit about "the virtual equivalent of having 7 incredibly demanding toddlers pulling at your clothes screaming ‘ME ME ME’" Believe me, Helen I have had days when the thought of having an ignore or mute button for toddlers would have been very attractive.Thanks for your comments Frances, and for your rather neat summing up of the 3 things going on there..!
As far as the bit about toddlers go (or any of it), I do hope that anybody who reads this who I do communicate with doesn't take it personally - it's not aimed at people, but at technology/communication overload... and the culture of hyperavailablility that we immerse ourselves in when working across boundaries of space and time, and are involved in so many virtual communities.
Ironically, i've been desperate for a tablet pc or PDA or something that's easy to carry around everywhere - so that I can constantly be online/in communication with people! But am now starting to wonder...
Significant vignettes:
Having a Skype chat with a colleague in February, we started sending Google Earth coordinates of our offices to one another. Then sending coordinates of our homes, and then as a joke I sent the coordinates for my parents home. At which point an email arrived from my parents, simply saying 'are you alive'? I'd been spending so much time at work/online/in Second Life that I'd neglected non-work-related friends and family!
Around the same time, a friend and I went over to visit some friends and their babies and took our laptops with us... and ended up in Second Life. In seperate rooms! So we were communicating with one another virtually, while in a physical family home, and we were in the rooms next door from one another. To be fair, we were demonstrating SL to people, but in the midst of nappy-changing and feeding it was a wonderfully surreal (yet slightly disturbing) moment, it has to be said!
Hi Paul,
Thanks for dropping by - I've just been reading your blog and am really looking forward to meeting you next week, and would love to chat to you about your experiences in various virtual worlds, seeing how you think they compare etc...
Hi Anne
Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Mark's post!!! I think more and more people are starting to feel overwhelmed by constant online communication, and sometimes it really does help to get away from it all in order re-establish boundaries/ground-rules, i.e. checking emails every 3 hours rather than constantly stuck in a cycle of instantaneous/back-and-forth online chat where you're constantly working but struggling to 'get things done'.
Anyway, thanks for the comment - hope you're well (will be in touch via email...!)
Helen
Hello Helen, and all of you,
yes it is indeed hard to find an equilibrium between work and family life, collegial communication, smalltalk and urgent calls, emerging contacts and local, old friendship. The three young grandchildren,age 5 and 7 were visiting me with Daddy, very earger to show me his brand new laptop (running Second Life faster than on my old outdated Beasty PC. We did manage to care for the kids' need to talk and look around in garden and house, before starting this Wonderful Machine. Nevertheless, I have a strong pleasure sharing this passion with my own son. And, with all those amazing new virtual playmates that I've found ever since I started as a Tapped In helpdesk trainee in 2000 (for my action research project). And, that's how I met the Webheads
Also, I met you Paul - actually we co-facilitated a workshop together, in TI combined with GEN - the Global Educators' Network - with Sylvia. This was long before Skype brought voice into our long distance lives - and we had several longer telephone calls about this workshop, connecting Tees Valley and Farum (here in Denmark). Small world! I'll now make you an Eduspaces friend, and go read your blog :-)
... and a perfect example of all that is RIGHT with social technologies!!!
Thanks Sus!!!
It was quite funny the other night; a few friends came over and I was communicating online, and they started teasing me saying 'stop being so ignorant, how about communicating with your REAL friends' - as though virtual friendships weren't as valid. Yet I have some wonderful online friendships via Flickr, Second Life etc...
It's great seeing you and Paul get back in touch via Eduspaces!
:-)
Hi Mark, yes it's rather long (for a blog post)... ;-)
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