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Things I Love About the Internet - Part 1

Tech Tuesday

Everyone is always talking about all the bad stuff online. I know that’s the job of the news agencies - they get paid to scare us - but millions of people still travel to cyberspace every day.

There's got to be a good reason, right?

The reason in some cases is hard to figure out - cyberbullying, online hate crimes and destructive websites come to mind. I suppose it's all a part of the human experience and at least we can actively choose not to visit those portions of the web we find disturbing. I find some peoples obsession with TMZ.com disturbing so that proves it's all a matter of relevance.

For all the current and potential pitfalls and dangerous information to be found, there are several reasons I am a huge fan of the internet and in some cases, don't wish to remember all that well what life was like without it. In the next series of posts I will be discussing those reasons starting now with:
Like-Minded People.

Putting the 'Fun' Back in 'Funemployment'

Work Wednesday

In the days following the untimely death of Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple’s world-changing i-devices, several variations of this meme made the rounds of social media: “Ten years ago, we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Steve Jobs. Today, we have no Cash, no Hope, and no Jobs.”

Well, I thought, sadly flipping through a thousand irritating emails on my iPod Touch, I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve got a job. A full-time job that provides a fair wage, subsidized health insurance, pre-tax spending accounts for medical copays and day care costs, paid vacation days and holidays, and a bunch of nice people to work with in a nice office building.  I shouldn’t take this for granted.

But, even though I paused to give thanks for full-time employment, I realize now that I didn’t really take my own advice to heart. I didn’t think it all the way through: What if I suddenly don’t have that job anymore? What would my plan be? Eh, I’ll think about that later, I told myself.

Well, wouldn’t you know it – now I suddenly don’t have that job anymore.

The Downside of Email

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Work Wednesday

A lot of people prefer to use email as a workplace communication tool. Many people will tell you it simplifies things, is quicker and doesn’t leave a lot of room for prolonged discussion or debate like phone calls or  face-to-face communication do.  While this may seem to be true, these things are actually some of the downsides of using email for work communication.

I’m not an overly enthusiastic fan of the phone as a means of communication. I have a tough time figuring out how to get off the phone with people who aren’t good at recognizing the signals that end a conversation and I find phone interviews a little difficult. In a face-to-face conversation, I find it a lot easier to follow the natural tangents and still come back to the original conversation or talking points.

I used to think email was a good compromise because it allowed me to ask what I wanted to ask or say what I wanted to say, read the other person’s response and then follow-up with my thoughts. More recently, I’ve realized there are some significant disadvantages for using email for work related communication. 

• Email is emotionless. That means recipients are more likely to ascribe their own emotions to the message. In fact, in an article discussing how emotion is communicated (or miscommunicated) via email, Kristin Byron, a professor at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, found that the inability to use nonverbal cues in email makes misinterpretation of the intended emotion much more likely. Recipients often interpret positive emails as neutral and neutral emails as having negative emotional connotations.

• People tend to drop the niceties in work emails. It’s very poor social etiquette to start a telephone or face-to-face conversation without a simple greeting or “How are you?” I’ve received a number of emails that jump right into “I need this from you” without even so much as a “Hi.” Even the emails I’ve sent that start out with some small talk sometimes seem stilted or as if I’m trying too hard to find a gentle way into a conversation.

• It’s not always easy to know when the conversation is over. I struggle with this and I’m sure others do too.  Once the meat of the discussion is complete, when do you stop the conversation? How many times do you have to email back a “thank you” before it’s too much?  What if somebody is expecting a response from you and you didn’t think it required one? This can easily lead to misunderstandings about your commitment to a project or whether you’re going to be a team player.

Ideally, face-to-face communication would be the best way to conduct business. Unfortunately, with global workplaces and a tremendous increase in telecommuting, that’s not always an option. There are a few thing you can do to help, though.

Identity is Messy

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Technology Tuesday

Another week goes by, another impetus for everyone to fret about identity online. In this case, as the New York Times puts it, " ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ Blogger Admits to Writing Fiction Disguised as Fact." Turns out the gay Syrian blogger writing about oppressive conditions there was: not gay, not Syrian, and not there.

In a telephone interview with The Lede on Monday morning, Mr. MacMaster, who is currently in Turkey, said, “I sort of by accident… created something that had a lot more interest than I had ever possibly expected and then when I tried to shut it down it just kept getting bigger.” He explained that he had initially created Amina, his Arab lesbian character, as “a handle” he would use when he wanted to contribute comments to online discussions. His aim, he said was to use the character to present “a perspective that doesn’t often get heard on the Middle East and that was also a challenge for me, as somebody who has aspirations as a novelist, to write in a voice of a character who is absolutely not me.”

I was not following this blog but had heard some buzz about it, especially after an entry was posted asserting that "Amina" had been taken by Syrian security forces. From what I've been able to quickly piece together, Andy Carvin (the amazing @acarvin on Twitter - doing really innovative work as a senior strategist at NPR) was key to surfacing the truth. Here's one NPR story about it. You can scan his twitter stream for more links and conversation.

This isn't the first Internet pseudonym that got out of hand. In this case, even the U.S. State Department was involved. The most interesting post I've read about the whole thing so far (before the blogger's entry was revealed) was an exploration of pseudonymity and repression by Zeynep Tufeckci. A snippet:

In the Wake of the Tsunami

Sharing Saturday

I woke up my nine year old son with a bribe yesterday morning: "If you get up now, you'll get to see the tsunami hit Hawaii live."

Needless to say, my geography-loving boy scrambled out of bed and was downstairs in his footie pajamas faster than you can say "earthquake." Hawaii? Cool.

We turned on both the computer and the television to see where we would get the best live streaming video, and sat down with our Cheerios, waiting, somewhat nervously, for disaster. He even calculated the exact moment of impact based on what one reporter said was the expected timing of the wave.

As it turns out, the tsunami did not hit Hawaii as expected at that moment, and we instead packed up lunch and his backpack and head out to school before there was anything to watch live.  We did see some video footage of the earthquake hitting Japan from earlier in the morning, and the terrible clip of one town that got washed away by the tsunami there, but I have to admit, watching the devastation left in the wake of the disaster wasn't nearly as thrilling (but in a terrible, looming way) as waiting to see what would happen next.

It reminded me of sitting on the couch nursing this same child, nearly 10 years ago, and watching the Twin Towers and Pentagon smolder and the world as we know it change forever, live and right before my very eyes.