Some things that I read about last week…

1) 31% of Americans aged over 18 years-of-age spend 5 hours per day on a computer, tablet device or smartphone.

2) Anders Breivik, the man responsible for killing 69 people in a shooting and another 8 in a bomb attack in Norway, ‘trained’ for the attacks on ‘Call of Duty’

3) Want to grow your own food with almost no effort whatsoever? Then try out iGrow, a virtual allotment being offered by a farm in the UK. You pick what you want to grow using your iPad or other device, get someone else to plant it, water it and look after it and grow it and tell them when you’d like it harvested.

Yes, very convenient, but surely this misses the whole point about growing your own food, gardening or life in general. If everything is instantly available then nothing has any meaning. If something requires no effort then it has no value and if something is too easy there is no pleasure to be gained from it.

A while ago I was on an 11-hour flight on Upper Class with Virgin Atlantic and my laptop battery was down to 8%. I asked if there was a plug socket in the seat and the attendant said “No”. I then asked if they could recharge my laptop for me. “No, I’m sorry we can’t do that.” I don’t know about you, but I do feel that a socket – or at least the offer to recharge devices – is more important that what’s on the new menu or what’s showing on in-flight movies. But it gets worse.

What do I see in the newspapers this morning, but an announcement that Virgin Atlantic is allowing mobile phone use throughout some of its aircraft “to encourage business travellers.” We’ll here’s one frequent business traveller that will from now on be flying with someone else.

Can you imagine sitting next to someone from London to New York, let alone from London to Sydney that is either on the phone or has a phone that keeps going off when you’re trying to sleep? Long-haul flights are just about the only place left where there is still silence and you can actually hear yourself think.

I’m sitting in a rival airline’s lounge (Cathay) as I write this and my  gold Virgin Atlantic frequent flyer card is flying back to Virgin.

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? The valuation seems excessive – it’s more than Boeing is worth, but on some levels it could be seen as something of a bargain. Other tech companies such as Google and Apple are worth far more and many of the big trends are moving in Facebook’s direction. Global connectivity is increasing rapidly (from 1.6 billion online in 2010 to 3 billion in 2016 according to Boston Consulting) and the move to the mobile web also benefits Facebook hugely.

At the heart of Facebook’s success is surely a deep and long standing human desire to connect with other human beings. People like Facebook because Facebook makes finding new friends, or looking up old ones, easy. It’s also a fast and convenient way to stay in touch and share everything from party invitations to baby photos, which is probably why the website now accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online globally. Don’t forget that Facebook also knows an extradordinary amount about the minutiae of its users lives, which is why it’s able to target advertising so effectively (and why 85% of its revenue comes from advertising). The sheer number of Facebook users (currently 850 million and rising) and the amount of time users spend on the site (15.5 hours per month in 2011) means that Facebook is rapidly becoming the world’s de facto homepage with other companies increasingly linking to it because users have to login in using their real identities.

But what might go wrong for Facebook in the future?

The first problem the company faces is operational. How to scale a small start-up into a giant corporation? This shouldn’t be too difficult. The second problem is around regulation and this could be tricky. If Facebook continues to be successful it will, at some point, start to resemble a monopoly in the eyes of the US regulators, at which point there could be an anti-trust case. It happened to Microsoft and it could easily happen to Google and/or Facebook. The third problem concerns privacy. To date Facebook has been very clever about mapping the connections between people and what interests them and then selling this information on to third parties. Much of the time Facebook’s users have little or no idea that this is happening and those that do know don’t seem to care. But this could change.

The network effects that made Facebook so large so fast could act in reverse if users start to feel exploited financially or no longer trust what is increasingly seen as a rather arrogant and potentially autistic company. Recently, users were forced to adopt a new feature called Timeline and had to opt out if they did not like it. This created a few mutterings, as did the acquisition of Instagram and the use of facial recognition technology, but so far there are few signs of a serious Facebook fallout. But as the company grows larger there will be inevitable tensions between attracting users and getting them to part with their money. One also suspects that when it comes to privacy the company’s devotion to online openness will continue to cause it problems in the real world too.

So it’s the school holidays (again!). The sun is out. It’s warm. We have a couple of acres of woodland and one of freshly cut lawn. We have footballs, rugby balls, cricket balls, bicycles, a fire pit, trees to climb and enough air rifles to start a small war.

Where are the kids? Inside playing on the Wii.

I am very tempted to place an ad in a national newspaper offering all outside areas free to any family, or children, that would like to enjoy the great outdoors.

I’ll even cook the sausages.

I’ve just been in San Francisco and amongst other things heard the CEO of Twitter, Richard (“Dick”) Costolo, talk about he power of real time information, so here’s my twitter feed. The most interesting thing he said, from my point of view, concerned Twitter’s vision.

He said the vision (or mission) is to “Bring you closer.” But, as he said, that’s not even a proper sentence. Brings you closer to what? But, as Jack Dorsey pointed out, users should be able to finish the sentence for themselves. Brings you closer to… whatever you’re interested in.

This is clever stuff, very empowering and very democratic on so many levels, but my worry is still that what people are interested in, and what Twitter is primary used for, is still largely facile and vacuous. It’s largely bringing people closer to trivia, which, I’d argue, distracts them from matters of real substance.

Maybe this doesn’t matter. If 99% of Twitter users are only interested in Lady Gaga then so be it. At least they can connect directly with her thoughts without the obfuscating intervention of agents, PR companies, traditional media organizations and such like. You could argue that this is a positive development, although you could also argue that the removal of traditional gatekeepers is precisely why we are drowning in digital dross and narcissistic nonsense.

The 1% that are left are free to connect to whatever they are interested in, which could be links to great articles from the New York Times or how someone’s day is shaping up down in Palestine or Syria. It’s as facile or fundamental as you want it to be. This said, I’m still rather concerned about why people have such a need to connect to superficial celebrities or broadcast the minutiae of their own lives. Is this because their lives are so isolated or lack real meaning?

Did he make me want to start using Twitter? Not quite. I’ve changed my mind about Twitter, but not about using it myself. I’m already dealing with a deluge of digital data and having to tweet and/or read yet more information from Twitter feeds doesn’t feel like a good idea for me personally.

Here are a few of the other interesting things Dick said:

– It took four years for the first billion tweets to be sent. A billion tweets are now sent every 4 days (Quite interesting if you start to think of this in terms of a global pulse or instant snapshot).

– They are sitting on a huge volume of information, but extracting meaning from the data is extremely difficult. What they are getting good at is seeing where the tweets originate from geographically, in close to real time (You can bet the FBI and CIA are rather interested in this!).

– The migration from the web to apps is a really big trend. They are seeing 40% QTR on QTR mobile growth. (He didn’t mention location based services or location based intelligence and analytics, but he could have).

– Global growth in non-smart phones around the world (e.g. Brazil and India is significant).

– It can be difficult to figure out the difference between a trend and an anomaly.
(Difficult without hindsight. A trend is only a trend until it bends as they say).

– If you look at how businesses are successfully using Twitter (Virgin America was cited as an example), they have an authentic and consistent tone of voice that comes from the heart not corporate PR. (This is really fascinating. In one sense big companies have got to learn to let go and let their own customers develop the brand’s personality and tone of voice).

– Twitter innovates through experimentation (Practice pivoting & ‘fast failure’).

– Innovators need to feel uncomfortable all the time (Only the paranoid survive).

– He’s relaxed about revenue streams – they will come. (Build it and they will come).

Feel free to tweet all this, of course. 🙂

This is too cool for words – a way to integrate your iPad with a manual typewriter keyboard. I don’t even own an iPad, but may now have to buy one just to get this out on the train (or you can synchronize with a standard PC or Mac, but that wouldn’t be quite so portable). Does this mean anything? I mean why do I want one? Is it just a pure nostalgia trip or is it saying something about our relationship with modern technology? You tell me!

More here (including DIY build instructions) or buy complete thing here via etsy.

1). Everyday acceleration.
People are spending more time online and are increasingly ‘always on.’ I even heard a father recently say that his teen now exists in one of two states: “Asleep or online”.
Add to this the impact of globalisation (markets that never close), the fact that it’s becoming easier to do anything, anywhere (24/7 mobile access to many goods and services) and corporate downsizing (more than one job to do) and you end up with a culture of rapid response, hectic households and people with not enough hours in the day to do everything they think needs doing.

Implications?
A demand for speed and convenience, an interest in filtering and currated consumption (because there’s now too little time and too much choice), multi-tasking (the erroneous belief that we can do more than one thing at once well), more mistakes (trying to do too much plus an increasing amount of distraction means getting more things wrong), less rigorous thinking (no time for reflection), less sleep, more anxiety and, ironically, a growing interest in trying to slow things down.

Another consequence is what’s been termed information pandemics. The idea here is that in the olden days (15-20 years ago) it took a long time for news to circulate. Therefore, individuals and institutions had time to properly consider whether threats were real or not and had the time to devise rigorous responses. Nowadays things circulate so fast (and people believe that they have so little time to react) that responses are often badly formulated or misjudged. The precautionary principle in politics, and society in general, fans this attitude of overreaction.

2). Data deluge
It’s become far too easy (and cheap) to create and distribute news and information.
The result is that everyone is now doing it and one consequence of this is a data deluge, with much of this news and information being of questionable origins or value.
This is atomising our attention, but is also making our relationships with individuals and institutions wafer thin and, at times, short-term.

Implications.
We need to adjust our mindset away from the old idea that information is power. Nowadays it’s primarily attention that’s power and we need to better understand that not all material is useful or trustworthy. We need to create better filters for information and learn to ignore what’s not useful, whilst being careful not to shut out things that may become useful over time. In short, we need to slow a few things down, either by switching things off from time to time or by deliberately using certain channels or media depending on what it is that we are trying to achieve.

Expect to see more interest in filtering, digests, data visualisation and reputation scores and reliability metrics.

3). Image & Text
We are entering a period where the power of the image is rising at the expense of the written word. This is largely demand driven – a reaction to people being time starved – but it’s also being driven by the supply side. The internet started off as a text-based medium and is now largely image driven, with video being a key component. Meanwhile, graphic novels are booming and telecom companies are reporting a massive increase in text-based communication at the expense of voice communications.

Implications?
Tensions in education with students demanding short, sensory and highly interactive instruction. Also, a danger of misunderstandings created by the lack of tonality and body-language contained within text-based communications. Also a growing demand for data visualisation and information aesthetics.

4). Online Anonymity
They say the things you love about someone when you start a relationship are the things you hate by the end of it. Our relationship with the internet has, until now, largely depended on anonymity. But the problems of anonymity are growing, such as lying, fraud, cyber bullying, or just outright bad behaviour and even hate. People behave differently online because they are anonymous. There are no real consequences.

Facebook and Google have started to change this. You have to use your real name to log on and everything you do is traced back to your real offline identity. This means your life becomes much more public and to some extent true, although my own experience of people using Facebook, especially with younger people, is that what they say is happening online is far from what is true in reality.

Implications
In the short-term expect to see more virtual courage and online hostility. Whether such nastiness, hatred and negativity flows out into the real world is an interesting debate.
Over the longer-term I suspect that online anonymity will go, although this point is open to discussion, along with the question of whether or not the generative nature of the internet will one day disappear, replaced by what is effectively a series of locked-down regional intranets (i.e. Apple owns Wikipedia, the information contained therein is fixed and can only be accessed by Apple products).

5) Transparency & Privacy
This is interesting because it both supports and contradicts the previous point.
On the one had digital information + connectivity means that things that were previously hidden, or only available to the eyes and ears of a few, is now open for all to see and hear. This is a good thing on one level because it fuels honesty and promotes collaboration and possibly empathy. But the corresponding trend is a decline in privacy, which not only includes what people say or see, but also where people are, what they are doing, what they are buying, whom they know and even what they think.

At the moment there are generational differences in terms of the response to this. Generation Y and below are generally unconcerned, although this can cause trouble. Generation X are concerned, but are not sure what can be done and Baby Boomers are generally blissfully ignorant of what’s occurring.

Implications
More honesty and accountability, but also more cyber and physical crime. Over time I’d expect our reactions to move towards the centre, with people becoming more aware of the dangers of over-sharing or placing information in certain formats or channels. Equally, calls for transparency will settle somewhere that’s realistic and practical and benefits the needs of all concerned.

6). Personalisation
One of the great things about digitalisation is that material can be personalised by users, often to the needs of a single individual. This can mean customising content generally or it might mean the customisation of content based upon precisely where someone is at a particular moment (i.e. locational services). However, there is a darker side to this. If we all, increasingly, live inside personalised bubbles of information, there’s a danger that we will become less tolerant of others, because we will not have our views or ideas challenged. A culture based on ‘me’ isn’t good for empathy or understanding of others.

Implications
More satisfaction and enjoyment on one level, but more selfish behaviour and intolerance on another, at least until society’s values and legislation catch up with the new technology.

7) Collaboration & Ownership
On one level, digital culture seems to be driving people apart, fuelling both isolation, passivity and self-importance. On another level, connectivity is bringing people together and is driving creativity and cooperation. We now, arguably, have a greater understanding of what’s going on much further away and we are more aware of the problems facing the world. Connectivity also means that it’s easier to find like-minded individuals and it appears that we are discovering that things we once assumed needed to be owned by in individual can in fact be shared by all, once we find something, or someone, we can trust. (i.e. Zipcar and iCloud being early examples of collaborative consumption and dematerialisation).

Implications
A realisation that none of us are as smart as all of us, a shift away from individual ownership towards shared or collaborative consumption and experiences.