As you might l know I loathe Twitter with a passion. I’m also not that fond of most blogs (I’m allowed to be contradictory OK). Anyway, I’m writing a new book about how digital communications (amongst other things) is changing how people think and act so I’m rather curious about a new micro-trend called Slow Blogging.

The idea here is that people are publishing faster than they are thinking and the rest of us have to spend time editing material as a result. But help is at hand. Nice sounding English person Russell Davies is asking people to send him postcards telling him what they are doing, which I think is a much better idea than Twitter. There’s also Todd Sieling in Canada calling for a “rejection of immediacy.” I can’t agree more. Writing and reading slowly is good for your brain and good for the rest of us to because we don’t have to put up with misss-spelt (sic) rantings about maters of no importance.

Perhaps the Slow Blogging movement should join hands with the Slow Food and Slow Cities movements and create a festival of slowness. Then again that might be a bad idea. I’ve given it no thought whatsoever. Act in haste repent at leisure as my mum used to say in the old days.

Here’s an interesting snippet from Tomorrow’s People by Susan Greenfield.

One of Greenfield’s main arguments is that technology is not facilitating a loss of individual identity. Indeed, we are experiencing quite the opposite. We are seeing the emergence of a kind of collective super ego that is not private but public. There is too much identity and it has become collective.

One of post-war Germany’s most influential writers was a fellow called Sebastian Haffner and one of his major aims was to explain Germany (especially the rise of Hitler) to the British. According to Haffner, the reason that Hitler emerged in Germany in the 1930s was a lack of identity. Essentially Hitler gave Germany its collective identity back. He also made the point that between 1918-1939 Germany became obsessed with sport (another form of collective identity).

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this. Have you noticed how, for instance, people are starting to wrap themselves up in flags?  When I was growing up in England the only people that painted their faces with the English flag were football hooligans. These days everyone is doing it. Over on the other side of the world, Australia Day has become a naked celebration of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and people do quite literally wrap themselves up in flags. Personally I find this rather unsettling. The mass public hysteria surrounding the death of Princess Diana seemed to tap into something similar.

Greenfield’s book was written in 2003 but since the financial collapse of late 2008, nationalist and tribalist forces seem to moving centre stage. I’m sure it’s not 1939 returning but it’s something to keep an eye on.

PS – Image from Ross Dawson.

I got a call from my friend Luicien this morning saying he was shooting a movie down the road from my office and would I like to pop over for a quick coffee? Unfortunately I couldn’t but I did have a blinding idea.

What if phones came marked with beer buttons or lunch buttons? The phones obviously know where you are (and where most of the good watering spots are) so you could press a button and send a quick message to anyone within a reasonable distance (say 1km) asking if they wanted to meet at the nearest café/restaurant/bar etc.

A few years ago a Japanese computer scientist called Hiroshi Ishiguro built what he claimed was the world’s most humanlike and attractive robot. The female android, modelled on a famous Japanese newscaster, was painstakingly created to appear human, not just in looks, but in mannerisms and movements as well. Indeed, from a distance the only thing that really gave the porcelain-faced robot away was the fact that it looked a bit too much like a Japanese version of Nicole Kidman.

But here’s the really weird bit. The robot’s creator found that whilst most adults found the robot to be very disturbing, some people, especially small children and elderly people took it at face value. It was merely a human looking interface that could be used for entertainment and communication purposes (so perhaps a bit like Nicole again?). Adults were disturbed by the robot because it looked too similar to a real person, whereas our more mellow members of society saw it as another amusing toy or a useful gadget.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, there were 610,000 robots in service worldwide in 2004. There are now 6.5 million and this figure is expected to reach 18 million by the year 2011. In other words, we are on the cusp of robots becoming quite common, not just in factories, but in schools, hospitals and even at home.

Back in Japan there are robotic security guards at the Aqua City shopping mall in Tokyo. The so-called Reborg-Q security robot weighs 90kg and is 130com tall. More worrying is a robot that is currently being evaluated by NEC in Japan. The PaPeRo (Partner-type Personal Robot) is not especially humanoid but again small children seem to regard it as friendly and have no difficulty becoming friends with it.

What’s especially spooky about this particular robot though is that the applications NEC is looking at include child-care centres and kindergartens. This fact isn’t in itself a worry because human carers would also be present but there is no reason why the robot can’t also be used by busy parents to look after their children late at night.

The PaPeRo robot comes with a camera, face-recognition software, microphones and wireless communication via a mobile phone. Parents can therefore see and communicate with their children through the robot via another mobile phone. So, in theory, you could go back to the office and do a few extra hours work or pop down the road for a meal with friends and leave your child in the care of a small ‘bot.

Is this something that we want to happen? Also on the horizon are robots in aged-care facilities and the US military is already using robots for surveillance purposes in Afghanistan and battlefield robots aren’t far away. Maybe they should make them look like our Nicole Kidman. That would be really scary.

In the 1980s Jobs were predictable. So were people. Work was structured around 8-hour days and 40-hour weeks and pay related to experience. Getting into the office early and staying late was therefore the way to the corner office with a potted plant.

I was talking to the marketing director of a big food company recently and she was lamenting the fact that after 5.30pm her office was empty. Her exact words were: “You have absolutely no idea what it’s like”. The reason for this is that her office is full (or rather it isn’t) of aged twenty-something members of Generation Y (people born after 1980) and they have much better things to do.

Similarly, I recently heard about company that had hired a member of Gen Y as a receptionist. After two weeks the director in charge received a text message that simply read, “I quit ☹ ”. Ridiculous? Of course. It’s called Instant Digital Gratification. But then there’s a firm of accountants I work with that sends prospective graduate recruits acceptance/rejection letters by text so perhaps we have only ourselves (and them) to blame.

So what is going on here?

First of all the economy has changed. Talent is in great demand and in most industries demand for Gen Y employees outstrips supply. Hence Gen Y is in the driving seat and they are behaving just like anyone would given a powerful new car and no driving lessons. This has recently changed due to the economic situation but things could soon return to normal.

However, I think there is more to it than this. Gen Y is promiscuous because they don’t want to get screwed. If you are old enough to remember your mum or dad being sacked or made redundant (retrenched, downsized or de-layered) you will do anything in your power to avoid the same fate. Corporations might be playing the tree hugging loyalty card right now but it wasn’t too long ago that unwanted employees were thrown to the wind with no more than a backward glance.

So what goes around blows around.

But the real reason for Gen Y behaving like it does is technology. Gen Y employees are good workers. They are diligent and task oriented but they are not concerned about time or place. Hence, if the work is done, why hang around? Moreover,Gen Y is famed for their ability to multi-task and to collaborate within networks.This means that they can do some things quicker. So, if you can do your work on a laptop at 11.45pm at home what’s with the 5.30pm physical presence thing?

And this, whether you like it or not, is part of the future of work. Offices will become drop-in centres (40% of IBM’s current 386,500 employees have no official office) and remuneration will be piecemeal. Individuals will not be paid for their time, but for what they produce. Contracts will become more flexible and telecommuting will be an option for those that want it, so some people will become digital nomads.

Technology will revolutionise work in other ways too. At simplyhired.com you can view job postings but you can also click to receive information about salaries in similar jobs and hyper-link to networking sites where you can find someone you know who already works for the company that you are interested in. Mash this up with Google maps and you will soon be able to check out potential commuting routes, travel times and even the proximity of friends and local shopping malls.

Things like this may seem revolutionary but to Gen Y it’s just how things are.
Gen Y has grown up with rapid technological change and this makes them expect change and speed as a matter of course. They have zero attention spans and get bored easily. They also have less loyalty to organisations, especially when the organisation seem not to care (about them or the wider environment) or fails to provide a quick and hassle-free route to the top within the next 36-months.

Those last two points are actually quite serious. It is well known that Gen Y is concerned about social and environmental issues. Hence a job with meaning is de rigor these days. But it is also a common Gen Y desire to accumulate as much money as quickly as possible. This means that Gen Y is ambitious and optimistic. But they are also debt ridden and anxious. They expect things to work out but there is no Plan-B, C or D if they do not.

According to the World Health Organisation, depression will be the most significant condition in the year 2020. Do they know something we don’t?

So there I was sitting in a traffic jam the other week when one of my kids says: “Jesus, this traffic is f*****g bad”. There was a pause. Then I screamed: “Jesus,I’ve told you not to use the F-word.” I was shocked. He wasn’t. Indeed he proceeded to ask me to remind him about the C-word. At this point his brother joined in and said, “Is it church dad?” I swear I am going to sell them both on eBay.

I blame Gordon Ramsay. His language lingers in the mouth like rancid milk.
But what’s really shocking about Gordon is how ordinary his attics now seem. A few years ago he would have been hauled up for using language like his. Now he just gets a second TV show. The media is pretty much to blame for this although we are fairly complicit. If someone lurid or something shocking goes down on primetime TV the ratings do up. Size is all that matters because large audiences attract big advertisers.

On TV there are shows about human dissections, surgery and people dying. On the Internet there is all this plus there are user-generated sites like Youporn where people that should know better pretend to be porn stars. Some of this has been going on for years. The difference now is accessibility. Once upon a time you had to be a medical student to see a live dissection. Now all you need is plasma TV to see some real human blood. Equally, instead of reaching for the top shelf in the newsagent to get a glimpse of something shocking all you have to do now is get an internet connection (what, you thought kids with internet enabled mobile phones were just sending clips of Big Brother to each other in the playground?). It’s just entertainment in the age of Youtube and mobile phone bullying.

What’s shocking here is that we are no longer shocked. This lack of distress and disbelief could be because everything is now blurred and ambiguous or it could be that we no longer react because we live in a twilight world where the real has become a form of fiction or fable. Beautiful Princess dies in car crash (true). Refugees throw kids overboard (fiction). Meanwhile, in the art world (another strange land marooned between fiction and reality), you can witness blow-up dolls engaging in sex acts, rotting flesh being eaten by maggots and vases showing scenes of child abuse. And that was just the Turner Prize Exhibition entries back in 2003. Art is supposed to be a mirror. These days it’s just another indiscriminate cluster bomb.

What is truly scandalous about all this is how outrage has been quietly killed off in the name of entertainment. Fictionalised images have become so real and ubiquitous that their authentic counterparts rarely register. When fact does occasionally penetrate the fog (usually something suitably cinematic like starvation in Africa, 9/11 or the Tsunami of December 2006) we are beside ourselves with collective grief.

What I suspect is going on here is that as a society we are anxious and unsure. We therefore cocoon ourselves in inner worlds of fantasy and escape so that we do not have to confront what is happening outside. Struth. That was all a bit heavy.

A few observations from London and New York…

1. Nobody really knows what’s going on
2. Current reality hasn’t quite hit home yet
3. An invisible issue is commercial credit
4. Volatility hasn’t gone away
5. January & February could be quite nasty
6. People are looking for permanency, certainty and control
7. Economic scenarios are reasonably well thought out by some but the ideological consequences aren’t
8. Companies are using the economy as an excuse to get rid of people
9. Some individuals would like a hard recession because then they could devolve all responsibility
10. Asking people to spend to solve a problem primarily caused by debt seems somewhat ironic and very short-term

Interesting how things can change — and how fast. Only last year people were complaining about Generation Y at work. No attention span, unrealistic expectations and so on. I was even talking to a partner of a major accountancy firm four months ago who told me that during annual appraisals one of the main Gen Y criticisms of the firm was the quality of their muffins. Not anymore. All of a sudden Gen Y have changed. They aren’t moving around as much and comments like “what’s with the physical presence thing?” have disappeared.

Moreover, the skills shortage has temporarily evaporated. Senior and middle —ranking employees are now staying put and this means that annual employee turnover rates of 10-20% are slowing to 5-10%. This means less graduates are being taken on. It also means that average employees are being let go as employers up-skill their skill base.

Spent the weekend on Dangar Island with no phone. It rained. Hence I managed to re-read A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brain Eno’s Diary, which I must have last read in about 1998. There is some truly wonderful stuff in this book.

For example, the question “What the **** am I here for?…. is a very modern question, only available at a certain level of luxury and self-importance.”

Other gems include the following:

8 January
“Spending lots of money is often an admission of lack of research, preparation and imagination”

24 February
“Young boy riding at high speed on a bicycle shouting repeatedly, “I am here”. Perhaps the central and single message of humanity”. (Twitter anyone?).

23 March
“The more ‘richly connected’ we make our world the more vulnerable we make it. Empowerment cuts both ways: as the complexity of things increases, so does the ability of an increasingly minute number of people to destabilize it.”

12 June
“Luck is being ready”

I also appreciated the idea of cosmetic psychiatry (made me think of cosmetic brain surgery in the future) and cities having ‘idea districts’.