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FreshMeat #11 from Steve Portigal

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If you aren’t addicted to FreshMeat, well, why not?
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Dive deep into the mundane; find fascination and humor
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Not too much to say about the following news article,
most every toilet joke imaginable was crammed into it,
so there’s no real need for me to add more (yes, this
takes enormous restraint on my part). I think the point
is that for just about anything that we consume (and
as consumers, take for granted) there is some subset
of a brand manager, a designer, a committee, a
conference, a product manager, and who knows what –
someone who is concerned with some combination of
business success, usage, and meaning.

——

By John O’Callaghan SINGAPORE (Reuters) – It’s something
people use every day but organizers of the World Toilet
Summit in Singapore hope to bring the taboo topic out of
the water closet. Some 200 delegates from Asia, Europe and
North America are swapping ideas on design, public
education and sanitation under the theme “Our toilets the
past, the present and the future.”

The new World Toilet Association wants to spread the word
with its Web site — www.worldtoilet.org

— as a nerve
center for researchers, designers, makers and vendors of a
device that is mundane to many but an unknown luxury in
much of the world.

“The proliferation of this movement worldwide will
inevitably lead to improvements in toilet environment
everywhere,” Jack Sim, president of the Restroom
Association of Singapore and organizer of the two-day
summit, said in an opening address on Monday.

Wash your hands and always flush was the message from a
mime troupe that kicked off the event with a graphic but
silent demonstration of the good, the bad and the ugly in
the bathroom.

Delegates, including Chinese officials preparing for the
Olympic onslaught in 2008, will also be treated to a tour
of some of Singapore’s most technically advanced commodes.
The latest and greatest loos will be on show at the four-
day Restroom Asia trade fair at Singapore Expo starting on
Tuesday.

The World Health Organization estimates 40 percent of the
world’s population does not have access to adequate
sanitation, leading to the spread of disease, higher
healthcare costs and the death of two million people each
year — most of them children.

“Up to now, it’s an area that has been very much
neglected,” Lim Swee Say, Singapore’s acting minister for
the environment, told reporters on the sidelines of the
summit. “You can’t avoid talking about the kind of
challenges we face.”

Singapore already is at the forefront of enforcing toilet
etiquette with fines for not flushing and automatic devices
that sense when to send the water surging. But the city
state is not taking the future sitting down by spending S$7
billion ($3.8 billion) on a deep-tunnel sewage system and
millions more on upgrading public toilets in hawker
centers, housing estate coffee shops, parks and schools.

“We are adopting an end-to-end approach in looking at our
sanitation requirements,” Lim said in a speech.

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FreshMeat #10 from Steve Portigal

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Three out of three doctors subscribe to FreshMeat!
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How or when does technology reduce distance? Increase it?
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A recent article in the New York Times describes
a new service from Teleportec – live transmission of
holograms. It’s the ultimate in videoconferencing; rather
than watching on a video monitor, you can see a full-size,
3D image of the person, right in your meeting room.

Cool, huh? And you can have a facility in your office for
only $5000/month, or you can rent offsite for $500/hour.

Teleportec is hoping to sell this to executives (is that
because of the value of the tool, or the price of the
tool?) and real estate companies to do property
walkthroughs.

A few years ago there was a company called Teleport
(hmm…) developing a virtual dinner table, a half-circle
against a large video screen, so each party would believe
they were sitting at a round table, with half of the
participants being remote.

Like many other products in that category, Teleport sought
to recreate the informality of a meeting, but I believe the
opportunity is in recreating the formality of television.
Although Teleportec seems gimmicky, self-indulgent, and
inappropriately high-end for this economy, they may have
brushed up against that formality.

The best videoconference experience I’ve had was one where
a colleague and I gave a presentation. We had a camera
operator who would pan and zoom between the two of us. We
had a monitor so we could see how we were framed on screen
and moderate our body language appropriately. We even built
a simple backdrop, and when the camera was on, we
performed. We acted like news anchors crossbred with
motivational speakers. It was a total success. The client
believed it was nearly as good as us being there (we
suspected it might have even been better).

The default assumption seems to be that we want to use
technology to simulate reality – that it’s going to put us
right in their office, and it’ll be just like being there.
In fact, it put us right on their office, onto their
television screen. If you’re going to be on television,
make it look like television, and act like you are on
television. That is the context within which your audience
experiences your content (and thus judges it). The frame
shift is from simulated reality to theater. Obviously,
great for presentations, maybe not so good for meetings.

Another story – at the 1994 Computer-Human Interaction
conference in Boston, they set up a video portal between
remote parts of the facility, and left it to see what would
happen. On its own, not too much. People mostly hustled on
by and ignored it.

After a couple of days, I went and stood in front of one
station, and began calling out to the people on the other
end. (Note: This was after David Letterman started taking
his camera out to the street but before Tom Green developed
a middlebrow art form out of this). “Hey you with the bag!”
I’d yell. Most people did their best to ignore me, but some
would stop. So I’d interview them, faux roving reporter
persona and all. I had enormous leeway to break cultural
norms (i.e., act like a jerk), because I was on TV, after
all. Of course, I drew a bit of a crowd, because there was
live theater (better than TV, supposedly) right there!

It seems like the opportunity for the folks developing
these products (and they are ultimately products, not
just raw technologies) is to understand the context, not
simply improve the fidelity. What do people holding video
conferences need to do differently from simply having a
meeting? How can the product better support that?

It’d be pretty exciting to see some of the results that
might come from a fresh approach.

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FreshMeat #9 from Steve Portigal

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Cultural stories of the day — more than meets the eye
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Just the other day a colleague asked me what I thought
about the near-term effects of the Current Situation
on advertising and marketing messages.

I replied that I had observed a complex, contradictory,
and divergent set of cultural themes going by, and it
didn’t seem to be as simple as the articles in the Times
and others were making it out to be. We explored some
specifics, and so I’m sharing my next rev of those
thoughts here.

Just the fact that terms like “Current Situation” are
appearing on blogs (that term is defined here)
points to the complexity of the issue – there is no name
for it. Of course, the choice of phrasing here brings
to mind the media coverage in the film “Starship
Troopers,” or a short story by Philip K. Dick.

I think we want to believe that it is an easily understood
series of events, perhaps a monolithic notion, but there
are a range of contradictory cultural stories being told.
As cultural stories, all are equally “true” and I’ll review
some here more as exploration than as social crit.

Let’s look at “issue conflation” – what exactly are we
concerned about now? About two weeks ago there were a
number of high profile “tribute” concerts:

* Allegiance of Neighbors, a benefit performance for
New Jersey victims and survivors of the 9/11 attacks,
featuring Springsteen, Joan Jett, Jon Bon Jovi
* United We Stand, Michael Jackson’s concert in Washington
for the Red Cross and other charities
* The Country Freedom Concert, in Nashville, with Trisha
Yearwood, for the Salvation Army relief effort
* Paul McCartney’s “Concert for New York City” paid
tribute in content to the firefighters, police and
rescue workers of 9/11, but where the money is going is
less clear (to me)
* Neil Young’s Bridge Benefit – the 15th year running,
this concert raises money for a local school to help
special needs children. Yet the musicians dealt with
issues of loss, peace, war, America, hope, freedom,
and love
* Music Without Borders, held in Toronto, featuring the top
Canadian performers, to benefit the United Nations Donor
Alert, detailed the plight of Afghan refugees between
musical performances

Who are the victims we are helping out? Americans? Afghans?
Firefighters? The overriding story is “Donate! Help out!
Stand up!” – but is it to reward bravery, to protect the
innocent, to care for the survivors? Already, it becomes a
bit more complex.

Another “issue conflation” appears when business people
speak of the economy, they can be heard referring to
“the downturn and September 11th” in one breath, speaking
out one indivisible atom, presenting them as one unit, one
factor in the business climate.

Another theme is what I call “transnationalism” – the
American flag being adopted by other nations as a symbol of
their support for the U.S. In Canada, long vigilant to
avoid being perceived as Americans, the American flag was
flown across the country, and now appears on buses (for
example) with the words “United We Stand.” This would not
have happened before 9/11. (Nor would it have happened
without an increase in Canadian nationalism that has been
percolating for a couple of years, and in case you think
this isn’t relevant to business, that particular trend was
capitalized on, if not generated by, a brewery).

“Back or forth:” When people speak of their hopes, or
expectations for an unclear and perhaps scary future, they
speak of two different things – moving forward, and moving
backwards. Some express a yearning to return to what was
once good and simple, before our society lost sight of what
was important, moving to the inevitable events of 9/11.
Others describe moving ahead, getting past the tragedy, to
find a new place ahead where we’ve learned some lessons,
and things are good and simple, and the focus is on what is
important. The endpoint is the same, but the perceived
direction is opposite. Advertisers can use Norman Rockwell
to tap into one of these themes, but it doesn’t come close
to addressing the other theme.

“Security first:” Apparently, both gun sales and enrollment
in self-defense classes are on the rise. It’d doubtful that
anyone expects to protect themselves from anthrax or
hijacking in this manner, but general feelings about
security are leading people to respond. Even issues around
computer security seem to be receiving more media
attention, somehow under the same general concern.

“The elasticity of inconvenience:” In the first days
following the resumption of air travel, the media showed
the effect of new security measures on travelers, each of
whom said something to the effect that it didn’t matter how
long it took, as long as they were safe. In the following
weeks, every time there were new measures put in place, the
news would do a similar story, but the tone began to shift,
as people began to imply their frustration with losing
their nail clippers, and having to wait at the same time.
The news stories still would feature the disclaimer about
preferring safety to inconvenience, but something had
changed – the travelers mouthed the statement as some
truism that they felt socially obligated to say. It now has
the same flavor as the Jerry Seinfeld “not that there’s
anything wrong with that!” disclaimer that must be said
quickly whenever someone is described as gay.

“Symbol devaluation:” American flags are so in-demand that
companies can’t make enough of them, one of the greatest
memes of the last little while. Millions of individuals
seeking to announce…something…with the flag. Then a
week later, NBC has changed their logo (appearing in the
bottom right corner of every program) to a red, white, and
blue version. Local auto dealers cover their showrooms with
red, white, and blue balloons. Are they doing what they can
to help out, or are they cashing in on a crisis? Or both?

Further to this, cars began to sprout antenna flags. What
happens when a car with a flag on it cuts you off in
traffic? Or the driver yells something angry or impatient
at a pedestrian, the flag whipping in the breeze and they
speed away? What does the act of posting a flag imply about
neighborliness, kindness, or brotherhood? Should it be any
different than it was?

Other stories which point to some complex and contradictory
experiences and perspectives:
* Bill Maher censured for saying that the terrorists
weren’t cowards (and that firing missiles from far away,
as the U.S. does, is cowardly)
* Public opinion polls suggest U.S. citizens willing to
surrender privacy rights in order to prevent future
tragedies
* University of British Columbia professor Sumera Thobani
saying that the history of U.S. foreign policy is “soaked
with blood” and facing extreme criticism, and pockets of
support for either her opinion, or her right to express
her opinion
* The Canadian government moves to override the patent on
Bayer’s anti-anthrax drug Cipro
* Increasing enrollment in Arabic language classes

In each of these, some basic principles that our cultures
assume are fixed and permanent are being questioned. And
for each, there are responses, columns, ads from the ACLU,
debates, etc. But issues are more complex than before, new
thoughts are being voiced, and old beliefs are being
challenged.

Again, these are cultural stories. They appear in the
media, at dinner parties, in email, around the photocopier
at work, etc. They are all happening simultaneously, and
we’re all participating to some extent in each of them. And
obviously, it’s all far more complex than this space would
allow for, but the goal here is to at least point to some
of the themes, to illustrate the complexity, and to provide
some food for thought.

—

An updated version of this article was published in LiNE Zine

Update: ‘Air rage’ is back

By JESSICA WEHRMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
January 14, 2002

– In the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, airline travel was primarily populated with placid, patient customers who braved long lines, applauded flight attendants and, on a few flights, burst into “God Bless America.”

Months later, most passengers are still patient, despite a few muttered complaints at security. But in a handful of cases, the bad behavior – also dubbed “air rage” is back – and it has led to arrests.

Most recently, an airline pilot was arrested after making what authorities called “inappropriate” comments at an airport security checkpoint. Elwood Menear, 46, a US Airways pilot, was released from jail Monday after being charged with making terrorist-like threats and disorderly conduct. Officials would not give specifics on the comments.

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FreshMeat #8 from Steve Portigal

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FreshMeat. It’s free as a bird now, so join in!
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A lazy journey through mistakes made and lessons learned
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It was a hot Toronto summer, late in the 1980s. I was
wearing shiny dress pants and a sock tie, sitting in a
big downtown office tower. I can’t imagine it, but I may
very well have been fresh-faced.

Yes, I was a summer intern.

I worked in the computer support department of a bank
that had offices across Canada. I provided technical
support for anyone who had a computer problem, be it
hardware, software, DOS, what have you. This was
pre-Internet, so there was no way to know anything
about the state of their system except what they were
able to tell you. It was a challenging job, and gave
me a real sense of user empathy.

As part of my internship, I was asked to develop an
application for one client, a woman who was using a
spreadsheet to manage data for her investment
customers.

A spreadsheet, for those that haven’t used Lotus or
Excel (or VisiCalc), is basically just a bunch of
columns of data. Across the top may be headers such as
name, date, opening balance, etc. For example, I use a
spreadsheet to manage my collection of live music
recordings, so I have headers such as band, date, venue,
number of discs, comments. Each row, therefore, is a
different “record” in the database. It’s quite cool
because you can sort it by any field, or look at certain
subsets of all your data (originally, spreadsheets were
described as “what-if” programs).

We decided to move the program from Lotus (a spreadsheet)
to dBase IV (a database program that had the ability to
write programs that would add, delete, sort, search, etc.

The client sent me her spreadsheet (I guess she must
have put it on a floppy disk and mailed it to me) and
I sat down and spent several weeks putting together my
dBase program (to be really trivial, I think we used
something called Clipper that made actual “programs”
out of dBase code). I built in all the great functions.
ADD a new record. DELETE a record. And, the good ol’
standby, CHANGE an existing record.

I did a really nice job. The program offered you three
choices (ADD, DELETE, and CHANGE) which you could
select by pressing 1, 2, or 3. I think I was wise enough
to include a function that would let you quit the program.
When you made your choice, you would see a new screen
that said something like “Enter the number of the record
you would like to delete” and had a little space to type
it in. I’m sure I even had confirmations before deletes,
and feedback to tell you that your record had been added.
All this without a single course in user-interface design!

A few days before the end of the summer, I delivered it
to the client, still never having met her, or discussed
her expectations. I got a very nice phone call a few days
later. She was very appreciative of all the effort, but
she politely informed me that it wouldn’t be much use to
them, because of the way they used their current solution,
the spreadsheet. They would typically scroll very rapidly
through the data, looking for “flags” that they had
embedded – two or three character codes they placed in
front of the customer’s name to help them anticipate
certain actions. My wonderful front-end made that entirely
impossible.

And thus endeth the summer. Many successes and one failure.

But it was to be more than a year before the reasons for
the failure really became clear. Back in school, I
encountered my first course that considered the human part
of software – the user. I was struck with a ton of bricks
when shown that the people who make any kind of stuff
(revolving doors, stairway railings, library searching
software) are responsible for ensuring that their intended
users can actually make use of the thing.

Whoah.

And then my software development experience came into sharp
relief. I had made dozens of assumptions without realizing
it. I had never before grasped my own responsibility to
step outside myself in order to understand how that program
was going to be used. This second ton of bricks hurt just a
little more. But it changed forever how I looked at the
process of designing anything.

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FreshMeat #7 from Steve Portigal

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If you build it, will they articulate their user needs?
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Many years ago, some friends and I climbed a hill
overlooking the Pacific Ocean and talked about the future.
We talked about the Internet – this technology that was
going to likely change something, somehow. This could have
been a scene from a Douglas Coupland novel, but we were
more of a cynical bunch than the introspective protagonists
he favors. In sneering giggles we hypothesized various
ridiculous uses for the Internet.

“Oh, in the future, you won’t pay money to people, you’ll
just send it to them…through the INTERNET.”

“Yeah, yeah, and in the future, well, you’ll be able to
do ANYTHING. On the INTERNET. People who do research with
consumers will do their research on the INTERNET!”

Ahem. Does wisdom = attitude plus time, or is it simply
that there are no ideas so bad that someone won’t try
them? Because that skeptically envisioned future is here
now.

In fact, the largest consumer of market research, Procter
& Gamble, held a press conference back in May to announce
their plans to do even more research, much of it
ethnographic. The best article I saw on the topic was in
the WSJ (“P&G Plans to Visit People’s Homes To Record
(Almost) All Their Habits,” May 17, 2001), describing P&G’s
history with this type of research, and the scope of their
plans.

Almost as an epilogue, the article described P&G’s ultimate
goal, the creation of an online library of indexed,
searchable video that could be accessed by marketers
from the comfort of their own desks.

And now, from September’s Fast Company comes an article about the future of online customer research, suggesting that eventually, all qualitative and quantitative research is going to move online. Quicker, cheaper, and more convenient, apparently.

Really?

Who said that getting closer to your customer was
supposed to be EASY? It’s hard, it’s very hard. If it comes
easy, that can be very dangerous, giving an organization a
false sense of empathy without really requiring anyone to
see something new, something beyond the unspoken assumptions
about their customers. This is often delivered as video
ethnographies turned into rock music videos, a collage
of quick cuts of “everyday people” chopping broccoli,
layered deliciously with a stirring P. Diddy soundtrack.

But at least there you get some (albeit false) version of
empathy. How much empathy can be created when you only
know your customer as Jeff_The_Best, SuperDiva, or
sexygirl2041? Online focus groups as qualitative research?
Say goodbye to all the rich unspoken cues – the body
language, the nervous laughter, the false starts, the eye
contact.

So video is better, right, it’s richer? It’s got all that
cool visual stuff. You can see how customers chop broccoli.
But anyone who’s ever watched a video ethnography knows the
insights are not simply flopping around waiting to be
scooped up – it requires inference, extrapolation, and
synthesis, more than simply watching. These are special
skills. If it were that easy, people like me would simply be
video camera operators – shooting some video of the clients’
customers and handing the tapes back to them. Innovation in
a box.

The truth is that there are a variety of tools to get at a
variety of data, to solve a variety of problems. Early
adopters of new methodologies would do well to keep a suite
of tools at their disposal. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow,
(or was it the Indigo Girls?) “If it seems too good to be
true, it probably is.”

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FreshMeat #6 from Steve Portigal

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Serendipitous discovery of the customers marketing forgot
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Over the past few months I have been attending a local
photo club, held in a small room in the City Hall of a
small Bay Area town. The group gathers about once a week
to share techniques and images.

I am by far the youngest member of the club. I would
put the next youngest person at about 20 years older
than I, and I’d put the average age at 30 years older.

This has made the whole experience interesting, and
very useful. My fellow club members not only have photos
that are 50 years old, they have 50 years of expertise
in taking photos. In a recent meeting, the discussion of
archival materials took on an interesting slant as each
of several men in their seventies dismissed the whole
notion with great bemusement. “Archival materials? But
I’m already archival!” joked one.

The pacing of the meetings is very gentle, and at
first I found that jarring, but I’m learning to ride
with it. As a newcomer to the club, I’ve had the chance
to do a microethnography of the meetings, and I’m going to
share a few of my findings here.

The club provides value to its members by providing a
forum for sharing consumer information: what products
to use (say, for mounting a print), where to find them
for a good price, and so on. A typical exchange might run
something like this (all names have been changed):

Bob: …so now you take the edge cutter here…
Gene: Say, Bob, where do you find a cutter like that?
Bob: What, now?
Gene: I was asking about the cutter.
Marion: Gene is asking about your cutter, Bob.
Bob: Oh, the cutter.
Hugh: You can pick ’em up at any photo store.
Bob: I ordered this one online.
Hugh: Or you can order ’em online.
Bob: Or you can get one at that store down towards…
[pause]
Bob: Oh, I guess down near Belmont. What’s the place?
Gene: The place near the Safeway?
Bob: No, it’s by the store, there…
Marion: By the Safeway?
Bob: I say what, now?
Doug: By the Safeway?
Marion: By the Safeway?
Bob: …No, it’s down near Belmont.
Gene: Photo Paradise?
Marion: The Precious Frame?
Bob: No…down near Belmont, there, where Hap got his
press last month…
David: Oh, Linda’s place. The Darkened Room.
Bob: I say what, now?
David: THE DARKENED ROOM.
Marion: THE DARKENED ROOM.
Bob: That’s it. Down by Belmont, The Darkened Room.

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but not that much. But beyond my
gentle mocking is a great example of a social network
exchanging consumer information.

I am also fascinated by the level of computer knowledge
many of the individuals possess. There’s not a lot of web
surfing, or email usage. Club admin info is shared by
telephone, by snail mail, or by handing out photocopied
sheets at meetings. In fact, there is no way any of these
folks are going to be buying a digital camera. But the
computer is a tremendously important tool when it supports
and extends their existing photographic behaviors, namely
scanning and printing of images. Several club members have
invested a great deal of money in color printers, paper,
and ink. And remember, these are not the “grandmas” that
marketeers drool over, the one that will invest in anything
that might provide better connections to children and
grandchildren — these are photographers and artists. They
are wrestling with the technology to make it serve their
needs.

One woman came in and presented the results of a
benchmarking study she had done to get the truest black and
white image output. She built a matrix that varied the
paper (manufacturer, grade, matte/glossy), the printer,
the image source (slide, print, color, black & white), and
some software settings that affected the type of printing
being done (I think it was black ink or color ink). (Side
note: if you think the discussion about the store location
was crazy, you should have heard the discussion of how to
change the printing settings in Photoshop…) For each
cell in her matrix, she had a different printout, and we
could see the green shift, the blue shift, and so on. It
was quite excellent.

I’m not suggesting this is a huge market — my evidence is
purely anecdotal. It may not be cost-effective for the
manufacturers to better understand these customers, to
develop and market products especially for them. I don’t
know. But what is provocative is how easy it is for anyone
to stumble on a market that is clearly not well understood,
that absolutely flattens the beliefs about others that
marketers have foisted upon us, for better or worse.

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FreshMeat #5 from Steve Portigal

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FreshMeat has the power to charm and seduce. Surrender!
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The process of getting a good idea shelved can be tricky
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Have you seen that commercial for new “Special K Red
Berries?” It shows a woman shopping in the produce section
of a grocery store, walking from pear to papaya, picking up
the fruit gently, sniffing it reflectively, and placing it
in her bag. Beyond the pomegranates, she encounters the
new cereal product from Kellogg’s. Okay, we get the point.
The cereal is so fruity and so fresh that it belongs in
with the real fruit.

I guess this ad made me think of something lurking behind
the main story – the way that advertisers have started to
use the hidden parts of product development in their ads,
perhaps to better bring the viewer into the commercial.
For example, videogame companies, Rolaids, Levi’s, and
Kellogg’s have developed commercials that borrow from or
parody user testing and ethnography.

In this case, the development work being (inadvertently?)
spoofed is the placing of a product into retail. This is a
significant barrier to innovation. If Kellogg’s really
wanted to get their new cereal in the produce aisle, they
couldn’t possibly do so. Retailers tightly control what
type of products go in what aisle, as well as what brands
go where. Deals are struck, money is exchanged, products
hit the shelves. Promotions, discounts for consumers,
discounts for the retailer, special end-cap (the end of the
aisle) displays are all part of the negotiation. Even the
stocking and maintenance of the display (and special
hardware such as refrigeration units) may be part of the
deal.

This is neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Retailers
need to provide a coherent and consistent environment for
their shoppers. But today’s retail completely puts the
lie to the “better mousetrap” approach to product
development.

Many manufacturers regard this problem as hopeless, and
throw up their hands in frustration. Getting the product
in the store in a way that the store can sell it is most
certainly a problem. Manufacturers who have taken on this
challenge have often found themselves embraced by their
channel – the realization that their common goal is about
placing stuff in the customer’s hands can alleviate some
(not all!) of the contentiousness that may exist in those
relationships.

—

The NYT just did a story about consolidation in the
grocery industry and in the broker industry (firms that
work for food producers to handle much of the negotiation
around placement). The article is here/

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FreshMeat #4 from Steve Portigal

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You’re gonna have to serve somebody…serve FreshMeat!
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Tune in, log on, drop out, uhhh, drop in, uhhh…
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In Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” Miles Monroe wakes up in the
Year 2173 to discover (among other things) that tobacco
and hot fudge sundaes are commonly regarded as the
healthiest substances for the body. As they say, it’s
funny cuz it’s true. Just look at today’s example…

Recently, Robert Kraut (a CMU social psychologist in the
field of human-computer interaction) has begun to make
public his ongoing findings into the effect of computers
and Internet use on personal well-being. The first
results of the study, from 1998, showed us that usage led
to poor social involvement and feelings of stress and
unhappiness. And the media had a field day with those
findings.

Going back to the same subjects, and conducting other
studies, Kraut now retracts that finding and says that
Internet use does not lead to detachment or alienation.
Indeed, life imitates life, and extroverts make more
connections online, while introverts may make fewer.

It’s interesting that as the business viability of the
Internet falls lower still, it turns out to be not so bad
for us after all. And the media has not made anywhere near
the fuss over the latest study. In 1998, the Internet being
bad for us was a bang – an incredible story that permeated
our culture, but the retraction in 2001 is merely a whimper.

—

This is a highly summarized version of some complicated
research. Read abstracts of Kraut’s papers, or request
copies of the full papers here

An article in the New York Times that describes how
our web habits have shifted can be found here.

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FreshMeat #3 from Steve Portigal

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               (oo) Fresh                  
                \\/  Meat

Give the gift that reeks of love…give FreshMeat!
========================================================
Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the cheese
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Recent news reports state that McDonald’s
“now has another problem: customers turning away in
droves because they don’t like the way they are
treated…the problem could be responsible for $750
million in lost sales every year.”

Now, if this were a talk show instead of email, I could
slowly lower the paper from in front of my face, and
raise my eyebrows in a look of sardonic significance.
But we’re stuck here, aren’t we, so rather than defining
a new emoticon for the reaction one has to really obvious
news stories, let’s look a little deeper.

I don’t think any of us are surprised. Customer service
at McDonald’s (indeed, all QSR chains — Quick-Serve
Restaurants, industry jargon for “fast food”) is
terrible. If we’ve patronized those places, we know the
story. The frightening question is how can McDonald’s
seemingly just be figuring this out?

In my work, I’ve interviewed QSR staff, store managers,
regional managers, and corporate folks. The higher up
the organizational ladder you get, the less focus there
is on the customer, and the more there is on the food.
They gauge their own success by such factors as speed
(kitchens feature overhead countdown timers and alarms),
temperature, and consistency. The customer focus may be
as simple as “clean.” One regional supervisor told me
that their best employees work in the kitchen. All a
counter employee has to do, they said, was be able to
count (since they handle the money).

In the space we have here, I think the point is this:
There but for the grace of God go each of us. Every
company has made specific, often implicit, choices about
what to be excellent at. And neglected others. McDonald’s
chose food over customers. Now they are realizing that
they have been paying a price for that. Many
organizations never get to that point of self-awareness,
and may continue to neglect something crucial that is
holding them back. The humor in the news story comes from
the fact that we could see what McDonald’s wasn’t able
to. Have the laugh, because you deserve a break today,
but maybe we can apply the lesson here to our own
companies.

—

Postscript: check out “The Deep End” starring Tilda
Swinton to see a current portrayal of customer
service. Often it is played for comedy, but here
the difficulties of getting help over the phone turn
into horror.

========================================================
FreshMeat #2 from Steve Portigal

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               (oo) Fresh                  
                \\/  Meat

If you know someone that should read this, send it to ’em
========================================================
There really are eight million stories in the naked city
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I just completed a six-week class in improv – not
stand-up comedy, but a series of collaborative,
improvisational games or sketches. The TV show “Whose
Line Is It Anyway?” is a good example of improv.

Part of the process of doing improv is to free yourself
from the evil, rule-based domination of our left-brains
and allow play to take place. This approach has been
applied to all sorts of creativity work, from Drawing On
The Right Side of the Brain to every brainstorming
facilitator out there. So, I won’t go into that…I’m
fascinated by the stories that we have inside us.

Improv is something that anyone can do – it’s not just
for extroverts or people who are “naturally funny.”
The games and sketches produce humor almost as a by-
product. Most of the activities are based on
some trigger given at the last moment (hence the
improvisation) such as an emotion, a headline, a
physical position, a relationship, an environment.

And, incredibly, when given this little bit of info, we
can generate very rich recognizable stories, conveyed
through bits of dialogue, tone of voice, characters, and
so on. We are all in possession of these cliches, or
scenarios, or memes – call them what you want, but they
are incredibly detailed and we’ve all got them inside
us. If anything, improv helps bring them closer
to the surface so they can come out that much more easily.

A rich couple having an argument, a lion tamer who has
lost a job (and an arm), a game show, a televangelist,
a pair of puppies, a politician orating – all these
quickly produce richly detailed stories that are easily
recognized, and added to by the other performers.

Probably while reading that above paragraph you generated
your own visual and/or spoken details, so maybe you don’t
think the improv is such a big deal. Okay – but what
about the fact that you were able to generate so much
detail from a simple phrase?

It’d be interesting to try improv in cultures where
there is not the same amount of media exposure. Bugs
Bunny and Sesame Street seeded countless memes for their
viewers.

Anyway, this really supports the whole notion of how
products participate in stories – imagine the props
for an improv activity – a mobile phone, a rolling pin, or
a Tickle-Me-Elmo. We, consumers, have very specific
stories that those (or any) products will be used to
tell. The companies that make “stuff” need to understand
the stories that are out there already and take care to
make certain their new products (services,
advertisements, and so on) play the roles they are
expecting them to.