Thriving too

Does Digital Inclusion Matter?

Yes!  Helen Milner from the UK Online Centres gives some important statistics in this excellent presentation.

The map is not the territory

National Geographic's fantastic map of America detailing the meanings of the Native American place names.

The map is not the territory, and more general sematics...

Analogue Blog

According to Toby Ng's posters, only 7% of the world have computers. I don't know what number of those owners are furiously blogging away, but it still leaves an awful lot of people out.

Step in Mr Alfred Sirleaf who keeps a blackboard blog in Liberia, sharing and condensing useful information for those without access to newspapers. Proving that a good idea is a good idea wherever.

Via AfriGadget
Photo by WhiteAfrican

The ColaLife Campaign

Image: grzegorzkomar

Over the last month, I have been helping Simon Berry (CEO, ruralnet|uk) promote his latest idea, and what an idea it is!

"ColaLife" is a campaign aiming to leverage Coca Cola's distribution muscle to provide life saving medicines to children in developing countries. The idea is so simple, but until now has been difficult to implement. The power of web 2.0 and social networking media however, has allowed Simon to digitally document his progress and to build a digital support network surrounding the campaign.

“We can distribute Coca Cola all around the World but we can’t seem to get medication to save a child from something as simple as diarrhea and I think that that is wrong.” (Annie Lennox)

Since the launch of the campaign and due to the power of a Facebook group, Simon was invited by Salvatore Gabola, Coca-Cola’s Global Head of Stakeholder Relations, to a meeting to discuss the idea further at Coca-Cola’s European HQ in Brussels. The campaign’s Facebook group has reached over 3,890 members since its inception on 18 May 2008. It was nominated for the NewStatesman’s New Media Award in June and showcased at London’s 2gether08 festival on 3 July.

Most recently, the campaign was featured on BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme in May and July, and on the BBC World Service on 13 July. Simon explains; “Before the Facebook group I was getting nowhere at all. The group has changed everything and is the reason we’ve made such rapid progress …Continuing support for the idea is vital if we are to turn this idea into a reality and actually save some lives.”

Image: Nick Gripton

Research and development of the campaign continues to evolve. The next objective is to get an international NGO to engage with the campaign. Meanwhile research is underway in East African into Coca-Cola’s distribution system and the feasibility of the idea is being investigated and reported on the campaign website.

Thanks to everyone who has already shown their support, and a huge thank you to the team at Inhabitat for publishing the ColaLife story and launching it into the blogosphere!

To find out more information and to follow the story, visit the newly created ColaLife.org (thanks to Dave Briggs!). To support the campaign, please please join the ColaLife Facebook Group! To get even more involved and if you have anything you can offer the campaign please sign up to the campaign’s Google Group “ColaLife”.

Want me

The film above shows the amazing project designed by Jonathan Harris's & Sep Kamvar for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA. "I want you to want me" is specifically designed for a 56" high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall.

Social trends, flesh meets, mobile phones

The Economist has a new special report on the social effects (among others) of digital media.

"Now, as mobile communications are becoming the norm, a new generation of sociologists is scrambling to update all these theories. So far, most of them agree that nomadic technology, far from isolating people, brings them closer to their families, friends and lovers—their strong ties. But they still disagree on what that means for weak ties with strangers, and thus society at large.

...With mobile phones, on the other hand, people call, text or e-mail one another constantly throughout the day. Since they are always, in effect, contacting a person rather than a place, and since the receiver can see the caller's name, and probably his picture, they often dispense with greetings altogether. The exchanges now tend to be frequent and short. People expect less content but instead a feeling of permanent connection, as though they were in fact together during the entire time between their physical meetings."

The many articles in the report are fascinating and I urge you to have a read directly. Two things really amused me that I wanted to highlight.

"On one hand, adolescents today become socially autonomous earlier than their parents did, “building their own communities from the bottom up” through constant text-messaging and photo-sharing among their clique, even if this circumvents the wishes of their parents. .... James Katz at Rutgers calls the mobile phone a new sort of umbilical cord between children and their parents and wonders whether this might in some cases “retard maturation”. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist at MIT, says that wireless gadgets are, ironically, a “tethering technology” and create new dependencies that delay the important “Huck Finn moment” in young lives when adolescents first realise that they are alone on the urban equivalent of the Mississippi."

I also wondered about the Japanese study on young love, which is all rather sweet in my view, although the terminology is getting a bit, well, illustrative . . .

"This steady stream of emoticons and photos in between physical “flesh meets” amounts to “tele-nesting”, says Ms Ito. It also spices up and prolongs the flesh meets. Young people in Tokyo, she has observed, will start their date by exchanging text messages all afternoon as they do homework or take the train to the rendezvous. At night, on their journey home after the actual date, they use messages again as “fading embers of conversation”, sometimes continuing for days and turning little memories into the couple's “lore”.

There is a brilliantly insightful post on Restless Mind on teenage privacy.

Blog Reviews

We have been getting some really fun referrals lately ... Here are a few ...
Me and My Big Mouth

osocio

Groundswell Collection

Greenpeace UK del.icio.us

Publication Design

Very Powerful Imagery

This awareness campaign for the International Red Cross won bronze at the ACT competition last year.
The idea behind the artwork is that everybody have the right to be treated as a normal human being. A healthy life is very important, compassion and tolerance is part of it.
“Every conflict around the globe, whether it’s between countries or cousins, begins when people disregard this (compassion) basic human emotion.
Compassion helps us find common ground and overlook our differences by discovering that we all have the same colour blood in our hearts.”

Direct from very hard hitting osocio

Evolve through play.

I didn't understand this until I checked here.  Now I do and I like it a lot.  Homo Ludens succeeds through play.

Hat tip Jon Bounds. Original source Emergent Game.

The Power of Email

Email is wonderful but everyone recognises the dangers of email over face-to-face communication. The facial and physical emotional cues are absent and so our responses to emails are created in a vacuum, out of context. Daniel Goleman discusses these in an article he wrote for the New York Times:

"When we talk, my brain’s social radar picks up that hint of stridency in your voice and automatically lowers my own tone of exasperation, all in the service of working things out. But when we send e-mail, there’s little to nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up. E-mail lacks those channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in a conversation, provide its positive or negative spin.

....One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.

....On the upside, the familiarity that develops between sender and receiver can help to reduce these problems, according to findings by Joseph Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at Michigan State University. People who know each other well, it turns out, are less likely to have these misunderstandings online."

In a recent Crucial Skills newsletter the authors said 'don't ever hold a crucial conversation over email'.

I have been playing very close attention to emails and feelings for some time. Some emotional intelligence observations reveal that we can still respond physically to email: that sinking feeling from an unpleasant email and a surge in happiness from a kind or supportive one.

Equally, email is an incredibly powerful medium to excite anger in other people - especially group emails. It is not difficult to get someone feeling angry and dissatisfied through using exaggerated or immoderate language. Words are very powerful, even without the face-to-face clues, for spreading warm feelings as well as negative.

We have to use email alot - we live distances away from people and communication is very important. Here are my own guidlines - mostly obvious...

- No matter how long it takes , always re-read your emails from the perspective of every reader you are sending it to.

- Write with the assumption that people outside your circulation list will see it.

- Never forward or circulate people's emails without permission. It erodes trust very quickly.

- Always reply. Sometimes the odd one can get lost or forgotten but 'no reply' can be worse that a negative reply. Someone said to me the other day 'not replying is a really powerful message'. Probably . . .but it is also unpleasant, especially if the conversation is a difficult one. Not replying can damage or erode good relationships. It works like game playing, even if no ill feeling is intended the person who sent the email always feels disregarded.

- Ignore 'perceived judgements'. Examples: If I reply quickly eveyone will think I am not busy or have no life.... or if I reply at length I am not cool and have too much time on my hands. Respond as quickly and carefully as you can.

- Never reply angry.

And if you find yourself in a real pickle through misunderstanding and misinterpretation, pick up the phone (carefully) or arrange to meet.

Don't be put off by the difficulties....keep communicating anyway you can!!!

Teenagers prefer face-to-face

In a new report on teenagers and social media by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that there is a subset of teens who are 'super-communicators' -- teens who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email. They represent about 28% of the entire teen population and they are more likely to be older girls.

This 'multi-channel' pattern could be described as transliteracy, defined as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks”. There is a very good article with examples from history, orality, philosophy, literature, and ethnography here.

Very striking about these latest figures is the percentages of teenagers who prefer telephone and face-to-face contact over email. The level of sophistication of using multimedia methods of communication is one that many adults are enjoying too! Lots of time juggling required.