Stilgherrian » Human Nature

International Fake British Accent Day

Stilgherrian — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:02:21 +0000

Today, 7 May, is International Fake British Accent Day. Apparently. Should I slag it the way I slagged International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Or should I slip into a well-oiled Received Pronunciation, old chap?

Mind you, my birthday on Friday is tagged as “International Be Sexually Inappropriate With Your Friends Day”. Apparently. Should I…? Oh, never mind.

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Passive-aggressive bullshit

Stilgherrian — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:20:46 +0000

What does “family friendly” mean? Merlin Mann, who writes at 43 Folders, explains it well: “I don’t mind people saying something is ‘not appropriate for kids,’ but declaring it’s not ‘family friendly’ is passive-aggressive bullshit. Almost anything can be ‘family friendly’ if your family is awesome and you’re not a normative dick.”

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Oh noes, thoze fickle “Gen Y” ppl…

Stilgherrian — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:40:25 +0000

…were right about job-hopping. In the big chair:

Major companies no longer value long service by their workers… The poll of 32 national and international firms found that when defining a high-performing worker, 69 per cent rated “length of service” as least important or not even applicable…

“If you turn the clock back 10 or 15 years, length of service would have been seen as a significant attribute of high performance,” Mr Tipper [Jeremy Tipper, business development director of recruitment firm Alexander Mann Solutions] told AAP on Tuesday.

“The reason for that is they had a great deal of knowledge… about the organisation and a good understanding of what’s happening in the marketplace.

“Today, because information is so much more freely available because of technology, that ‘information is power’ probably doesn’t exist to the same extent.”

Mr Tipper said the new breed of workers was less “risk averse” — they were more prepared to change jobs and they were more aware of the value and portability of their skills.

Hat-tip to the Snarky Platypus. He even wrote the headline. He also has his own blog, but is too goddam lazy to post there. We must convince him to fix this.

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Savoradin on Depression

Stilgherrian — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:39:27 +0000

I just stumbled across this quote about depression by Antonio Savoradin: “Depression, probably the most obvious condition leading to suicide, is a prison filled with repeat offenders, and the crime of melancholia has a startling recidivism rate. But it is not a prison in which rights are respected, nor is humane treatment the standard fare. Rather, the jailer is a fickle torturer who punishes his charges without mercy. The depressed person inhabits a cell with a tiny window and iron bars, is beaten, burned, electrocuted, and flayed by the guards, left shivering and in pain, while relatives and friends may visit, blind to both the unbearable wounds he suffers and to the bars which hold him. Bewildered, they cannot understand why he doesn’t rise and walk through the empty doorway; they do not understand his pain; and they may inflict guilt or further torture by sneering at his condition or offering pointless advice (’What’s the matter with you? Just leave!’) which only exacerbates his suffering. Because they do not see the bars, the walls, the jailer, the prison grounds, they cannot take his pain seriously. It is an enigma to them. They can give him little, if any, comfort.” Hat-tip to Andrew Barnett.

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I came for the gin, I stayed for the social revolution

Stilgherrian — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:23:41 +0000

“Television, the drug of the nation / Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation,” rapped American poet and musician Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of ~~Hipocrisy~~ Hiphoprisy”, now of Spearhead. Could this literally be true?

I’ve just read the most amazing speech, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Sharky, which you can also watch on Blip.tv. It begins:

A British historian [argued] that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing — there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders — a lot of things we like — didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

Sharky goes on to argue that when WWII ended, we suddenly had to cope with another social surplus: all that leisure time thanks to a 5-day working week and all those new-fangled gadgets which made household chores a breeze. So what did we do? We slothed in front of the TV. For a generation.

As we turn off our TVs and connect to each other, this cognitive surplus is creating things like Wikipedia. An estimated 100 million hours of work has gone into it. Yet this is but a drop in the ocean…

How much time do we spend watching TV?

Two hundred billion hours, in the US alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the US, we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads… People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is.”

Back in 1992, David Gelernter asked, in his book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, where the great public institutions of the information age were. Where were the equivalents of the great cathedrals? The grand Victorian railway stations and bridges?

Obviously Gelernter asked that before the web, and before Wikipedia and Google and YouTube and Facebook and… and… OK, some of those are commercial projects. But as Sharky points out, we could have 2000 new Wikipedia-sized projects every year.

The information revolution has only just begun…

I do recommend you check out the entire speech. Hat-tip to Daring Fireball via Garth Roxburgh-Kidd.

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Sydney manic after 13 days of rain?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:34:59 +0000

Will Sydney see an outburst of manic behaviour today? I’ve written about The Sydney Effect before. Today is the first sunny day after 13 days of continuous cloud and plenty of rain. Were we more depressed than usual? Perhaps. Will we be manic? Let’s see.

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More Thoughts on Twitter

Stilgherrian — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:21:05 +0000

Weird. I was thinking that today I might write about how I’ve been using Twitter recently, and I’ve just found myself writing in its defence.

Over on the Link mailing list were talking about Microsoft’s new Live Mesh when I noted:

It’s been interesting to watch the vastly different reaction here on Link with the (mostly) very positive reaction amongst the alpha geeks in my circle of friends on Twitter.

There, the reaction is all “When can I get a Mac version?” and “How can I hook this into X technology?” and about exploring the possibilities — what can be achieved. Here on Link, the reaction is often negative, “How can it go wrong?”, “Where do you sue?”.

Both reactions are necessary to provide a balanced response to a new technology. How to we get them to meet?

Systems administrator Craig Sanders was quick to respond, and I must admit I found his response to be almost a stereotype — something I later dubbed “old man syndrome”.

Craig wrote:

yes, well, there’s your explanation.

gross, but mostly accurate, generalisation follows:

Twitter is the lowest form of blogging, with everything worthwhile about blogging removed, and all the most annoying things about instant messaging added.

it is basically just an avenue for vacuous people to instantly spew every trivial thought that flitters through their minds. people don’t need more communications tools. they need to learn how to shut up. and how to think before opening their mouths.

learning to think before forming an opinion would be a good idea too. but that’s probably way too much to hope for, i’ll settle for people learning how to shut up.

My reply [slightly edited for the web rather than email]:

I don’t know how much you look at what’s been written about human communication, Craig, but this is just plain wrong. The VAST majority of human communication is what you’d call “trivial thoughts” — the constant stream of social bonding that holds any group together. It’s MEANT to be ephemeral, since it’s about the now.

I’ve written specifically on this, and there’s an excellent little Canadian video…

This ephemeral communication is how we explore and solidify our own thoughts and beliefs. We DO say what comes into our heads. And then we monitor the reactions of those around us and decide whether we need to modify our thoughts or not. All Twitter does is put that constant chatter onto teh interwebs, so it can happen at a distance.

I must admit, all I’m detecting here is “old man syndrome”: that the new tool to do this task is “bad”, ‘cos there’s on “old” tool which you may use for this task. Or is that off the mark?

I don’t mean that particularly personally. I had much the same reaction to Twitter until I actually used it to stay in touch with some of my friends and colleagues. Some of them, as you’ll see from the comments on my blog post, still have that belief.

I think the reaction is akin to the parents of teenagers in 1960s American sitcoms, wondering what their kids were doing on the phone “all the time”. The answer is “forming and maintaining their network of friends, their social connections and their group bond with their peers, using different methods from their parents”.

I also observed that “Opinion-forming is a group activity”.

I reckon Twitter has hit a sweet spot in terms of message size, immediacy, accessibility and so on. Now all they need do is figure out some sort of business model to pay for it — because currently someone’s haemorrhaging money to make it possible.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

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Communication usually fails, except by accident

Stilgherrian — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:20:46 +0000

Every time I read 37signals’ blog, I find something of value. Today they tell me about a Finnish researcher in human communication, Osmo Wiio, and his Murphy-like laws of communication.

If communication can fail, it will.
If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

After that, you may want to read more about Osmo Wiio.

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“Urgency is poisonous”

Stilgherrian — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:13:48 +0000

Here’s one for a rainy Monday morning. 37signals’ experimental 4-day working week is going very well.

When I first compared this enlightened approach to people-management with the drive-them-harder style of Jason Calacanis, it triggered a massive debate, and I wrote a follow-up comparing the Calacanis approach to an evil cult. Last week 37signals reckoned that urgency is poisonous.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.

Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.

When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations.

If you’re a just-in-time provider of industry parts then precise deadlines and deliveries may be required, but in the software industry urgency is self-imposed and morale-busting. If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed. Don’t plant it if you can help it.

I can’t agree more. A client phoned once, all a’fluster about an “emergency”. Before I could think, I blurted out the question, “Why? Whose life is in peril?”

Of course no-one was in danger. This client was operating in crisis mode, as usual: that anti-pattern also known as “firefighting mode”: “Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis.” I’ve written about that before here and with my colleague Zern Liew.

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No evidence that porn causes harm

Stilgherrian — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:18:58 +0000

One book on my to-buy list is the recently-released The Porn Report by Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby. Until I get around to that, Danny Yee’s review has some juicy tidbits (ooherr).

[T]he common stereotypes are wrong: unsurprisingly, given that pornography users make up about a third of Australian adults, they are fairly representative of the broader population, with the major exception being that fewer than one in five of the respondents were women…

Detailed analysis of the most popular Australian DVD titles shows that, even with broad definitions, fewer than 2% of scenes have any kind of violence. The total ban on violence in the Australian X-rated category seems to have worked. Another finding was that “pornography does not really objectify women more than men… On some measures, men are the more active sexual subjects… on others, it’s the women.” The Internet is a lot more diverse, but despite extensive efforts the authors managed to find not a single site with actual rape photographs, and only a handful of sites with faked ones.

There is no evidence that pornography causes harm to its users: the studies that suggest this have involved pushing pornography on non-users in artificial laboratory experiments. In contrast, there has been almost no attempts to study the beneficial effects of pornography, even though consumers overwhelmingly report positive effects…

Part 2 of the book covers issues such as censorship, and notes:

“Protecting the children” has been a rallying call for censorship for a long time. It turns out that actual child pornography — the police prefer to call it “child abuse material” — is extremely hard to find. And evidence-based education has to be central to protecting children from harm, whether from cyberstalking or contact with material they will find disturbing.

Essential reading, I’d have thought, for anyone wanting to discuss censorship of the Internet, eh Senator Conroy?

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Raped by a wombat!

Stilgherrian — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:24:17 +0000

OK, so the emo thing wasn’t the best headline of the week. This is: Man sentenced over wombat rape claim. “A New Zealand man has been sentenced to community service after telling police he had been raped by a wombat and the experience had caused him to start speaking ‘Australian’…” Hat-top to The Road to Surfdom.

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Anti-Emo riots break out across Mexico

Stilgherrian — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:59:16 +0000

Attacks began on 7 March when, according to Wired, “several hundred people went on an emo-beating rampage in Querétaro, a town of 1.5 million about 160 miles north of Mexico City.”

The next week punks and rockabillys harassed emo kids in Mexico City, prompting police protection and a TV news story. Meanwhile the emos have organised anti-violence protests (pictured).

Hat-tip to Alex Willemyns for one of the oddest headlines — but this is for real.

The core issue is a clash between Mexico’s macho culture and emo’s sexual ambiguity. Yep, it’s just good old-fashioned gay-bashing.

[O]nly in the past year have emos begun to make their presence felt in the streets. In response, many of the established so-called tribus urbanas like punks and metalheads are responding with violence…

[B]y some accounts, the emo subculture is identified with homosexuality in Mexico. As Mexico City youth worker Victor Mendoza told Time.com: “At the core of this is the homophobic issue. The other arguments are just window dressing for that.”

Perhaps not so old-fashioned: we can drag a web 2.0 angle into this…

Many of the attacks have been planned, or at least fomented, on violently anti-emo websites like Movimiento Anti Emosexual, which features videos of physical violence sprinkled liberally with anti-gay sentiment. Last.fm’s Anti Emo Death Squad group has almost 4,000 members.

Weirdly enough, Gustavo Arellano, the author of Ask a Mexican and an editor at OC Weekly, thinks this could all be a positive for Mexico.

“It’s a great clusterfuck for the American mind’s idea of Mexico,” Arellano said. “This teaches the rest of the world that Mexico is not just a bunch of cactuses and sombreros.”

Yeah, Gustavo. It teaches the rest of the world that Mexico is populated by ignorant, medieval fuckwits who are a long, long way from being fit to inhabit the 21st Century.

More at the Intersections blog, and Mexican newspapers La Jornada’s stories on the original attacks an the follow-up.

[Photo: "Protesta de emos en la ciudad de México el miércoles pasado" from La Jornada. Photographer: María Meléndrez Parada.]

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Quote of the Day, 22 March 2007

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:08:27 +0000

Overheard in a pub recently, someone asking their friend, “Are you an atheist?” The reply was, “What does that mean? You’re so intelligent!”

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Never rely on people

Stilgherrian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:42:25 +0000

Never rely on people to point out the glitches. I’ve just printed one of my business’ invoices for the first time in ages — hey, I do everything on screen — and noticed that the template is still tagged with “Holiday Arrangements 2007-08″. In 2.5 months, no-one has mentioned it. Then again, I’m hardly surprised. Energy Australia tells me that street lights stay broken for months because no-one tells them — even though they can usually fix them promptly.

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Throwing new tools at the communication problem

Stilgherrian — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:00:36 +0000

If you think some fancy new communications tool will solve your problems, think again. According to one commenter at 43 Folders, “Reality was that the same bad habits were then applied to the new tool just like the old tools. And soon the new tool was just as cumbersome and inefficient as the old ones.” I’ll come back to this post next week, because some good lessons are accumulating — and it relates directly to some work I’m doing with clients.