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22 October 2004

Is Instant Messaging replacing the coffee machine?

The 21st century networked organisation seems to have found an alternative to chatting by the Coffee machine. A lot of informal conversations are happening across the network between colleagues through instant messaging services.

What is even more interesting is that we have here another example of a communication channel whose adoption has emerged bottom up out of individual initiatives and not as part of a grand organisational schema.

Some data in support of this emergence come from the Radicati Group "Instant Messaging Corporate Survey, 2004-2005". Radicati surveyed 78 global companies corresponding to about 900 K personnel. A large majority of organisations (76%) do not provide their personnel with internal IM platforms. Yet, about half of them are users of IM. This difference between number of users and number of organisations which have deployed IM gives a rough indication of the extent of free public IM services usage at work.

The report also gives some indications concerning IM usage in the workplace. Respondents describe informal internal communication, presence awareness and private use.

Where: unspecified (global companies)
When: October (publication)

21 October 2004

Email usage and spam control

Thanks to Dawn Anfuso's Excellent Email article for pointing out and discussing DoubleClick's 2004 Consumer Email Study, a series started in 2000. ROI Research carried out the survey selecting, among the TNS NFO Access panel of 900.000 US consumers, 1.000 consumers who make use of the email/Internet at least once per week. The participants responded to an email questionnaire between July and August 2004. We are therefore squarely within the space of the email users population: how many email she receives, how she understands and copes with spam, how she sets up her email environment.

We know that email is one of the routines of digital life: the large majority of respondents (81%) say they go online daily and repeatedly to email, and a third of them (33%) qualifies its usage as constant. This corresponds to a 13% increase in a year.

Also reported incoming traffic has increased (16%) in a year, with the average email user receiving 308 emails per week, of which nearly 200 are considered spam. Compared to 2003, this number has increased 6%.

Among the categories proposed in the questionnaire to explain what makes a message into spam, respondents converge on deceptiveness (96%), unknown senders (93%), offensive subject matters (93%), with frequency (58%) and irrelevancy (57%) in the case of permission-based email. Once an incoming message has been classified as spam, some delete it (72%), some set up bulk folders (64%, a 11% increase in a year), some send a spam report (49%, a 13% increase in a year), some attempt to unsubscribe (28%). Email users have also reacted to spam by adopting spam filtering software. They are now 27% to do so; they were 16% in 2003. A small percentage (4%) declare inaction. The result is that overall, respondents estimate at 7% the average number of spam messages that are opened. Most of the email users who have created bulk folders rarely or never inspect their content (77%); some (44%) check them frequently. In that case, they either rarely or never found emails they should have seen (47%); or have sometimes found such emails (43%). Privacy is now concern number one among email users (91%) with spam second (85%).

In terms of their email environment, 40% of users have at least three email addresses. The primary one is a free email address for 48% of the users; their home ISP address for 42% of them.

Where: US
When: July and August 2004

20 October 2004

Communication technologies foster multitasking

One of the distinctive features of the time we spend online is that it combines and superposes different strands of activity and perception. When sitting at the computer, we read and write text while listening to the radio, then handle a couple of IM sessions, receive a phone call, and as the conversation languishes go back to the text we were reading or writing. Often the TV is in the background, and printouts, magazines and newspapers are at reach. At any moment, our attention can be captured by them and treating them can enter into our multilayered flow of activity. If we are home, we can at the same time carry out practical tasks that only require partial monitoring, such as cooking or washing. In the office, some media-related activities are less frequently, but on the other hand all our activities take place against the background of parallel conversations, interruptions and coordinations. Even these sacred institutions that are seminars and conferences, now offering wireless Internet connection, have become hosts to multitasking. We listen to the speaker while we have conversations or we consult the web. But how widespread is multitasking around communication technologies?

We had already some indications from our analysis of IM usage research (see How teenagers use IM). While they instant message, teenagers run two or three more strands of activity in parallel.

Twice each year, BIGresearch runs the Simultaneous Media Usage Survey (SIMM) which monitors over 10.000 consumers' combined media consumption behaviour. The October 2003 SIMM showed that while listening to radio, 57,3% of the people say they are online, either regularly or occasionally, 46,5% that they read the newspaper and 17,7% that they watch TV ; while watching TV, 74,2% of the people say they read the newspaper; 66,2% say that they are online; while reading the newspaper, 52,4 say they watch TV while 49,6% say they listen to radio ; while online, 61,8% say they watch TV, 52,1% that they listen to music, whereas 20,2% say that they read the newspaper.

The September 2004 SIMM report suggests that the tendency to multitasking is growing. For instance, when they are online, 63,5% people say they watch TV either regularly or occasionally; 59,7% that they listen to the radio and 40% that they read the mail.

Where: US
When: October 2003, September 2004 (publication)

19 October 2004

Natural-Born Cyborgs, by Andy Clark

To appear on the November 2004 issue of Interactions of the ACM

The latest book by philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark is a challenging and eclectic discussion of how the relationship between biology, technology and culture construes our mind and our identity. The book is articulated around a unique central character: the cyborg, a CYBernetically controlled ORGanism.

The first cyborgs Clark introduces are organisms which have incorporated machines into their bodies, in the form of prostheses, enhanced perceptual systems, and neural implants, to recover and extend physiological functions. Examples of such cyborgs are organisms with implanted pumps that inject chemicals to provide supplementary biotechnological control loops, thus extending their capacity to adapt to exceptional environmental conditions. Cochlear implants, which electronically stimulate the auditory nerve, and more advanced implants that bypass the cochlea, directly penetrate the brain stem to extend the hearing faculty. Few of us are cyborgs in this sense.

The second cyborgs we meet are of a different kind. They are organisms surrounded by props, aids, tools, and artefacts external to their bodies, and yet completely integrated to their actions; contributing to the way information is processed and problems are solved. We are all cyborgs in this sense. In the course of our activities, we effortlessly couple with many of the technologies that are available to us, in what Andy Clark calls information processing mergers between our mental activities and the operations of artefacts, such as pen, paper, print and electronics. These technologies can be totally transparent: a technology that is so well fit to, and integrated with, our own lives, biological capacities and projects as to become almost invisible in use. We wake up in the morning at the ring of our alarm clock, PDA or mobile phone. The ring of the alarm takes on a very basic, yet critical morning task, creating a control loop for managing our daily schedule efficiently. The same happens with such mundane tools as pen and paper when we want to compute the result of a complex multiplication, when we need to remember a specific piece of information and write it down, when we plan a move and make a sketch of the way the furniture will be laid down in the new house.

Three properties of our brain make these forms of mind-machine integration possible. The brain naturally works by distributing functions among subsystems that take care of the execution of part of the action without requiring conscious control. For example, when we decide to reach for an object, posterior parietal subsystems take on control of hand orientation and finger placement to grasp the object at a subconscious level, while conscious thought can focus on something else. Similarly, if an external resource is available that can autonomously carry out part of the information-processing task, the mind will naturally outsource to it some problem-solving activity. Finally, the cortical plasticity and the protracted development and learning phases that characterize our species explain our brain’s unique capacity

to factor an open-ended set of biologically external operations and resources deep into its own basic modes of operation and functioning.

One of the pieces of research used by Clark that I think captures most vividly the depth of this integration is the transposition of the magic number seven experiment among speakers of a Cantonese dialect where number words are significantly shorter than English ones. In this linguistic context, around 20 seconds after they were presented to them as a list, participants could recall ten or more of the numbers, instead of the seven plus or minus two usually reported. During this delay, more of these shorter number words could be kept looping in the temporary buffer, expanding the overall recall capacity. The merger with external props and aids enables the biological brain to exploit its strong pattern matching and associative capacities, while augmenting its weak storage and recall of information that is externally encoded and available to perception.

Given this very strong disposition to merge with external artefacts, as new technologies become available, cyborgs are forced to evolve. What happens when the technologies let us interact with people, places, and situations at a distance? Or when the technologies give us the opportunity to control a third arm with our muscles, or to control a robot with our brain? We adapt, Clark argues, by extending and redefining our sense of body and self as a function of our experiences of direct control:

Humans are never disembodied intelligences; work in telepresence, virtual reality and telerobotics, far from bolstering any mistaken vision of detached, bodiless intelligence, simply underlines the crucial importance of touch, motion and intervention. What matters are the complex feed-back loops that connect action commands, bodily motions, environmental effects, and multiperceptual inputs. It is the two-way flow of influence between brain, body and world that matters, and on the basis of which we construct our sense of self, potential and presence.

The critical factor is not physical co-presence and direct contact. It is the feeling of directness of the experience, as produced by the combination of rich sensorial stimulation throughout and action upon the distant environment.

The book ends with a generic discussion of the personal and social implications as we merge with the latest digital communication technologies. Nine themes are analysed: inequality, intrusion, uncontrollability, overload, alienation, narrowing, deceit, degradation, and disembodiment; but, unfortunately, little of the insight and precision of the preceding discussions is brought to bear to shed new light on these issues. The main contribution is a call to factor in our hybrid biological-technological nature in our effort to make sense of ourselves and of the relations we have with the technologies around us, and an invitation to actively engage in shaping the future technological and social environments that will emerge.

Written in a very engaging, discursive style, the book addresses conceptual issue of great relevance for the Human Computer Interaction community:

It is our own natural proclivity for tool-based extension, and profound and repeated self-transformation, that explains how we humans can be so very special while at the same time being not so very different, biologically speaking, from the other animals with whom we share both the planet and most of our genes. What makes us distinctively human is our capacity to continually restructure and rebuild our own mental circuitry, courtesy of an empowering web of culture, education, technology and artefacts.

The argument that the interplay of brain and artefacts is the foundation of human identity and intelligence is richly supported by findings from philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. As usual, one would have wished for more: more about the specific types of information processes that are most elicited by the latest wave of technological innovations; more about the particular conditions that web and mobile technologies have created for augmenting the social space and about the transformation to social identity that follow; more about the active cyborg that not only merges with technologies, tools, aids, and props—but creates or contributes to the development of such artefacts.

NATURAL-BORN CYBORGS:
Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
By Andy Clark
229 pp.
Oxford University Press
Hardcover: April 1, 2003

The proactive consumer : online research as part of purchasing behaviour

The 2004 American Interactive Consumer Survey by The Dieringer Research Group, a yearly survey started in 1995, studies 3.000 US adults online and offline purchasing behaviour and assesses how the Internet influences their behaviour either directly - online sales - or indirectly - offline sales. Compared to the previous years, 2004 has seen a significant increase in the Internet driver of offline purchases. It is estimated that for 1$ consumers spend directly online, 1$70 dollars are spent offline after some Internet research. In a year, Internet-influenced offline spending has grown 31% versus 14% of direct online sales. This phenomenon is reported to be even more pronounced when what is purchased are financial and insurance products and services. In 2004, 20.5 M US adults used the Internet for financial and insurance product information compared to 12.6 in 2003.

Where: US
When: June 2004

IM adoption: the steady progression

The Week in review data report for week 3-10-04 includes, among the Top 10 Telecom/Internet Destinations, three IM (AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger Service, Yahoo! Messenger) and three e-mail (Yahoo! Mail, AOl Email and MSN Hotmail) services. The three top IM services combined have a unique audience of over 51 M who spend an average of 40 minutes per person; whereas the three top e-mail services have slightly more than 50 M unique audience for an average time of 20 minutes. AOL Instant Messenger alone has a unique audience of 28.740.000 each spending 1:01:11 AIM on average.

Lets go back a couple of years. In May 2002, Nielsen//NetRatings (cited by Bob Woods' U.S. in-home IM usage hits 41M) collected data on IM usage for the first time. The number of active Internet users to log onto one of the public IM networks then was 41 M, with AIM already drawing the largest audience of 22 M unique users.

A reminder: Nielsen//NetRatings measures audience by automatically tracking a panel of more than 50.000 US residents with home Internet access.

Where: US
When: October 2004 (1st week)

Reinventing the DVR

Thanks to Sean Carlton Advertising is more than just TV commercials for pointing out two pieces of customer behaviour research that enrich our understanding of DVR usage. Research from MPG confirms reports that the very large majority of DVR users (90%) skipp commercials on recorded programs. More surprisingly, they just do the same when they watch live TV (84%). How do they do that? Lyra's DVR Love: a survey of DVR users found that DVR are used for a delayed viewing of the program - the delay being of about half an hour - and commercials are fast-forwarded.

Where: US
When: May 2004 (publication)

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