Turned Off

We got rid of cable TV at home a while back. We still have basic cable, but it's on a small TV, the only one in the house, sans cable box. If we switch from the Apple TV to cable channels, it's only to one of the PBS networks for kids' shows.

We didn't stop watching TV shows, though we do watch less. We use Netflix via the Apple TV, or on the iPad or iPhones. We might rent a movie in iTunes, and we have a number of movies on one of the computers that we can stream to the Apple TV. We buy seasons or season passes to some shows in iTunes: Mad Men, The Wire, Top Chef, The Office, Fringe.

When we visit someone else's house and the TV's on, it hits us really hard: How obnoxiously loud, demanding and manipulative the commercials are. They've become a foreign language to us. The same thing happens if we switch the car radio from a CD for the kids to an over-the-air station--The commercials are jarring and offensive to our ears.

We've sought to minimize the role TV plays in our home. I could see us upgrading to a larger TV in the future, to enjoy movies or quality programming as a family, but I cannot see us returning to cable networks running in the background bombarding us with commercial messaging and consumerism.

What hath we wrought?

We watch more programming on Internet-enabled devices. I read more books these days, on Internet-enabled devices. We play games on these devices, catch up on social networks, read blogs, RSS. We're still consumers of media, but our consumption habits have changed. They've become quieter and more personal, but the reality that's emerging is that they're just as bad, if not just as noisome.

And so this week I read Darren Hoyt's blog post, Wireless Void.

My favorite piece of writing from the last year was “Sad as Hell.” Officially it’s a book review for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Unofficially it’s a portrait of the reviewer’s addiction to media and the struggle to prevent it from derailing her life.

As poignant and impactive as Alice Gregory's book review that he cites is, Darren's blog post hits me harder. Alice Gregory is a twentysomething fresh out of college. Darren is my generation.

The visuals could be loud or clumsy, but the experience was “quiet.” The 1998 web never provoked panic or made me feel like I needed to have 20 apps and browser windows running. No one expected my constant presence or feedback or “Likes” of their content. It was not a substitute for my brain; it was a place for my brain to get lost for awhile.

(Was the web ever that quaint? Is anything as quaint as you remember it?)

Almost 15 years later, I go through phases of spending embarrassing amounts of time online. It’s like someone flipped the hourglass and all the contents of the real world trickled down into the virtual world, which is where all the exciting stuff happens now.

On Alice Gregory's lament for a non-Internet life:

There is no mention of limiting the iPhone usage, taking breaks from Twitter, or modulating the anxiety by simply unplugging for awhile. Unplugging isn’t a serious option, not even close. She’s a reluctant internet Lifer like the rest of us. The choice is whether to surrender and accept the permanent changes to your brain and nervous system, or to be the lone defector among your family and friends who unplugs from all their status updates and feels like the most isolated person on earth and the only one who understands what a mixed blessing that is.

Darren's not alone in his assessment. Brian Lam writes about his experience "[reducing] the overage of technology and noise in my life":

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It's a tool, but it's not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn't seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day x-box binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it's evil, but because it's too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%.

Brian says that the technology isn't evil. But increasingly, the commercial interests behind the technologies that we've latched onto are being evaluated for their capacity to do evil.

Google's Broken Promise: The End of "Don't Be Evil"

Apple's iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China

Twitter to Censor Tweets in Individual Countries

Consumption: The root of all evil?

One of the most promising aspects of the Internet was its ability to let us unplug and synch up when we plugged back in. To let us collaborate asynchronously with the state of our own interaction preserved between sessions. We would no longer need to occupy the same space for long stretches of time, because our interaction time could be synchronized with what needed to be done. Ease of reconnecting after a disconnect was as valuable as connectivity itself.

What's come to be is in stark contrast to that potential. We're perpetually tethered to devices and screens, compelled not only to respond in real-time over longer portions of our day, but also to fill in every available moment by keeping up. Keeping up with news, with social streams, with new blog posts. In consuming more and more, we do less and less.

Brian Lam:

Technology lets us do things faster and more efficiently; why would we use that newfound free time to do more and more of the same old thing? I'm not just talking about smarter consumption of content...I'm also saying, fuck consumption.

From Alice Gregory's Sad as Hell:

I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. I blog about real life; I talk about the internet. It’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job. It feels like tedious work to be merely conversationally competent. I make myself schedules, breaking down my commute to its most elemental parts and assigning each leg of my journey something different to absorb: podcast, Instapaper article, real novel of real worth, real magazine of dubious worth. I’m pretty tired by the time I get to work at 9 AM.

That our definition of activity has to come to include endlessly creating and replying to micro-messages and refreshing feeds, that productivity now means evaluating and adopting the latest-and-greatest app that will let you scan more messages faster, push more bits around or check off more items, is troubling.

It's not enough to say the companies, devices or network are evil, true as it may be. As with an economy in peril, overconsumption is the issue. The challenge on the Internet is that the rate of change and introduction of new services and content is so fast that we confuse overconsumption with "keeping up." The question, to me, is not, "what do we do when we're maxed out on attention?" Rather, it's, "Why are we not leveraging technology to improve our lives in the real world and free our attention for more meaningful pursuits?"

The Rise of the New Groupthink, Solitude on the Decline, Introversion in Web Developers and the Workplace

"...the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous creations." (via @37signals)

I clicked through to the article linked by that Twitter quote this weekend, and saved the NYT article, "The Rise of the New Groupthink" to come back to later. Kottke linked to it today as well:

Susan Cain argues that the lack of privacy and freedom from interruption in modern offices might not be the best way for those office employees to be creative...particularly for introverts.

He quotes the article:

The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I'm talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open plan offices, in which no one has "a room of one's own." During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

I've been self-employed for 5 years now, and for most of that time have had personal office space to myself.

Providing client services, there's not as much freedom in self-employment as people often assume. The opposite is typically true. I have to be consistently available to clients, partner agencies and my team of contractors. Between this and 2 young children at home, when I work is not something I have a lot of control over. Where I work and what my workspace is like is, and that's very important to me. I've sat in an office that I've rented, alone, and still worn noise-canceling headphones to attain solitude.

My oldest son, age 4, shows strong introverted traits as well, and I see him struggle with this. He processes discoveries and thinks things through internally, revealing his conclusions on his terms. He needs space & downtime to process things. He excels at solo tasks, like learning to read. Seeing this as a documented long-term trend makes it all the more troubling. It's not just me.

Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too.

I came across the article via 37signals, a successful web-based software company that blogs frequently about how they work. Oftentimes when I read about their geographically-diverse team, flextime arrangements, collaboration over minimal overlapping time periods, and how those contribute to their success, I think, "You're just a bunch of introverts."

And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extraverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic.

This shows a misperception about introversion. Introverts can be quite capable of speaking prolifically, one-on-one or to large groups, about ideas and topics they're invested in. "Exchang[ing] and advanc[ing] ideas" are not exclusive to the extravert end of the scale. It's small talk, unnecessary interactions and noise that distract, and exhaust, introverts -- Exactly the sorts of things that persist in an open workspace.

And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

The Introvert Advantage is a great book if you're an introvert or are close to an introvert. It examines biological differences in the brain when introverts & extraverts process situations and emphasizes understanding strengths and weaknesses to better structure your life accordingly.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted.

Sounds just like the way people behave in traffic. I rent an office within walking distance from our home, in large part to avoid starting and ending my day contending with traffic.

Another article that popped up recently (via @shawnblanc) was "Solitude and Leadership":

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

Even if we establish private space as important for creativity, physical solitude as important for thought, even if we turn down the noise in our real space, we have to keep the distractions in our virtual space at bay as well.

That how we work is as important as the work we do is a recurring theme here. It's part of that gap in preparedness for successful work and collaboration. "The Rise of the New Groupthink" just scratches the surface on a lot of topics -- globally, nationally, in the workplace, in education, and in my own life. Clearly the attention I've seen this article receive is coming from like-minded folks. Over time, however, there's a lot of work and opportunity in this space to be more successful, more productive and happier with the work we're doing.

Will 2012 be a good year for web/technology education?

It looks like a lot of people are thinking about the talent gap in web technology and how we can extend our knowledge & educate others.

Code Year promotes learning to code with weekly lesson links by email and the opportunity to join a movement:

Make your New Year's resolution learning to code. Sign up on Code Year to get a new interactive programming lesson sent to you each week and you'll be building apps and web sites before you know it.

http://codeyear.com/
http://www.codecademy.com/

Paul Graham, Founder Y Combinator, on the Code Year website:

If you want to invest two years in something that will help you, you would do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA

Joel Spolsky writes about The Academy for Software Engineering coming to NYC in the fall:

OMG do we ever need more software engineers. The US post-secondary education system is massively failing us: it’s not producing even remotely enough programmers to meet the hiring needs of the technology industry. Not even remotely enough...

But college is not for everyone—many of the best programmers I know were just not interested enough in a general four year degree and went straight into jobs programming.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/13.html

Mandy Brown (@aworkinglibrary) polled Twitter for the Best beginner resources on HTML/CSS.

Jake DiMare, at CMS Myth, writes about the Millennial generation, their familiarity with web publishing, and advocates reverse-mentoring:

First of all, to a millennial, contributing content with a CMS is second hand. This is a generation of digital natives who has not known a world without the Internet. They had Facebook in high school. They get it. The days of explaining how to copy and paste embed codes or wasting hours fussing with typeset issues like ‘widows and orphans’ will soon be a thing of the past when they begin replacing their predecessors in the workplace.

http://www.cmsmyth.com/2012/01/what-can-millennials-teach-us-about-the-future-of-content-management

Self-Hosted Social Media?

I've been thinking about how a self-hosted social media platform would work. Think of something like Twitter, Facebook or Path on your own server.

The thing is, those sites aren't just publishing tools. They're communication networks. Users flock to them because their family & friends are there, and there's zero resistance or lag in sharing and communicating with others.

The trade-off for painless publishing and sharing is having commercially-driven enterprises responsible for your data and the transmission tools. Once you pull those tools onto your own server, you fragment the network and the timeline. You add resistance to others' ability to consume or respond to your content.

So you'd need an app, presumably mobile, that would let you follow friends' social URLs just as you do their accounts on a given social network. You'd want one party issuing the hosted web app, which you'd install on your own web server, and the mobile consumption/publishing app, so that things would still be seamless. That party would, however, not have access to your data or the ability to shut down the network, whether deliberately or through negligence.

Think of it as a Twitter, Facebook or Path app on your iPhone that publishes updates directly to an API on your own web server, while also consuming feeds from friends' servers, merging everything into one timeline. It would have to be easy to install & configure, support pushing updates to existing networks, and be able to pull conversations--replies, mentions--into threads on your server.

Why the effort? You could integrate your content into your own publishing platform. You could stop worrying about privacy controls and having your life mined for marketing and advertising revenue. You could also avoid watching it all go up in flames if the platform du jour shuts its doors. Zeldman:

But there is another piece of this which no one is discussing and which I now address specifically to my colleagues who create great digital content and communities:

Stop selling your stuff to corporate jerks. It never works. They always wreck what you’ve spent years making.

In light of the threat of SOPA, power-user displeasure with "new new Twitter", Gowalla going under, Facebook's constant tinkering with privacy and unquenchable thirst for ad revenue and profit, it's something to consider.

Doing What We Do, Better

In "A winter of discontent in the web design world?", Christian Heilmann discusses things that we, as web designers and developers, take for granted, and could be doing better. He also touches on the topic of educating the next generation, which I've been writing here about:

Not so hidden agenda: getting graduates hit the ground running

And this is where a lot of the “forget the old ways, here, write less and achieve more” mentality comes from. Companies are hard pushed to hire as many engineers as they need so they want to make web development interesting for people who just came out of university. Now, in university we learn nothing that is of much use in web development. Re-educating people is a long and arduous process so let’s bring the things we learn in university into the market deliveries.

This is a good idea to hire people and to stop them from building native code (Android, iOS) instead of thinking about becoming web developers. It washes out the craft though, which is always the case when things become mainstream and need lots of people.

Where we think we build Chippendale furniture, the market needs more IKEA Billies and it makes sense to teach new people to build those.

Decoded: Bridging the Gap

In Filling the Gap, I wrote about a talent shortage in Digital Marketing and teaching young people how to code, to fill that gap and create work opportunities.

Before all that, I'd been thinking about another gap: That which exists between designers, project managers, account executives and coders. I've presented technology topics a few times, to rooms full of smart people who don't have firsthand exposure to how code works, much less how developers or manageable technology projects work.

And this month we have members of Congress expressing willful ignorance of how the Internet works and how SOPA legislation will destroy it. (via @daringfireball)

Today I heard of Decoded:

If so many people’s jobs are touched by the Internet and digital technology, then how come so few of us have even a basic understanding of how things work? This is the fundamental question behind a new course in the U.K. called Decoded, which promises to teach people how to code in one day.

There are plenty of courses and a seemingly endless series of conferences, workshops, and events that discuss “being more digital” and “integration” and which encourage a change of mindset. But really, if you are in the creative or communications industries on any level and you haven’t already addressed this, then what have you been doing for the last 5-10 years? Decoded’s aim is to go beyond changing mindsets and actually teach non-developers how to code. (via Fast Company)

The Web Design & Development community is really good at sharing knowledge through conferences, workshops, events, podcasts and collaboration. We're good at teaching each other. Reaching out to other groups and getting everyone working with web technology to understand it is not always a priority, especially in the client services space, where the emphasis is on billable time.

I've been logging bookmarks and thoughts on this subject for some time. It's an idea whose time has come. It's also about more than just understanding the tools and technology your teammates are using; equally important is understanding how to make the process work in a way that brings out the best in everyone.

I've had this idea simmering on the back burner for a while now. I think I need to move it up in the coming year.

Filling the Gap

An article on a talent shortage in Digital Marketing conjures up a solution to long-term economic concerns cited in an assessment of the Great Depression and the current economic slump.

Joseph Stiglitz identifies parallels between our current economic crisis and the Great Depression in "The Book of Jobs". He identifies the cause for both as a failure to acknowledge, and address, a "shift in the 'real' economy", from agriculture to manufacturing back then, and from manufacturing to services now. Along the way he points out:

Unemployed young people are alienated. It will be harder and harder to get some large proportion of them onto a productive track. They will be scarred for life by what is happening today.

Writing about the "Digital Marketing: Organisational Structures and Resourcing report", in his Econsultancy article "The ticking digital talent time bomb", Neil Perkin writes:

According to [Eric Shmidt]: "Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made." There is even a well-supported government e-petition that has been started in order to encourage the government to start teaching coding as a part of the curriculum in Year 5.

There is much to do, but given the wide and growing requirement for these skills it makes sense for organisations from many different sectors to support initiatives such as this.

As businesses increasingly adopt strategies that require depth of expertise in these increasingly in-demand areas, it also makes sense for them to take action to protect themselves from the inevitable challenges this will bring.

This includes creating working environments that will attract the best digital talent, and through effective career and succession planning. The ticking digital marketing talent time bomb is very real, and it's not going away.

I've worked in web development, primarily in Digital Marketing, for the past 15 years. There is a very real shortage of talent in this field today. Higher Ed graduates aren't prepared to do the 'real' work, though.

Apprenticeships, internships, hands-on learning and exposure could not only bridge the career gap, but in many cases could supersede costly degree programs that are also becoming a drain on the economy and future financial well-being.

Kicking Off

I'm working on posting my own content in its own home. CIRCA1977.com is a domain I've owned for more than 8 years now, and corresponds to my @circa1977 Twitter handle.

I've whipped up a simple little publishing system that I'm calling Dispatch. It uses PHP to parse Markdown files from the Filesystem. I'm using Markdown because I can easily write using Mou on my Mac or Textastic on my iPad, and just post the files to the server.

A simple naming convention for the Markdown files organizes things by date and generates URLs. The system also supports site pages created using Markdown.