Leap and the net will appear.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Happy 2010
A beautiful 2010 and a brand new decade ahead for us all.
Enjoy the new year day by day, moment by moment! The beauty is in the moment, and the treasures; try not to let them become the moment that has just past us by. :)
Leap and the net will appear.
Leap and the net will appear.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The Great Burger Con | Bull and burgers: mincing their words
Amazing stuff. This intrigues the intrinsic marketing communications training I've had thus far - it's really all in perception. The mind is such an easy thing to toy with sometimes. But the truth about the Macdonald's Angus Burger is, it is bloody tasty. It could be relative to the standard of the rest of their burgers of course, which have significantly decreased in size and taste over the years. Smart.
---
Bull and burgers: mincing their words
Source - The Age, 30 December 2009
Image Source - http://www.sydneytable.com/angus/
Hats off to the year’s most spectacular marketing success, or con job, depending which way you care to look at it: the rise and rise of the Angus beef brand via the lowly means of fast food hamburger mince.
McDonald's and now Hungry Jack's have pushed beyond the marketing aphorism, “sell the sizzle, not the steak”, by flogging a vague and arguably uninformed concept of the sizzle.
The Land newspaper reported in September that the launch of the two “premium” Angus burgers had resulted in McDonald's beef sales soaring by as much as 20 per cent.
The greatest confirmation of that success has been rival chain Hungry Jack's jumping on the Angus bandwagon. Ah, the power of branding.
But also big winners are Angus cattle breeders – to the chagrin of other breeders - as the massive advertising campaigns print on the brains of the great unwashed that Angus is the superior breed of moo cow. Chances are the vast majority of fast food customers seeking something “a little bit fancy” only know the names of two or three breeds anyway and a great deal less about the meat itself.
It’s a dangerous thing to criticise any cattle man or woman’s breed of choice - you’re much safer criticising their religion or even brand of ute – so I’ll play safe and just say that Angus is a very fine breed, as are several others.
The Sydney Royal Easter Show steer and carcase competition is by no means a definitive indication of beef superiority, but for what it’s worth, the Stanhill Trophy this year was taken out by the Limousins with the silver going to Charolais, followed by Shorthorn, Square Meaters (yes, there is such a breed), Poll Hereford, then Angus, Murray Grey, Galloway and Santa Gertrudis. Properly prepared and slaughtered, they are all very fine eating.
Beef taste testing becomes very subjective, as several other competitions can show. What’s more, the breed of the beast is well down the list of what makes a particularly tasty steak. What the animal had been eating, its age and condition and how little stress it experienced in the lead up to slaughter all count a great deal more.
And as for what goes into hamburger chain patties, well, despite the advertising, it’s not actually the prime cuts of prime beef. That sticker on the McDonald’s ads, “Prime Australian Beef“, doesn’t seem to be actually defined as anything by Meat and Livestock Australia.
It doesn’t necessarily mean cattle in their prime, just good Australian hamburger mince which, depending on the season and what’s being turned off, can mean a whole pile of old cows as well as the usual offcuts and less-marketable bits from trade steers.
So there’s actually nothing particularly special about McDonald’s or Hungry Jack's hamburger mince that happens to be made from cattle that are at least three-quarter Angus (the definition allowed McDonald’s by Certified Angus Beef Pty Ltd).
There might have been a hint of what the marketing success was about in this paragraph from The Land:
“Bronwyn Stubbs, corporate communications manager for McDonald's Australia, said Angus beef had come up trumps in its extensive research with local customers to identify what they perceived as a good quality, great tasting beef.”
Perception is a wonderful thing. It was probably helped by the availability of plenty of cattle of that breed with a well-organised breeders’ lobby group promoting them. That Angus burgers were first launched by McDonald’s in the US three years ago no doubt has absolutely nothing to do with it.
So congratulations to McDonald’s, Hungry Jack's and Angus breeders on a well-copied marketing format that has more Australians eating beef.
For what it’s worth, taste being such a personal thing, the best beef has to be grass fed – all that grain-fed nonsense just ads weight, fat and maybe some tenderness to a beast while taking out taste.
The animal has to be prepared well for slaughter – no stress. And then, if you really want something a bit fancy, it will have lived on desert grasses.
Without doubt the best steak I’ve ever had was in Birdsville while doing a story on the Channel Country’s OBE organic beef. I’ve tasted nothing like it before or since. And the breed didn’t really matter.
Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor, now in hiding from feedlot operators and Angus breeders.
---
Bull and burgers: mincing their words
Source - The Age, 30 December 2009
Image Source - http://www.sydneytable.com/angus/
McDonald's and now Hungry Jack's have pushed beyond the marketing aphorism, “sell the sizzle, not the steak”, by flogging a vague and arguably uninformed concept of the sizzle.
The Land newspaper reported in September that the launch of the two “premium” Angus burgers had resulted in McDonald's beef sales soaring by as much as 20 per cent.
The greatest confirmation of that success has been rival chain Hungry Jack's jumping on the Angus bandwagon. Ah, the power of branding.
But also big winners are Angus cattle breeders – to the chagrin of other breeders - as the massive advertising campaigns print on the brains of the great unwashed that Angus is the superior breed of moo cow. Chances are the vast majority of fast food customers seeking something “a little bit fancy” only know the names of two or three breeds anyway and a great deal less about the meat itself.
It’s a dangerous thing to criticise any cattle man or woman’s breed of choice - you’re much safer criticising their religion or even brand of ute – so I’ll play safe and just say that Angus is a very fine breed, as are several others.
The Sydney Royal Easter Show steer and carcase competition is by no means a definitive indication of beef superiority, but for what it’s worth, the Stanhill Trophy this year was taken out by the Limousins with the silver going to Charolais, followed by Shorthorn, Square Meaters (yes, there is such a breed), Poll Hereford, then Angus, Murray Grey, Galloway and Santa Gertrudis. Properly prepared and slaughtered, they are all very fine eating.
Beef taste testing becomes very subjective, as several other competitions can show. What’s more, the breed of the beast is well down the list of what makes a particularly tasty steak. What the animal had been eating, its age and condition and how little stress it experienced in the lead up to slaughter all count a great deal more.
And as for what goes into hamburger chain patties, well, despite the advertising, it’s not actually the prime cuts of prime beef. That sticker on the McDonald’s ads, “Prime Australian Beef“, doesn’t seem to be actually defined as anything by Meat and Livestock Australia.
It doesn’t necessarily mean cattle in their prime, just good Australian hamburger mince which, depending on the season and what’s being turned off, can mean a whole pile of old cows as well as the usual offcuts and less-marketable bits from trade steers.
So there’s actually nothing particularly special about McDonald’s or Hungry Jack's hamburger mince that happens to be made from cattle that are at least three-quarter Angus (the definition allowed McDonald’s by Certified Angus Beef Pty Ltd).
There might have been a hint of what the marketing success was about in this paragraph from The Land:
“Bronwyn Stubbs, corporate communications manager for McDonald's Australia, said Angus beef had come up trumps in its extensive research with local customers to identify what they perceived as a good quality, great tasting beef.”
Perception is a wonderful thing. It was probably helped by the availability of plenty of cattle of that breed with a well-organised breeders’ lobby group promoting them. That Angus burgers were first launched by McDonald’s in the US three years ago no doubt has absolutely nothing to do with it.
So congratulations to McDonald’s, Hungry Jack's and Angus breeders on a well-copied marketing format that has more Australians eating beef.
For what it’s worth, taste being such a personal thing, the best beef has to be grass fed – all that grain-fed nonsense just ads weight, fat and maybe some tenderness to a beast while taking out taste.
The animal has to be prepared well for slaughter – no stress. And then, if you really want something a bit fancy, it will have lived on desert grasses.
Without doubt the best steak I’ve ever had was in Birdsville while doing a story on the Channel Country’s OBE organic beef. I’ve tasted nothing like it before or since. And the breed didn’t really matter.
Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor, now in hiding from feedlot operators and Angus breeders.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Pandora's inbox
Mighty good read this, we should all take some time off to take stock. Microsoft research seems to show that "we spend an average of 14.5 hours a week reading and answering email..."And that's just email!
---
Pandora's inbox
JOHN ELDER
December 6, 2009
Source - The Age
SOME people get up early to walk the dog or do tai chi in the park. Others get out of bed to look at the sunrise, bathe in their own thoughts or otherwise meet the day in a happy way before the circus of life puts a bridle in their mouths and starts whipping them with a riding crop. Peter Beilharz feels the hurry-up lash as soon as he opens his eyes.
It wasn't always this way for Professor Beilharz. There used to be time to think. But that was in the days when work messages came by memo on a piece of paper, and friends wrote letters and postcards. With snail mail and even the telephone there was no sense of being constantly on call, he says.
These days, dozens of pressing matters pile up in the night-time and the La Trobe University sociologist gets up early to check his emails before going to work.
''If I don't check my messages before I get to the office I'm already three hours behind,'' he says. ''I used to go to work and do stuff. Research, teaching: that's what academics are meant to do, but we spend three or four hours a day communicating. I'll have urgent things in my diary but I'll forget my diary because I keep checking my email. I don't feel I have any control of how much I use it. It just shows up … distracts me from what I am meant to be doing. It's a silent medium but you feel it shouting at you.''
Beilharz isn't making news by venting his spleen at the distracting, time-wasting and somehow controlling power of the email inbox. Email trouble is spawning a host of academic research, self-help books (such as Inbox Detox), and entire businesses (such as Sydney-based Email Management Solutions) devoted to solving your problems.
Just ask around and it seems that most people - particularly those with jobs and families to commune with - have some kind of love-hate relationship with email. The words ''a blessing and a curse'' come up sooner rather than later. ''As a message system, it's great,'' says Beilharz, ''but … there is a supposition that you are on tap all the time … and that speed is good for you.''
The short version: email is a symptom of a world where time, under the pressure of accelerating demands, has been cut up into small units. Our day-to-day lives are now a factory line of many things to do quickly.
''And it feels OK because it feels like you are doing something valid, that cult of busyness … . [but] our days are full of endless small tasks that mightn't add up to a great deal at all,'' Beilharz says.
Email in particular has a demanding personality. ''It's not dialogical. If I say something to you in a conversation, you can correct me or respond to me. I think email informs ultimatums … it lays down the law.''
Beilharz was one of a dozen academics contacted for this story, initially to ask if they agreed with US writer John Freeman, who recently made a small but significant splash here and abroad with his book Shrinking the World - the story of how email came to rule our lives. The book is both a neat gathering-together of all known complaints against email, and an eloquent, almost crazed, plea that we return to some form of ''slow'' communication (such as writing a letter now and then) as a means of returning to our more natural, happier selves.
In an online essay that presaged the book, Freeman writes: ''In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather.
''It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live.''
While most local thinkers have sympathy for Freeman's general argument, they tend to see email more as a symptom than a cause of the world speeding out of control. And not all agree with Freeman's specific charges against the inbox. These include:
■ The compulsion to check our inboxes (up to 40 times a minute, according to one piece of research he cites) is akin to poker machine addiction.
■ The faceless disinhibiting psychology of email communication unleashes our dark side, making us rude, even nasty, or at least lacking in the consideration that we apply to letter composition.
■ People feel pressured to keep up with the ever-filling inbox because a failure to reply to email within a few hours can lead to loss of trust and relationship difficulties.
■ There is emerging evidence that the brain is becoming hard-wired for instant gratification and that email is part of the rewiring process.
■ The hours spent dealing with email interfere with workday productivity and keep people in the office and away from family and friends.
Support for the last claim, particularly from the corporate sector, is accumulating like flies on dog dirt. A recent British newspaper report declared email ''a broken business tool'' that had become the new time-waster, like coffee and cigarettes. Sharon McNevin, of Sydney-based Email Management Solutions, reckons ''it doesn't seem to matter what corporations try to do. Software solutions don't work … they need to address the cultural problems.''
McNevin, citing Microsoft research, says we spend an average of 14.5 hours a week reading and answering email and the time we spend looking for and analysing information costs companies $28,000 per employee per year. And based on her work with local businesses, McNevin suspects it is getting worse. A US study found that broadband access in the workplace had ''increased the number of web pages viewed by individuals by 55 per cent and increased the amount of time spent online by 23 per cent''.
However, Dr Brad West, a sociologist with Flinders University, sees the personal use of email in the workplace as reflecting new work practices where employees self-manage their time and are kept tied to the mast for longer periods. ''It's a trade-off. Workers will use email for non-work purposes during the working day, but in exchange they have new demands on them which often means there is a fuzzy line between work and home.''
We might be busy with email, but are we actually addicted? University of Technology Sydney anthropologist Dr Jonathan Marshall says the number of people who have lost their wages or home because they check their email is probably quite small. ''If there is any validity to this point about addiction, it is simply that we live in a society which encourages addiction … Email just becomes part of the wider pattern.'' Marshall suspects that apart from people who are expecting a specific message, the only people checking their inboxes 40 times a minute ''would generally be people who are bored out of their skulls and seeking the only stimulation they get at work or, if they are really depressed, at home''.
Dr David Holmes, senior lecturer in communications and media studies at Monash University, says Freeman's addiction thesis can perhaps be better explained by seeing email less as an exchange of information than as a ritual. ''I agree that many email users are feverish about checking their mail. But the same persons are probably very anxious about receiving printed mail also,'' he says.
''The difference with the online experience is that it is an 'always-on' technology … The addiction lies not in discovering what is there, but what is not there. It is about being satisfied that there is nothing that constitutes a gift, an unsolicited communication, that is not simply a functional reply, but is distinguished, sincere content that is the internet's equivalent to 'breaking news' on the TV.''
According to associate professor Peter Corrigan, of the school of behavioural, cognitive and social sciences at the University of New England, compulsive use of email reveals our fears of being left alone. ''The receipt of an email proves that we actually exist for others … The more we need validation from others … the harder it is to switch off,'' he says.
This may be why teens spend so much time being connected to others through texting and emails, Corrigan says. ''In some ways this is a sign of the higher-than-usual chances of that particular social group not lasting.''
FREEMAN'S contention that email makes us rude, even malevolent, inspires a shrug from University of Sydney anthropologist Dr Stephen Juan. ''Disinhibition leading to rudeness also exists on the buses, trains and on the roads,'' he says. ''We are experiencing an age of rudeness. The reasons for this would constitute another article.''
But Jonathan Marshall sees it differently, arguing that email brings about a different class of behaviour because of its lack of visual cues. It can be hard to tell if people are responding to you or like what you have written, he says. Emailers who maintain polite discourse may lack a sense of how they are being received. If you are unpleasant, on the other hand, you will almost certainly get a response from somebody, Dr Marshall says. ''Then you know you exist and the response is a reinforcement of your existence, so you do it again.''
If this is true, it lends weight to the idea that we become anxious or even angry when our emails are not promptly answered and that relationships are subsequently strained.
Associate professor Julie Fitness, an evolutionary psychologist at Macquarie University, agrees with this notion, saying it has become the norm to feel anxious and aggrieved if emails are not answered right away. In her own profession, her students complain bitterly when a response is slow in coming. But responding to this kind of pressure just increases it, Professor Fitness says. The more often and sooner we answer the incessant, demanding emails, the more we reward the emailer.
''We are laying ourselves wide open, saying my time belongs to everybody,'' she says.
One of John Freeman's most interesting arguments is that ''the boundlessness of the internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits … the overheated capacity of our minds''.
Stephen Juan sees this as possibly true, but notes we have ''no data that we have reached the human mental breaking point''.
Maybe we're not at breaking point, but some cracks are showing. A Hewlett-Packard study found that workers who are constantly distracted by email and phone calls suffer a temporary 10-point fall in their IQ, more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana. Plus, there is evidence that our limited working memory is being sorely tested by email.
PROFESSOR John Sweller, of UNSW, is an educational psychologist who came up with the influential ''cognitive load'' theory, which refers to the load of working memory during learning. Regarding cognitive load and email, he says: ''A large number of emails on disparate topics all of which need to be handled 'now' can overwhelm humans' limited working memory with occasional disastrous consequences such as emails sent to the wrong people with information we would probably prefer was not sent.''
Glitches or weariness is one thing, but is the brain being rewired to adapt to digital living? Juan says the data is lacking. ''However, science has taught us that the brain is continually reworking its synapses. So this rewriting is possible.''
There is some evidence that this adaptation is already in play, notably among younger people. US research found that ''digital natives'' (people born into the online age) seem to adapt better to online information-gathering, simultaneously managing to maintain a more balanced relationship between the online world and that occupied by friends and family. Better, that is, than ''digital tourists'' (the older folk, who grew up doing things more slowly).
Beilharz says: ''If you joined a university in the last few years, that's the way the world works. If you entered 20 years ago, you can see it has significant effect on the capacity to do other things. Time spent on email is time not spent on doing other things.'' Such as the job one is paid to do.
In 2005, Professor David Levy, of the University of Washington's information school in Seattle, published a paper arguing that ''the accelerating pace of life is reducing the time for thoughtful reflection, and in particular for contemplative scholarship''. Professor Levy illustrates how the blessing and curse of the internet is notably ironic and bittersweet for academics. ''The loss of time to think is occurring at exactly the moment when scholars, educators and students have gained access to digital tools of great value to scholarship.''
In 2006, Levy started running a course called Information and Contemplation. It teaches students how to slow down their thinking to a contemplative pace, as a response to ''the speedy, fragmented and inattentive mind states that digital technologies seem to encourage''.
But what about the rest of us?
John Freeman suggests we cut down our inbox access to twice a day. ''And wherever possible, don't send.'' Speaking from New York, Freeman says he hasn't managed to get his own usage down to twice a day. ''I try and check it five to seven times a day rather than minute to minute.
''I could write emails all day long. The more emails I write and reply to, the more I will get … But I don't check it when I get up in the morning. I have breakfast with my girlfriend. If I'm going to have to work, I won't blend work with chatter. But it's like a Pandora's box, your mind starts to drift.''
---
Pandora's inbox
JOHN ELDER
December 6, 2009
Source - The Age
SOME people get up early to walk the dog or do tai chi in the park. Others get out of bed to look at the sunrise, bathe in their own thoughts or otherwise meet the day in a happy way before the circus of life puts a bridle in their mouths and starts whipping them with a riding crop. Peter Beilharz feels the hurry-up lash as soon as he opens his eyes.
It wasn't always this way for Professor Beilharz. There used to be time to think. But that was in the days when work messages came by memo on a piece of paper, and friends wrote letters and postcards. With snail mail and even the telephone there was no sense of being constantly on call, he says.
These days, dozens of pressing matters pile up in the night-time and the La Trobe University sociologist gets up early to check his emails before going to work.
''If I don't check my messages before I get to the office I'm already three hours behind,'' he says. ''I used to go to work and do stuff. Research, teaching: that's what academics are meant to do, but we spend three or four hours a day communicating. I'll have urgent things in my diary but I'll forget my diary because I keep checking my email. I don't feel I have any control of how much I use it. It just shows up … distracts me from what I am meant to be doing. It's a silent medium but you feel it shouting at you.''
Beilharz isn't making news by venting his spleen at the distracting, time-wasting and somehow controlling power of the email inbox. Email trouble is spawning a host of academic research, self-help books (such as Inbox Detox), and entire businesses (such as Sydney-based Email Management Solutions) devoted to solving your problems.
Just ask around and it seems that most people - particularly those with jobs and families to commune with - have some kind of love-hate relationship with email. The words ''a blessing and a curse'' come up sooner rather than later. ''As a message system, it's great,'' says Beilharz, ''but … there is a supposition that you are on tap all the time … and that speed is good for you.''
The short version: email is a symptom of a world where time, under the pressure of accelerating demands, has been cut up into small units. Our day-to-day lives are now a factory line of many things to do quickly.
''And it feels OK because it feels like you are doing something valid, that cult of busyness … . [but] our days are full of endless small tasks that mightn't add up to a great deal at all,'' Beilharz says.
Email in particular has a demanding personality. ''It's not dialogical. If I say something to you in a conversation, you can correct me or respond to me. I think email informs ultimatums … it lays down the law.''
Beilharz was one of a dozen academics contacted for this story, initially to ask if they agreed with US writer John Freeman, who recently made a small but significant splash here and abroad with his book Shrinking the World - the story of how email came to rule our lives. The book is both a neat gathering-together of all known complaints against email, and an eloquent, almost crazed, plea that we return to some form of ''slow'' communication (such as writing a letter now and then) as a means of returning to our more natural, happier selves.
In an online essay that presaged the book, Freeman writes: ''In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather.
''It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live.''
While most local thinkers have sympathy for Freeman's general argument, they tend to see email more as a symptom than a cause of the world speeding out of control. And not all agree with Freeman's specific charges against the inbox. These include:
■ The compulsion to check our inboxes (up to 40 times a minute, according to one piece of research he cites) is akin to poker machine addiction.
■ The faceless disinhibiting psychology of email communication unleashes our dark side, making us rude, even nasty, or at least lacking in the consideration that we apply to letter composition.
■ People feel pressured to keep up with the ever-filling inbox because a failure to reply to email within a few hours can lead to loss of trust and relationship difficulties.
■ There is emerging evidence that the brain is becoming hard-wired for instant gratification and that email is part of the rewiring process.
■ The hours spent dealing with email interfere with workday productivity and keep people in the office and away from family and friends.
Support for the last claim, particularly from the corporate sector, is accumulating like flies on dog dirt. A recent British newspaper report declared email ''a broken business tool'' that had become the new time-waster, like coffee and cigarettes. Sharon McNevin, of Sydney-based Email Management Solutions, reckons ''it doesn't seem to matter what corporations try to do. Software solutions don't work … they need to address the cultural problems.''
McNevin, citing Microsoft research, says we spend an average of 14.5 hours a week reading and answering email and the time we spend looking for and analysing information costs companies $28,000 per employee per year. And based on her work with local businesses, McNevin suspects it is getting worse. A US study found that broadband access in the workplace had ''increased the number of web pages viewed by individuals by 55 per cent and increased the amount of time spent online by 23 per cent''.
However, Dr Brad West, a sociologist with Flinders University, sees the personal use of email in the workplace as reflecting new work practices where employees self-manage their time and are kept tied to the mast for longer periods. ''It's a trade-off. Workers will use email for non-work purposes during the working day, but in exchange they have new demands on them which often means there is a fuzzy line between work and home.''
We might be busy with email, but are we actually addicted? University of Technology Sydney anthropologist Dr Jonathan Marshall says the number of people who have lost their wages or home because they check their email is probably quite small. ''If there is any validity to this point about addiction, it is simply that we live in a society which encourages addiction … Email just becomes part of the wider pattern.'' Marshall suspects that apart from people who are expecting a specific message, the only people checking their inboxes 40 times a minute ''would generally be people who are bored out of their skulls and seeking the only stimulation they get at work or, if they are really depressed, at home''.
Dr David Holmes, senior lecturer in communications and media studies at Monash University, says Freeman's addiction thesis can perhaps be better explained by seeing email less as an exchange of information than as a ritual. ''I agree that many email users are feverish about checking their mail. But the same persons are probably very anxious about receiving printed mail also,'' he says.
''The difference with the online experience is that it is an 'always-on' technology … The addiction lies not in discovering what is there, but what is not there. It is about being satisfied that there is nothing that constitutes a gift, an unsolicited communication, that is not simply a functional reply, but is distinguished, sincere content that is the internet's equivalent to 'breaking news' on the TV.''
According to associate professor Peter Corrigan, of the school of behavioural, cognitive and social sciences at the University of New England, compulsive use of email reveals our fears of being left alone. ''The receipt of an email proves that we actually exist for others … The more we need validation from others … the harder it is to switch off,'' he says.
This may be why teens spend so much time being connected to others through texting and emails, Corrigan says. ''In some ways this is a sign of the higher-than-usual chances of that particular social group not lasting.''
FREEMAN'S contention that email makes us rude, even malevolent, inspires a shrug from University of Sydney anthropologist Dr Stephen Juan. ''Disinhibition leading to rudeness also exists on the buses, trains and on the roads,'' he says. ''We are experiencing an age of rudeness. The reasons for this would constitute another article.''
But Jonathan Marshall sees it differently, arguing that email brings about a different class of behaviour because of its lack of visual cues. It can be hard to tell if people are responding to you or like what you have written, he says. Emailers who maintain polite discourse may lack a sense of how they are being received. If you are unpleasant, on the other hand, you will almost certainly get a response from somebody, Dr Marshall says. ''Then you know you exist and the response is a reinforcement of your existence, so you do it again.''
If this is true, it lends weight to the idea that we become anxious or even angry when our emails are not promptly answered and that relationships are subsequently strained.
Associate professor Julie Fitness, an evolutionary psychologist at Macquarie University, agrees with this notion, saying it has become the norm to feel anxious and aggrieved if emails are not answered right away. In her own profession, her students complain bitterly when a response is slow in coming. But responding to this kind of pressure just increases it, Professor Fitness says. The more often and sooner we answer the incessant, demanding emails, the more we reward the emailer.
''We are laying ourselves wide open, saying my time belongs to everybody,'' she says.
One of John Freeman's most interesting arguments is that ''the boundlessness of the internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits … the overheated capacity of our minds''.
Stephen Juan sees this as possibly true, but notes we have ''no data that we have reached the human mental breaking point''.
Maybe we're not at breaking point, but some cracks are showing. A Hewlett-Packard study found that workers who are constantly distracted by email and phone calls suffer a temporary 10-point fall in their IQ, more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana. Plus, there is evidence that our limited working memory is being sorely tested by email.
PROFESSOR John Sweller, of UNSW, is an educational psychologist who came up with the influential ''cognitive load'' theory, which refers to the load of working memory during learning. Regarding cognitive load and email, he says: ''A large number of emails on disparate topics all of which need to be handled 'now' can overwhelm humans' limited working memory with occasional disastrous consequences such as emails sent to the wrong people with information we would probably prefer was not sent.''
Glitches or weariness is one thing, but is the brain being rewired to adapt to digital living? Juan says the data is lacking. ''However, science has taught us that the brain is continually reworking its synapses. So this rewriting is possible.''
There is some evidence that this adaptation is already in play, notably among younger people. US research found that ''digital natives'' (people born into the online age) seem to adapt better to online information-gathering, simultaneously managing to maintain a more balanced relationship between the online world and that occupied by friends and family. Better, that is, than ''digital tourists'' (the older folk, who grew up doing things more slowly).
Beilharz says: ''If you joined a university in the last few years, that's the way the world works. If you entered 20 years ago, you can see it has significant effect on the capacity to do other things. Time spent on email is time not spent on doing other things.'' Such as the job one is paid to do.
In 2005, Professor David Levy, of the University of Washington's information school in Seattle, published a paper arguing that ''the accelerating pace of life is reducing the time for thoughtful reflection, and in particular for contemplative scholarship''. Professor Levy illustrates how the blessing and curse of the internet is notably ironic and bittersweet for academics. ''The loss of time to think is occurring at exactly the moment when scholars, educators and students have gained access to digital tools of great value to scholarship.''
In 2006, Levy started running a course called Information and Contemplation. It teaches students how to slow down their thinking to a contemplative pace, as a response to ''the speedy, fragmented and inattentive mind states that digital technologies seem to encourage''.
But what about the rest of us?
John Freeman suggests we cut down our inbox access to twice a day. ''And wherever possible, don't send.'' Speaking from New York, Freeman says he hasn't managed to get his own usage down to twice a day. ''I try and check it five to seven times a day rather than minute to minute.
''I could write emails all day long. The more emails I write and reply to, the more I will get … But I don't check it when I get up in the morning. I have breakfast with my girlfriend. If I'm going to have to work, I won't blend work with chatter. But it's like a Pandora's box, your mind starts to drift.''
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
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