On Hamlet’s Blackberry
Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted. I blame the fact that I’m working now. How silly. Luckily, I have a backlog of things I want to write about, of which this is the first installment.
The May 23rd edition of the NPR show On The Media (yes, they capitalize the ‘the’) was about the future of paper. (I actually heard it on the 25th of May on my local station.) It covered a variety of angles to the story, such as e-paper and on-demand publishing, but what I found most interesting was an interview with a fellow (and Shorenstein Fellow) by the name of William Powers. In his paper entitled Hamlet’s Blackberry, he argues (among other things) that what makes paper so enduring as a medium despite decades-long predictions of its impending demise is the way we humans interact with it, and the information it transmits to us.
For example, when reading a long article, paper, essay, or book on a computer, information about how far through the work you must be obtained using the eyes and brain, by looking at a scroll bar or other indicator that tells you that you are on page 21 of 50. A reader of a book, in contrast, knows their progress by simply feeling how think each half of the book is. How often have you said to yourself, “Oh, I’m halfway through!” about an online article? There is a distinct cognitive difference, which makes for a different reading experience.
Another trait of paper is that it offers no distractions. I will admit that even as I write this post, I have not read in its entirety the essay on which I am commenting. This is because computers make it psychologically easier to skim. We want to find the singular piece of information we are looking for, then move on. Sustained reading on a computer screen is not something we have adapted to (Or is it that computers have not adapted to the conditions we find conducive to sustained reading?). I have read much of the essay, but I keep finding myself coming back to continue the post, look something up on Wikipedia, check the weather, etc. Paper, of course, would leave me with no option but to read what is at hand, which is a gift to those of us with disappointingly short attention spans.
Personally, I don’t know where paper is headed. Even as I try to elimitate as much paper as possible from my life (I am among the 15% of people mentioned in Powers’s essay who have opted not to receive paper bank statements), I find that I can get through a newspaper article much more easily if it is printed on paper. I also find that ideas flow more easily when I hand-write a personal letter, although perhaps the slower pace at which words can be written on paper allows for more advance thought, which leads to the perception of more contiuous writitng. Ultimately, I don’t know.
The Cost of Text Messaging
A couple of weeks ago there was an post in a New York Times blog about the cost of text messaging that I would like to briefly recap here. A British space scientist, Nigel Bannister, ran some quick numbers and concluded that
“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is [about 10 cents]. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 10 cents each, that’s [$734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte].”
So basically, consumers have allowed mobile phone companies to charge literally astronomical rates to send a text message: we pay at least 4.4 times as much to send a text message than NASA does to download data from the Hubble Space Telescope (in cost per unit data, anyway). I can’t believe we put up with that. Disgusting, I think.
The Uselessness of Public Transit, thanks to Google
I don’t know how long Google Maps has been able to give directions using public transportation, because I’m sure Detroit has been late to that party. Now that there are some places in my area that Google tells me I can get to by bus (the only form of public transportation we’ve got, not that I’ve ever used it), it’s been really interesting to compare how long they estimate it would take to drive a route versus riding the bus.
With the perfect storm of peak oil, climate change, and enriching some unsavory characters (i.e. funding both sides of a war), I would love to be able to take the bus. Here’s why I don’t:
- From my house to the local college
- Driving: 10 minutes
- Bus: 55 minutes, including a 35-minute walk
- From my house to my yoga studio
- Driving: 6 minutes
- Bus: 42 minutes, only 2 of which are on the bus
- From my house to my dad’s workplace
- Driving: 17 minutes
- Bus: 2 hours, 48 minutes
Pretty pathetic.
… and I have a problem
I admit it: I am an information addict. It really is a problem, a problem which is made worse by the fact that I have not been doing a whole lot these past few months. The problem manifests itself in my inability to pull myself away from the computer even when I am not doing anything useful. I am always checking and rechecking to see if anyone has posted anything new to various forums or Facebook, seeing if I have any new email, or checking the news and weather.
I certainly can’t say that this addiction problem has interfered with my success in other endeavors. After all, I did manage to do quite well in college and get into a master’s program in addition to managing to write a blog post now and then (and even create a whole blog site) without getting too sidetracked by NetNewsWire. (Ironically, I started using NetNewsWire in the hopes that having everything aggregated in one place would prevent me from browsing around so much. I don’t think it’s done that.) And it isn’t like there aren’t other things I’d love to read, like, for example, books. But there’s something so addictive about the computer. It really is horrible.
In yoga there has been talk of quitting the newspaper, and while I can appreciate why someone would want to do that, it seems like something of a contradiction: how can one be a caring citizen if they are not well informed? I have at least started to turn off the radio (generally tuned to NPR) while I drive.
Here’s the new rule: forums no more than once a day for twenty minutes unless it’s work-related. (There, it’s out in public, so now I really have to stick to it.)
I think the big thing I need to get into my head is that it doesn’t matter if someone posts something new. My life is not going to change. Checking Apple’s website once a day is plenty. Ok, I need to go see if any Adium Trac tickets are updated….
West Coast vs. Midwest
There seems to be a distinct difference between West Coast companies and those from elsewhere in the country, with those from the midwest being the absolute worst. Maybe there’s something in sea breeze that makes people do things right.
I decided to try Mint.com (Mountain View, CA) today, and I was absolutely blown away. It is so well done and feels so much like a real app that when I needed to go to my bank’s website to check something, rather than go for the ’switch tab’ keyboard shortcut I reached for the ’switch app’ shortcut. It’s as if I subconsciously forgot I was using a web app! Starting with the sign-up process, everything seems to work exactly the way it should. For example, when typing in my ZIP code, it made an AJAX request and automatically retrieved the name of my city. Why doesn’t everybody do that? I added my accounts (which was an almost flawless process), and away it went. It’s really an incredible application.
Since I had that up and running, I decided to glance through my account information and noticed that my car payment is due tomorrow, and it will be the first payment since switching my payment method to “Direct Automatic Pay” with my auto financing provider (Detroit, MI). I figured I’d double-check that everything was set up for that, and I found the following on the Account Center section of their website:
- I had no pending payments
- I had not registered a checking account for direct payment
- The direct payment option was grayed out
- It would not let me change payment methods
- When I tried to re-register my bank account, the results were ambiguous at best
Finding this somewhat worrisome, I immediately set up an online payment with my bank (Chicago, IL/Troy, MI) — which spawned way more browser windows than I wanted — then called the auto financing people to work it out.
Amazingly, I got through to a customer service rep. in about 1.5 rings with no hold time (after navigating through a bunch of touch-tone stuff, of course), and it turns out that everything was set up fine, and that four business days before a payment is due, they gray out the payment method because they’re already prepping the transfer. Now, I don’t understand why it takes 3-5 business days to electronically transfer money from one institution to another, but that’s a whole different story. At the very least, the website should have told me that I have a payment pending, to be withdrawn tomorrow, that I have a bank account set up and properly linked to my account, and that I can’t change the payment because of this limitation. But no.
Oh, not to mention that I thought maybe there was a browser compatibility issue, so I switched to Firefox from Safari, and in Firefox there was a nasty formatting bug that pushed some text onto a new line that absolutely should not have been there.
Dear Midwest,
It’s no longer acceptable to put a few ugly GIF images on an even uglier front-end to your database and call that Online Services like you could in 1996. Take a page from Mint, Google, and the rest of the Mountain View crowd and I bet you’ll be able to run your online services with fewer people, using better technology, and have higher customer satisfaction. Until then, I guess I’ll have to hope that I can get through to phone reps as quickly as I did today.
Your customer (because I have no other options),
Noah
Simplify, simplify, simplify
The following is an excerpt from my School of Information application essay:
Our society is inundated with information. We crave it. We’re addicted to it, and we know it. Blackberrys are called CrackBerrys, some states have found it necessary to make it illegal to check email while driving, and I was personally disappointed to find out that my preferred RSS feed reader can update no more frequently than twice an hour. Too many of us live in a state of “continuous partial attention,” never fully applying ourselves to a given task because one eye is always on the inbox or browser window. The societal issues this causes — car accidents, reduced productivity, inferior workmanship, loss of true interpersonal connection — dictate that information professionals must play a role in addressing this epidemic of information addiction. Technology alone cannot solve these problems; indeed, while the problems I describe have been exacerbated by technology, they predate electronic information technology, as related by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 classic Walden: “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.” Just as technology helps feed this craving for information, so, too, can technology help reduce the craving.
