Throughout the article, Turkle provides a series of examples to support her claim: families text during dinner; students socialize online during class; executives text under the boardroom table. These are broken up with slightly longer anecdotes of troubled individuals she has encountered: a lonely businessman, a socially awkward teenager, and an elderly woman comforted by a robotic pet. Turkle believes these stories speak for themselves. But to me they read as a frustrating replacement for serious discussion.

The main problem with the piece is that Turkle’s evidence supports quite a different argument from the specific one she’d like to make. Many of Turkle’s examples show domestic and workplace changes decades in the making. For example, it is true that families spend almost 3 hours per day alone together, but according to time-use research, those hours are primarily spent in front of that age-old scourge: the television [source]. Students have always exercised selective attention during class, and businessmen have been lonely for a lot longer than social media have been around. Without a sense of scale, it’s impossible to place Turkle’s experiences in an appropriate context.

I’ll take one example apart to show you what I mean. I found Turkle’s tut-tutting about headphone-wearing knowledge workers particularly illuminating, since I happen to be one. Turkle writes “we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies…and then they put their earphones on; they turn their desks into cockpits.” As is her custom throughout the piece, Turkle conflates two separate trends here: walking/driving-while-distracted and self-imposed auditory isolation in the workplace. Hand-wringing about personal urban soundtracks is as old as the Walkman (have a look at the excellent book Doing Cultural Studies for more on this). And as for headphone-induced isolation in the workplace, I propose a much more direct culprit: open-plan offices. Both as a designer at a digital marketing agency and as a grad student in an academic lab I’ve worked in an open space where employees sit at desks all day mere feet from each other in pods, without even the privacy afforded by cubicles. Of course I’m going to wear headphones! I view it as common courtesy.

What’s most frustrating to me about all of this is that I actually yearn for some serious study of the challenges created by mediated communication, and both “The Flight from Conversation” and “Alone Together” are deeply unsatisfying in this regard. What we get in this article (and even more so in the book) is a series of stories hand-picked by Turkle to fill out an argument, rather than the other way around. Turkle describes the process of gathering these stories as “research” but it’s hard to see what’s systematic or ecologically valid about her process. The result is a combination of appeals to common sense (and the shared experiences of the typical reader of the New York Times) and sensational tales from the digital fringe.

I believe Turkle when she says that a greater portion of our connection with each other is now computer-mediated. But that’s all her evidence shows. There’s a big difference between a static communication economy (where in order for poking, liking and friending to increase, conversation must necessarily decrease) and a growing one (in which these new computer-mediated social practices replace non-social counterparts, increasing the overall time spent socializing). How much of this new ‘alone together’ time is supplanting rich interpersonal conversation, and how much is adding new connection opportunities? I don’t know. Serious scholars of social media need to know, and Turkle isn’t helping us.

At her best, Sherry Turkle is one of our great thinkers, and she offers some real insights. The ‘always on/always on you’ section (adapted from a book chapter of the same title) is the strongest material here. In this section, Turkle makes three testable, concise claims about the seductive effects of mobile communication devices. Turkle claims that these devices make us believe that 1) we will always be heard; 2) we can direct our attention at will; and 3) we never have to be alone. There’s truth in this, there’s structure, and it’s easy to see how these hypotheses could be tested.

But ultimately this clarity is transitory, and Turkle returns to rhetorical gimmicks. One of her favorites is the use of “we”. We are always communicating; we have sacrificed conversation; we text and shop and go on Facebook during dates; we shortchange ourselves; we are tempted; we ask each other simpler questions; we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective; we flee from solitude; we have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party (I still don’t know what that means). Who is the “we” Turkle refers to? It’s certainly not everyone. This is a neat trick; it’s the equivalent of one of those “restless leg syndrome” checklists. I certainly feel that I shortchange myself sometimes, that I am tempted to hit refresh on Facebook when I’m feeling bored, that I would like better conversations and more solitude in my life, that I should be more self-reflective. I must be the “we” Turkle’s talking about! But it’s still ultimately a trick. The “we” that most closely matches Turkle’s use of the term is someone who summers on Cape Cod, who’s regularly on the M.I.T. campus, and who attends meetings in board rooms. The more I think about it the more I feel sure that the person who most closely matches the “we” in “The Flight from Conversation” is Turkle herself.

So for me, Turkle’s argument is deeply flawed and demographically suspect. Even if it does represent a truth, at best it applies to WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people in the early years of the 21st century. So what can we learn from this? (Just kidding; this blog entry has been all about me as well) What can I learn from this?

I think the likeliest explanation is that much of what Turkle describes represents a sort of teething process. Social computing—like it or not—is part of a broader trend towards greater interpersonal dependency on a global scale. Humanity is becoming more interconnected economically, culturally and technologically, and it’s all happening at once. It’s a lot to take in. The rich and the technically inclined are the first to have to truly grapple with the everyday social implications of this shift, and because we’re treading fresh snow there are no tracks to show us the way.

Yes, let’s teach ourselves (and each other) to unplug. But as a research community, let’s also put these technologies to meaningful use. Let’s figure out how to use them as amplifiers for democratic change, to increase good “offline” habits and to reward healthy affirmation. Social computing technologies may seem superficial because researchers and entrepreneurs haven’t even begun to test their true potential. I see this as my life’s work. I’m eager to have a conversation with those of you who feel the same.

Mention my name in Sheboygan, and you might hear that I have some bulldog puppies for sale, or that I’m a reverend on the lam. If you believe my inbox, I also have a mother who keeps goats, run a B&B in Wales, book bands for my bar in Savannah, and promised to bring a keg to that one party.

Twenty nine years ago, I was born Andrew Donald Miller. I was in good company: Andrew was the 13th most popular boy’s name in the US during the 1980s, and growing up I always knew a few other Andrews. Donald fared less well, and my lifelong wariness of the name is borne out by the statistics: ‘Donald’ hit its peak of popularity during the Depression, and never recovered.  Combine a popular first name with Miller, a surname almost as bland as “Smith” (“Miller” is currently the 7th most popular surname in the US) and it’s surprising I don’t hear more of my namesakes’ exploits.

And hear of them I do. Once or twice a week I get an email intended for another Andrew Miller. As a result, I’ve had to become an expert human spam filter. When an errant email makes its way to my inbox, I scrutinize it to determine if it’s actually spam or an honest message gone astray. Usually I simply ignore it and hope the sender and their Andrew work it out, but sometimes I feel compelled to respond. My earliest and most prolific miscorrespondent is a woman who calls herself “GoatWoman2000″. When I first started getting email from her in 2007, I assumed it was spam. Here’s GoatWoman2000′s first email to me:

November 7, 2007

Oh my word, if you need a laugh…you have to

read this…from our pastor Lowell…just

WAY to funny!

Have a great day,  Jill, your mom, auntie

Note: forwarded message attached.

The message was seemingly innocuous, but I noted a few oddities. First, there’s the—let’s just admit it—porny name GoatWoman2000,  and the exhortation to open an attachment. Spam klaxons sounded, and I ignored it. But as the emails continued, sometimes multiple emails a week, I finally responded. By February 2008 (after several reply attempts) I began to realize that GoatWoman2000 wasn’t going away, and either she never read her own inbox or my replies were going into her spam filter. It was around this time that she started calling me “Eeyore”. A few months later, she began to send me photos of her goats. Most of the emails are religious forwards, annotated with statements like “for HIS glory!!!!!” and I’m legitimately confused as to whether she’s my mother, auntie, grandmother or great-grandmother. I think it’s possible that multiple people are using the email account, since I sometimes get emails from “Jill” and alternately from “Grammy” and sometimes from “Grammy and Jill”. Last year she started sending me e-cards. I’ve often wondered what the ‘real’ Andrew Miller thinks of all this. The emails are never urgent, and I can tell he sees GoatWoman occasionally. I wonder what relationship would sustain this kind of unreciprocated communication.

Most of my misdirected mail never gets that far. In the last few years, I’ve taken to signing my name “Andrew 2″ in my replies, partly to assuage senders’ embarrassment and partly so I can find the emails again. While I don’t reply to all of them, I seem to be getting a larger volume based on my reply rate. Last year I sent  24 “Andrew 2″ replies, and I’ve already sent 18 this year so far. Mostly the emails are from mothers whose sons don’t call home enough; in this respect I am average for my namesakes. Sometimes the emails are bizarrely accurate in some respects, like the one from Atlanta-based band “The Well Reds” (They’re good! You should check them out.) After an exchange with their frontman (who was hoping to book a show at my bar) I bought their EP, and they autographed it. Sometimes my namesakes are far-flung: last year I got an email from a travel agent wishing me a safe return from my honeymoon in Buenos Aires. After one exchange, I was invited to stay at my “relatives’” delightful hotel in Dorset, England. I haven’t been yet, but it’s on the list.

Most of the exchanges are light-hearted, and even pleasant. Until recently, the most serious exchange occurred when an accountant mistakenly sent me another Andrew Miller’s tax forms. But the bulldog emails, it turns out, were more pernicious. They started arriving late last year, one or two a month, and I just couldn’t figure them out. They came from different cities, but they all referred to my bulldog puppies for sale. There didn’t seem to be any apparent criminal motive. I never imagined that “I” was the one doing the scamming!  It turns out that another Andrew Miller has been blanketing small newspapers with classified ads for bulldog puppies. When unsuspecting dog-lovers email him, he replies with photos of puppies and asks them to send him their credit card info for fast puppy delivery. Just a classic scam, really. In retrospect, I’m actually glad for the people who mistakenly emailed me — hopefully their error prevented them from being duped. But I do feel a little tarnished by the whole experience, as if my Andrew Miller-ness was being challenged. And about that “Sheboygan” reference: I really did get an email recently from someone who read my bulldog ad in the Sheboygan Sun.

Now I’ll admit that I’m a co-participant in this digital identity play. As an early adopter, I’ve been quick to stake my claim on as many digital properties as I can. I own AndrewMiller.net, my name at gmail.com, @andrewmiller on Twitter, Facebook.com/andrewdmiller and many others. Just this morning I signed up for Spotify (I’m andrewdmiller). But despite the occasional mistweet, email is far and away the main source of confusion. Last October another Andrew Miller even offered to buy it from me (I declined). But the medium itself is also to blame. I have friends of friends on Facebook with my exact name, but we never get confused because modern social systems have a more robust identity system. You don’t just Facebook message someone out of the blue; they have to be in your contacts list already. An email address is much more like a phone number in this way; imagine being one digit off from the phone number of a pizzeria and you get the idea. People simply remember that their friend said something like “it’s my name at gmail” and type it in. But I can’t change my name as easily as one could change a phone number. My name is my label, and to change an email address because it contains my own name seems like a tough price to pay. So far it’s been a minor annoyance. But if an Andrew Miller were to do something truly bad, I’d have to change my email address or switch away from email entirely and move to a walled garden like Facebook or Google+. Email is the most open and accessible direct communication medium ever invented, but this flexibility comes with some tradeoffs.

I’m not the first to write about these issues. Fellow Georgia Tech student Nirmal Patel wrote eloquently about his own name, and its meaning in Anglo-centric America. English comedian Dave Gorman has mined his own (surprisingly unusual) name for two entertaining books about searching for his namesakes: “Are You Dave Gorman?” and “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure“. The Freakonomics guys wrote a fascinating piece about baby names and race over at Slate.

But I’d hope to add a note to the conversation: that having a common name can be as enlightening as having an unusual one. Our names are the first gifts we get from the outside world. They brand us with cultural, temporal, even racial markers. Mine has connected me to a whole world of other Andrews, and reminds me, once in a while, of how big that world really is. So here’s a toast to all my other Andrews brothers: be well, do good work, and call your mother, will you?

—Andrew 2

Full text [PDF]

I know my relationship to social media is abnormal; I essentially study social network sites for a living. And yet there was nothing cyberpunk or early-adopter about the experience or my desire to share. It’s simply the way a milestone life event happens in 2011. And in generalities, it’s very similar to the way a marriage proposal has always been propagated. In Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, for example, there’s a telling scene in which Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the mother of Mr. Darcy’s intended, rushes round to the home of Eliza Bennet to castigate her for agreeing to marry Mr. Darcy, a proposal he has yet to make! (If you haven’t read the excellent Austenbook go now. I’ll be waiting.) The key difference seems to be that in our case, the message came directly to our friends’ news feeds. Within minutes, the congratulatory messages began pouring in from across the world.

So I was struck by a talk Sherry Turkle gave as part of the promotional tour for her new book “Alone Together” in which she asserted (among many other things) that we have gone from having a feeling and wanting to share it to sharing in order to have a feeling. She argues that social media technology, particularly phone-based messaging and social network apps, have reworked our reward centers and warped our experience of life. But for an event like an engagement, the point of the whole exercise is to affirm your love in the eyes of your family, friends and acquaintances. It’s always been performative, it’s just now the articulation is more discrete. I accepted the proposal on the top of the hill, but I became engaged when my world knew I had done so. If this sounds cold to you, ask a married couple when they felt they were married: when they signed the papers in the courthouse (something I hope to do someday) or when they affirmed their marriage in a ceremony in front of their friends and relations.

I did, however, notice something in the past week that Turkle didn’t mention in her talk but which bears thinking about: what happens to those who live off the network? Robert and I sing in a choir every week and some of the choir members are our friends on Facebook but most are not. When we arrived at rehearsal this week, we were met with hugs and congratulations from our Facebook friends, and brief puzzlement from our offline-only acquaintances. While their congratulations (after being informed) were equally as heartfelt, I can’t help thinking that the gap between those on the network and those cut off from it had a real effect. So while sites like Facebook might strengthen weak ties within the network (as I believe they did over the last week), they might reciprocally weaken offline-only weak ties.

The morning after we got engaged, we boarded a plane for Atlanta and returned to our daily lives (and really, the transition from Scotland to Atlanta has got to be one of the most jarring within the English-speaking world). And while our Facebook announcements may have been par for the course these days, we did add an Internet twist: we ordered custom engagement rings on Etsy.

We discuss the development and ongoing evaluation of The American Horsepower Challenge, a pedometer- based fitness game for middle school students that is being used in over 60 schools across the United States.

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]]> http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/stepping-outside-the-classroom-fitness-video-games-for-k-12-settings/feed/ 0 http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/horsepower-challenge/ http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/horsepower-challenge/#comments Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:40:33 +0000 andrew http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/horsepower-challenge/
A mobile application for managing your
financial life. iPhone version just released
in Hong Kong!]]> Studying a pedometer-based fitness game for middle school students Platforms: Website, sensors Developed by Humana Games For Health and sponsored by The Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., the American Horsepower Challenge (AHPC) is a game that turns everyday walking activity into a team sport. AHPC addresses two trends: a decrease in youth physical activity levels and an increase in online and computer-based social play. As part of the Georgia Tech-based research team, I’ve been following the participants in this competition over two school years by collecting step data, surveying stakeholders in the game, conducting focus groups and individual interviews with students and teachers.

Studying a pedometer-based fitness game for middle school students Platforms: Website, sensors Developed by Humana Games For Health and sponsored by The Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., the American Horsepower Challenge (AHPC) is a game that turns everyday walking activity into a team sport. AHPC addresses two trends: a decrease in youth physical activity levels and an increase in online and computer-based social play. As part of the Georgia Tech-based research team, I’ve been the participants in this competition over two school years by collecting step data, surveying stakeholders in the game, conducting focus groups and individual interviews with students and teachers.

I became active in the project in the fall of 2009, and helped conduct on-site interviews and focus groups. I am now contributing to the qualitative analysis of our interview data, and have participated in presentations of our findings to Humana. This project is closely related to my own research, and is helping to inform my methodological approach as I plan my own deployments.

The continuing epidemics of diabetes and obesity create much need for information technologies that can help individuals engage in proactive health management. Yet many of these technologies focus on such pragmatic issues as collecting and presenting health information and modifying individuals’ behavior. We argue that viewing health management from an identity construction perspective opens new opportunities for research and design in technologies for health.

Full text [PDF]

This age of social data presents us with a new set of tools for self-presentation and peripheral awareness, and countless new ways to be awkward. For example, a former colleague used to update twitter so comprehensively that he even tweeted his bathroom breaks. But such early-stage hiccups are not the big story here – every electronic medium has its own specific “reply all” potential. The real change is the new computational layer mediating our interactions with each other and our environment. Using FourSquare on my iPhone, I can tell people when I’m at a bar (or when I’m actually in the office for a change!). Using Google Reader I can share blog entries or newspaper articles I find interesting, and attach a short note (especially important if irony is involved). Using Last.fm I can share what music I’m listening to right now, and anyone who clicks through to my profile can get a pretty good picture of my music-listening preferences. Facebook lets me share all of the above, as well as update my status and comment on any of my friends’ actions. And of course, there’s Twitter, which I use mainly as a way to stay in touch with techie friends in academia and industry, but which often veers into in-jokes and gossipmongering anyway.

In fact I create so much social data every day, that when setting up my ‘lifestream’ I found myself selecting a subset of all the possible data I could push. I told myself at the time that this was to avoid the andrewmiller.net visitor from feeling overwhelmed, but really it was an exercise in self-curation – the selection of information about myself that I wanted to represent me as if it were my real-time CV. I chose to make this a service-level decision, excluding FaceBook (which is where I discuss emotional, political, and other semi-private topics). But I have on occasion gone in and removed certain tweets that for one reason or another I felt were not appropriate for andrewmiller.net but I didn’t feel like removing from Twitter.

I admit I’m an early test-case, but I think we’re months, not years away from my generation having to deal with these issues. As services like FaceBook open up our homepages to the public (or at least allow us to do so) and as services like Twitter, with a culture of public sharing, reach mass adoption, our virtual and physical identities are going to have to merge. This is one of the central issues I’m trying to unpack in the Human-Centered Computing program here at Georgia Tech, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Comment, shoot me an email, send me a tweet @andrewmiller or whatever other channel you’d like.