I think had Alex pushed farther, he would have probably detected fear prompting the defensive thinking posture he (we) adopted. Fear of rejection, fear of not being good enough, fear of not being perfect, fear of not being loved. There are damn few Socrates in the world whose motivations are not based on fear; for the rest of us, I think we adopt that intellectual camouflage and hope for the best.

And I loved this description of one of the risks we run by overindulging our penchant for thinking over a livelier balance between thought and action:

Believing advice is the greatest help we can provide others who are suffering. It’s not. The greatest gift we can provide others who are suffering is encouragement—encouragement that draws its power from our having experienced similar sufferings that we’ve overcome ourselves.

Anyway, his post reminded me for some reason of this wonderful Alexander Theroux quote from his novel Laura Warholic:

I decided at one point in my life that I never wanted to be anything that would not allow me to be anything else I wanted to be … I ended up being nothing that I can currently identify, which I suppose means I got my wish.

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One might add the Bad Writing Fairy; sometimes re-reading fondly remembered pulp adventures from my junior high school years (I’m looking at you, Doc Savage) highlights the sheer awfulness of the prose.

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The essay I tore out and kept in my “Essays” folder lo these many years was by the writer Norman Lavers, now retired from teaching English and enthusiastically maintaining a site on The Robber Flies of Crowley’s Ridge, Arkansas. If you want to know all there is to know about these vicious critters, that’s the site for you.

The essay he wrote, titled “On the Simple Life,” is a fine personal essay that sweeps over the course of his life, the choices he made, and the choices he continues to make. It’s a cranky, curmudgeonly view of the modern world. He preaches about retiring early in your life and then going to work, being frugal with your time, money, and attention (“kill your TV” advice), and generally simplifying your life by letting go of the things that aren’t needed in favor of the essentials that honor you.

The reason I kept the essay, I think, was that he put into words something I’d not seen up to that point. I’ve seen it since (Stutzman mentions it in my previous post) but I’ve come back to it so much in my mind that I thought I’d put the passages here.

He compares the bombardment of TV images to the Web’s bombardment of opinion, flash, etc. You can guess his opinion.

Get off the internet. Oh, how can I? It’s got everything on it. Exactly, and you’re letting it all into your house and into your mind. Be more selective…[O]n the net, I have my privacy. You don’t, you’ve let the whole world in. You’ve let everybody in, and yet no one’s there. Virtual people have invaded your privacy. They’re god-awful boring, but you’re too mesmerized to respond by turning them off…

An essential part of getting off the web is: Don’t do e-mail. But it’s so convenient, so cheap, you will tell me. That’s the problem. ..I inveighed against e-mail in one of my classes and a girl said, “Oh, but this is how I’ve been able to keep in touch with all my friends from high school. Without e-mail I couldn’t have done it.” I was too polite, of course, to say, You should be leaving those kids behind and getting on with your life. If you wouldn’t have kept in touch without e-mail, it means you probably shouldn’t be keeping in touch now. They are getting in the way of your maturing.

If someone distant wants to get in touch with me, he’s going to have to sit down and write me a letter. It takes time, it costs the price of a stamp. He’s going to have to say something that will still be valid several days later when I receive his letter. If I’m not worth it to him, then his emailed Have a nice day! is not worth my receiving…If I had e-mail, I would have a sort of obligation to checked to see what I had each day, and 99% of it (to judge by what my friends say) would be trash, another invasion of privacy. With letters, they come in the box, you can open them when you’re ready, read them a few times, answer at your leisure, It’s a more humane rhythm. Letters can approach to literature. Can you imagine wanting to read Keats’s collected e-mail notes? E-mail is like television: you do it because it is free and easy–but in return it takes away your time, and for one good thing you get from it, you get 99 things of dross. If you are actively doing literary or scientific research, where real information is being exchanged, or if it’s part of your job, okay, yes. For communication with people, no.

Lavers’ preferred mode of engagement is to grow one’s own creative projects, having to do with art or with nature, activities that take you out of yourself and place you in a state of meditation. Hence his enthusiasm with the Robber Flies.

Yes, it’s over the top, but I like his firm this-is-how-it-is tone, which is what makes reading essays fun. Certainly, junk mail is an invasion of privacy, and one is not ever obligated to return an email immediately after it’s been received.

But I was struck by Lavers’ point about e-mail keeping alive relationships that should probably die a natural death and Fred’s point about middle-aged Facebook users reconnecting with people from their high school and college days 20 or more years before. There is the warm flush of remembering what we used to be like, and there’s a pleasing nostalgia that’s surely fine to experience now and then, if only to remind us that maybe those old days weren’t so bad. But we aren’t those people anymore, and I don’t wish to go back to that foreign country anymore. (A no-prize for whoever gets that literary reference!) And the economics of energy, time, and attention are such that we only have resources for the immediate, not the distant.

When I entered NCSU in 1979, I kept in touch with a few friends from high school (some of whom were in my freshman classes) but by my sophomore year, I was in a new world with new friends. When I left college, it took longer to separate myself from that comfortable world, but I eventually landed in Rocky Mount and started a new life there. I left in 1988 and brought no one with me from my 4 years there. If email had been around then, how long would I have stayed attuned to the local gossip, the dramas? I don’t know. Given my state of mind and emotions at the time, I would probably have kept up an unhealthy level of attachment. It was good for me that email and FB weren’t around back then.

Instead, I did (and still do) as Lavers suggested: I wrote letters. Letters to friends served as my journal, my writing practice, my meditation time. These days, with so little time available to me to get into the mindset that letter-writing demands, I send cards instead. I even send them to friends to who live nearby. There’s something just more special and personal to me when I see an envelope with a stamp and a handwritten address. I think it’s special enough to send to dear friends and I do it simply because I enjoy it. I don’t expect reciprocity or obligation–that’s not the reason to write to friends who’ve stood the test of time. One does it because of love and attachment and, I think, creative expression. Selfish reasons, ultimately, but delightful ones, as well.

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Fred Stutzman is a PhD student at SILS and the creator of numerous good things, among them ClaimID and the Mac-based Freedom (which I used today to good effect).

He has a blog, Unit Structures, and tends to post announcements of upcoming events or good ‘n’ chewy postings related to his research interests of social networking and social software.

I liked today’s post very much, which ties into one of my favorite aphorisms, from Louis Pasteur: “Opportunity favors the prepared mind.” The lesson is that although passion for your product can pull you through the low times, you still need basic presentation skills if you want to be heard. My favorite line:

Notably, the research found that having taken public speaking lessons was a significant factor, indicating that communication skill, if not passion, was still important.

Digression 1: I’ve wondered about teachers who don’t take public speaking or presentation classes or workshops — or at the very least, some kind of vocal training. I know from the years I spent acting in amateur theater that a good voice was rare, but your own voice and presentation could be developed and made stronger. Certainly, professors get years of practice at speaking that most people who go to Toastmasters don’t get, but still — even in the classroom, it’s all about presentation.

Whenever Facebook is in the news, Fred usually has a considered and contextual opinion on the issue, with a prescription for how FB should move forward from this. Facebook’s recent misfire with its Terms of Service elicited a good-sized posting, with this as my favorite passage:

Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook as if it was a country. If Facebook were a country, it would more accurately resemble North Korea or China than the United States.

Fred also weighed in on the 25 Things meme that tagged all of us on FB, but uses it as a meditation on the phenomenon of refreshing or renewing dormant connections. I’m certainly seeing more people from my college years appearing on FB and connecting with me (or me touching base with them), and other friends are seeing high school chums reaching out to them. Fred wonders about the value of this activity:

We’ve all had the email or telephone reconnection with an old friend – after you have the getting-reacquainted conversation, is it really practical to re-integrate the individual into your life? More often than not, it simply isn’t practical (especially if geographic distance is a factor). This doesn’t take away from the wonder of reconnection and the warm feeling it produces – it just means that mediating technologies don’t change everything. Our everyday needs and processes exist higher up in the hierarchy of needs, and reconnection and maintenance of an extended social network is time-consuming.

Digression 2: I am, in fact, wondering how many of my current “cohort” at UNC I’ll be in touch with after the next 2 years. When I think of the places I’ve lived and worked, I’ve actually carried very few people with me from those places. When I left a job, I left my co-workers there. The time we spent was productive and intense and, I hope, enjoyable, but it wasn’t lasting, and the space I left behind was quickly filled.

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Her advice would be right-on to my 23-year-old self: I had very little direction, a graduate degree would have been wasted on me, and my next 25 years or so would be spent working (or not), gathering experience. and developing as a person.

The comments to her post are as opinionated, so she succeeded in stirring up some thoughts and opinions (much of it taking her to task–rightly–for her crack about the military.) Though I kind of understand her point — if you don’t have a direction, then entering grad school or the military could lead down paths that may not be right for you — it was a carelessly thought out remark.

As many of the commenters note, a graduate degree can bump up your pay grade (that’s what my employer does) and, after years of job-hopping, it can be useful to get a degree that tells the world — your bosses, your peers — that you do in fact know what you’re doing.

My manager is getting an MBA through NCSU and it’s been a transformative experience for him: he’s made great local contacts, he’s extended his skillset, and he now has a degree that qualifies him for bigger and better-paying jobs. Had he simply read the books and gone to local networking meet-ups, he would never have received the validation that he gets when he meets with his managers and with local executives in meetings set up by his school.

For myself, I have enjoyed my master’s experience tremendously. One of the most important things I learned was that I can apply my odd agglomeration of skills and abilities to more than the narrow band of activities I’ve grown accustomed to. The other important thing was that it awoke my intellectual side, which the last 25 years of work has rather successfully smothered (except when it was useful to the project, of course). And I’ve found my professors to be up to date on what’s happening in the big ol’ world outside of Manning and to be very generous with introductions to people they know in academe and industry, thus extending my personal network.

Still, her article is one of those goads that my reticular activating system has been sending my way as I contemplate the PhD. Does it make sense to leave a guaranteed paycheck to go to school full-time in this economy? Will I be able to find work as a 50-something PhD when I graduate? What, really, do I want to do with my life and will grad school help me get there?

That’s the real question I think Penelope means for her readers to ask themselves.

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• Gruen, D., Rauch, T., Redpath, S., & Ruettinger, S. (2002). The use of stories in user experience design. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(3&4), 503-534.
• Head, A. J. (2003). Personas: setting the stage for building usable information sites. Online, 27(4), 14-21.

<<In class, we wrote sample story/scenarios, and I refer to a great story written by a classmate about a guy at a party who is covertly listening to his music while grudgingly assisting his wife with hosting a house party.>>

I thought the story about the guy at the party trying to hide the earphone was great–it worked as a complete vignette, the character had a secret (which puts the reader on his side), and it has a nice curlicue at the end. It’s complete in itself but could fit nicely inside a larger story about this character.

OK, now *that* I would consider a story, more so than the scenarios we read in the IBMers’ paper.

I’ve been writing short stories off and on since college and did a couple of NaNoWriMo stints, so here’s what I think about the narrative devices used to create stories that could be used for scenarios.

CHARACTERS. Some of the best ways to create a character include starting with an archetype (the Scrooge type, the strong and silent type, the talkative type, the Type A type), someone you know, or a fictional character you know really well. As you write and spend time with the character, you’ll get to know them better and their own personality emerges, especially as you put them in difficult situations.

You can create an amalgam character or persona, but one person that has many different kinds of tags (like the primary persona in the Personas article we read) can seem a little unreal to me, very manufactured. At that point, I think you’re checking stuff off a list rather than creating an imaginary character that *seems* real, which is the goal of fiction. I’d suggest starting simple and then adding stuff as it feels right.

One of the age-old questions to ask about a character to get your imagination primed, is to ask yourself what the character eats for breakfast. This is also a good opening question to loosen up interview subjects, BTW.

PLOT. The IBMers don’t talk about the mechanics of plotting, which is one of the toughest jobs in story-writing. A story’s theme is what the story’s about; the story’s plot is this happened, then that happened, then this other thing happened.

Samuel R. Delany has a technique he calls “thickening the plot,” in which the writer describes the setting in detail and gets the character interacting with it. So in the party story, we see the character moving around the house, taking things to the kitchen, anything to disengage himself from the party. People trying to talk to him, him turning to hide the earpiece, all help to thicken the plot and ratchet the tension that he’ll be discovered.

RACHETING THE TENSION. In the party story, the tension is, “Will he be discovered?” There’s no such tension in the IBM stories because, really, what’s at stake for the characters? Nothing much. Particularly, that last story iteration they did was all Star Trek technobabble, there were too many characters (so no one person a reader could care about), and there was really no tension or emotion. (I’d say this is a danger of stories in the IBM method, in which lots of people start using the story as a dumping ground for their ideas and you start losing the main thread.)

But tugging on heartstrings isn’t what scenarios are supposed to do; they’re mainly of use to engage your imagination so you see the whole problem space, not just a little piece of it. (The other advantage being they get the picture and expectations from inside your head into someone else’s head.)

The best IBM story was the one where the guy was installing software at 3 a.m. because the workers would be coming to do their jobs in a few hours. A ticking-bomb deadline is tried and true. I’d say that even the Madeline scenario <<a scenario provided by the professor, of someone using a health-care information system>> could use a ticking-bomb urgency, if the waiting room is crowded, people are being processed quickly, and the subject needs to hurry up so he can get back to work.

GOALS AND OBSTACLES. This is plot. An interesting character in an interesting situation creates the plot naturally without too much intervention. In the case of scenarios, we could introduce massive power failures, ice storms, zombies, etc. but they don’t really help us with our purpose, which is to design a good user experience. (Another case where stories diverge from scenarios.) I would call scenarios not stories but soap operas: just one damn thing after another, until the fadeout.

That said, yes, the protagonist wants something and is frustrated by a stupid UI, a deadline, ice storm, zombies, etc. which means that something has to be at stake for him or her, and there have to be consequences for failure. In the party story, the husband gambled with multiple consequences of being discovered, which is what made it entertaining (another difference from scenarios: scenarios don’t have to be entertaining, though they’re more fun to read if they are). In the Madeline scenario, what are the consequences of not understanding the UI? Will I feel sorry for that character if they can’t get the video working?

Here endeth another of my verbose postings. Carry on.

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• Go, K., & Carroll, J.M. (2004). The blind men and the elephant: Views of scenario-based system design. interactions, 11(6), 44-53.
• Gruen, D., Rauch, T., Redpath, S., & Ruettinger, S. (2002). The use of stories in user experience design. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(3&4), 503-534.

I thought the best thing about the Go and Carroll article was their listing of differences between scenarios and specifications (though it would have worked better as a table than as text) and their review of the literature surrounding the techniques. I also liked the breakdown of strategy/requirements/HCI planning to year/day/moments. Apart from those squibs, I thought the article was unbelievably dry and unimaginative (which is odd, considering they’re talking about the importance of imagination in creating scenarios); for one thing, they introduce the “blind men and the elephant” story in the lead without following it up in the rest of the article. Do scenarios help us see the elephant? Or do they only show us pieces? By the end of the article, we don’t know and the authors haven’t told us. (I wonder if the editor made them tack it on.)

The Gruen, et al., article by the IBMers I thought was more interesting and meaty; they seemed really in love with their new tool which seemed to have united disparate stakeholders within IBM as well as their clients. I also thought it was interesting how the stories could be decomposed for other audiences as well, down to the design, marketing, and documentation materials. They don’t attempt to speculate as to *why* they think stories unite audiences with differing needs, but I’d guess that we’re simply trained, from childhood onward, to think in terms of linear narrative. A page of prose describing someone solving a problem is easier to read and understand than a functional specification document, which requires a specialist to draft. Stories don’t require specialists.

Their descriptions of its use made it seem like a silver bullet, and I would have liked to know what, if any, limitations they encountered. How do they control their stories, to keep them from becoming distended or unbalanced when descriptions get too specific?

I’d also say that what they’re calling stories are not stories, but extended scenarios that use narrative devices like character, setting, plot, etc. The chief characteristic of a story is that the character is different at the end of the story than at the beginning. Their example scenarios don’t have that quality; they’re more like Star Trek problem stories: Picard is trapped on the holodeck–how do we get him out? No character in such stories really learns about himself or his life. The interest is mainly in seeing people spew technobabble and race against the clock.

Likewise, the IBM scenarios attempt to trap someone in a problem and watch them squirm to get out. The interest is in watching this particular character squirm (would a different character behave differently in the same situation?) and noting the details of what they do to solve their problem.

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Whittaker, Steve, and Candace Sidner. “Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email.” Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-18, 1996, 276-283.

From a records management POV, I had these thoughts:

• People are so overwhelmed when they’re in the thick of their email, that they can’t discern an immediate difference between the ephemeral and the archive-worthy. (This is even though they describe their jobs as mostly managing email.) For this reason also, we can’t depend on them to prune their stash of mails.
• If the users can’t categorize their mails so they can locate them, then records managers will have even less success at helping anyone find them later.
• If we’re faced with having to archive everything, then nothing is of value. You can’t find the needle if you keep adding hay to the stack.
• If we establish retention policies, then we’re the only ones who will follow them. I perceive these users as being so busy, that they will think of archiving as someone else’s job. They already have too much work to do.
• The article doesn’t address the issue of file attachments (I use Gmail for file storage as much as for communication) or of the corporation owning your email. File attachments are as important as emails these days.
• Again, it’s not mentioned, but users are more likely to hear from corporate IT that their inboxes are taking up too much storage space and that’s when they have to purge. At [previous workplaces], we took training now and then on retaining records, but you hear more often that you need to trim down your mailbox size.

Other stray thoughts and babblements:

• This article was written over 10 years ago, and I wonder what biases or expectations the authors and the users brought to the topic of email and email programs. What were they expecting email programs to do for them?
• Having used Lotus Notes at various jobs since about 1995 or so, I can testify that its general yuckiness contributed mightily to the users’ problems. Although Notes has added buttons to let you copy a mail into a calendar or to-do entry, those are areas of Notes that users I’ve worked with know very little about, like the Journal or To Do areas. You can make Notes remind you to do things regarding your mail or tasks arising from it, but it requires you to click buttons and takes you away from the inbox, which seems to be everyone’s home base. When people leave the inbox pane, Notes is a lot more forbidding and cold, with toolbars and commands appearing that don’t have anything to do with email. (Which makes sense–Notes is a document database program with an apparently sophisticated macro programming language, and these toolbars and commands help with database and record manipulation; an email is just another document in the database to Notes, but that’s not how users see an email record. I read somewhere that the original developers built the email app originally just to show what could be done with the language; but it turned out that customers wanted emails more than the databases.)
• That said, Notes STILL doesn’t have a threaded message feature as Outlook does and it regularly frustrates me. Add to this annoyance the extra one that [my workplace's] Notes team has turned off full-text indexing, so searches are slow and incomplete, and you can’t search within file attachments. I can’t say enough bad things about Notes.
• It would be easy to blame the users for not managing their emails, but the problem also lies with the app developers who either don’t listen or are unable to accommodate technical improvements that might make life a little easier for their users.
• I think these users were not taught good work habits, basically, and probably expected Notes to do the thinking about their work for them (there I go, blaming the user). I doubt any of them had 90 voicemails just sitting there, yet they’d have twice that many emails just sitting there. What is it about the email UI or the promise of email that makes people think their work is done?

On the subject of Gmail Overload, here are two links to how a PR guy uses Gmail as the center of his information universe. These postings include links to other articles in the series where he contorts Gmail into painful positions.

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/02/transform_gmail.html

Micro Persuasion: How to Use Gmail as a Business Diary and More Tips
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/04/a_few_weeks_bac.html

This link is to a guy who thought email was great and now thinks it’s bad.
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_print.html#pollack

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It’s not as narcissistic and self-involved as it sounds, though it’s that, too. I spend goodly bits of time and brain energy writing my posts, and I’m not keen on them disappearing into the digital ether when the class is over. I sometimes also put links to various sites in these mini-essays, so for that reason also, it would be fun to keep them around.

Herewith, a reaction to the following readings:

• Lehikoinen, Juha, Antti Aaltonen, Pertti Huuskonen, and Ilkka Salminen. Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age. Chichester, England: John Wiley, 2007. [48-51, 84-94, 127-157]
• Whittaker, Steve, and Candace Sidner. “Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email.” Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-18, 1996, 276-283.

For the Lotus Notes scenario, I imagine that the lack of standardized practices and behaviors would make the retrieval of important emails very difficult. (Would it make the storage difficult? I don’t know.) I believe most of the metadata in the emails would be the obvious stuff, such as the standard To: From:, etc., and the header path information, and so on. These could provide clues.

But the only clue to the content of emails (and perhaps their attachments) would be in the Subject line, which notoriously doesn’t change even when the thread of the conversation changes. If the users create folders to hold their mails, then that could perhaps provide a further clue to content, but my project email folders tend to be few and fat, and so a single folder will hold dozens of different conversations and threads related to many different topics, spread over several years.

I’d bet that, if an old mail needed to be accessed, one could locate the file format of the email, see how the sender and receiver information was coded, and then a brute force search on this info would then give you a smaller pile of messages to search through, but it’d still be a pile. Date information may be helpful in locating something specific, if you know about when an event occurred.

I think there are very few emails that sum up the situation of a project or a decision in a coherent narrative. Most emails regarding a decision accrue over time and, without the sender or receiver there, I think it would be difficult to recapture context, motivation, and other crucial information that would help you understand the import of an email message. It would be as difficult for the sender or receiver to piece together as it would an outsider.

I was struck reading the last section by how all parts of their metadata framework are in motion. Files on my computer just sit there until I call them up. On this mobile device, opening a file fires off a round of associative metadata linking and updating; it’s almost bewildering trying to comprehend all that’s going on.

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