Links

Related blogs and websites

Academia.edu
I am using Academia.edu to share my academic papers.  Click here to go to my Academia.edu page.

Connectivity Scorecard
Orginally sponsored by Nokia Siemens, this is a great interactive resource that shows a 'connectivity score' for over 50 countries.  See how your country rates.  I sometimes use this as a conversation starter in my classes.

Information Overload Research Group (IORG)
This not-for-profit research network was founded in 1992 by Nathan Zeldes and contains loads of resources, including scholarly articles, around the predecessor condition and one of the main outcomes of hyper-connectivity.  Deeply useful and well-organised.  This group meets once a year to discuss issues associated with information overload.

Dynamics of Virtual Work: A European Collaborative Research Network
European network of researchers interested in studying virtual and other new forms of work and organization in an Internet age.  Includes conferences and workshops, as well as other research funding and resources.  Supported by Collaboration in Science and Technology (COST).

Nathan Zeldes
Founder of the Information Overload Research Group, thought leader and speaker, Nathan's website and blogs provide valuable insights into the issues facing individuals, teams and organizations in a digital age.

Backed By Research (BBR) - Kai Riemer's blog
Kai Riemer at the University of Sydney posts insightful observations, commentary and the occasional polite rant on the socio-technical world around us.  Well worth a read and/or following Kai as a thought leader.

The Future of Work
Lynda Gratton's blog considers a range of issues and opportunities associated with the evolving nature of work.  Well-crafted and thought-provoking, Professor's Gratton's insights hold general optimism coupled with critical reflection on multiple human dimensions of work and life in a digital age.

Learning On-line
If you're interested in on-line learning programs and resources, see the Online MBA site.  In a hurry?  The Minute MBA can give you a creative kick-start into a general or current business topic.

Rate, rank, review...the cult of verification

Hey, I just heard about a great restaurant.  Let's Google a review of it.

Sound familiar?  This is a great way to take the risk (and adventure) out of day-to-day decisions.  But, are we creating a cult of verification, where everything must be rated, ranked and reviewed?  Do we really need ratings, league table rankings and reviews to make a simple decision?  Apparently so. Trip Advisor, for example, contains over 75 million reviews of travel-related services and gets 60 million page views per month, or about 2 million per day!

Only a small fraction of users write reviews.  But, what motivates them?  For some it is their way to have their say, or to keep commerce honest. The Internet as truth serum.  It turns out, however, that many reviewers are paid evangelists, singing the praise of a place to eat or stay... for a small fee.

Susan Scott and Wanda Orlikowski have been studying the way that on-line reviews and ratings actually change behaviours in the hospitality industry.  Hoteliers and restauranteurs begin their day checking their reviews and ratings.  Behaviour modification you might say.  But, is popularity always a proxy for quality? Recall that historically good ideas are not always popular, and popular ideas are not always good.

Everyone loves a Top 10 List.  Recently, the Academy of Management published a ranked list of the 'top' 384 management scholars.  Of course, no mention was made of the quality of ideas these people had contributed. Rather, citations and web page views were used as proxy for 'impact.' In the end, these astute authors did acknowledge that, 'Our results indicate that top performers in terms of impact inside the Academy do not necessarily have a similar impact outside the Academy' (Aguinis et al, 2012, p.129). If you ever suspected that too many business school academics are more interested in vacuous narcissism than making organizations work better, now you have verification.  Or, at least you have read a review of a review of it.

Good news.  I am currently ranked in the top third of all humans alive, according to my new website: www.PersonAdvisor, where we can all find out exactly where we stand.  :-)

Update 5 May 2013 - New York Times article on how following restaurant ratings (on Yelp) not only can be wrong, but following the crowd diminishes our own individual judgments of and preferences for what is good or not.

The cost of clicks: The cloud as sociophysical problem

Several recent posts have dealt with the physical elements of connectivity, such as lost broadband at the home office, Internet cabling and how it gets installed, but this week's New York Times investigative report by James Glanz on the power demands, pollution and waste associated with data centers (a.k.a., 'the cloud' or 'big data'), is sobering reading.

For example, the power consumed by data centers is roughly 30 billion megawatts, or the equivalent of 30 nuclear power stations.

And, it is not just the shear amount of power consumed, it is the fact that most data centers are idling wastefully in order to avoid our rapid surge from users. As Ganz reports,

"Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.

A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.

Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found."

The report insightfully critiques how the social drivers of Internet culture (including providers and users) play themselves out in real physical terms, i.e., power consumption, pollution and waste.  In short, the web-based industry has grown fearful of servers crashing or going off-line, while users have come to expect that every email and billions and billions of songs, movies, photos and other documents can all be stored and/or backed up on-line.  We think we no longer need big hard drives, because of the cloud, but the cloud itself is just a lot of big hard drives. (use quote)

More from the New York Times Report:

"Today, roughly a million gigabytes are processed and stored in a data center during the creation of a single 3-D animated movie, said Mr. Burton, now at EMC, a company focused on the management and storage of data.

Just one of the company’s clients, the New York Stock Exchange, produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years, he added.

EMC and the International Data Corporation together estimated that more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information were created globally last year.

“It is absolutely a race between our ability to create data and our ability to store and manage data,” Mr. Burton said. With no sense that data is physical or that storing it uses up space and energy, those consumers have developed the habit of sending huge data files back and forth, like videos and mass e-mails with photo attachments. Even the seemingly mundane actions like running an app to find an Italian restaurant in Manhattan or a taxi in Dallas requires servers to be turned on and ready to process the information instantaneously.

The complexity of a basic transaction is a mystery to most users: Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could involve a trip through hundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits and multiple data centers before the e-mail arrives across the street.

“If you tell somebody they can’t access YouTube or download from Netflix, they’ll tell you it’s a God-given right,” said Bruce Taylor, vice president of the Uptime Institute, a professional organization for companies that use data centers.

To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to figures from the International Data Corporation.

Nationwide, data centers used about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or roughly 2 percent of all electricity used in the country that year, based on an analysis by Jonathan G. Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University who has been studying data center energy use for more than a decade. DatacenterDynamics, a London-based firm, derived similar figures."

*This is not to say that companies like Apple, Facebook and Google aren't working hard to lower emissions and power.  For more on energy efficiency initiatives at data centers, see Katie Fehrenbacher's report at gigaom.

Not to worry...Networks are good!

In his recent keynote address to the Academy of Management, Barry Wellman was very excited about his latest book, with Lee Rainie, called Networked: The new social operating system.  Rainie is Director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project and former Editor of US News and World Report.  Barry Wellman is the S. D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where he directs their NetLab.  Wellman's distinguished career has long been focused on social networks--no, not the Facebook kind.  In fact, Rainie and Wellman argue that Facebook is not really based on social networks at all, but a reflection of a phenomenon they call 'networked individualism,' which is becoming the new social 'operating system.' Another famous sociologist, Manual Castells, has suggested a similar thesis in his two editions of The Rise of the Network Society.  The concept of networked individualism is, nonetheless, a new and important development in the way we think about social systems in a world of pervasive connectivity.

So, how do networks relate to connectivity?  Indeed, Wellman and colleague Anabel Quan-Haase were some of the first scholars to use the term 'hyperconnectivity.'  But when they--and Rainie and Wellman still do--use the term hyperconnectivity, what they are referring to is merely 'a lot' of connectivity, not 'too much,' as my colleagues and I use the term.  They refer to hyperconnected individuals as those who are almost constantly connected, usually using multiple media. We focus on the problems associated with performance and/or loss of personal well-being when that connectivity is considered by the individual to be excessive.

More fundamentally, networks are a 'given' (social structure), whereas connectivity is 'contingent' (within social systems).  For example, we are part of a family network regardless of whether or not we can reach family members by cell phone.  Connectivity comes and goes.

Networks, of course, do change.  In particular, they are extensible by their very nature.  And networks are a useful way to describe social relationships.  By contrast, connectivity is the interactive dynamic that both constrains and enables those social relationships.  If networks are social maps, connectivity is the traffic report.

Rainie and Wellman and I do agree, as I suggested in the iCrazy post in July, that the hand wringing over levels of connectivity can be over-stated and that we must be careful to clarify our sources when we make conjectures about the information and communication overloads some are feeling.  Hyper-connectivity (too much connectivity) is real, but it is difficult to say how many of us feel it, how much of the time, and to what effect.  More research is needed.

Connects and Disconnects

Ok, so today is 5 years since my last post. Time to connect again. Watch this space. I will be back ..... soon.

Darl