The digital divide is growing

Living in an 'infrastructure challenged' setting, it is not lost on me that even as the uptake of Internet connectivity is rapidly expanding, it also slow to reach many of the world's population.  And, importantly, the digital divide is growing, according to a recent McKinsey report, titled 'Off-line and falling behind.'

The report offers several reasons why certain groups are slow to adopt Internet services and suggests that four factors, including 'incentives,' 'low incomes and affordability,' 'user capabilities' and 'infrastructure.'

Moreover, the factors are often compounding and inter-related, according to McKinsey.

"We measured the performance of 25 countries against a basket of metrics relating to each category of barriers to develop the Internet Barriers Index.⁵ 5.The Internet Barriers Index ranks 25 developed and developing countries based on their scores in four categories of barriers: incentives, low incomes and affordability, user capability, and infrastructure. To create the index, we defined a basket of standard metrics to quantify each category of barriers, normalized each metric to a scale of 100 points, weighted each of the metrics equally within each category to generate barrier category scores, and then normalized and weighted each of the category scores equally to generate the final index score. Our analysis indicated that the Internet Barriers Index has a strong ability to predict the Internet penetration within a country, explaining more than half the variance in Internet penetration across countries. We found that all factors correlate strongly and separately with Internet penetration, and all regressions indicate an elastic effect on Internet penetration—that is, improvements on each individual pillar of the Internet Barriers Index will have a disproportionately positive impact on Internet penetration. In addition, we found a systematically positive and, in some cases, large correlation between barrier categories. This implies that the factors are not totally independent and that countries with low Internet penetration tend to have multidimensional bottlenecks when it comes to increasing their Internet adoption. Further, it means that meaningfully addressing these barriers and boosting Internet penetration will require coordination across Internet ecosystem participants."

While it appears that this is a developed versus a developing world phenomenon, I have observed that connectivity is 'lumpy' all around the world and that "we're all a little bit third world."

3 reasons why we constantly check our phones

Why do people constantly check their smartphones? 

I was recently asked this question by Finland's top newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat.  Click for story in Finnish.

There are a lot of specific reasons, but here are 3 drivers of this behaviour.  

First, think of rosary or ‘worry beads,’ which humans have held in their hands for millennia; the tactile touch is reassuring and something simple to do when we are nervous or bored—this is the physical/material factor of handheld devices. This could also be called the boredom factor. 

Second, there is the avoidance factor, i.e., when we are in (even slightly) awkward social situations and want to avoid eye contact with others, we relieve the social pressure by gazing into our handheld screens instead of meeting the eyes of a stranger.  This makes perfect sense as the cost of engagement with others adds up in dense social settings.  We do this naturally in busy city streets where we cannot look into every passing strangers’ eyes, so we tend to avoid all eye contact, reserving our attention to the familiar, like a friendly message or favourite app on our smartphone.  

Finally, there is the fear factor as some of us are driven by the ‘fear of missing out' (FOMO), that feeling that something interesting and important MIGHT be happening and we want to know about it, i.e., we don’t want to ‘miss out' on what's going on.  Of course, much of life happens to be more or less mundane, so the odds of something truly significant happening is low, but still probable enough to not ‘risk’ missing it.  This latter drive is understandably heightened in younger users, where the need for social inclusion and acceptance is relatively high.

Uniting Analogue and Digital

This week I had the privilege of visiting Taupaki Primary School in a rural area just outside Auckland.  I was invited by a friend who is on the school board, who said, 'you've got to see our 10-12-year olds rapid prototyping and digital printing their own design projects.'  

Wow! It was worth it!

Principal Stephen Lethbridge is a true visionary who has brought technology to the School, but also and perhaps more importantly sees technology's role in uniting parents and children, parents with the School and the school with the community.

Here's how:

The thing that struck me was that the digital innovation was clearly present (Stephen's office looks like a cubicle at IDEO), the 'analogue' world was equally represented and celebrated.  There was a school garden and the workshops were still producing bird houses.  Stephen emphasised that he sees the analogue and digital worlds both very necessary and he works to unite the two.

For example, when I visited what looked like a 'home ec' (home economics) classroom, there were sewing machines that reminded me of similar classrooms from my high schools days many years ago.  But, the teacher, Kim (whom Stephen hired via Twitter) who, having spent time working in London, came home and studied teaching technology.  Kim pulled on a glove that had been sewn by one of her students.  With Stephen applying a battery charge to the leads, the glove lit up with tiny LED lights.  The project these 11-year olds were working on was a bike safety challenge--designing clothing to make riding a bicycle safer (riding a bike is incredibly dangerous in Auckland).  Analogue glove meets digital lighting!

Taupaki School is currently on its third generation of digital printers, whereas I doubt that my Business School owns one digital printer.  That is the scary part of this visit, to think about how we are going to challenge these students when they arrive at the University in a few years' time.

The recurring challenge for educators at all levels is to not lose touch with or appreciation of the physical, analogue world as we embrace the digital frontier.

Updated 23 November 2014

Here's what management consulting firm BCG says about the intertwinement between the physical/analogue and digital worlds in their fascinating project called, Now is The Time.  In their 4-dimensional report, BCG walks their talk by presenting analysts' commentary in text juxtaposed with photographic imagery.

"The Two Sides of Connectivity. Companies live in a multichannel world of bits and bricks, and they need to be masters of both. The physical world is being remade through massive spending on infrastructure. About $40 trillion in infrastructure spending will be required over the next two decades – rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of mature markets and constructing new roads, railways, airports, shipping stock and telecommunications networks in emerging markets.

Digital technologies, meanwhile, are becoming embedded in everyday objects, everything from refrigerators and televisions, to roads and buildings. The “Internet of everything” is fundamentally blurring the hard distinctions between the physical and digital worlds."

You can find some more of Stephen's thinking on his blog at www.stephenlethbridge.com or follow him on twitter  @stephen_tpk

Darn lucky to stay anonymous

American pop-art icon Andy Warhol once said: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." 

Nik Dholakia, Professor of Marketing, E-Commerce and International Business at the University of Rhode Island, offers a new take: 

"In the future, we will be darn lucky to remain anonymous for 15 minutes."

Other insights from Professor Dholakia, include the following.

Through new information and communication technologies, "virtual life-worlds that are portable and always networked are becoming pervasive, persistent, and constantly malleable."

Global statistics back that up. According to the International Telecommunications Union, at some point in 2014 the number of active mobile phones will exceed the number of people on the planet. Russia, already has 1.8 times more in-use mobile phones than people. Brazil has 1.2 times as many. Importantly, those phones are increasingly smartphones, with full internet access. And, as everyone knows, the internet is becoming porous with social media and with early experiments in augmented reality.

To make sense of what is happening, says Professor Dholakia, a useful step is to "fly above the turbulence" and grasp the technological changes in terms of the social and political factors involved – in other words, to develop some co-ordinates, or "conceptual anchors". Dholakia's recent research, and that of several colleagues and students, has focused on doing just that.

Among the insights:

• The "newness" of the new technologies is relative. Every medium already participates in the mobile, the social and the virtual. Film and radio, for example had enormous potential as social media and began as one-to-one and many-to-many media. It was commercial interests that turned film, for example, into a one-to-many, or mass medium.
• Mobile has become the core global identity credential. More than a passport, a driver's licence or a national identity card, the mobile phone is becoming the universal ID credential. The new coming-of-age marker is when a child gets his or her mobile phone. More people worry about leaving their phone at home than their wallet.
• Mobile is becoming an individuating, locating and enabling technology. The development of apps is very open and this is one of the more positive aspects of the mobile sphere. Many apps enable sampling, comparisons, ratings, curating, locating and more.
• We are on the threshold of augmented reality. For more than a century the offline versus online distinctions held. Virtual realities were clearly identifiable and often immersive but quite separate and distinct realities. Now, with broadband hyperconnected mobile devices, we are entering a time and a space where these distinctions are dissolving. Augmented realities are emerging on a mass scale – but unlike the old video arcade games, and because of the individuating nature of the mobile device, they tend not to be shared realities.
• Social media has added frenzy and fluidity to media fragmentation. Many countries have seen a shift from a one-channel universe to one of a billion channels or more.
• Traditional trust anchors are disappearing. Social media lacks the regulating structures of traditional media, such as awards and industry codes of conduct. It will take time to come up with new, reliable and accepted ways to vouch, to verify, to endorse and to guarantee. This happens in all periods of technical upheaval. Developing new forms of trustworthiness is not the task of science, but of society.
• The power of "meta-industries" is growing. The amount of stored data is increasing rapidly, but data transfer over networks is rising at an even faster rate due to the new forms of data, including hi-res video, being sent. Some countries, including those in Scandinavia, have introduced public policy measures to improve broadband availability. The growth in content produced by individuals is being rapidly overtaken by that produced by content delivery networks (largely commercial video providers). Machine-to-machine traffic is also projected to increase by 84% a year.
• What any technology becomes depends on who controls it. Examples from across the world show how social, mobile and virtual technologies have been harnessed to improve lives and open channels of communication for previously excluded people. Some researchers are studying how new media can help us become what they call "produsers" and "construers". Unless we embrace such notions, they say, the consumer in us will continue to inflate, squeezing out our other life roles.

Professor Dholakia spoke about digital media at the Business School in July 2014 as part of the Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series.

The above was extracted from the UABS Network e-magazine, written by Vaughan Yarwood, Managing Editor.

For the full article, see this link

http://www.business.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/news-and-media/news-stories/uabs-monthly-newsletter/uabs-monthly-newsletter-2014/08/14/welcome-to-the-mobile-social-virtual-world-of-tomorrow.html.

How technology is changing time, space and relationships

Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist and Vice President at Intel.  In a recent column interview of the NY Times, she commented on how technology is changing society in terms of time, space and social relationships.

"First, there are changing ideas about time. With the advent of electrification in the 19th century, there was no more night. Now with digital we think in new ways about availability, responsiveness, the time it should take to get things done.

The devices want to be connected, in touch, upgraded, all the time. We’re on their clock. But that may get renaturalized. Every major world religion divides out some kind of special time — there is time for prayer, time for fasting, time for celebration. 

I harbor a suspicion that we need to be disconnected at times." 

Space is also changing.  As Bell observes.

"We map physical space differently: At the airport, the location of power outlets becomes critical. We think of spaces that have good Wi-Fi or cellular locations. They are “better.” And we’re seeing the idea that the Internet is going to create one world is not quite true. Turkey turns off Twitter. You get different search results in different places."

Bell's third area of change is in social relationships.

The last thing, after space and time, is changing social relationships. 

"How do we relate to each other? What do we think about social ideas like privacy, security, risk? There are changing ideas about love, fear, passion."

What does all that mean?

"When tech affects ideas about time, space and social relationships, it carries anxiety. We are reinventing a lot of ideas around security, privacy, safety, love, marriage, kids, god, violence, the nation state, power, justice, money. Everything is up for grabs.

It means social movements will emerge around this, arguments about what government should look like. One hundred years ago there were arguments about government, and how we should organize ourselves. There was Fascism versus utopian government. We’ll have arguments about government and governance, about taxation and regulation."  

As Bell suggests, the technological changes associated with connectivity mean 'everything is up for grabs,' which is both exciting and contentious as we re-negotiate time, space and relationships. It is, however, a frontier we have entered and society cannot go back to where we were pre-Net.  

As pioneers, we cannot possibly know what the collective patterns will be, but we can be mindful of our own personal and micro-social (email, for example, is a social not personal medium) beliefs and behavioural patterns, which ultimately shape future society more than technology.

Denali - on 'peak experiences'

Thirty years ago I stood on the summit of Denali (Mt. McKinley) at 20,320 ft, the highest peak in North America.  Surveying the magnificent Alaska Range in the midnight glow of Arctic summer (at -40 degrees F; with windchill at -100 F) was and remains one of the highlights of my life.  From landing on the glacier to flying back to Talkeetna took 16 days.  During that time we were completely out of contact with the world below.

A few years later, during a 20-day trip down the Grand Canyon, we were similarly out of touch, which was a natural part of the adventure.  Indeed, working as a wilderness instructor and guide for 10 years in the 1980s, we routinely said good-bye to friends and loved ones as we worked 20 to 28-day courses in the backcountry of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Texas.  These were some of the 'peak experiences' in my life.

Yesterday, I participated in a round table discussion with Nik and Ruby Roy Dholakia, both of the University of Rhode Island.  Both are doing groundbreaking work on the future of marketing, in particular 'consumption.'  Among other ideas, Nik and colleagues argue that social media are shifting the nature of our life experiences, like my summit experience on Denali and running the Grand Canyon.

If we think of a continuum of 'mundane,' 'special' and 'peak' experiences, we have all seen how social media are used to make the mundane 'special,' i.e., posting photos of food, checking in at routine coffee breaks, etc.

Conversely, bringing others along virtually on 'peak' experiences risks making those experiences less rarified, less extraordinary than the isolated triumph of standing on top of the world (literally or metaphorically) on your own or with your climbing partner.  Posting or texting from the summit of Denali--as a friend of mine did a few years ago--is still no doubt 'special,' but it is somewhat less extreme than being there knowing that it would be several days before my wife even knew if I had survived the summit push and descent, let alone see my summit selfie.

Modern day adventurers will no doubt counter that documenting expeditions has a long history (including coincidently the Kolb brothers with Powell in the Grand Canyon) and that sharing an experience immediately and widely on social media heightens the experience, rather than contributing to its deterioration or demotion on the Mundane-Special-Peak scale.

Making the mundane special is mostly harmless.  It brings a farcical and humorous dimension to social media (for example, a web site devoted to photos of people taking photos of food).  On the other hand, social media's fascination with the mundane may have more serious existential consequences.

Meanwhile, existentialists should rightfully be concerned if, as my colleagues suggest, intensive life-defining 'peak' experiences are somehow reduced in their impact as we rush to document rather than simply experience our moments of personal triumph.

What is connectivity?

Returning from Rotterdam (sitting in Heathrow), where I had the pleasure of being a co-convenor of a European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) Symposium sub-theme on 'Connectivity and Mobility' with Marleen Huysman leader of the KIN2 Group at VU University of Amsterdam and Kristine Dery, who recently joined MIT's Center for Information Systems Research, I am reflecting on the 'state of connectivity' (as opposed to my usual preoccupation with 'states of connectivity').

From an academic perspective, have we reached a point where we can consider connectivity a field of research?  Certainly, a substantial proportion of papers we saw at the Symposium focused on mobile technologies, work-life balance or 'new ways of work' and organisational control of such and drew upon constructs of 'connectivity.'  

Connectivity studies address the central organising theme of our time, namely increasingly ubiquitous and pervasive connectivity, with its attending promise, problems and opportunities for all levels and dimensions of individuals, organisations and society at large.

In particular, leading and raising star academics, like Paul Leonardi and Melissa Mazmanian, use the term in recent influential publications, which are already being heavily cited.  Since citations are the primary currency of scholarship, it is reasonable to suggest that connectivity is emerging as a legitimate field of research.

Coming back to the question of what 'connectivity' is, I have previously offered a comprehensive definition, as follows:

‘Connectivity is defined here as the mechanisms, processes, systems and relationships that link individuals and collectives (e.g., groups, organizations, cultures, societies) by facilitating material, informational and/or social exchange.  

It includes geo-physical (e.g., space, time and location), technological (e.g., information technologies and their applications) as well as social interactions and artefacts, including shared histories, travel, trade, migration, culture, politics and other social activities.’ (Source: Kolb, D. G. (2008). Exploring the metaphor of connectivity: Attributes, dimensions and duality. Organization Studies, 29, 1, 127-144; direct quote found on p.128)

I remain pretty happy with this broad and inclusive definition.  In fact, the term is used to describe all manner of connections, from the most technical to most social/humanistic/philosophical.  I have not seen a reference to God as connectivity or connectivity as god, but it is only a matter of time.

Connectivity as Metaphor: Attributes, Dimensions and Duality

In that same 2008 Organization Studies article, I referred to connectivity as a 'metaphor.'  This is because, at that time, it could not be considered a 'theory' or a 'field,' but rather it was a way of seeing something, i.e., the social world, through a lens used in another context, in this case, the technical (e.g., electronics) world--where the term came from (although the term also appears in neuroscience and I am not sure which used it first).

Attributes: Exploring the metaphor, I suggested that one might think of connectivity as ‘... a constantly changing set of connective links, some of which have never been used (latent potential), many of which are reliant on individuals (actor agency), which come and go (temporal intermittency) and some whose reach cannot be fully understood or predicted (unknowable pervasiveness).’ (Kolb, 2008, p.140). 

Dimensions: I went on to show how connectivity occurs on multiple dimensions, including: geo-physical, technical, interpersonal, group, organisational, networks, economic, cultural, political, philosophical. 

Duality: Finally, drawing on adaptive structuration theory, I suggested that connectivity is characterised by ‘connects’ and ‘disconnects,’ which exist as a ‘duality,’ i.e., they are distinct, but interrelated phenomena.

So that is connectivity as metaphor.  What about theory?  There are several theoretical frameworks of connectivity, including our model of 'requisite connectivity' (Kolb, Collins and Lind, 2008), 'connective flow' (ibid; Dery, Kolb and MacCormick, 2014) and Paul Leonardi and colleagues' work on the 'connectivity paradox.'  Based on what we are seeing from emerging researchers, there are bound to be new and exciting theoretical developments coming to the field soon. 

Of course, I am mostly involved with the organisational theory, communication and information systems communities, but others are also employing the term. 

Here is my new bold claim. When you consider the machine-to-machine connections that characterize the Internet of things, the deep concerns about our brains on screens, the isolation of being 'alone together,' and the growing philosophical pursuit of the 'good life' in a social-meets-digital age, I believe it is safe to say, we have truly entered the Age of Connectivity.

To put it another way, at this point in history, connectivity isn't everything, but it's almost everything.