Posted: June 14th, 2005 | No Comments »
Audio recording
Quite a character this guy. One of the reasons tech fairs are interesting: you always get these speakers with weird backgrounds, or interests, or education, or dressing code. It seems Ben is cumulating all these particularities so that made up for an amazing 45 minutes of presentation. His main point: technology has evolved faster than social codes. We the tech people of the world need to care about the gap. Details follow:
A bit of history first. When Europe moved from the medieval era to the “Lumières” (enlightment?) period, something interesting happened: the dress code that was allowing everyone to situate people on the social ladder disappeared. Fashion stopped showing rank. You couldn’t tell anymore who the other guy is.
Mobile phones are another major social change. Proof is this new concept of “proxy meeting”: “I’m in town can we hook up for a beer?”. On the fly scheduling has changed our habits in a decade
Blogging is also a major social change. Some nobodies can suddenly reach audiences, and even anonymously at that. That create many new capabilities for these people, including the one to be some pretty “total bastards”
But guess what: new technologies are rude. They do not easily let people in. They exclude, punish, humiliate (so we’re in a windows context here probably).
Another issue: etiquette has not evolved as fast as tech. We have these mobile phone whose use is not clearly codified yet. Is it rude to send an sms while you’re with some friends? Is it rude to pick-up your phone while dining, get up and exit the restaurant? We’re in some kind of grey area here, people do things that when done by others bother them. Ben showed some stats I couldn’t pick up on the subject so if he’s technorating his fame and end up in my humble home may he take one minute to help on this?
Now on to the key point we have: Ben came to the conclusion that technology scares people because they are afraid of humiliation. People don’t always know how to integrate tech in their social environment. See the reasoning here? – we face constant social changes – codes are always (and naturally) behind – some people are scared to embrace change because they are afraid to fail in these non existing codes.
He gave us to examples: his wife does not like to play Starcraft, not because she does not enjoy the game but because she does not want to look ridiculous in the eyes of other players she’ll btw never ever meet. Wives are weird anyway.
Second example: his grand mother would never ever buy a phone for a simple reason: she does not want to be in a situation where she would be noticed (and hated) by people in the bus because her mobile is ringing and she needs time to take it off her bag.
Adoption of technologies is a social problem, not a software/hardware problem. It’s obviously not true all the time (nobody got a copy of windows me because it really sucked, software problem) but you get the bigger picture. nice point.
A good example: video phones. These are slow to take off because people do NOT want their interlocutor to know where they are.
So in change we should remember three things: – new technology should always come with out of the box etiquette – people need time, you can’t do much about it – for some times manners will have to make it for inexistent rules
As a designer you should always worry about the social conventions you break, and propose some new ones eventually.
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