If you are like me, in your late forties, or up and down in that neighbourhood, some of the new behaviours of younger people might be puzzling. I must admit for example, that even live chatting is not natural or preferred for me. Another puzzling thing is the total openness of quite a few in the younger generation who are sharing their intimacy in online diaries. And a third puzzling phenomenom for me was ‘twittering’ (named thus for the dominating software in the field) or ‘lifelogging’ (the general concept of ‘recording your life events’).
Why would anyone want to share everything he does in the day, and want to know what everyone else is doing?
So, for the benefit of such older people, I’m happy to have found an article, or more precisely an interview with the founders of the lifelogging software Jaiku, which explains to me what personal and social trends drive such changes in behaviour.
Let us first of all define it: Lifelogging = the continuous logging and recording of life events so that the daily experiences of connected group members can be shared.
Lifelogging software enables “Social Peripheral Vision: the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Once you know what the people you care about are up to, you notice opportunities for social interaction that you would probably otherwise miss. Even just the simple knowledge that your loved ones are ok can have a lot of emotional value in an increasingly unstable world.”
The founders “realized they both wanted a better way to share what we were doing in real life with our friends online. Although we spent a lot of time on blogs and Web services built by our friends, like Flickr, we felt they were too cumbersome to update and difficult to read on our mobile phones. We decided to make a service that regular people would use every day, that was quicker to update on the go and would enable all of us to see what our family members, friends, and colleagues were doing simply by glancing at our handset.”
How does it work exactly?
“Just as a recap, the posts on Jaiku are simply called Jaikus. They are shorter than blog posts. Because their content is usually about what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, or where you’re going right now, their value typically also degrades more quickly over time. On many Web services the interval between new updates from a user is a day or more, but on Jaiku the updates are more frequent. When you browse the profiles of Jaiku members, you’ll notice that a Jaiku that was posted an hour ago can already be outdated by several newer ones. The content of Jaikus is also often more personal than on blogs. Although many share their Jaikus publicly, a lot of people prefer to share them privately with their friends.”
And why exactly is it emerging so strongly?
“We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them.”
Want to know even more?
See how this new social need is driving the development of what is alternative called “Personal Data Streams“, Attention Streams, or Lifestreams.
Please note that we monitor such changing behavioural trends in our ‘P2P Relational Concepts‘ section of our wiki.
I guess I’m firmly planted in the older generation, because this sounds like a nightmare to me. I don’t even own a cell phone, because to me one of the virtues of the land line is that it is a built-in excuse for being unavailable. You can’t very well screen your calls via an answering machine with the message that you’re “away from the phone” when you’re carrying an electronic leash with you at all times.
For the same reason, I never saw the appeal of IM or texting. The beauty of email is that–just like a land line phone with answering machine–it insulates you from real time communication and enables you to deal with people when you feel like getting around to it.
Cell phones and text messaging remind me of the Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron.” People of above-average intelligence were required to carry “handicaps” that constantly disrupted their thought processes with loud noises or electrical shock, so that they were unable to pursue a coherent train of thought. In our world, people are lining up to buy their handicaps. I’ve organized more outlines, even draft paragraphs, in my head while on long walks, than I could possibly count. When I see most of the people on a sidewalk engaged in telephone conversations, I can’t help wondering “when the hell do these people ever manage to think?”