UsageWatch.org

Analysing usage : keeping close to very few people

 

In many developed countries most people have access to multiple channels of communication every day, such as a fix and mobile phone, email and other internet based channels such as IM, Skype or social networking websites. A good proportion of adults in Europe  and USA will be using on average 4 channels a day.  This is without counting traditional post and face to face exchanges. Many regular internet users have more than one email account, most social networking users have more than one personal page, in a few European countries there are more mobile subscriptions than inhabitants.  But all of this is well known and well hyped.  What is less well known is that with all these channels, devices, services, a user contacts on average the same 5 to 10 people 80% of the time.

 

The concentration of exchanges on very few partners is rarely reported by the press and media in general and often  users themselves are not aware of it. The general view is that ICT has hugely increased the number of contacts, that internet based communication in particular has extended the number of friends and acquaintances people stay in contact with.  Social networking sites in particular have given the illusion that it is possible not only to reacquaint with old friends but also to find new ones based on ones interests and tastes. Instant messaging and skype with their long lists of buddies have suggested that rapid exchanges with tens or hundreds of people is the norm. Popular media have also divulged the fear of children being constantly exposed to random encounters online in their pursuit of new online buddies. Commentators and popular sociologists have been discussing at length of the risks of having numerous but shallow conversations at the detriment of real profound relationships.

 

All of these beliefs have been generated by confounding the possibilities and functionalities offered by these new online services and the reality of peoples practices and needs. While it is true that buddy lists can contain hundreds of names, that facebook pages can be linked to tens of friends and that skype allows you to call whoever you see online, the vast majority of people has regular contact with only a tiny susbset of the people they know. This does not mean that they do not enjoy visualizing a big social network, seeing how many people they could potentially chat with or communicate with, just as most people find it essential to be always reachable with their mobile phone. The potential of contact is certainly providing many people a sense of belonging and connectedness but the reality of usage is focused on far fewer and far more significant relationships. Exactly those profound and continuous relationships of which commentators are announcing the decline.

 

Researchers in various universities and business research centers around the world who have systematically studied the daily use of mobile phones, IM or email are all reaching the same conclusion (Ling, Ito, Wellman, among others). New communication media are significantly contributing to strengthening core relationships. New channels are being used to intensify contacts with very significant relations. The main effect, I would add of new media is to extend the range of situations in which an individual can be in touch with the people she most cares for.

 

The intense number of exchanges that we have described above seem not only to be focused on few people but also are consistently and systematically  related to certain types of contents. Once we exclude professional exchanges,  personal mediated communication revolves around issues of awareness of each others state. Awareness of physical location, of emotional status, and of activities. Basically people are asking and informing about their whereabouts, their feelings, what they have done or are doing at the moment. Planning and coordination also accounts for many exchanges but often this corresponds to an extension of what we just described into mutual awareness of state allowing to coordinate encounters and activities (I am on my way and will be there in 15mns…).

Analysing usage : continuous contact

Continuous contact with loved ones as eloquently described by Ron in the previous story posted today, has emerged as a very general behaviour, embraced by people of different generations and cultures. Teenagers were the first to recognize the possibility offered by mediated channels for maintaining a sense of permanent awareness of their friends, but they were rapidly copied by their elders who learned how to use channels to keep in permanent contact. What Ron is describing, while somewhat extreme, is becoming more widespread.  Couples talk, text, email each other many times a day and this regardless of their age.

 

In a 2008 report by the Pew Institute for American Internet Life, Networked Families by Barry Wellman it emerged that one in two married couples in American communicate on the mobile phone and email at least once a day.

 

70% of couples in which both partners own a cell phone contact each other daily to say hello or chat; 54% of couples who have one or no cell phones do this at least once a day.

64% of couples in which both partners own a cell phone contact each other daily to coordinate their schedules; 47% of couples who have one or no cell phones do this at least once a day.

42% of parents contact their child/children on a daily basis using a cell phone, making cell phones the most popular communications tool between parents and children.

 

Stories of daily communication : continuous contact

Ron is in his late thirties,  and recently  had a baby with his second wife. He also has a teenage son from his previous marriage. He is the sole employee of an art galery and has quite a lot of empty moments in his day waiting for customers.  Ron talks to and texts his wife many times a day.

 

“I really like mobile phones, I have two mobile phones and so does my wife. “I call my wife to say hello, I call my wife to know if everything is ok, I call my wife to know if the children are ok, I call my wife for the doctor... I call my wife all day long!” Im a guy who really likes to participate and I love hearing that the baby just ate his first apple or the older one just said something funny. And I want to hear it straight away not tonight.

 

Ron can’t wait until the kids will be old enough to talk on the phone so that he will be able to talk to them too during the day. With his older son Jon they stay in touch with IM, he bought Jon a mobile IM device to stay in touch. The two of them have had a couple of rocky years especially after he remarried and it was really difficult to talk to each other. One day Jon told his dad that he had started using IM with his friends and so Ron tried to chat with him once on MSN. It turned out that this worked much better than talking on the phone and since then that seems to be their main channel of communication.

 

Its incredible how much closer we have become, before when I ringed him up at home it would be awful as I don’t really get along with my ex wife and I could hear her in the back mumbling and ranting while Jon was talking. So obviously Jon hardly said a word and I ended each call frustrated ...  Then he got a mobile and I thought great we can talk directly, but first he never had it switched on, then he never had credit and wouldn’t call me back, so we used texting but it was pretty limited. The other problem with speaking on the phone is that sometimes a tone of voice or a silence can be misunderstood and you know how terribly touchy teenagers are ... you can just be silent for a second too long because you are blowing your nose, and they think you are scolding them or being reproachful and then I also got annoyed when he only answered yes and no. Writing is easier, you can think before you write anything, there is no intonation, you don’t see the face so you can say things that would be difficult face to face.

 

Now with IM I see if he is online, actually with the little gizmo he is always online so I just say hi and see if he answers.I think it is because he can chat to me while doing other stuff he doesn’t feel it is an obligation a formal call from dad, its just in the flow of his activities. In a sense he is off guard and so can tell me what is going on that day or that moment. And that is just what a parent wants isn’t it , just know what your kid is doing and thinking and feeling that moment. You don’t want a report you just want to share a moment be together a while. Thats the hardest thing when you divorce I think, the fact of not sharing as many moments. And somehow it may sound absurd but with IM its coming back, I really can be there with him for a while.

 

Ron is not just a family man, he has a very intense relationship with a group of friends from his country of origin, The all left more or less at the same time, but one friend went to Germany, another to London, one is in Canada. So they are spread out but chat a few times a week. They also meet up every couple of years. They have this habit of taking a week of holiday together somewhere. We don’t go back home because there are too many family commitments there, it would mean we would all have to spend time with family first and we wouldn’t have time to be together. So we choose a nice sunny place and just go for a holiday together. It's really important to keep our friendship going we can't just do it over skype.

 

So with these friends we IM a bit, we phone and we skype. Last year we had real fun with skype and a videocam we really fooled around with it. Again it's like with my son, if you don’t share some moments the friendship dies out. If you only talk once a month or every three months it gets kind of formal you give a summary of the last weeks and that is it. But for me real friendship is participating in the daily life. So with my friends we try to keep in touch by sending each other music we like and films and we chat about them and then we all look at some  online news from our city so we can keep abreast of what is going on.  “

Stories of daily communication : calling from the workplace

Greg is Bulgarian and has been living in Manchester  for 3 years, he followed his older brother s and a sister  who had moved to the UK in the late nineties. He recently moved into a flat with his girlfriend who also comes from Bulgaria. They are both in their early twenties, very much in love and wanting to be married in a year or two. Greg works in a packaging and logistic company and he is in the packaging section. He works night shifts from 8 in the evening to about 5 in the morning,  his girlfriend works during the day so there aren’t that many hours of overlap in their day.  The job is very repetitive but he is been doing it for nearly two years and knows most people in the plant and feels there is a certain advantage in being well acquainted with the supervisors and managers.

His job consists in preparing boxes for clients of material that he has to find and organise. He must collect racks of material, look at the order forms, prepare and then label the boxes. The people around him in the big plant floor are doing the same. Supervisors monitor the work, hand out the orders and solve any queries.

The company has rules about phoning during work time but nobody seems to follow them apart from the newcomers, and most workers find ways to make a few calls during their shifts. The main processing floor where the employees  sit at tables working on their boxes, has videosurveillance and therefore everyone avoids making calls from there.  However, as soon as they get up to go to pick up some material in other rooms they pull out their mobile phones. Usually the other deposit areas have no video and they manage to have a few minutes for a call.  Another solution is to call on the way to the toilet.  

Greg thinks he makes about 2 or 3 calls per evening, obviously he says he is limited by the fact that there are not many people you can call after midnight... Generally he calls his girlfriend once or twice before she goes to bed and his brother once. His calls are never long, probably a couple of minutes. Other people sometimes call for longer,   and although the majority of the employees are women he says that it is the men that he most often seen speaking on the phone.

In general everyone prefers calling than texting because they are wearing gloves. Some people have bought a Bluetooth headset and they cover their heads with their overalls so as not to be noticed and therefore manage to speak a bit longer. Greg thinks that the fact they are working at night makes it all more possible, because the supervisors are in their offices and there are no managers and bosses around. He is not sure if the workers on day shifts get away with the calls, like they do.

He recalls another company he worked for which was smaller and run by a very authoritarian boss. There it was strictly forbidden to make any calls at all and anyone caught sending an SMS or using his cellphone was dismissed immediately.

Stories of daily communication : migration

Sam is 25 and arrived in Switzerland 5 years ago from Syria. How he came to Switzerland precisely is still not clear to him, he wanted to go to Germany where there is a big community from his area and he had a few cousins working there, but something went wrong with the visas. There was a friend who had told him about a political refugee program in CH and he applied and was very surprised to be accepted. On the map  Switzerland and Germany are pretty close and he thought it was a first step towards joining up with his relatives. The whole process however turned out to be pretty slow and to make a long story short he was still in Switzerland 4 years later, where he had no relations and no Syrian friends. He had also underestimated the restrictions that the refugee status imposed on him in terms of travel outside Switzerland, although there was a daily train to Berlin that took only 9h he could not get a visa for travel in the EEC. He obviously could not go back to Syria either and therefore had not seen his family since the day he left. He had hoped to be able to send a good amount of money back home each month, but life is so expensive in CH that it was only possible to send small amounts and some times he skipped a month or two.

He was working as an assistant cook in a restaurant in the center of the city and had the typical complex shifts of people working in restaurants. Some days he would finish round 23h other days he would start early and have a main lunch shift with a big break until 18h when the evening service would start.  He loved going out but had few friends and little time, which meant he only got to go bowling or to dancing once or twice a month.

I miss my family a lot but I talk to them every day for at least 2h with skype and a webcam and it only costs 42 CHF a month for the internet connection. Until I had skype I had to go and call in a phone booth or in one of those international call cafes. Not only it was expensive but I only went once a week and just called for a few minutes. I wasn't sure who was home and who I would talk to. Sometimes we tried to make an appointment to be sure. But with my funny schedules it wasn’t always easy to find the right time,  and there was no webcam so I didn’t see them. I hated going, it made me really sad, I would talk to them and then miss them, and then wait for the next call but I'd be sad again.

Now as I come home I switch the computer  on and can see my sisters, my parents, they show me anything new they have bought. The other day an uncle came in and showed me a huge huge tomato that had grown in his garden. I don’t mean its like being together but now it is every day I don’t wait to call and then am disappointed it is a sort of ongoing conversation.

 

When I’m not talking to them I’m on MSN chatting with some friends. I have about 30 buddies also people I met online in arab forums, but  I only really chat regularly with 3 or 4 friends and cousins. We all look at the same websites about Syria. We upload films, videoclips, nice pictures, funny pictures and music from Syria. We can look at the news and know what people there are thinking and worrying about. Every day when I am at home in the morning or in the afternoon I go online and have my family there, my friends on MSN and all this music and information from Syria. Its a bit like if my room was in Syria.

Analysing usage : using voice to complement text

Although text seems to be preferred in most interactions essentially because of its asynchronous nature, there are  topics and discussions that can only be done orally and synchronously. When there is a complex issue, a certain level of disagreement or ambiguity, when the interlocutors don’t really understand each other, voice calls are by far preferred to other channels. We have often heard IM users telling us that if there is any doubt that the person they are writing to is upset or angry or not understanding the register of what is being written, then they quickly make a phone call to disambiguate the situation. Similarly when people must discuss a complex topic where the conversation requires mutual adjustments and tuning, then again voice is preferred. In our research we have seen that in business environments when people have a different level of understanding of an issue or come tiogether from different professional backgrounds, they tend to engage in more meetings and more voice calls.Professionals with similar backgrounds working on a project seem to rely more on email, IM or wikis, because they share much more of the background context.

The possibility to immediately adjust ones response to the other person, allow speakers to address far more complex relational situations than with other channels.This is why voice is systematically preferred in initial phases of business negotiations.

There are also cases in which it is socially unacceptable not to use a voice and synchronous channel. An example, of topics that are generally addressed by voice and synchronously, are notifications (Ryan...) : there are some types of news that can only be notified by face to face or in verbal one to one form, e.g. bad news about a patient's health, the death of a close person, etc. The ritual regarding the transfer of this news requires a sense of respect for the receiver of the information that must be put in a position to express his feelings, concerns etc. The giver of information must be able to read these expressions and modulate his message or enter in a discussion. Sending a bad news by asynchronous medium means that the sender does not want to enter into that negotiation process and does not want to handle the reactions of the receiver. This is seen as profoundly disrespectful and cowardly.

Violations of this principle are so serious that occasionally the press reports them, as in the case of a company informing its employees by SMS that they were being made redundant. The media also often comment on the fact that teenagers dump each other via SMS or Facebook, giving this as an extreme example of the generational transformations incurred following the adoption of the Internet and cell phones.

Analysing usage : why SMS is more successful than voice

Synchronous communication, such as a voice call, has a very strong prerequisite: that both interlocutors are available at the same time for the conversation. Available, willing and ready to dedicate the necessary amount of attention required for the conversation. When people are face to face it is easy for both interlocutors to see and understand if the other person is available for a conversation. When people are distant this readiness for conversation must be inferred or negotiated. The fact of answering the phone provides a first indication of readiness, but often callers ask for confirmation by querying the whereabouts of the person called or even more directly by ensuring themselves that the receiver can talk now.

Many sophisticated social techniques have been developed to ensure readiness such as sending an sms first to ask if a call can be made, fixing a set hour for a call (eg the Saturday call from a distant grandmother, or the fixed appointment on skype). Similarly the apparently rude habit of checking the name of the caller on the mobile before answering, has often more to do with assessing ones own readiness, than with screening out someone. The receiver usually knows the caller and may guess the topic and therefore may be able to estimate if he has the time, the emotional or cognitive availability in that moment to address that conversation.

When a person calls another, they are aware of asking for attention, interrupting the other persons activities and this type of request is not done lightly or unconsciously of the social implications. Most people will not choose a synchronous channel to communicate with a person in a very different hierarchical position, such as their superiors or their teachers. Less intrusive channels will be preferred such as email.

Giving and asking for attention in communication is far from a neutral social behaviour and requires a sophisticated understanding of social norms and practices. The social practices regarding who we should give attention to first, for how long, how much attention we should request are highly complex and links between attention and power, attention and gender, attention and education have been extensively studied. Charles Derber (1979), for instance, argues that status relations, in general, are fundamentally about the distribution of attention-getting and attention-giving across the social hierarchy. Those of lower status are expected to give attention to others. Those of higher status are expected to demand and receive the attention of others. Thus, when either lower status individuals give attention or upper status individuals get attention, they confirm their status.

This issue is still far from resolved and the basic rules of power, hierarchy and availability are still being respected even after a decade of mobile phone usage. Most people do not call their bosses on their mobile unless instructed to do so to report back for instance, most people will not contact officials outside office hours and preferably on land lines that indicate they are calling an institution and not a person. Most people will call just the closest friends on their mobiles.

This means therefore that voice calls are being done either at well designated times where it is assumed that a person is available or to a very small range of intimate contacts. Well known, intimate connections are people with whom the issues of attention have been resolved either because the mutual schedule is so well known that calls are only made when the other is known to be available, or because the relationship is such that the strategies for attention giving and grabbing have been negotiated in the past or can be done so on the spot with no big risk for the relationship.

The pitfalls of negociating attention are without any doubt the main reason why the mobile phone is being used in its voice format, to call so few people.

How did people use the web in 2001 ?

We wrote this article with Francesco Cara at the end of 2001.

 

All Internet users can be split up in three main categories : expert, naïve and what we call “light” users. Experts are the first comers to the net, the nerds, the ones who download software, who remember Mosaic, who can tell you the difference between Google Altavista and Yahoo!, who wouldn’t be seen dead near AOL. Naïve users haven’t moved into the Internet yet, they are still waiting for a good reason to log on; sometimes they are back seat drivers asking their kids to find them what they need. They still think that Internet is magic and that there is only one site for each topic.

 

Light users are regular internet users who use the net one or two hours a week, doing a bit of email, looking up practical content, such as train timetables and cinemas. This is a relatively new user population, which appeared in the last couple of years as the internet generalized to a less pioneering style of consumer. On the classical curb of technology adoption (Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority pragmatists, Late Majority conservatives, Laggards), these users correspond to the pragmatists and conservatives, who don’t rush to buy new technology but wait to see if it works, if it is really useful and if it is available at a cheaper price. The interest of this user group is that it represents the majority of new users on the net and the target of future expansion. If ever the internet user population moves above the threshold of 25-30% of the global European population, the newcomers will all be in this category.