Category: Four pillars

Malcolm’s post on Second Life, itself riffing off Scoble’s On Not Getting Second Life, got me started on this particular snowball.

If you haven’t done so already, you should check out Cyworld . [Yes, I know, I’ve linked you to the wikipedia definition and article and not to the site itself; since most of the site is in Korean, I submit that I am being helpful…]

I’ve had a Second Life account for some time now, and haven’t really done much with it. I’ve thought of doing things with it (like my aborted attempt to use Second Life as a stage for discussing Net Neutrality) but I must confess that it’s been more lurker and observer than participant.

Back to Cyworld. Over 17 million South Koreans use it; this is out of a total population below 50 million, so Cyworld has a one-in-three coverage. More tellingly, over 90% of South Korea’s 13-30 age group use it. Even more tellingly, more than half of SK Communication’s $110m revenues come from it. And half of that is made by selling dotori, the synthetic currency used in Cyworld.

That should give you an idea of the scale Cyworld operates at.

From my admittedly weird point of view, I see no difference between Second Life and Facebook and Bebo and MySpace and Flickr and last.fm. Or for that matter Skype and eBay. Or even Stardoll. By the way, every one of these sites/communities/facilities has an entry in Wikipedia. Amazing.
They are all communities where people can

• create virtual identities
• share interests
• build relationships
• converse with each other
• create (and co-create) value
• exchange value

Yes they are the same. And yet different. Different in terms of the narrowness or breadth of the interests they represent, the age-groups they attract, what is created, what is exchanged, how all this is done.

But they share one thing in common that is critical.

A low barrier to entry. Cyworld’s real popularity (and it is the Daddy of this genre) is its relative ease, the ease with which it could be adopted by a community that was not technoliterate. No html or PHP or control panels or sidebars or anything.

In a prior post I quoted Kurt Vonnegut Jr as saying “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be”. I also made reference to Halley Suitt‘s comment on getting a First Life before you get a Second Life.

This is why the low-barrier-to-entry issue is critical. We spend so much time ensuring that people are disenfranchised in the real world that we should not be surprised when they are attracted to synthetic ones.

Our challenge is to ensure that the synthetic worlds are complements to the real world, and not substitutes. That people are not disenfranchised to the extent that their only life is in Second Life. There is immense value to be gained in role-playing and simulation and synthetic worlds, in the serendipity and learning and experimentation that can take place. But this value is As Well As and not Instead Of the physical and real world.

So we all have to learn about these other worlds, in order to make our world better.

At a level of abstraction, the minihompy in Cyworld is a Dilbert Cubicle. In the real world, you get given a starter cubicle at work, and have to spend years crawling your way up the organisational ladder before you can have your minihompy.

Initially, cubicles are any-colour-you-like-as-long-as-it’s-black. No choice as to decor, but some rights to personalise. And it is only over time that the cubicle becomes a room becomes an office with a desk and a table becomes a corner office becomes a corner office with a window and a table and maybe even some art on the wall and wonder of wonders, a sofa.

Generation M will treat that as serious disenfranchisement. They want their minihompy today. With their skins and their devices and their personalisations and their preferences.

Or they will find an alternate world where they get their minihompy and not their cubicle. An alternate world which may be the one inhabited by your biggest competitor.

It’s all about enfranchisement. Connected not channelled.

Word has been spreading all day today that the Indian government has blocked a large number of blog sites. Both Dina Mehta as well as Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing commented across my radar screen.

I could be wrong. But my guess is that the ISPs were asked to do something they couldn’t, by a group of overzealous whoevers, and they resorted to the sledgehammer as the only way to comply. I’m going with inadvertent sledgehammer until and unless I am rudely awakened to a different reality.

 

I’ve always accepted the received wisdom about men and women and multitasking. Mars and Venus. Men solve problems and work sequentially and logically, women are good at multitasking and some sort of ordered chaos. Or something like that.

Now, as I watch Generation M and the modern workforce, I’m not so sure.

Maybe housewives were the world’s first knowledge workers.

Maybe men did sequential and problem-solving and breadwinnining things because that was their ‘allotted’ place in society, not because their wiring was different.

Maybe women handled multitasking better because they ran the home and you couldn’t run a home with kids like an assembly line, you had to learn to multitask. Not because their wiring was different.

And as women “entered the workforce” some of these lines blurred, and we still tried to believe it was all wiring, but it really wasn’t.

Maybe it was always nurture and not nature, as far as multitasking abilities were concerned.

And now, as Generation M enters the workforce, they don’t care about perceived differences in wiring. In fact they don’t agree that there is a difference in this respect. They already know that it has nothing at all to do with sequential and parallel wiring, it has to do with what they have to do, and how they adapt to that task.

Maybe Generation M multitask because they can. Maybe we could have as well, but we were conditioned, “nurtured”, to believe men couldn’t and women could.

When I look at voluntary organisations and startups, they seem to have got this already. In both cases they did not have assembly line thinking to colour their perceptions, they did not have the luxury of assembly line behaviour, they had to multitask, no choice.

Yes, maybe housewives were the world’s first knowledge workers, working networked and in community, with collaborative filtering and ratings and reviews and recommendations. With constant interruptions and an innate sense of deciding what’s important, very quickly. An innate ability to make mistakes and learn and move on. They had all the practice. They just didn’t have the technology.

Now, with the altered workforce and the entry of Generation M and the availability of relevant technology, maybe we will see multitasking proven as a gender-neutral thing, as it probably was in the first place.

Just maybe.

In that serendipitous flow that blogs excel at, Chukti made contact with me after a quarter of a century. [Great connecting up, Chutki!) And as we conversed he brought up Attention Deficit Trait (as defined by Edward Hallowell) and wondered what I thought of it.

A few days later I was reading The Economist’s Intelligent Life Summer 2006 issue. And found this article by Tim Hindle referring to the same concern; unfortunately it’s hidden behind a premium wall.

I quote from the article. “Mr Hallowell says that people who work in physical isolation are more likely to suffer from ADT than those who share a lively office“.

When I see statements like that I start thinking about popes and catholicism and bears and woods and faeces.

But what do I know?

So I continue to do what I do, and learn from my wife and my children. It’s strange, my wife does not do e-mail. She wants to, and we keep putting off “the lesson”. It will happen. Soon.

But in the meantime.

Watching her deal with her daily routine, and (when and where possible) participating in it, teaches me more about multitasking and dealing with distractions than I could learn in an “office” environment. Let me draw out some themes, briefly.

1. Some of her tasks are regular and inflexible in terms of time. School runs and mealtimes are classic examples.

2. Some are regular but more flexible in the context of precisely when she does them. Shopping and laundry and meal preparation are examples of these. And keeping fit.
3. Some are regular and low-flexibility in terms of time, but she outsources them. Cleaning and ironing and dry-cleaning come to mind.

4. Most of this is done while I am at work and the children are at school, so she does them largely on her own. But she interacts a lot with people while she does them. And she has many interruptions, some welcome, some not. Phones and doorbells ringing. “Outsourced” task handlers needing answers to questions in order to continue. Things to follow up, things to organise.

5. And somewhere within all this, she finds time for herself, to rest, to relax, to read the Bible, to pray. And motivate and spur and cajole and support the rest of us. And stay contented and patient.

What I find particularly fascinating is a constant and dynamic prioritisation process. They say a woman’s work is never done. And sometimes it seems to me that as a result, their concept of what is important and what is not is very well defined.
Yes, I can learn a lot about multitasking from her. And I try to. Especially since she has all this without e-mail and IM and RSS, and has learnt how to deal with it all.

This mix of must-do and may-do, of time-inflexible and time-flexible, interspersed with personal and household recharging, this mix tells me a lot about how 21st century management could be. Not assembly line but networked household. With adults and children and friends and service providers. I learn a lot about prioritisation and pragmatism from my wife.

LifeKludger, if you read this, maybe you can give us your take on all this. You probably know more about working in isolation than I’ll ever learn.

Isn’t it ironic

That “the internet…a series of tubes”

is clogging up

The Internet [via] a series of YouTubes….