How to save a week in a day

At a conservative estimate, I’ve saved around 4 hours today. Yesterday, it was more like 7. The day before, I saved more than a week in a day – possibly the closest thing to time travel I’ll ever get.

My time-saving frame of reference is my usual followthehumming period of 28 years. Back then, according to my diary, I was developing photos through a complex process based on visits to a high street chemist. Then I was taking my printed photos and sending them to friends and family in small physical packages transported by a network of government-owned couriers.

When I wasn’t doing this, I was waiting around for friends with no notion of where they were, how long it would be before they arrived, or even whether I was in the right place.

Then of course there were the times I was trying to find my way somewhere, having forgotten to bring along my unfeasibly large and unfoldable map.

Given that we now do all this and more with a quick finger swipe, we’re surely saving oodles of time as a species…so the question is, what are we doing with it all?

Fortunately we do have one place that might just give us an idea. Google’s annual list of most popular searches is a decent place to get a sense of what the collective consciousness is thinking about when it isn’t watching cute cat videos on YouTube.

Here in the UK last year, we were most concerned with how to draw, kiss, crotchet, meditate, knit, twerk, squat, shuffle, revise and wallpaper – in that order. Our favourite cake recipe was chocolate and our preferred holiday destination was Paris. We were curious in particular about Banksy, Frenchy and Dappy, and what Ebola, ALS, fracking and love were.

Globally, we searched more for the departed Robin Williams than anyone else, and also wondered mightily about flappy bird, the ice bucket challenge, and Eurovision’s Conchita Wurst. And the world’s most searched YouTube video wasn’t actually a cat, but a slightly disturbing mutant giant spider dog.

So it turns out that we’re actually using any time we may have saved to do more of what we’ve always done – gossip, communicate, have fun, discover the world, work, get stuff done, learn new things, and find out what the hell is going on around here anyway.

It’s a case of more (and more) of the same.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. These fundamental interests and activities – and in particular the opportunity to gossip – are exactly what Yuval Noah Harari describes in his excellent history of humankind, as the winning cards in homo sapiens’ powerful evolutionary hand. 

Advertisement

Friending, inboxing and googling: how verbing is changing the way we speak

Diary date: 3rd November, 1985

It’s the Autumn of 1985 and I’m back at university again, this time for year 2 of my 4 year course. I leave my parents at home with a promise to call or send a letter soon, but with so many student distractions to get reacquainted with, it will be a while before I’m in touch.

If I didn’t pen many letters back then, I write even fewer now. All but the most formal have been replaced by text messages, Facebook, Twitter and the rest.

In fact, we’re in such a rush to communicate these days that we’ve even reduced the words we use to describe these activities to the bare minimum. Sending a text message is simply texting, just as contacting someone on Facebook is now Facebooking or inboxing them. Tagging a tweet on Twitter involves hashtagging and sending an email is obviously emailing. Linking up with people is friending, and falling out with them again is described by the Oxford University Press word of the year of 2009: unfriending. And of course searching online is now amply covered by the ubiquitous idea of googling.

It all makes you wonder why sending a letter never quite managed to become lettering, and why watching TV isn’t just TVing or tellying (although in our own linguistically progressive household, it has recently been shortened to simply ‘watching’ – just as standing in front of a mirror preening yourself has become ‘vaining’).

What’s happening here is something that English has a proud tradition of doing with gay abandon, and that’s ‘verbing’ – converting nouns to verbs as the language evolves. It’s not only technology that makes use of this trend – nouns as diverse as butcher, parent, showcase and chair all spawned equivalent verbs years ago that today we take for granted. Linguist Steven Pinker has explained just how common this phenomenon is:

…easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English. I have estimated that about a fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns…

What’s wonderful is the degree to which people care about these changes and how quick they are to take a view on whether they represent positive or negative contributions to the popular vernacular.

My favourite case in point is the recent spat between Swedish lexicographers and global Internet giants Google. When it was proposed that the word ogooglebar (literally ‘ungoogle-able’) should be officially added to the Swedish language as a word roughly meaning ‘something that cannot be found on the web using a search engine,’ Google objected and pushed for the definition to include reference to their brand. Believing that language should be independent of such sordid commercial concerns, the Swedes refused and promptly dropped ogooglebar from their plans.

Swedish lexicographers (playing at home on the moral high ground): 1, Google (playing away from home and forgetting that a language belongs to its people): 0.

Is stupidity making us Google?

Diary date: 12th September, 1985

My working stay in Sweden lasts around six to eight weeks. It was a real eye-opener at the time, but reading back through my 28-year old diary, the whole period feels distinctly analogue.

A lot of the time, I don’t really know what’s going on and frankly seem to have very little way of finding out. I write longhand messages to friends and family on pieces of paper which are then carefully transported to them over a period of several days by a series of paid messengers. I lose track of what’s happening elsewhere in the world, and seem to struggle even to find out what’s going on in the immediate vicinity. I collect maps by the armful to help me get around. When I finally leave Gothenburg by train, I have no way of letting my family in Munich know that I’m two hours late, so they have to hang around the station just hoping I’ll turn up.

But taken as a whole, one thing stands out more than anything else in those innocent, analogue days – the tremendous effort I put into trying to know stuff.

And when I say know, I really mean know.

For certain.

You used to need to know stuff. Back then, it seemed really important. These days, you just need to feel reasonably sure that the stuff you’re concerned with is knowable, and that if and when it’s needed, you’ll be able to find it.

In other words, we’ve slowly but surely begun outsourcing the knowledge that we used to carry around with us – principally of course to the Internet and our friends at Google, but also to phones, satnavs, e-readers, tablets, MP3 players and lots of other devices.

So what are we doing with all the spare mental capacity that our outsourcing policy has presumably produced? Is it really all being spent on Angry Birds and watching cat videos on YouTube? Perhaps we’ve now got the potential to know a great deal more than we ever did before – albeit by proxy. Or maybe we’ve got surplus brainspace available to know and store more and more interesting/useful/esoteric/ephemeral stuff – leaving all the dull, heavy-lifting to the magic of the Internet.

Neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield for one has her doubts. She’s argued frequently and publicly that the human brain’s incredible ability to adapt may well mean that life online and our obsession with the “yuck! and wow!” of the Web will result in lasting and not necessarily desirable changes to how we interact, think and manage knowledge. She’s occasionally been criticised for her views, but she’s far from being alone. Even Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt sounds concerned that we’re losing the ability to think deeply enough to retain genuine and profound knowledge.

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking.

Celebrated technology writer Nicolas Carr – asker of the original question, Is Google Making us Stupid? – has written along similar lines, suggesting that the Internet may represent a Faustian pact that will trade ‘deeper’ thought for something more superficial:

For most of the past 500 years, the ideal mind was the contemplative mind. The loss of that ideal, and that mind, may be the price we pay for the Web’s glittering treasure.

Outsourcing both knowledge and storage is nothing new. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years as evidenced by everything from the Pyramids to the Rosetta Stone. But the sheer power, speed and ubiquity of the Internet may well mean that unlike the mechanisms we’ve used in the past, this one has the potential to fundamentally change the nature of the minds that created it.

Why Facebook friending doesn’t mean friendship

Diary date: 29th April, 1985

I’m depressed. Or rather, my 1985 self is depressed. My diary today is a stark and rather maudlin list of the names of eight good friends I’m about to leave behind – probably forever*. I’m getting ready to go back to university in Hull, but more importantly – now that they have successfully launched me from the family nest – my parents are in the process of upping sticks and moving house from rural Norfolk to the bright lights of the Bavarian capital, Munich. Once they move, ‘going home’ will never be the same again.

The eight names are like a roll call of the lost.

Keep in touch, maybe? Send letters? Ridiculous. At 19, the very idea was embarrassing – and how did you put pub banter in writing anyway? The occasional phone call? No chance. No access to a phone and no money for calls either.

No, all is lost. Might as well forget them all now and be done with it.

Facebook: compare and contrast.

Life these days couldn’t be more different. Facebook and other social tools mean that losing contact is almost more difficult than maintaining it, and relationships can seemingly be sustained with much larger numbers of people. According to an April 2013 study by Stephen Wolfram,  the median number of friends per person on Facebook has now reached the dizzy heights of 342. This number varies with age of course, with younger users having substantially more ‘friends’ than those in older age groups.

The people we ‘friend’ on Facebook change with age too. Most of our friends in our younger years tend to be about our own age – then as we get older we start branching out a little. Wolfram also explains why it is that so many of our friends appear to have more friends than we do – a real world phenomenon called the friendship paradox.

Facebook even means people can make relatively intimate contact in anticipation of possible future friendship – say, hooking up online before going somewhere new – perfect for today’s university newbies.

It seems numbers of friends may be important for reasons other than notional popularity too – the more friends you have, the more money you’re allegedly likely to earn. In 2009, the BBC cited a 35-year study of 10,000 US students which suggested that the most financially comfortable in later life were those that had the most friends when they were at school. Each extra friend added a not insignificant 2% to their future salary.

Robin Dunbar

But friendship surely isn’t a numbers game.  And is it really possible to have active friendships with the hundreds of contacts that Facebook encourages? Enter British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who proposed a hard-wired limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships – an idea popularised as Dunbar’s number. The most oft-quoted Dunbar figure is around 150 – way below Wolfram’s median of about 400 friends for Facebook users in their early twenties.

The obvious conclusion is that what’s happening on Facebook (and elsewhere) isn’t friendship in its traditional sense, but a set of relationships built more loosely around values like mutual awareness and availability. As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Facebook and (more effectively) Google+ have both introduced ways for us to group friends according to the kind of relationship we want to have with them. In other words, they’re facilitating their users’ retreat to something closer to Dunbar’s number.

Of the eight friends I left behind in 1985, the absence of social media combined with our collective male apathy meant that I eventually lost touch with all but one. I’m sure the current crop of Facebook users will fare far better, but the jury’s still out on whether they’ll be able to maintain the extraordinary pace they’ve set themselves.

*In fact, it turned out to be about 23 years, but I wasn’t far wrong, so let’s not split hairs.