The dissertation has been on hold for a bit this summer while I get some other things going. High on that list is our new company - Appozite - and my work becoming an expert in the social shopping arena.  So, as you might guess, becoming an expert in social shopping involves a lot of shopping. Thinking about shopping, reading about shopping, and my favorite - actually shopping. As part of that work, I recently undertook a very scientific approach to shopping and conducted a shopping experiment.

I am generally very careful to keep things related to Appozite only on Appozitegeist and not here on this blog, but I don’t want to be too science-y on Appozitegeist, and I can be science-y here and there are a few things I would like to explore related to the details of this experiment.

Basically, my goal with this experiment was to apply a carefully planned and executed method to the shopping process. As an academic, I carefully plan and execute most everything, so it makes sense to take a rigorous scientific approach to other aspects of my life, specifically shopping.

The Experiment

So I set out to experiment with shopping. (If you want to read more about the experiment, I proposed the experiment in one post on Appozitegeist and followed up with results in another post.) Normally I take a very willy-nilly approach to shopping. I go shopping (online and offline) whenever the mood strikes me and I get whatever I feel like getting. This, as you can imagine, can lead to large credit card bills and a grumpy husband. So I decided I needed to come up with a better way to shop, since I’m doing more of it now (as research, of course).

It was very interesting to apply what I’ve been trained to do as a social scientist to something that feels as silly as shopping. I’ve done quite a bit of reading and research on shopping, not to mention had a great deal of personal experience in the area (I guess you could call this an autoethnography). Based on that “lit review” I developed a set of criteria to test in the field.  I came up with three such criteria: cost, selection, and entertainment. A good shopping trip should balance those elements.

The Criteria

Cost is easy to define; I simply needed to set and stick to a budget. I was excited about testing this as I’m usually terrible with a budget.  For this experiment, I determined my budget would be $75 - high enough to give me some flexibility in the number and quality of my purchases, but low enough that it wouldn’t impact the household budget in any way.

Selection refers to the type of items I can shop for. A good shopping trip allows for the shopper to browse for and purchase a number of different items. Knowing this, I broke selection into two subcriteria: weight and variety.  Weight is the relative importance or significance of an item, and variety refers to a diverse set of items. The ideal shopping trip would balance those criteria; I would purchase several different items that each contribute to my wardrobe in a significant way.  For example, a good shopping trip would result in two shirts, two pairs of earrings, one dress and one pair of shoes. This trip has high variety; there are several different kinds of items in my shopping bag. It also has a high weight, as I need shirts and dresses to round out my wardrobe, and earrings and shoes are always neccessary additions.

Entertainment is harder to quantify than the first two criteria, but essentially it refers to the quality of the shopping interactions. A successful shopping outing needs to be fun and enjoyable, not stressful or frustrating. This was assessed throughout as well as at the conclusion of the shopping trip.

The Results

You can read the full results on Appozitegeist, but the experiment was successful. I stuck to my budget, purchased an ideal combination of high weight and high variety items, and had fun doing it.

It was so successful, in fact, that I want to try again. I think this experiment needs reproducing. And if that means more shopping, well, so be it. It is for science, after all.

I realize I’ve been very bad with posting regularly the past two weeks. It’s been nice outside and I’ve been otherwise engaged. But I have been keeping up with my Twitter updates pretty well. It sometimes just seems easier to post 140 characters than it does to come up with an entire well-written, original, full-length blog post (well, full-length to be sure; you can argue with the well-written and original parts).

I don’t see Twitter as a replacement for my blog; they each serve different functions. But I do see Twitter as providing a very important service that my blog doesn’t really provide, and that’s the sharing of links. There are tons of sites I come across every day that I want to share with people, but don’t want to write an entire blog post about. I generally bookmark these sites in del.icio.us, but I don’t think many people subscribe to my del.icio.us feed. I use del.icio.us more to file things away for my own future use. But Twitter is a great place to share links with others. And I’ve found that I learn about lots of new things from reading others’ feeds.

I know I’m not the first person to talk about Twitter in this way (there goes this post’s originality), but after talking to some non-Twittering friends yesterday, I think this is a very important use of Twitter. These friends, all of whom use MySpace or Facebook and Flickr, don’t really get Twitter. Which is fine; I didn’t get Twitter when I started using it. It’s hard to see its usefulness if people in your network don’t use it.

Anyway, I’m going to keep thinking and blogging about this issue (and posting more regularly), but in the meantime, please check my Twitter feed - http://twitter.com/jennmonroe.

I learned some interesting things with the informal poll I conducted with 50 of my undergraduate students today.

First, all of them have cell phones. Duh. But what is more interesting is that more than half of them have web-enabled cell phones, and many of those are Blackberries, iPhones and other PDAs/smartphones.

Second, they almost all use Facebook. More than 90% of the students in class today have Facebook accounts. Almost half are also on MySpace (and none of them were only on MySpace). A couple are on Xanga and Friendster, as well. Almost half have YouTube accounts (though I don’t know how often they actually upload videos).

In terms of network fatigue, this group really doesn’t seem to be affected. They just aren’t using that many of these sites. Several students don’t have accounts on any social sites at all. And only a couple students were on more than Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. A few have Flickr accounts. Only one student said he has accounts on more than four sites.

We didn’t have time for much discussion or elaboration on these topics in class today, but I am looking forward to learning more about how my students use these tools. In fact, if any of those students are reading this now, I invite them to comment with their perspectives.

It’s time to conduct interviews for my dissertation. Everything’s been approved by the IRB, so I’m ready to go.

So, if you’re interested in talking about the ways you use communication technologies (cell phones and smartphones, laptops, instant messaging, email, the web, PDAs, etc…) to be connected, I would love to interview you!

I’m specifically looking for people in the Austin, San Francisco and Raleigh/Durham areas. Let me know if you’re interested!

A recurring theme at SXSWi this year was network fatigue. As in, a person is on so many social sites - Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce, Dopplr, Yelp, and so on - that she can’t keep up with all of them. She’s overloaded, and definitely not communicating and connecting efficiently.

So in response to this problem, some smart folks have come up with some clever solutions - FriendFeed and Socialthing! two of hottest. Just in time, too, because I was about to be buried under my growing pile of network connections. The idea behind FriendFeed, Socialthing! and other services like them is that you can get one account to track all your other accounts. So on your FriendFeed site, you are notified whenever a friend posts something to one of the various social sites; instead of having to log into potentially dozens of other sites, you can log into one.

I do think this is a good idea. Probably an inevitable one, too. For the past four or five years, more and more of these social sites have been popping up, each offering an interesting angle or different community. But the more we sign up for, the harder it gets to manage. Imagine having 15 different cell phones - one for each set of people you want to talk to or topic you want to talk about. I’d have one phone to talk about photography, another to talk about work stuff, another to talk to people I knew in high school, plus a dozen more. That would be a mess! So it’s great to have one cell phone, one central space to manage all the others.

Or is it? How many people actually suffer from this network fatigue? Facebook has approximately 68 million users. There are somewhere between 6 and 7 billion people in the world. Which means somewhere around 0.1% of the world uses Facebook. Of course this is a silly argument - there are billions of people who don’t or can’t use even the internet, let alone a social networking site - but it provides a little perspective. And of course, any business would be happy to have 68 million customers; that is still a ridiculously huge number of people. But how many of those 68 million people have accounts on multiple other social sites?

At South by Southwest, it would appear that everyone does. They also all have iPhones and MacBooks. The people who attend the interactive conference are a very specific group, and they do use multiple social sites. They use them a lot. But when I leave the wonderful little bubble of SXSW, I don’t see as many people using all of these sites. In fact, I see most people using only a couple.  Almost everyone has a Facebook or MySpace account and then one or two others (usually LinkedIn, Flickr or Yelp). And these are middle class, well-educated Americans in their 20s and early 30s - one of the main demographics for social networking sites. If these people aren’t using much more than Facebook and MySpace, why do they need FriendFeed? And if they don’t, who does? Besides the group of early-adopting super-users who frequent conferences like SXSW, of course.

I’m going to do an experiment. I teach a class of 60 undergraduates. Tomorrow I’m going to find out which sites they use, which sites they’ve heard of, and how they feel about network fatigue. Because I do think sites like Socialthing! and FriendFeed are very interesting, and will personally help me manage my networks. But I just wonder how prevalent this network fatigue actually is.

An update on this experiment soon…

Over the next few days, as I’m recovering from SXSW Interactive and making sense out of all that I saw, heard and experienced, I’ll be posting some of my thoughts on what I learned. But for now, here are some of the ideas I noticed cropping up again and again throughout the conference.

1. Life streaming
   1. Individual public image, brand, identity, reputation, publicity
   2. Internet famous
   3. Credibility, authority
   4. Authenticity, honesty, transparency
   5. Consumption vs. creation
2. Community
   1. Collective intelligence
   2. Smart mobs, the power of the many
   3. Building audience/community
3. Constant connection and communication
   1. Portable technology
   2. Efficiency
   3. Real-time, all about the now
   4. Interactivity and social
   5. Emerging/emergent
   6. Types of friends
   7. Control
4. Hyper-locality
5. Organizations
   1. Failure vs. small success vs. big success
   2. Organizational culture
   3. Work-life, lifestyle
   4. Coworking
6. Addiction and overload

This is a big list of big ideas, many of them core to the “social ecosystem” in which we currently find ourselves (another big idea).  And all of these relate to the social side of SXSW content (I’ve heard from Hayes that there were quite a few interesting technical discussions, but I’ll leave that to those of you who are qualified to talk about the technical). As I further digest what I learned, I’ll post more on these ideas individually.  But I can summarize SXSW in two words: intellectually stimulating.  I enjoyed myself thoroughly, met some bright and creative people, and am definitely motivated to continue thinking about and researching these interesting and important ideas.

A reader posted this question on Fast Company’s website, and though there are only four responses so far, everyone has said yes. Huh.

Update: I didn’t have time to elaborate any on this before, but I can now. I am not at all surprised that people check their Blackberries while with their families or friends. But I am a little surprised they admit to it so readily. I would have expected a social desirability bias in people’s responses; isn’t it bad to work when you’re with your kids? That’s what TV says anyway.

Looking at their individual responses is a bit more revealing - the four responses use language like “need to stop that” and “wow I have no life.” So maybe these people are comfortable telling the world they check their Blackberries while with their kids, as long as they admit that it might be a bad thing.

I wonder what kids think of Blackberries and their ilk. When I was little, no one had cell phones, especially not my parents. Do they mind that their parents keep their Blackberries around all the time? Do they think their parents are important or cool? Do kids want their own Blackberries?

The SXSW Interactive schedule has been posted. I’ve yet to go through it completely, but I’m so geeked out and excited that almost all the panels look good.

Lots of the Core Conversations look interesting - Examining the Different Ways We Can Work, Coworking and the Evolution of the Independent Worker, Next Generation Education: Bringing the New Web to Campus, Mobile Manners: Mobile Presence and the Undefined Etiquette, Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?, Online Identity: And I *Do* Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation, among others.

More on this over the next few weeks.

Why is it, that even when we know months in advance when a deadline is, we always end up working right up to the last possible minute to finish something? I use the generic “we” to refer to all people, not just me or the people I work with. Though there may be unique individual cases (a.k.a. freaks), procrastination seems pretty universal.

I absolutely despise working under duress, and last-minute work is always stressful. And every time a big conference paper submission deadline approaches, it seems to surprise us. Even though the submission date is the same every year! This is a strange phenomenon that seriously demands scientific study.

So, we’ve reached another annual NCA submission deadline. My last paper was just submitted, only minutes ago (not by me, thank goodness, because 40 minutes before the submission site closes really is pushing it), so now we can all relax. But I really do want to know why we always wait so long to get started. It probably has something to do with behavioral economics; somewhere someone like Steven Levitt is ready to tell me that procrastination is an expressed preference for valuing present time over future time. Or something having to do with rational utility maximization. Probably that one. It sounds so technical; it must explain this.

My last post (and various on and offline responses to it) have gotten me thinking about what sorts of things we’re always connected to. I’ve been thinking in terms of simply being “always connected” and not paying much attention to the blank that follows (being “always connected to _______”). Or maybe I’ve been filling in that blank with something along the lines of “telecommunications grid.” Either way, I think I need to consider what else can complete that phrase.

So, just off the top of my head, here’s a list of a few things we can be connected to: faith/God (as discussed in previous post), family and friends, the community, our past/heritage, nature.

But the kind of constant connectivity I’m talking about is a literal connection. Though there may not be an actual wire connecting my device to the telecommunications grid, with it I have a connection to the internet and through that, the world. This physical connection can lead to being in perpetual contact with family, friends and co-workers. But it has nothing to do with a more spiritual connection to nature, faith, etc… Like I said before, that connection - when it exists - does not require a cell phone or the internet.

So, what have I learned from this little thought exercise? That the “always connected” I’m talking about is the communication-enabling internet connection one gets with laptops, smartphones, PDAs, etc… And as an organizational communication scholar, I am interested in the ways we talk about and make sense of that kind of constant connection. How does being always connected to the telecommunications grid impact being (always) connected to work?