Wonderful Things

I’m bumping into a lot of wonderful things that seem to be sprouting up all over the place.

To keep track of them and share them, I have made a wonderful-things tag on delicious.

Enjoy!

Mobile Phones – Impact in Africa

Tonight there was an excellent piece by BBC Newsnight on the impact of mobile phones in Africa generally, and Kenya specifically. See the 18 minute video here. (Or a short text article with alternate video link here.)

It’s also a vivid picture of life in Kenya generally, quite removed from a lot of the more cliched media pictures. It made me feel like going back there.

This reinforces the message of stories like Ringing the Changes in Nigeria and plenty of other evidence that mobiles are having a major impact on life.

As I said about this before: The kind of revolution that actually works.

Internet Dating More Successful Than Thought

I’m not surprised by this now…

A study by the University of Bath shows that internet dating and online relationships work for many people, and the likelihood of success for relationships that start online is as great as for relationships that start face-to-face.

Before I got involved with online communities a year and a bit ago, I’d have been very surprised by that. But I’ve found that you can get as close to people online as offline, and what happens in those relationships is much the same too. The same ups and downs, the same fun, the same thrill, the same happiness and misunderstandings and arguments, and making up.

It does seems strange when you haven’t experienced it yourself, but that’s how it is.

Online World as Important to Users as the Real World?

A major study by the Center for the Digital Future highlights the importance of online communities to those who use them.

Some key findings are that:

• 43% of members of online communities feel as strongly about those communities as their real-world communities
• More than 20% take real-world actions connected with these online communities, such as meeting people face-to-face
• Online participation leads to social activism, with large numbers of people both participating in causes that they would otherwise not know about, and being more active in causes than they otherwise would have been
• Almost all users say that online time does not reduce the amount of time they spend with friends and family in person

All of this suggests that it is time to stop talking about online versus real-world. Online life has become a significant part of real life for many people, and the number of such people is growing rapidly.

To me, the findings about activism are particularly interesting. Online life is often portrayed as the domain of the very young, and as rather insubstantial and superficial. My experience is that it can certainly be a light-hearted medium, full of fun, but it can also be serious and powerful. Often it’s both of those at the same time, as with Vasco’s Journal.

The serious/frivolous distinction is as simplistic as the online/real-world distinction. It’s time to recognise that each of us travels back and forth through all these spaces all the time.

---

Related Links

Report Summary in PDF
BBC News – Virtual Pals Soar In Importance

Does happiness live in cyberspace?

An interesting piece from the BBC Technology site:

Is it possible that we can find friendship, fulfilment and contentment on the internet? Almost two-thirds of all adults now log on to the web. We spend more and more of our time staring at computer screens. The question is whether this behaviour is driving human beings apart or bringing us together.

Some random thoughts on the article… Like most things, a person could go either way with it. But the way technology is set up does make certain things either easier or harder, and we tend to go for the easy options. The idea (also in the article) that TV “makes” people into couch potatoes and “displaces” social interaction is inherently nonsensical. But it does make it easier to entertain yourself without having to step outside your door. It does make it easier therefore to cope with a lack of social interaction.

Like a lot of social phenomena, you need to look at what happens in terms of a whole ecology of inter-related factors that co-evolve. i.e. Society gets more fragmented, and more people live alone, which creates a demand for TV entertainment, among other things. The availability of TV (among many other things) makes it easier and more viable to live alone, and so might add to social fragmentation. So just like a rainforest, a whole ecology of lifestyles grows up where each element supports others, and no one thing is “the cause”.

TV viewing is now actually going down, partly because people spend time online instead. If we go back to the “real world” – well frankly a lot of it not tremendously well-designed to support any kind of real social interaction either. I daresay we’ve spent many hours in bars having banal conversations with people who we never really connected with in any meaningful way. But the bar didn’t “make us” do that.

In some ways, the internet could facilitate a deeper level of connection. True, anonymity means you could pretend to be somone that you’re not. But conversely, anonymity means there is freedom to be who you are, without worrying what people think of that.

Psychologists talk about the “Strangers on a Train” phenomenon. Sometimes you neet someone travelling on train, feel connected, and find yourself telling them things you haven’t told your best friends. Because no fear of what they might think, of consequences to the future of the relationship, of being gossiped about, and no past baggage between yourselves. Also applies online. But unlike on trains, the relationship can keep growing from there. And unlike on trains, or for that matter bars, you tend to be hanging out in places where people who share your passions and interests and general take on life are also hanging out.

In one of the first comments on the article, a woman writes about her son marrying someone from South Africa:

My son, based in Worcestershire, met a girl in South Africa whilst doing some research online. After six months of online dating including endless games of chess and meeting her family and friends during a link up to a party in SA, he finally made the journey to meet her. They married 6 months later in South Africa and she joined him at university in England a few months later. I find it amazing that he found his perfect partner (she shares his love of fishing, camping, travel and sport) thousands of miles away from what started out as an argument in a chat room. We feel so privileged to have such a lovely young woman as part of our family.

So, speaking from personal experience… It is quite possible to have banal conversations and superficial relationships in “real life”. It is also quite possible to have profound conversations and deep relationships online. And having great relationships seems to take much the same kind of things online and offline.

Original Post and Comments on my LiveJournal

Blogoholism

My friend vasco_pyjama mentioned an article in Slate about Blogoholism.

Well, I wonder about blogoholism too.

Though I read and comment more than I write entries to my own blogs.

In my case, I think I’m always likely to have some kind of -oholism though, so if it’s not blogging, it’ll just be something else.

Blogoholism is better than most, as I do get to connect with interesting people all over the world, and have worthwhile conversations with them.

And I get a lot of pleasure out of writing my little stories and having people enjoy them. Which without interested readers and immediate feedback, I wouldn’t be doing at all.

The article in Slate is about a would-be novelist. I’m thinking there is a bottom line about the demand and supply for writing. One good novelist (or whatever other type of writer) can meet the needs of millions of readers. So there have always been far more people that would love to be writers than could ever earn a livelihood from it.

And reading the blogosphere, I see that there are actually very many good writers out there. It’s not their lack of ability that would prevent them from being professional writers, simply the reality that there are far more potentially good writers than available readers for all of them. We can only read so much.

So the blogosphere is an outlet for writers who want to write for the love of it, not to reach a wide audience. Instead of everyone being famous for fifteen minutes, it’s everyone being famous to fifteen people.

It’s like amateur drama, or playing in a band for fun.

For a few it might be a pathway to being discovered, but for most it’s all about the fun, the fulfillment, and the creativity of the act itself.

Original Post and Comments from my LiveJournal