 And this is Kate Crawford, who is here with us today from the University of New South Wales in Australia, which you'll notice immediately once you start speaking. And she's also visiting us at Microsoft Research for a couple of weeks. And she is at the Journalism and Media Research Centre and is here to tell us about the art of noise. Thank you Dana, and thanks everyone for coming along in your lunch break. Can everyone hear me? For the internets. Okay, for the internets. This is who I am, and this is what we're going to be talking about today. I'm really very much going to take this as a work in progress. So what I'm going to share with you is, first of all, the findings from a study that I'm currently working on. And this is a three-year study looking at mobile and social media in Australia. And the second thing I'm going to do is talk about some really early emerging ideas around how we analyse and think about noise and attention. But before I get there, I just want to say a huge thank you to the Berkman Centre for having me along, and for AMAR for arranging to get me in the room. It's absolutely a pleasure to be here. So to get started, I'm going to take us back to 1741. Now, this might seem like a relatively unusual place to start talking about mobile and social media. But I'd like you to keep this image in your hindbrain if you can while we have this discussion today. This is an engraving by William Hogarth from 1741 called The Enraged Musician. And you can see the enraged musician who's up there in his window having a look at the streets of London. And he's furious because as you can see, there's a town crier. There's a woman holding song sheets with a crying baby. There's a boy who's using a drum. There's a man sharpening his knives. There's a boy pissing under his window, in fact. And this is all of the cacophony of commerce and human life, as well as the attendant anxieties about growing industrialization in the UK in the 1700s. And I think if we fast forward to the 21st century, we can think about a new kind of noise complaint. And that's the complaint about network conversation. And it doesn't come to us through the windows, but it reaches us nonetheless via our mobile phones, via Twitter, via Facebook, sometimes in 140-character bursts. It's important here, of course, that many forms of social and mobile media are not actually audio. They're not sound based. But I think by using these kinds of oral metaphors, we can get to a different sense of a nuanced understanding about how we engage with these modes. We often tune in over the course of the day just checking in what people are saying, maybe on Facebook, maybe on Twitter. And I think Nick Cauldry says it best. He's a media theorist in the UK. That, in fact, oral metaphors are a very productive way of thinking about the intersubjective nature of contemporary networks media. The other thing I like about using the term listening in this space is that it implies there's a limit to our listening, where all of these various channels become like noise. So with that in mind, I'm going to tell you a little bit about this study that's currently underway. It's funded by the ARC. It's a discovery grant. It's called Young Mobile Network. It's actually the largest study in Australia of mobile and social media use by 18 to 30 year olds. And I'm conducting this with my colleague, Jared Goggan. And we've pretty much got two years under the belt and a year ago. So this is very much by way of early findings, which I'll be sharing with you from the quantitative side. The quant work is just about to begin in the next couple of months. So choosing the 18 to 30 cohort was somewhat controversial because talking about young people, we often see quite younger cohorts being studied. But given the way in which the term youth is being mobilized in this space, we thought it was going to be quite interesting to capture a wider range of people and also to compare what was happening for the 18, 19 and 20 year olds with the 28, 29 and 30 year olds. And it's also a really fascinating time to be studying what's happening with mobile media. At the moment, we've just gone past the five billion mark for mobile subscriptions worldwide. In Australia, we now have more mobile phones than we have human beings. We've got to around 110 to 115% mobile subscription penetration. So obviously, Australia is a country that's very accustomed to using the mobile phone. But even more so, I think it's a critical period of metamorphosis for the mobile that we can no longer talk about the mobile qua mobile. It is in fact a space of media rather than just a space where we take and receive calls. So this might mean using it as an MP3 player, as a camera, as a place of sharing and making media, but also as a portal for where we connect through to other kinds of media spaces. And of course, social media is a very important one here. So not that we're talking about lava to butterflies, but definitely a period of critical change for the mobile. So how do we do this study? Well, the first question that we wanted to ask was about youth culture and its imaginaries. And what we meant by that were looking at the ways in which young adults were being represented in the media. So that's everything from the discourses around idealized youth. And we see this a lot in the advertising around mobile media, young people running around with fancy, beautiful phones, through to the vilification of precisely the same group as the people who are engaged in cyberbullying, sexting and a whole range of activities that are seen as somehow deviant. But in addition to looking at the panics, we then wanted to compare it to the lived realities of how the mobile was actually being used. Not just in a day-to-day sense, but also in how it was a critical part of the infrastructure of friendship, both in the maintenance and development of how we actually form these friendships and continue them over time. And finally, thinking about the mobile as a kind of emotional technology. The cultural theorist Zoe Sifoulos has this lovely term of the container technology. We tried to think about the mobile as a kind of emotional container, both for images and texts that might be of particular emotional value, but also as a conduit of a way that we reach different kinds of emotional spaces. So to the practicalities, in 2009 we conducted 339 interviews, of which 172 were women, 167 were men. This was around Australia, so we did a lot of travelling for the field work. We wanted to go to big cities as well as regional centres and very small towns, towns that were quite remote and to see the sorts of differences between these kinds of populations. To get a sense of where we went, we went to Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. So a fair whack of a country was covered. To give you a sense of the sorts of places, Maricaville, which is a very populated suburb in the centre of Sydney, is one example on the other end of the spectrum, we went to Port Augusta, which is about three hours out of South Australia in a very small town. So what did we find? Well, it's very much in keeping with a lot of former studies, small pilot studies about what's happening in Australia, but also comparative studies in other Western industrialised nations. First of all, the mobile is seen as a critical infrastructure for day-to-day life. It's integral to the experience of how you stay in touch with people, how you coordinate your activities. And as one of our respondents said, it's a network of all of my friends in one. I think we've heard similar things before. Of course, the other thing that was really consistent is the phone is a constant network presence. It's always on. People are constantly using it for things like Facebook, which was number one. Very clearly, this was by far and away the most popular space. But Twitter was coming in probably at a sort of a distant second and my space at third. But this idea about the phone always being held near the body and always on was clear across the entire sample. What was interesting about this was one of our respondents was telling me a story about how she was taking a long haul flight and she was asked to turn her phone off. And she had completely forgotten how to do it. She was utterly stricken that thought of, I actually have to turn my phone off. I know how to put it into silent, but I just never turned it off. And this wasn't actually an unusual story. It was very common that people just see it as a device that day and night is just kept on all the time. What's also interesting here is that we found that the phone is not necessarily about making calls. And I see that Clive Thompson in Wired has actually written about this yesterday. And this is absolutely confirmed in the findings of the last 12 months that actually calling people was the least preferred mode of contact. And that in fact texting first using asynchronous modes like sending Facebook messages or Twitter, DMs was infinitely preferred to actually making a call. Now, this has been called light touch or lightweight forms of contact. But I think we can put a question mark over that term when we think about the kinds of populations that are sending many dozens of texts a day, receiving texts, sending Facebook messages and Twitter messages. So because it's so-called light touch and asynchronous doesn't mean that it's not still taking up a large part of the day. So we saw that absolutely for the people that were participating in this study that there are growing pressures on their attention. And this is a classic case in point. While people would tell us stories about the way in which their phone made them feel quite powerful, they could find out information where they wanted, they could reach who they wanted, there was a sense of agency and control that the phone would give them. It was also a sense of dependency and reliance and in fact a kind of anxiety if they should be separated from the phone. So this is a very typical quote. My phone's usually not more than like three meters from me at all times. I'll even admit taking it to the bathroom with me. When I'm going to have a shower, I'll have it on the bench. It's so sad. It's under my pillow when I sleep. I think a few people in the room can recognize this phenomenon. But again, this sense of what happens when you become disconnected from your phone has a particularly heightened anxiety. And this was another very interesting story that a respondent shared with me. She was trapped in an elevator for six hours. And I was interested in asking her what she found most concerning about this experience. And the reason why she had remembered it so vividly was because of the anxiety of being completely off-network. That in the elevator she had no reception. She couldn't receive calls. She couldn't check what was happening on Facebook with her friends. And she had to sit there for six hours and this was her greatest anxiety. So I kept asking, weren't you concerned about your physical safety? Weren't you thinking that perhaps, you know, the elevator might collapse? And she said, no, this was the furthest thing for my mind. The greatest concern was this kind of connectivity panic. So it's a very different kind of claustrophobia. However, all we found was a really interesting distinction between our rural and our urban populations. Now, for the urban populations, connectivity was such a present part of life. It was so important that even brief periods of being off-network were seen as being quite disastrous and sources of enormous irritation. So people would swear about their telecommunications providers and say, this is outrageous. I'm having outages of a couple of minutes a day. Whereas with our rural populations, it was quite different. They had a far more laissez-faire attitude to the experience of being off-network and more importantly had little hacks about how they would use the up periods and the down periods of the network. They were very good at sending burst communication and then using the downtime as being, you know, a way that they could actually escape from having to respond to people. So even if they did have network reception, they would use it as a way to say, oh, you know, the network was down. I was traveling out of town. This is obviously a very consistent issue in Australia because we have poor network reception outside of the cities. And even within the cities, it's not fantastic reception. But it was interesting to see that the response to this in many of our rural populations was not an attendant anxiety and concern. It was more like, well, I can use these periods to be off-network. So just to take a little moment to sum up some of these findings. What we saw were practices of managing constant connectivity, particularly in the cities, and a set of evolving norms about how we engage with media forms and how much attention we give them. And more importantly, this was being negotiated within friend groups, peer groups and families. So it's not something that an individual was making a hard set line decision on. It's, what are my friends doing? How are my family engaging with these technologies? And really importantly, what's happening in my workplace. The workplace was a very important space for this kind of normative construction. So with this in mind, I'd like to turn to the network noise debate or as some people call it, the information overload debate or data smog. I'm sure this is something that people are familiar with this debate. It's, as I can see, just as big in the US as it is in Australia. It's certainly also a present debate in Europe and in India. So it seems to be a very consistent concern in our contemporary moment. And the way that I've been thinking about this debate is it seems that we have two distinct camps that are emerging. On one side we have people who are saying that technology is the problem and on the other that technology is going to provide us with a set of solutions. So thinking about technology is the problem here. I tend to describe this as the myth of the fall when we think about media history. That somehow there was this period of a garden of Eden where things were much simpler and easier. We didn't have all of these media technologies impinging on our time and that actually the technologies in themselves are problematic. Now, you can hear I think a tone of this in Jared Laney's work, I'm not a gadget, but also in contemporary philosophy. Giorgio Agamben in a 2006 essay wrote about his hatred for the mobile phone. And he uses this word. He was extremely angry about the mobile phone for what he saw as reshaping the gestures and the behaviors of people in Italy and more than this. He saw it as actually reshaping subjectivity, a very profound homogenization of Italian society that he saw as a great source of concern. But what I'd like to add to this is that in actual fact this is not a new problem. And that in fact, if we go back to Walter Benjamin, this is in 1932, he wrote about the landline telephone as being a technology that was both uncanny and violent. And he has this lovely quote, that the telephone disturbed not only my parents after the nap, but the world historical epoch in whose middle they dwelled. And I think that's a lovely way of capturing that sense of how technologies feel as though they're interruptive. They're actually a disruptive moment, but in actual fact they come as part of a much longer sequence of technologies. On the other hand, we have an emerging school where technology is the solution to our problems. And I'm calling this the information filtering group. Clay Scherke is obviously a name that comes up in this context, although I think he has a more nuanced perspective. But he has the quote, which is often used in this context, which is that there's no such thing as information overload, there's only filter failure. And to some degree, I think this implies that there are going to be better filters. We need to be using technologies that will resolve some of these issues for us, but also ourselves. That we need to engage in better personal management in greater individual discipline in terms of how we engage with these rich information sources. We can also see this evidenced in sites like Life Hacker and the Getting Things Done program, which is about managing yourself and your time, your technology use, so that you can be a highly efficient individual in the workplace. Merlin Mann, who founded a site called 42 Folders, calls this kind of thinking productivity porn. And I think it's actually quite a handy term in terms of summing up what is now a very popular kind of activity on the web, which is that people are going to blogs and websites about productivity, trying to think about ways to be more effective and efficient individuals, but as Merlin Mann points out, actually wasting a lot more of their time as they're doing this. That in fact, productivity porn is a very particular kind of concern with self-discipline, which in fact undermines that very discipline. So by thinking about some of these processes, I think what we see is this belief that in fact there was a time of great focus and that complete and total focus is something possible, nay desirable. But the curveball that I'd like to throw to you today and hopefully we can discuss it a bit later on this afternoon, is that total focus was never possible. Technologies have always been interrupting us. We can go back to the wheel, we can go back to the Library of Alexandria where in fact there were so many scrolls that no human being could have read a third of them in their lifetime, that excesses of information are part of the narrative of human experience. But I'd like to add to that and also say that it's not actually desirable that this idea that we can have complete and total focus isn't necessarily always the best way forward. And I'm gonna do this by giving you a little touch of the history of noise. That's a very, very brief examination. Going back to 1906, there was a society which is I think possibly one of my favorite names of any kind of societal grouping for the suppression of unnecessary noise. And this was formed by Julia Barnett Rice in New York and she was extremely good at using her social power to leverage a way of changing the shape of city noise. She managed to get Mark Twain as an honorary president, certainly as a way to get to the top end of town. And what she was advocating for were quiet zones or protective circles that would be placed around schools and hospitals and homes for the aged. And the theory for this particular society was that noise creates, and I quote, jerky mental habits and a kind of syncopated thinking that causes the brain to jump from one topic to another. I think we can probably find something very similar in current debates about information overload. It's a very familiar kind of framing. But what was interesting was this very much sort of a citizen coalition that was working together to try and address the issues of noise. Now today, there are two thinkers who are both sort of bridging the academic industry space who use similar ideas. Adam Greenfield, who was just recently at Nokia, uses the term zones of amnesty. And Genevieve Bell, who's based at Intel, likes the term spaces of refusal. And I think there's something quite similar to this idea about quiet zones, that it's about ways in which we can find time to be off the network, to escape the network. And that this is actually the next kind of shared negotiation that we need to make as a society. In fact, Adam Greenfield tells a joke that when he retires, he's gonna set up a chain of cafes called Faraday's, which will actually be built inside Faraday cages so that nobody can get any wireless information, they can't get any data, and their phones won't work. And that there is something incredibly appealing about being in a cafe where suddenly you're immune from all of those forms of contact. In complete contrast, of course, to the rise of the internet cafe and free wifi in the 2000s. And this is an image that Genevieve Bell took in Korea along the same lines. This is a sign which is sitting inside a church and loosely translated. It says, more grace to you if you should turn off your mobile phone. So that's certainly one space of refusal. But rather than glamorizing this idea of silence and being off network, I think it's important also to think about the kinds of dualities of noise here. Because noise can be both a positive and a negative influence. We've talked a little bit about the negatives, but certainly in the history of music and the arts, there are a lot of positive things that we can say about noise as well. In fact, at the same time as the society for the suppression of unnecessary noise was forming, we saw the data artists and the futurists using noise as a very particular way to come up with compositions that they felt reflected the experience of life in the city. So in fact, not long after the very foundation of that society, we saw the anti-symphony concept in 1919, which is a critical moment in the history of noise music. Which then forms, of course, a very important trajectory. And as a musician, a trajectory that I care about very deeply, of thinking about noise as being actually very productive, as being interesting sound environments to introduce new forms of composition. So what I can do just very quickly here is give you a sense that noise has many different meanings, that it can be both an intrusive element of randomness, but also that it can be a catalyst for growth and for creativity and for new ideas. So how do we think about this in terms of mobile, social media, and moving forward? Well, a couple of concluding thoughts. By drawing together the histories of city noise from the 17th century right through to the kinds of information overload debates of the 21st century, I think what we can see is a range of attempts to engage with how we deal with noise in everyday space. And more importantly, that this is actually a collective issue. And perhaps this is why I'm really bringing together Julia Barnett's society along with thinking about the dataists and the futurists. Because what they did is they didn't think about noise as being an individual problem to be solved, that I have to try and restrict the amount of noise in my life. They saw it as a shared problem with collective solutions. Even if their solutions and approaches were pretty much entirely counter to each other. And this is certainly reflected in the kinds of data that we've been gathering in the mobile social study. But ultimately what was happening in these groups is that people were getting an enormous amount of data that they were always on. They were always connected to their phones. But they were managing it through the social connections of their friends and their families and their colleagues. That this wasn't an individual problem that they felt. It was an ongoing conversation about how norms of information use would develop. And I think it's important to keep in mind here just how quickly some of these norms are developing. The mobile phone has been around for 35 years. It's been a very popular technology for less time. But if we have a look at MySpace, seven years, Facebook, six, Twitter, four years, this is an incredibly brief period of time to be developing complex social norms. And if we think about all of these spaces like vast cities full of people who are communicating all the time, this is actually quite a complex negotiation that people are having every day when they enter these kinds of spaces. So rather than thinking about this as a very difficult moment, I'm trying to suggest that this is actually an adaptive moment and one in a long series of adaptive moments. I had to rely on a Kubrick still here. I hope you understand this is not me suggesting we're devolving, but rather this is an evolutionary moment for us. So this is actually really a question about how we think about media norms. So to sum up, what we are seeing certainly in terms of the people participating in our study was a remarkable kind of social adaptation to high levels of information. And that while this was going on, at the same time as these kinds of adaptations occur, there's also a change of definition about what constitutes focus, attention, and productivity. So if we have a look at many white collar and no collar jobs, services like Twitter allow you to have constant news updates that are related to your field that you can then use to engage with other people. This is actually the definition of productivity and attention and that were you to behave like the enraged musician and to retreat into your room, that this would actually not be highly productive in many of these kinds of workplaces. So these ideas about what constitutes our attention are definitely changing at the same time. Also for the 18 to 30 year olds we were interviewing, it wasn't really about the technology. This is running counter to the kind of media discourses that place young people as being very technophilic, as being obsessed with what they can do with their phones and always having the latest phone. What we found was actually quite the opposite. That the people we interviewed were actually kind of only using a few of the functions on their phone. They weren't really fascinated with all of its capabilities. Neither were they particularly invested in what's the latest next one that I have to get. Instead they were seeing it as a means to an end. Just I use these things in order to reach my friends because this is where they are. So I think we can learn something from this about how we think about moving forward in this space. First of all I'd suggest that technology isn't going to be the solution. That trying to think about this being purely a technological problem to which there is a technological fix is actually not going to be the issue. Rather the technologies are going to involve in a co-constitutive way with social norms. And in fact the way that these two are informing each other is a really important way about how we understand this space. And that in fact as we use these tools we're actually negotiating through our own social groups our times of being on network but also those quiet zones and those spaces of refusal. So I'm going to finish with an image from the field work. This comes from the highway that takes you out of the Flinders Ranges. So you've just crossed a desert, you're leaving the Flinders Ranges. You are in the middle of nowhere. This is near no large towns, not even any small towns. But there is a sign to tell you that your period of being in the quiet zone has ended and you are back in the mobile phone area. So on that image, I might let us move into the conversation part of the day. Thank you. I have about a hundred questions, but I'll follow them. That was wonderful. Very provocative and... Thank you. So let's take Pleasure Fees, wonderful summing up and I want to extend that a little bit. Namely there's no such thing as information overload, there's only filter failure. Which is a beautiful way of putting an important point. Absolutely. But I would also want to say to Clay who will be joining us next semester. As I hear. That yes, but also the nature of filters have changed so that in the pre-digital error when you were filtering something, say the books that come into your library, you're on the elections committee. The books that you don't select, nobody sees. They don't see the trucks turning away with the books you didn't select. They only see the ones that get in. Whereas filters in a digital world and a networked world are, they just shorten the number of links it takes to get to something. And because you say, here's my list of books and it's a fun click away. But meanwhile, all the other books are still overwhelmingly there and the hundred million hits of Google are still there and you know they're there. So I assume that this change is changing our sense of what it means to filter things out. And when it comes specifically to noise that I'm wondering whether the change in the nature of filters changes is changing our attitude towards noise as being something that we can filter out and we get angry and annoyed when it's there because we're the enraged musician. And maybe this isn't what you're saying. So or whether the fact that filters don't work that way anymore means that we are always aware of the noise and it becomes, it changes its meaning, its role, its value in our... So am I simply restating your point? Am I having your ideas at the... Well, it's interesting. These are very much the set of issues and I'm not claiming to be presenting you with the ultimate solution but I think these are precisely the kinds of questions that we need to ask about noise and information overload. But to address the question, I think that sense of being aware of the information that is around us is part of the information overload debate. That we can see it around us therefore there is some kind of obligation to engage with this level of information. And what is interesting is to see how different groups of people are managing that process. So certainly for the 18 to 30 year olds, one of the biggest filters wasn't actually search technologies at all, it was their friends. It's like, okay, I'm listening to what my friends are doing, I'm gonna set these things up according to what they think is important. And I think it's very interesting to think about how services like Twitter are really structured around listening to the people whose information, you're gonna say this is important. I'm gonna follow some of these things because I care about what they value. There's also I think an important note here about information elites that there is going to be a process by which people become very accustomed to using particular kinds of filtering technologies. And I think Clay is absolutely spot on in this sense that we are seeing the emergence of groups who really know how to use these tools. But the risk that I see is that it moves into this kind of obsession with productivity which is highly individualistic, that it's all about you being this highly efficient individual. Whereas in actual fact, we are looking at a broader social question, which is what counts as important information? How do we get to it? And how do those norms develop over time? So I think we're sharing the same sort of discussion in those points, but is that answering a question? It's a wonderful answer. I'm not sure that my question was focused enough to deserve it. Well, I'll think about it more. All right, wonderful, we can do that. I think there's an underlying misperception here because noise is context sensitive. Absolutely. You take back into the gardening world, a weed is a plant that's where you didn't want it. So noise is something wherever your interest or focus is that you weren't interested in. Your attention needs to be elsewhere. And so the possibilities for the future really are very personal and their personal context sensitive. And when you have that as smart adaptive filtering in the middle, then you are basically only getting what it is that you're after supporting yourself, your life, whatever it is you're up to. And that's the opportunity here that's before this whole space for the next wave to really be there to be what it can be for all of us. Well, it's interesting. I think that's a very common perspective that I hear in the technology space. So there are a lot of technologists who I talk to who say that really this is very much a personal solution. You think about what you wanna do when you will tailor your tools to get the kinds of information that you want. But to use your first example, which is the idea of the weed in the garden, what to you might be, okay, that's a weed, it's noise, I don't really need that in that space, is operating in a wider ecology. So immediately thinking about how we think about ecologies of information and what counts as important to one person might actually be different for a wider group. And that there are a set of issues around everything, from how we tend our gardens and our environments through to how we tend our information environments that are collective issues. It brings us right into the issue of privacy versus disclosure. Absolutely. If that gets broken, there will be trouble on moving to you. The benefit you get from disclosing in having effectively less noise is got to motivate you to disclose more. Well, what's also interesting here is when you're aware that you're actually disclosing. So this is becoming a real issue for people who say might be using iPhones or Android phones. So what we've seen in the last couple of weeks is that in fact, if you're using apps on your phone, you might be thinking, you know, this is a cute little app, it's a fun game to use. But actually, the people who made that app are also getting access to your address book, to your geolocative data, and the things that you might see as being noise and kind of not being that relevant. Anybody hasn't seen it at the Wall Street Journal article this morning. Precisely, as a case in point. So that in fact, the things that you see a noise are still feeding into a much wider information ecology. So I think that's absolutely the point that's being made here. Actually, that's happened collectively at times when I was frustrating. I just went to and back from New York and was hanging on the train. And on the way there, I sat in a quiet car. And it was not during a rush hour time. And quiet car meant you didn't even type on your computer, I noticed around me. And I negotiated that because I was ready to do it and then nobody else was. And as I started typing, I realized how loud you know, I was performing. And so I typed lighter and then I took the whole thing away, but it was actually quite nice. The same space, a quiet car in the cellar, completely different on the way home during rush hour. Everybody had their phones out. Everybody had their computers out. You could not talk. That was the noise that was not okay. But the noise of computers beeping, of typing, cell phone every now and again, making a, I'm running out of battery noise, that was all right. So I think what's interesting about what you're saying is it may be ways that we can personalize noise, but I also think that we have to do reports in some situations to negotiate these based on the social norms. And they may shift in places that are unexpected. Down there, it was one kind of quiet back. That's a beautiful example. And I think that's absolutely a case in point of that kind of collective engagement. Here is a shared space, we're on a train. How are we gonna deal with the fact that we all have mobile phones, we all have work to do, we're all engaging in lots of different deadlines at the same time. Well, we'll create this shared space, which is the quiet car. And I think that comes from precisely that trajectory that we saw from 1906 of creating quiet zones. So this is actually now becoming an increasing political kind of issue about how we negotiate data noise. So I think that's a beautiful point. It's the most popular car, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. Absolutely. This is probably, perhaps TMI, too much information, but I was just at a library and I just went to go to the ladies room. And somebody was absolutely had her calendars out and her phone on and negotiating all her appointments just in that little, little, little space. And I felt like, I didn't know, you know, I didn't say anything, I wanted to say something because it just, but there's no protocols. There's just nobody saying, you know, you can't hop on the phone in the bathroom and it just puts on a whole nother, it's like smoking if you're not a smoker and somebody just went, you know, how do you negotiate that as well because there's no real protocols because everybody's been smoking here. It's very tricky. I think that's true and that's what I find so exciting about this period is that if you're actually studying this moment, it's incredibly formative. There are so many norms which are having to be established at the same time synchronously. And if you think about smoking as a counter example, that one's had decades to deal with where is it okay to smoke, how do we deal with smoking in collective spaces versus individually? Whereas with these kinds of technologies, people are figuring it out on the run as they go and we're seeing points of real conflict emerging when people are saying, well, actually, I don't think that's an appropriate use of data or I don't think that's an appropriate use of taking up my space and my time and my attention. So I think this is precisely why I'm so fascinated with how these terms can be deployed. Hi, yeah, you've been waiting for a while. I'm thinking about the sociability piece of this and the noise metaphor. And wondering if you could argue that noise reduction is an inherent property of this kind of networked interaction in that if you're meeting people in the ordinary world, they don't come with labels. By definition, when you're meeting people on Facebook, there is a name, it may be a false name, but there are labels, there are signals that are actually reducing the noise to say, this is what you're looking at, this is the person you're interacting with that you don't get at all in a real life world. So maybe these are noise reduction machines rather than increasing, they increase the volume of information you have to deal with, but they also provide you lots of valuable cues. I think that's absolutely true, although I'd probably dispute the fact that when we meet people in real space, they don't necessarily come with labels attached, I think. There's no clues, but it's different than having a name to attach to somebody in a immediate vehicle for recontacting them? Absolutely, but it's a different set of social labels. But I think your point is spot on. The way that I think about Twitter research in this regard I think is really useful, because obviously Twitter is pointed to as a kind of source of real noise that people are like, oh, I'm getting messages all the time, I don't know what to follow, but in actual fact, it's the way that you negotiate that, that becomes a noise reduction device, that you say, in fact, these are the important articles that I need to read today. These are people in my field who have already vetted this kind of information for me. So I think it's really both things at once. It is that duality of noise. It is both introducing new kinds of noise, but it's filtering to some degree to the things that you might find interesting. But is that duality that I find needs to be explored further, certainly in the research that I'm doing? Because they label themselves as that duality of noise. But there's even a larger universe, and that's when people like others in the box, just because they see your name, the color of your skin, or you belong to whatever is in a certain activity. So that's an even larger universe that we have no control about, because it's so personal at the level of discrimination for many, at a level of understanding of others. How do you deal with that? Absolutely, I think that was absolutely the point. I want to address two from the ether, because we have two different questions from the ether. One from Nancy about whether or not the Australian mobile media context differs from other places in important ways, whether their same issues flow and how they actually think about cultural differences. And one from Bernie about the tension between self-regulation and social norms, other people who are more active, quiet, self-aware, et cetera. Do they wish they were more like their friends, or are the friends more like them? And how does that play out? Great questions. Thanks, Nancy and Bernie. Well, to take Nancy's point first, yes, there are real cultural differences here. And what's really interesting, certainly I've been doing some work with scholars in China and India and to see the similarities between the populations. And it's really about geography. It's about where you live. So for people who are in the big cities, their use of mobiles and social media has a lot more in common than the people who are actually in rural and regional areas. So for kids in Mumbai, what they're doing with their mobile phones is much more similar to kids in Sydney than it is for people in rural areas in India. So we're seeing a kind of social strata which is much more similar than you might think. But in terms of the particularities of the Australian scene, we have a very different set of telecommunications providers than you have in the US and a very different history in terms of how those telecommunications providers came into being. And certainly one very dominant player who is now facing ongoing competition. But the way that that is played out because we have a population that's really moved into the urban centers and we're seeing a flight away from regional and rural areas is that all of the concentration of data and network availability has been focused on cities. So there's a real divide between what you can actually do in regional and rural areas which is why we were so interested in getting a very large sample of people from these areas to find out what is your experience? How are you actually dealing with the large amount of network difficulties and network downtime that you have to contend with every day? So I think the similarities in the big urban areas internationally are really fascinating to me but it's those differences as well that often get overlooked. So it's about spending more time in those regions to see how people are actually finding little hacks and little ways around networks. Now, Bernie's question. So Bernie, let me just check if I'm doing this right. He's interested in how there's a tension between self-regulation and normative flow. So if somebody's a quiet, retiring individual and their friends are very communicative, how do they actually make that transition? And do they wish they were more like their friends or that their friends were more like them? How does that come into attention? And also social pressures to keep up with the noise. Right, okay. Well, that's absolutely a real factor. What we found in the interviews was really interesting. People would talk about, oh, that's my friend who's on Facebook all the time. And actually I kind of find it irritating because we'll go to a cafe and then she'll be sending Facebook updates about everything that we're doing at the same time. This was a really common complaint that friends were aware of the kinds of distinctions of how people are engaging in these spaces and that it caused them some level of irritation. But I guess we can look to a much broader history of how we find social norms developing, that there's a kind of evening out over time and that if somebody was really constantly using Twitter or Facebook and you were finding it really irritating, it's quite likely that this is somebody that you're not gonna be spending a large amount of time with and that people are tending to find like amongst like. And this is another thing that we saw around Twitter use and Facebook use is that people will tend to follow people who are broadcasting relatively similar amounts of messages a day. There are real norms around what constitutes an acceptable level of communication. But then as to the question of pressures to keep up, they're real, they're genuine. I think that's what some of these spaces do, particularly in some workplaces that has become almost a job requirement that you're using these tools, that they're using them really effectively and you know how to navigate them. I think those pressures are very real and talking about labor politics in relation to these technologies is a big research question and one that a lot of people are actually looking at at the moment. And I think that's gonna be interesting also for an older set of people. So while we were going up to 30, I think from a 30 to 50 cohort, we're gonna see a different set of questions about those particular kinds of pressures. Yeah, I've got a question out of the back. It does not be hard to let the development of the social norms be a notion of change that's very interesting. And I think that also it's sort of a generational issue. You're tackling and you're not involved in a very interesting way. But the other thing is if you look at brain research, I find it very interesting that brain research shows us several pieces of research, several studies that don't show the adduction of human brain to multitasking. So the prejudice that we can do lots of different things at one point seems to be really ridiculous. And if you look at this from the economic point of view, it seems to be that we will get less productive and not more productive by trying to to fulfill all those tasks. Do you relate to that also? Absolutely, in fact one space where I see this merging very clearly is in the management literature. That we've seen a shift in management literature and particularly through things like the agile methodology that multitasking is a myth and that actually we're much better when we focus on one thing at a time. So I think to some degree, there is a fashion that operates here that again in the 70s and 80s the management literature was about multitasking. We also saw a very gender discourse that somehow women were seen to be better multitaskers than men. But in actual fact, we're now in a period of fashion where it's about single focus and single tasks. And I think that's very interesting. To some degree, cognitive science is on point and agreeing with that kind of perspective that in fact, brains prefer to have one task at a time. But I guess I query both to some degree the romanticization that we can focus on one thing at a time. And I think people with children will know exactly the kind of phenomenon about what it's like where actually multitasking is a particular kind of lived reality. But also I think cognitive science itself goes through particular fashions and trends. And I think what we're gonna see is a lot of attention being paid to how brains focus. There's a recent book that just came out in the last couple of weeks called Effortless Attention which I think is a classic case in point and a really beautiful study about how we think about flow. The state where you're in complete flow you're absolutely focused on one task and things seem to come very, very easily. I think that's a very different state to the state of being at your desk at work. You've got Twitter on in the background. You're trying to write 50 emails and you're trying to finish a task on deadline. And that this is a space of a different kind of flow that actually drawing things from that Twitter space, drawing it from emails is actually part of what you have to do. So there's a tension there. And I'm not claiming to be a cognitive scientist so I can't speak to whether or not this is something that we're gonna see as an ongoing issue in cognitive science but I do see that there is a kind of ideological trend that goes along in terms of how we think about fashion and the fashions of attention. And that's certainly I think why media historiography is a really useful way of thinking about some of these problems that if we look back hundreds of years that this concern about how we use our attention and our focus is a really age old concern. So yeah, great question. And I don't claim to be an adolescent psychologist but it's the mother of a 13 year old who does text a lot and a reader about this because of my sort of fascination with it. I recall just last week in the supplement they did on education life in the New York Times, one of the stories that caught my attention was about roommates who text each other because they're no longer speaking to each other because there was so much miscommunication that existed because of the texting and the Facebooking and not direct understanding how to resolve conflict. And they went off from these sort of anecdotal moments into talking with a lot of people at colleges today explaining that they've had a lot more instances where the students who arrive are not capable of resolving face-to-face conflict. Well, how much different is this than the, I mean, I remember the passive aggressive notes that we would leave on each other's beds which continued on to the passive aggressive notes that we leave on our neighbor's doors. Right, so there's the element of not being able to cope, which I would say is distinguished from the technologies. Yeah, absolutely. I guess my only thing I would say is that the technologies seem to be giving away for this generation to back away from, say, more verbal communication and resolution of conflict because they can text. I mean, I've had a number of kids who are like in their early 20s who have told me that they don't break up with their boyfriends in person or even by phone or even by talking to them. They send them a text message. And that is how they end up. Very hushed. I know, I mean. It does happen. I do think that is different because the technology exists and that's the way they communicate and that's the way they use it. So I'm just putting it out there as asking the question. Dana, you may be completely right that this is, again, you know, as Kate has said, you know, what's old is new again or what is new is old again. You know, that there were different means of doing this. So I'm just releasing this as part of this question. I mean, there was another thing I saw where someone sent me something from what's called Lane Book as opposed to Facebook where they take exchanges that take place on Facebook that end in, you know, absolute disarray. And this was one that didn't take long to get to that point of people who were going to be roommates. And one of them suggested at the beginning that they exchange phone numbers so they could actually talk to each other. And the other one said, no, no, I'm not interested. And they went back and forth to Facebook after a period of five or six exchanges with each other. One was calling the other racist. They were saying to each other, they were not going to allow each other to share things in the room. They hadn't even met in person or talked. And they already had developed this conflict and didn't seem capable of resolving it. So this is actually quite efficient. They've realized that they shouldn't be roommates before they've even moved in. I think this is a great story. I think that's a fantastic use of technology for that. But let me respond, though, to your first point because I think to really clarify this so-called death of the phone call. I mean, we are seeing it certainly in the Australian data and by the looks of it now in the US data as well. But this is not to suggest that people are reviling from contact. They actually don't want to talk to each other. I think what it is instead is recognizing that asynchronous contacts were really useful. That it's a way of saying, well, actually, I don't know if this is a good time for you to talk. So I'm just going to send you a DM and then you can get back to me at your convenience. This is a way of using these technologies to find quiet spaces, to say this is going to be a good time to talk or you let me know, rather than just simply ringing and you don't know if they're going to be available or not. So let me just clarify that this isn't people trying to escape human contact, but really trying to moderate it in ways that will be more effective. And I think that's the story that isn't often told in relation to people not making phone calls. And it's really important that that point is heard more clearly. So one thing that's coming from the back channel on all of this is a kind reminder that interpersonal communication skills have been flawed forever. And that there are reasons why there are courses on them. And that- Sounds like Nancy. I think Nancy's in the room. How could I tell? And that there's something very interesting about how to actually think through resolving conflict as in medium specific skills and that these are skills, whether we're talking face to face or whether we're talking about different media and that we may be losing those skills, but the question is how much the technology is at stake. And I think this is why it really gets back to normative development and why that is such an interesting point to focus on. Because again, these are new spaces that people are acquiring new skills. How do they do it? How do they actually share those kinds of problems together? How do you have a fight on Facebook with potential roommates that you think are racist? Well, you have that fight and then you say, okay, I'm gonna move in with other people. I think that is a classic story of good negotiation of these kinds of spaces. And certainly when I was growing up, I was told that the television was making children unable to actually communicate with each other because I was sitting in front of the idiot box or I was playing Commodore 64. We've always had these forms of media which has said to be actually removing human communication but actually became little cultures of communication in their own way. So I feel very much that that's certainly what we're seeing in this case. Yeah, question up in the back. Could we be members of the society or not? I do love the name. I think on name alone, I'd almost join that society for the suppression of unnecessary noise. I'm fascinated by this question about how we find quiet zones and spaces of refusal. And I brought it up today because I think it's provocative and not because I think it's a straightforward and easy thing to set up in your own life. And also I am wary of this sense that the period of being off network is somehow when we're most ourselves and most focused and most comfortable. I don't know that that's actually the case, but I think there is something too, this capacity to syncopate, to use their word, between spaces of noise and spaces of silence. And that that is a literacy, which we're still developing. And certainly I'd say that's a literacy that's very nascent. How do we find those off network periods and those off network spaces? That's a trick that a lot of us are still trying to learn, I think. Yes, I think you made that, that was wonderful. Totally appreciate it. But my question was, you seem though to be also finding a value in noise. Absolutely, absolutely. And this is why I think that syncopation is important. Why we need to go into spaces of noise as well as finding spaces of silence. So I guess if you're asking, would I actually join the society for the suppression of unnecessary noise? I think ultimately, no, I think how you find value in noise changes over time. And this is what is so interesting about, thinking about information as noise that highly subjectively, some signals are gonna be very important to you, even though you might say, right, this is not important to somebody else. For me, this is an important signal. So thinking about how you actually navigate noise to me is where the interest comes. That's where the meat of this issue is. So avoiding it altogether, absolutely not. Yeah, I know anything. If I may, though. Oh, I'm sorry. The idea of signal is in opposition to noise that was Shannon's structure in space. And so the idea of being in favor of noise is, in its way, it seems almost a radical thought. It's like a thought. It seems not obvious, even though the case you make for silence spaces, you just come off the sailboat. Absolutely. Well, isn't that, excuse me, isn't that there could actually be a recognizable signal in the noise? You just don't know it. Like, a book is noise to a dog. The characters on the page don't mean anything, it's noise. And as you get into things more, you might be able to analyze it and pull out something of survival value. So we're actually at an intersection of two senses of noise. That's right. One of which is the traditional one that we all use and the other is Shannon's, which is usually technical, but in the sort of non-technical sense of it seems to be what Shannon means by what the world is. Everything except the signal that's going through all of the things that could interrupt the signal, which is what life and the world is. It's everything outside of that signal. Beautifully put. And I'm actually, oh, I'm sorry. I was just gonna say. If you look at our lives, it's about drawing more and more signal out of what you would casually say is noise. I'm really fascinated by the information science is use of the term noise. And it has actually varied over time. And noise now is actually seen as a kind of information, not just as something which can be discarded. And there are some really interesting lines of research in this area. And in fact, one of the interesting areas where noise and randomness is used in cryptography comes from, have you heard of a zero knowledge proofs? That zero knowledge proofs is a classic case of how we can actually see randomness and noise being used as a way to get really good data and really good information. So I see Ethan is nodding about zero knowledge proofs, but I'm gonna try and explain it to you. Is someone in the room who can explain zero knowledge proof? I'm nodding only because trying to explain a zero knowledge proof in this room without doing two or three hours worth of preparation is probably beyond me. Well, can I have one very, very quick go at it? And this is thanks entirely to Henry Cohen who's at MSR who very kindly explained it to me. And I think the clearest way I've ever heard. A zero knowledge proof would be, say for example, you know a pair of twins and you know how to distinguish them from each other. Perhaps it's a mole, perhaps it's a little mark, but somebody else wants to know how do I distinguish between these two people but you don't wanna tell them a secret. You don't wanna tell them what the mark is but you wanna show that you know the secret. So one of the ways you could do it is you could bring one of the twins into a room and you'd have to try and say their name over multiple times. So you'd bring in a random variation of the twins and you'd have to get it right every time. And if on the probabilities, you actually were getting high rate of success, then that person knows that you know the secret of actually how to distinguish those twins without you ever giving the secret away. So for cryptographers, this is a very important trick and it's about using that kind of randomness. It's the random sampling that you can use to really evidence your knowledge about how to tell them apart. Does that make some sense? Because I thought Henry- That's one of the most curious versions I've ever heard of in an explanation for that. That's lovely and I'll be stealing none of the- Wonderful. So I don't know how we're going for time. Oh, Nalini, we had one more question. I did. Maybe a little bit of an unfair question after this, but to what degree do you think noise gets defined through class issues? So, I mean, I think it's sort of obvious from the example that you see of the precious musician with the riffraff outside making noise to the idea of the quiet car, where people can think and quotes to some of the earlier work done actually in sociology on housing projects and the amount of noise that you would see and how that was detrimental to development in all sorts of ways. I was really hoping you'd ask something like that. I thought you might. How did I know? What's the talk without a question about class? Absolutely. And I think there is a class politics operating around noise. And that is what is so interesting about the fact that primarily the information overload debate coming from your educated middle classes, often in white collar and no collar jobs. And these are the sectors where actually people are the most literate in dealing with information. It's just that they feel that the information sources are multiplying. So it's I've got all of these sources of information to be really excellent in my field. I need to be across all of them. And so I think there is a very interesting class politics around what it is around particular work spaces. And that's where I think a study of class and noise would be really interesting is to say, OK, rather than just looking at white collar work spaces, what's happening in blue collar spaces? What's defined as the noise there? And actually looking at it through a kind of a labor politics lens, because that's where I think we'd have some really interesting findings. I can't claim to have done that study yet. But it's something that I think is very interesting because it's very much a class term that is mobilized differently. Can I jump in with a historical question? In the 1870s, there is actually work done on the noise issues in London in the 1870s, where this was debated in Parliament, where there was and it could not be more explicitly class based, where the itinerant musicians were foreigners. And the police were rousing them. There were social movements. Babbage was an insane. He was the guy in the window. He's being driven crazy by the noise. He writes about this in a very eccentric way. And it could not be more clearly class and in fact cultural vision that was driving us. Exactly. And watching that change over time and thinking about how the city as a space makes a whole range of different questions come up around who's using the space, who gets to deal with the noise, and who doesn't, very much a class issue. So I think that's a fantastic story. Within that, I'm interested in whether noise is actually the right metaphor for all of this. So as it happened, it's a Tuesday, which meant I spent three hours driving in here and driving in here. I'm listening to my favorite podcast, which ironically in this case is Benjamin Walker's Too Much Information, the most recent issue of which is on noise. So I highly recommend it both because of noise and too much information. I'll look it up. But one of the sub themes of this show is noise as sort of a form of violence. And it's basically the way in which it gets imposed on someone else in another space. And I think this gets very much into the sort of class dynamic. And if we sort of think about, you know, I'm remembering all the talk about noise pollution when I was a high school kid growing up was all those kids of color with those boomboxes imposing their music, which, you know, you didn't like into the space as this almost sort of violent intrusion, which obviously had all sorts of complicated class and race things going on with it. Social media in this form of noise seems much more like noise like trying to pick up the signal within the static. I think it's a different form of noise than this sort of noise pollution sense of noise where you're sort of impinging on others. If you think about the sort of noise in the sense that you're talking about, the noise is that, you know, Dana won't stop tweeting at me and that I want to maintain my friendship with her except for the fact that, you know, she insists on over-sharing of this medium and just, you know, avalanching me with these floods of 140 characters, which is very different, I would argue, than noise in the sense of me deciding to dominate your conversation by standing and making an overly verbal comment and going on forever and ever and ever, which probably does, at a certain point, turn into noise. So I'm just wondering about the frame there. You know, it's so gendered. It's all a giggling girl from the hallway and it's the sort of feminine chatter that seems so boring to people. I probably picked the wrong example. Dana actually doesn't over-tweet. David over-tweets. I picked it arbitrarily on a random. In the media, the discourse of over-sharing is incredibly gendered. And this is why I think noise, it's a difficult term to use because it has so many meanings and it's intensely subjective and that's why I think it's really useful to talk about it in a subjective space and the difficulty is of rendering those kinds of meanings so that they're useful to us as tools of analysis. Completely agree with you. I'm very interested in the way in which the Boombox example, which was seen as kind of the ultimate urban interuptive noise, that this was really hostile, actually became the symbol of a whole new music culture that was really important and an incredibly strong part of urban creativity and hip-hop and that this was actually a very clear symbol of a new kind of music space. Carving out a community space within another public space. So actually I think these two ideas of signal and noise are actually speaking to each other. They're not quite as counterposed as you might suggest in defining those kinds of differences that we can get to a really nuanced sense of what's going on in these spaces. These kinds of clashes of culture and shared communicative space. Great question though. So I'm wondering if we go back on some of your history. We're all here existing in a domain of light, domain of fragrances and odors, domain of the structure of this building, domain of our personal safety as we're around here, domain of all slight differences and all of that we managed to process in our brains and ways that we focus on our other topic here. So it'd be curious as an inquiry over in the future to look at if we think there's something distinct or different about this digital information or this digital information world that's somehow different than what we as humans have massively successfully managed to deal with with our brains in an increasingly complex world where we not only can focus but while focusing still have a little bit of noise for our survival to continue and to be productive in whatever that means for each of us. I completely agree and not only that, I think what's so exciting about being here in this room and being at MSR is the fact that these sorts of conversations are intensely interdisciplinary and solving those kinds of questions like what is different about this space what is adaptation like in this space is a question that can't just be resolved by technologists or by computer scientists or by social scientists that it's actually getting people to collaborate or by the cognitive scientists so I think claim a particular kind of pervy to this space that there are so many factors that it is a classic question for interdisciplinary research what is actually going on in this space is how does human attention adapt to what I'm doing today is also saying that I think it's not just about trying to say it's for the computer scientists or the cognitive scientists and that it's in these interstices of disciplines that we're actually getting a much more detailed answer to your question and we had one over here as well did you ask Jessica? I was just thinking that everyone was talking about filtering and just getting what you want but isn't there also the worry of over filtering and running yourself into a box like I don't know for example in MSR you hear things about people in math or whatever I mean they seem to have nothing to do with social media but then you realize the similarities and if you filter that out because it's math you wouldn't see those similarities you might not come up with certain ideas and conclusions there's also that where you don't want to be in a box absolutely right I think that's where noise is really useful and the fact that I'm here talking to you about proofs I think it's a case in mind by having those kinds of conversations outside of a box by being open to noise from completely different fields is actually how we get innovation around these kinds of ideas but it's a really rich question and it's very much when it's lovely to throw it into a room like this and to see how people respond to it because it's by no means an established field of research it's like how do we think how do we take this information overload question seriously and say historically in terms of how we adapt to space what is going on here what is distinct about digital space and digital noise is your study published yet? sorry? is your study published yet because you were talking about various findings in it? indeed we're actually just moving into the final year so we're just gathering our quantitative data in the next six months and then we publish at the end of next year so that will be a book which I'll let you know about we've been looking at it from a slightly different perspective there's a little bit of a curve ball but I think there's some goodness in it and that is what if you imagine that your iPhone is actually part of your cyborg maybe you have a mechanical heart you are what you can control and I think I've started looking at it from that standpoint and a lot of the questions of what's noise turned into what are the capabilities I want to have and what kind of heart do I have to buy what kind of calendar manager what kind of part do I need for me to do that just a different perspective I wonder whether you've come across it and what you think of it well I think I haven't come across that question before but certainly in the history of thinking about technology as extensions of ourselves we're going right back to McLuhan here that in many ways they are parts of our body we do carry these things with us I mean this is Empire Larson who is a European theorist talks about being quintessentially affective technologies that they're part of the emotional and affective space of what it is to move in day to day life so I think we're already there to some degree that these are already enhancing our capabilities which is why I think the noise question is interesting because it's a question of what you let in it's a question should I buy a filter to straighten out this from my manservant or me to help me and if it was a straightforward technological fix you could do that but I think that it isn't actually that straightforward and that the idea of a quick way to tell immediately between what is a valuable signal and what is noise is actually a very complex question and with that I have to cut things off but I want to thank you all for a wonderful wonderful discussion and thank you Chris