Over the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.
Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.
Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.
However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.
How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?
So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.
The Six Mindsets of Adaptive Leadership
By Ross DawsonMadston Black, a top-tier leadership development consultancy, recently engaged me to do some executive briefings on the future of business as part of some of leadership programs they are running for major Australian organizations.
For two of their major client leadership development programs, Madston Black also brought out Professor Ron Heifetz, Founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, to run workshops. They also organized two very well-attended public presentations for Ron in Sydney and Melbourne, and kindly invited me along.
Here is the video of Ron Heifetz’s Sydney presentation – while it’s an hour long it’s well worth watching for the rich insights and examples he offered on adaptive leadership (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is his latest book).
Professor Ronald Heifetz Adaptive Leadership Presentation from Jimmy Tsang on Vimeo.
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Facebook tells CNET but not Victoria Buckley they have apologized for Nipplegate
By Ross DawsonWell hopefully this story is finally completely done – but perhaps not quite.
I originally broke the news that Facebook had banned doll nipples, reviewed the saga of how they arbitrarily closed down the Save Ophelia protest group, and how, until today there had been major media coverage in 13 countries about this story, but not a peep in the US press.
Earlier today Chris Matyszczyk at CNET wrote Facebook apologizes for censoring doll’s nipples, reviewing the story and closing with the punchline:
Spokesman Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail: “Our reviewers look at thousands of pictures a day that are reported to them. Of course they make an occasional mistake. This is just an example. We apologized and have encouraged the poster to put it up again.”
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Headlines around world for Facebook doll censorship story but NOTHING in the US media yet
By Ross DawsonQuick update on the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook doll censorship row:
The latest news is here. In short: The ‘Save Ophelia from Facebook censorship‘ Facebook group was simply deleted by Facebook without a trace (AFTER they had deleted the offending doll images leaving only the discussion of Facebook censorship), and Victoria has had to take down any images showing a trace of porcelain (the doll equivalent of flesh) from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.
There has been more coverage of the story overnight. Victoria particularly likes the coverage by Toronto Sun in a story titled Facebook censors nipples on $40K doll which brings out her thoughts on some of the issues at sstae here:
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The digital intensity of weekends – a critical dimension of life we can choose
By Ross DawsonOver the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.
Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.
Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.
However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.
How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?
So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.
Facebook’s arbitrary, unwarranted, and unexplained actions: it needs to learn from its mistakes
By Ross DawsonThe background: On Saturday Facebook threatened closing down Victoria Buckley Jewellery’s Facebook page because it showed an unclothed doll (top image at left), prompting widespread media coverage and global discussion. Many mainstream media such as Sydney Morning Herald and London Evening Standard used the original picture, suggesting that they didn’t think it was objectionable.
As Victoria was scared of losing her Facebook page with now close to 2,000 fans, a key way of connecting to her customers and community, she deleted images of the doll from her fan page, and replaced them with self-censored images, black bands hiding what Facebook presumably considered to be ‘nudity’ (middle image on the left). She put the original images on a new Facebook page Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook. Facebook promptly deleted the images from the site, and shortly afterwards closed down the site completely. Given all the offending images had been already deleted, they presumably objected to the discussion of Facebook’s censorship.
The latest: Facebook have now deleted the self-censored image of the doll from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page, leaving her with nothing (bottom image on the left, though she has now replaced it with an image that contains no trace of either flesh or porcelain, for safety’s sake).
Since Facebook have yet to contact Victoria, or to my knowledge respond to the many media requests for response on this issue, we can only guess what they found objectionable about the censored image. Her chin? The way her legs are crossed? The length of her hair?
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Nipplegate escalates: A faceless Facebook shuts down protest group and proves it REALLY doesn’t like doll nipples
By Ross DawsonOn Monday Sydney Morning Herald wrote the story up as Now Facebook bans doll nipples. The headline spent 12 hours at the top of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald online site, and became the single most read story on the newspaper. Since then it has made news all over the world, in leading newspapers such as London Evening Standard and Der Spiegel, and in countries as far away as Timor and Finland.
In fear of losing her Facebook page with its close to 2,000 fans, Victoria deleted the offending photos and posted them on a new Facebook group ‘Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook’ to show these beautiful images of the exquisite doll, and to discuss art and what constitutes nudity.
In response Facebook deleted the doll images on the Save Ophelia Facebook group. A short time later they simply shut down the group with its 500 members, with no indication of what remained to offend after the pictures were gone.
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The rise of the cloud workplace: co-working facilities
By Ross DawsonTele-commuting has shifted from something that prognosticators talk about to an everyday work practice for many. More and more companies are happy for their staff to spend some or all of their time working from home, facilitated by a profusion of cloud software as well as familiarity with collaboration tools such as instant messaging, screen sharing, and video chat.
At IBM, for example, 46,000 out of its 115,000 workers in the US were reported to be working at “alternative workplaces” including home. Many companies large and small are following this lead. Moreover, in the free agent economy a rising proportion people global headquarters IS their home office.
There are of course pointed upsides to working from home, not least forgoing frustrating commutes, as well as greater personal flexibility. But some people find it hard to get themselves motivated, and many miss the daily banter and social interactions of the office. This is not a trivial issue – the vagaries of working from home will be a shaping force on society and how companies operate.
One of the approaches more and more freelancers and home workers are taking is to regularly meet locally to work together, creating a pleasant, sociable, collaborative work environment.
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We are as gods – the cycle swings back to techno-optimism and neo-psychedelia
By Ross DawsonThe opening words of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 were: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Indeed, the late 1960s were a time of vast optimism for many, based not just on the belief that ancient social strictures could be thrown off, but also that by use of new technologies we could liberate ourselves. The 1970s and then 1980s disabused people of the notion that revolution had truly arrived, as so little of the potential seen in the full flowering of new ideas seemed to have come to pass.
Then in the 1990s there was a smaller renaissance of techno-optimism, I think best captured in Douglas Rushkoff’s book Cyberia (now fully downloadable), which talked of designer reality and technoshamanism. By then Timothy Leary had reinvented himself as a digital apostle, in Chaos and Cyberculture (the full text is here though it doesn’t do justice to what is a highly visual book) describing how computers and connectivity were now the tools of enlightenment.
Today, after a decade of financial greed and excesses analogous to the 1980s, techno-optimism and neo-psychedelia are coming back with a vengeance. A strong indicator is the forthcoming documentary Turning into Gods by Jason Silva – the trailer is below.
TURNING INTO GODS – ‘Concept Teaser’ from jason silva on Vimeo.
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Better ways to help readers filter and edit the news
By Ross DawsonUser filtered content, which I’ve talked about for many years now as an alternative to human editors, has recently progressed primarily through tools that aggregate the links shared on Twitter, such as Tweetmeme and Topsy. This is because Twitter (and Facebook, though the data is not readily available to third-parties to use) has become the dominant platform in how people share links and content of interest.
These Twitter-based content filters are very crude, not least having no good way of sorting by interest profile. As such they are filled with the trivial rather than what would be interesting to any one person.
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Facebook’s Nipplegate hits the front page
By Ross DawsonHey, I was there first! :-) On Saturday I wrote Breaking: Facebook bans doll nipples on profile images, about how my wife Victoria Buckley was told by Facebook she couldn’t show nude dolls on her Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.
Today the Sydney Morning Herald has featured this as its top story, with a headline Facebook nipplegate row and story by Asher Moses titled Now Facebook bans doll nipples. It says:
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