This, kids, is dial-up
Earlier this week I had coffee with an old friend from the world politics. It was meant to be a pleasant affair – the two of us had a lot of catching up to do, so we both blocked out an hour just to talk and sip coffee. We also knew that we were both prone to distraction, so we made a promise beforehand that there would be “no interruptions like we had on the campaign.”
True to form, however, I managed to mess everything up: as we sat down at the atmosphere-rich coffee shop near the corner of Harvard Square, I made the monumental mistake of taking out my cell phone and placing it on the table. Thus, although we attempted to engage in a pleasant discussion about Calvinism and the religious right, my spritely little iPhone kept buzzing, blinking and urgently demanding my attention. Embarrassed, I eventually reached to turn the blasted thing off, but my friend stopped me.
“Don’t worry about it – you’re just popular!” She said warmly.
“I’m really not – you know that!” I chuckled. “Like your phone didn’t ring way more than mine did during the campaign!” She grinned.
“True, but I learned: I keep it in my purse now. I can pick it up later, and I don’t really need to talk to that many people a day anyway, you know? I can’t handle that many conversations anymore…”
I stopped for a second. What did she mean by “that many people a day”?
“So wait…” I started, “How many people do you talk to a day, like, now?”
My friend started to respond, but then stopped – she didn’t really know how to answer. Instead, she stared at the ceiling for a good 20 seconds, deep in thought. Eventually she just shook her head, sighed, and stammered “I don’t know!” before continuing on with our discussion (after I turned off my phone, of course).
- – -
The moment stuck with me. Inspired, I decided to engage in a little experiment that would answer a simple question: how many people do I – an all-too-digital member of the millennial generation – converse with on any given day?
Well first, I had to establish some ground rules:
1.) A “conversation” has to be a “back-and-forth” with another human being that has SUBSTANCE. This means that attempts at conversation – an unanswered text message, a left voicemail – do NOT count as a conversation, but rather as “attempts.”
2.) A “back-and-forth” varies per medium. When broken down, that means:
- Actual Conversation: you must speak and have another person reply. Note: pure business exchanges – that is, “One Chai Latte please!” – are NOT counted as exchanges unless their is additional, non-business information exchanged. Thus, if “One Chai Latte” is followed by something “So, how ‘bout them Red Sox?” it counts as a conversation.
- Text Messages, Instant Messaging, email and phone conversations follow fairly self-explanatory rules, although it should be noted that an exchange of voicemails between two people DOES count as a conversation, as it is a legitimate – albeit awkward – back and forth.
- Twitter only counts as a conversation if there is an exchange of direct messages or a series of @-responses.
3.) The “day” begins when one wakes up and ends at midnight, just for the sake of brevity.
With these in mind, I began my day yesterday at 10:00AM. My schedule was straightforward: I had a 10:30AM trip to the grocery store, a 1:30-3:00PM class, a coffee meeting at 4:00PM, and a movie outing with one friend at 7:30PM. In other words, it was, by all accounts, a very light day.
And with that, my results:
My Talkie Talkie
EDIT: Yeah, I know that the blues and greens on the pie chart look way too similar, but the picture just exported that way. To Clarify: the 12% green is email, the 6% green is Twitter, the 32% blue is Actual Conversations, and the 22% blue is texting.
Number of people “conversed” with: 44
Number of “Actual Conversations” (including class discussion): 16
Number of email exchanges (with multiple emails per exchange): 6
Number of facebook exchanges (via walls and messages): 3
Number of IM exchanges: 3
Number of voicemail exchanges: 3
Number of phone exchanges: 5
Number of text exchanges: 11
Number of twitter exchanges: 3
Additional notes: You will notice that that doesn’t exactly add up to 44 – it’s more. That’s because I conversed with several people through multiple mediums. These were folks with whom I had Actual Conversations that were also contacted by a text messaging or a phone call arranging where to meet. Also, the average conversation was 15 minutes, the average email exchange 3 emails (from me, and three from the other party), the average facebook exchange two posts, the average IM 50 lines, the average voicemail 45 seconds, the average phone conversation 8 minutes, the average text exchange 6 texts, and the average twitter exchange 2 tweets.
So what does this tell me? Well, for one, I use text messaging a LOT. But when we put my fondness for typing shorthand and butchering the english language aside, it remains clear that I talk to a LOT of people in a day, and thus interact with a very wide net of people. Generally this could be seen as a good thing, but if my ideas, thoughts, and actions are influenced by an average pool of 40-60 people, what does that say about me? Moreover, when one considers that posting something on twitter, facebook and a blog literally exposes oneself to THOUSANDS of people, where is one’s individuality defined?
Finally, yesterday felt – and was – extraordinarily light. When I worked for the Obama campaign, we gauged our efficiency by listing the number of “conversations” and “contacts” we made during the day. Roughly speaking, 44 conversations was usually about an hour’s worth of work for the average organizer – and that is JUST cold calling voters. In other words, 44 is nothing, and I’m sure most of you out there talk to far more people on a given day.
This raises all sorts of questions: did people in 1909 “converse” with this many people a day, and if they did, how did they do it? Letter writing? Telegram? In-person meetings?
And if we are engaging with way more people than an ancestors, how does this distort our perceptions of the world and an ourselves? Does this make us associate more strongly with a collective whole, or do we become more individualized as a result?
So what do you all think? Also, are any of you out there interested in trying the experiment out for yourselves?? If you do, please post your results in the comments box!
