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I’m not exactly a digital native, more first generation immigrant. Nor am I an enthusiastic internet pirate.

I grew up with the habit of newspaper buying. I once worked for a national newspaper. I enthusiastically read the paper cover to cover.

Not anymore.

I stopped buying during the week, once we moved away from Finchley Central. The combination of the regular delays on the Northern line and a newspaper  shop on the southbound platform meant a reasonably regular thought process of  ”sod it, might as well buy a paper while we wait”.  The mere geography of the new tube station undermined the purchase process.

For a while it remained a weekend pleasure (with coffee and cats) but in the end I stopped that too.

I stopped because the content alienated me. I was disappointed with the bizarre fashion supplements, with the obsession with new media (biogs for authors that were nothing more than “who blogs at”) and some frustratingly elitist editorials ( Few people know nothing at all by Beethoven). I’m still annoyed about the folksonomic zeitgeist.

And I felt like I knew little more when I put down the paper than when I had picked it up. I knew the gist of the news before I read it and I could guess what the columnists were going to say about. There was never any real analysis, nothing that made me understand.

I tried other papers, even straying a long way from my political comfort land. They all annoyed me. Oddly the Financial Times annoyed me least, perhaps because I had a lot to learn about their particular view of the world. And then I just gave up and saved the pounds.

These days I don’t normally get news from the internet, whether that be blogs, the BBC or newspapers. I get it from the radio.

I do go to newspaper websites (of all stripes) to read the comment stuff but mostly it just annoys me.  Reading it is irrational but I still do it. Paywalls will help me stop irritating myself.

I do still like the supplements ( food , money, gardening and the like)  but figured I might as well just buy a dedicated magazine. They’ll cover those subjects better anyway.  And so we do. Shedloads of magazines still pass through our house.  Proper dead tree media.

So perhaps we could move on from all this paywall business and complaining about the internet.  Maybe it is time to sort out the lazy, trite content instead?

One of the blogs I follow faithfully is The Simple Dollar. In  The Variables of a Purchase: Is Price the Ultimate Bottom Line? Trent says

I place a significant extra value on buying local produce and dairy products versus buying items that are shipped in. I place a slight premium on the ethics of the business, but I often find that companies with questionable practices often have many competitors and it’s trivial to simply use more ethical businesses. I have something of a minimal standard for customer service and shopping experience – if a company doesn’t meet that standard, I just don’t give them my business, regardless of price, but above that level, I view all competitors roughly equally.

So  Trent has a ‘minimal standard’ for shopping experience but there are other factors that he places higher value on.

I came back to this thought when reading yet another perplexed UX blogger, wondering why the field isn’t sufficiently respected or valued.  As usual, I thought of iPlayer.

The user experience team that worked on iPlayer had many anxieties about the product that launched.  The UCD process hadn’t been followed as faithfully as it could have been. Everyone felt the UX could be better (although we didn’t necessarily agree about what was wrong).

And yet, iPlayer has been a massive success for the BBC. And appears to have turned the guy in charge into The Man Who Saved the BBC and gave him the opportunity to say in print “I only do things for the user”. Those users were delighted to get their favourite shows for free,  so appear to have put up with the clunky bits of the UX.

(Now Five On Demand. That’s a different matter. The UX sucked, I was only mildly interested in the product and they were expecting me to pay. No thank you.)

With free services, I definitely put up with some rather undesirable user experiences. Google apps are a mess when used on my EEE and the keyboard shortcuts are patchy but I stay faithful. I use Swapshop all the time and that’s a shocker.

But is it different when I’m paying?

I like the user experience of Waitrose way more than Morrisons. But I go to Morrisons. Mostly because it is near my house and a bit because they stock the things I buy regularly.

We also buy meat direct from farmers and I can assure that the user experience of that process is absolutely awful. But we persist. We like the pigs.

When travelling I buy the cheapest, direct flight and then complain about the customer experience when I get home. I can’t stand American Airlines but when my parents lived in North Carolina I flew with them many times a year. I still get mad when I talk about their flight attendants but they were the only airline that flew direct from London.

Some services I do care about how good the UX is.  Others it isn’t the deciding factor.

It isn’t enough for UXers to say “UX matters”. Because sometimes it doesn’t matter enough to stop someone making money. You have to have a developer otherwise you won’t have a site. But it is possible to launch a successful website without a UX designer and even without a particularly good UX.

Not always, but sometimes.

So when does UX matter? And how do you know if this is one of those times?

I’m never quite sure I’ve ‘got’ what Bruce Sterling is getting at…but there’s always something in his non-fiction writing that I feel the need to capture, come back to, mull over. I never read his sci-fi, I picked up one of his novels in the charity box at work and flicked through it. The prose didn’t seem like something I wanted to spend my time with. I’m not sure if that was hasty.

Still, his article in interactions magazine has the usual hints at possible wisdom. Or maybe just comforting statements of the obvious, although he almost certainly doesn’t intend them to be comforting!

“Below the professional level of for-profit publishing, the subculture of science fiction fans exploited early, DIY duplication technologies: Gestetners, hectograph. There were letter-writing campaigns, amateur press associations, local writers groups, regional science fiction conventions galore. One might even argue that contemporary Web culture looks and behaves much like 1930s science fiction fandom, only digitized and globalized.”

“Digital media is much more frail and contingent than print media. I rather imagine that people will be reading H.P. Lovecraft-likely the ultimate pulp-magazine science fiction writer-long after today’s clumsy, bug-ridden MMORPGs are as dead as the Univac.”

“Experience designers are a tiny group of people with a radically universalized prospectus”

“I scarcely know what to do about this. As Charles Eames said, design is a method of action. Literature is a method of meaning and feeling. Hearteningly, I do know how I feel about this situation. I even have some inkling of what it means”

via interactions magazine.

I’m hugely looking forward to David Gauntlett’s inaugural lecture on 12th November.

“The particular significance of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision is that it involved people making and sharing things – all users as contributors, not just readers. Thus began the shift from the ‘mass audience’ towards creative individuals and communities. David Gauntlett has had a long engagement with the Web, having produced the award-winning website Theory.org.uk for over a decade. Several years before the rise of ‘Web 2.0′, he was writing about the Web as a creative and collaborative playground of everyday culture, politics, and self-expression. He has continued to embed an interest in the Web with broader research about creativity and ways to engage people in social research and social issues.

Gauntlett considers these themes in the context of a broader growth in home-made culture, craft, recycling and remaking, which connects with environmental issues, transition towns and cities, and therefore – in one grand bound – the future of the planet. He will argue that this making-and-sharing culture may foster the ‘tools for thinking’ which will be required to solve social and environmental problems.”

The wine reception is all ‘sold out’ but that’s not the best bit, is it? Register for the free lecture here http://www.12november.org.uk/.

“it is the first social environment created for the asocial individual, and in that respect it divides us into anomic particles and conquers us as effectively as any political tyranny. It returns us to high school, where popularity is the only standard of success, where taunts are the dominant style of amusement, and where self-absorption has yet to ripen into self-awareness.”

Lee Siegel at Comment is Free on why the internet isn’t an unqualified good

This month’s FUMSI included Derek’s Law introduction to Digital Natives but not everyone is taking the concept of ‘digital natives’ at face value. Academic Sue Bennett of the University of Wollongong, Australia is trying to take a scientific approach:

“The idea that a new generation of students is entering the education system has excited recent attention among educators and education commentators. Termed ‘digital natives’ or the ‘Net generation’, these young people are said to have been immersed in technology all their lives, imbuing them with sophisticated technical skills and learning preferences for which traditional education is unprepared. Grand claims are being made about the nature of this generational change and about the urgent necessity for educational reform in response. A sense of impending crisis pervades this debate. However, the actual situation is far from clear. In this paper, the authors draw on the fields of education and sociology to analyse the digital natives debate. The paper presents and questions the main claims made about digital natives and analyses the nature of the debate itself. We argue that rather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a ‘moral panic’. We propose that a more measured and disinterested approach is now required to investigate ‘digital natives’ and their implications for education.”

The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence

Further reading :

• Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky
• Washington Times article covering the Library of Congress lecture series
• Digital Natives research project from Harvard Law School and University of St. Gallen in Switzerland
• Pew Internet’s Teens & Social Media

TED.com just won a Webby for best navigation.

Now TED is a great site to while away hours with and still feel like you are improving yourself. I’ve spent lots of time there and I’d be struck by the navigation but not always in an entirely approving way. As with most new and exciting attempts at navigation there’s something fun about it and also something kind of irritating when you need to get something done.

Good

• traditional but useful text-based left nav combined with the more attention grabbing main content
• lots and lots of different ways to slice the content – themes, tags, speakers, popularity, most inspiring and so on
• choice of list or ‘visualisation’ view

Bad

• in the ‘visualisation’ view, the mouseover interaction gets in the way. If I try to select a promo in the middle of screen but move a little too slowly then the promos I am passing over pop up and obscure the one I’m trying to get to.
• illustrating sub-categories with pictures of individual speakers. Takes a while to realise that if you click on that big promo with a picture of Jane Goodall you get taken to another index with 36 talks on the topic ‘inspired by nature’ and not straight to the Goodall talk.
• surprisingly low-key use of the tags. No tag browse on the homepage or the themes pages (where I can really see value for drilling down further with them)

But going back and playing with it some more I think all in all that the good outweighs the bad. Would like to see that mouseover sorted though. It is a bit too much like the problems I have with the Windows Start menu(!)

Is Google making us stupid? is the title of Nicholas Carr’s article in Atlantic about the impact of the internet on how he thinks.

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Part of me thinks there is something to this but the other part believes this is just an attempt to deny that this is happening because we’re not as young as we used to be.

One casual definition of extroverts is ‘someone who thinks whilst they are speaking”. Introverts, on the other hand, have to work out exactly what they think before they tell everyone else.

Introverts often fear (sometime rightly) that everyone else equates extrovertion with creativity (genius-recluse myths notwithstanding). Whilst this is mostly rubbish, it might help everyone else to realise the introvert’s general brillance if they actually told someone else what their ideas are, maybe once in a while anyway.

Pre-blogging I assumed that blogging was the clearest possible indicator of extraversion/exhibitionism/attention seeking and that the social media phenomenon is for extraverts only. But a surprising side benefit of blogging has been getting this introvert’s vague, unformed ideas out there. It takes quite a lot for me not to see this as a bad thing, given the earlier definitions of introvert.

But I can’t deny the blog has been helpful in getting ideas to completion. It creates expectations from others that you are going to do something you’ve blogged about (aka nagging), flushes out co-enthusiasts, and other people build on the idea and suggest directions. Mostly this hasn’t been with the assistance of internet users around the world but with people that I work with everyday. I recognise that it is slightly ludicrous that I need a blog to share ideas with people a few desks away but there you go.

Nice to see a story suggesting that everything isn’t going to the dogs:
books are thriving despite the internet