[POLL] Communication and Intrusion

[jducoeur]

The latest issue of Newsweek contains a rant by Robert Samuelson, one of their columnists, in which he rails about why he is never getting a cellphone. He rehashes most of the usual arguments about how they are destroying privacy, intrude on your life, remove the distance between you and work, and so on. He cites a lot of statistics, aiming to demonstrate that people who have cellphones tend to resent them.

Nothing terribly new in it, but this is the first time I've read this particular argument since I've had a cellphone long enough to judge for myself. And I was intrigued, because it totally does not match my experience. So I figured this is an interesting excuse for an unscientific and self-selected survey about how the online crowd feels about "push" communication technologies. Please take a minute and fill this in. (LJ users only, I'm afraid -- you can't fill in a poll anonymously.)

The following is broken down by technology. I'm specifically interesting in push technologies -- ones that can interrupt you in some fashion. The sections are more or less identical to each other: one of the things I'm curious about is the differences in how people feel.

When I ask how useful you find a technology, that's utility in general, not necessarily for work. If you think that it is indispensible for your social life, that counts. When I ask about how intrusive you find it, that's purely asking how you feel about it, regardless of whether that intrusiveness is justified or not.

This is the first time I've done an LJ poll, and I'm building it by hand, so forgive me if I mess something up. This is already my second try. (Having found out the hard way that I can't put arbitrary HTML into a poll.)
[Poll #338617]

Comments

[keshwyn]

I assume that when you're talking about landline phones, we're supposed to ignore whether they're necessary for things like DSL or such? We can't have DSL at our house without a landline number, so if I include the landline there we've got an indespensible. But if I take it in terms of using the landline only for phone calls, it shifts around in the poll notably.

[jducoeur]

Yeah -- the focus here is on the push communications technology. So for purposes of this poll, the fact that DSL is piggy-backed onto a landline phone is largely irrelevant: that's more about infrastructure implementation than about the mode of communication.

Indeed, I would say that a phone that is hooked up to one's TV cable counts as a "landline phone" for purposes of this poll. The interesting distinction is really about mobile vs. non-mobile...

[siderea]

Sorry, couldn't make heads or tails of your survey:

1) I send about 3 pieces of postal mail per month (bills I don't pay electronically and the odd RSVP). For that purpose it's indispensible, but well...

2) Emailemailemail. I don't find it intrusive because I'm bright enough to have no incoming email alerts. I see my mail if I check my mail. No biffs!

3) Landline: do you mean for voice? My landline is for data. If I could keep my computer on all the time, I would probably have it answer my phone for me. I find getting phonecalls enormously intrusive -- so I just unplug it if I don't want to be called. So, no, I don't find it intrusive. And I don't use voice telephony for work at all. But I use my landline data connection to dialup my place of employment.

4) Mobile phones are great! There's a short list of people who have my mobile number, and I have it permanently set to vibrate so it can't reach me if it can't reach out and touch me. No one at my place of employment knows what my cell # is. I never use it for work. So, yeah, it's "intrusive" when someone calls, but it's generally someone with permission to intrude, and I'm good at enforcing boundaries by just not carrying it when I don't want to be bothered.

5) I don't IM. I used to use zephyr, and understand it to be a fantastic way to ruin your arms.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

(2) Heh. I find things are "intrusive" if I have to poll them, in a weird way, because worry about them intrudes on my train of thought. So xbuffy makes email less intrusive for me, because I can check off on incoming mail very rapidly.

Now, replying to the parent thread:

Interesting poll.

Mobile phones have functionality none of the others have, namely, they follow you and not a location. I guess as wireless becomes ubiquitous, IM and email will pick up this piece (I *can* receive IMs to my phone, but it's a PITA).

The one thing people seem to always overlook about mobile phones is that they have an OFF mode, usually coupled to voicemail. It's not like your landline, where it rings at three AM when you don't want it to.

Oh, and caller ID has totally changed how "intrusive" phones are, by shifting the possibility of caller rejection from post-interaction to pre-interaction. On the other hand, this means people know you can screen your calls, and wonder why you didn't pick up when you saw it was them. Visibility works both ways, in general...

[jducoeur]

I don't find it intrusive because I'm bright enough to have no incoming email alerts.

That's fine. This is mainly about pure subjective feelings, more than facts. Samuelson was asserting that people find cellphones intrusive and annoying, yet utterly indispensible to their lives, so I'm trying to gauge feelings relative to other push technologies.

Landline: do you mean for voice?

Yes -- truth to tell, the dialin/DSL side hadn't occurred to me as a potential confusion. (And I can't figure out how to edit a poll once it's running.) As I replied to keshwyn, this is about end-user communications technology rather than infrastructure. (And IP connectivity is infrastructure, in my book.)

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

I've used IM, but I am currently not using it much. I used to use it all the time at work, but I haven't switched IM names, and the old one has my old company name built into it.

Unlike the cell-phone and e-mail, I find that IM can chew up time unpredictably [there is less social etiquette to keep it brief so far].

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Yes.

What annoyed me about IM was not IM, but stupid IM users. Like the one that IM'd me to tell me she was going to send me email... Grrrr.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna IM you to tell you about this email I'll send you.

Actually, an IM with "sent you email" has a valid purpose. Not too sure about "gonna send you", however...

[keshwyn]

I will note that I don't find -my- cellphone to be particularly annoying, nor, really, that of my friends. That's the answer I put in.

The inconsiderate lout who's cellphone rings very loudly in a quiet situation, or who is there bellowing at the top of his lungs at the bus stop about the fungal problem in his toenails...

That cellphone I mind. That one would get a 5 for intrusiveness.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

That was my reaction as well. I also find walkie talkie phones exceedingly annoying.

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

hm. i find that the more laggy a method of communication is, and the more manipulation it involves, the more annoying i find it (in the above survey, i mapped "intrusive" to "annoying", as i really don't have a metric for measuring intrusiveness).

thus, for example, i find postal mail the pinnacle of annoyance, as it has a very long lag, is only delivered once a day to one particular place, no matter where i am, and then sits there until i go out of my way to deal with it. email is somewhat less annoying; it requires more effort for me to check it, but at least it's quick and easy to delete or file or reply to (which is one of the reasons i have lots of problems with clumsy mail interfaces, i.e. just about all html mail frontends), and i can automate what happens to it, to a certain extent.

but the phone, and specifically the mobile phone, is just about the only means of remote communication that's instantaneous enough not to annoy me. i'd rather be interrupted by a phone call (especially since i can choose when i would prefer not to be interrupted) than receive a message that's out of date by the time i read it. for example, i find voicemail to be worse than email, since it takes so much longer to parse and manipulate voicemail messages.

hm. maybe that's not really the issue. i need to think more about this.

-steve

Auxillary data

[mindways]

I was very dubious about the cell-phone thing for a long time, having much the attitude expressed in this article...but then I saw how kviri used his, and got my own, resolving to do the same thing.

The reason I find my cell phone as unintrusive as it is is because I Do Not Give Its Number To Work. I swore when I got the thing that I'd rather throw the phone in a lake than have it turn into a leash, where every time I got a call I'd wince because I'd worry that it might be someone from work - if I ever work somewhere that a cellphone or pager is required, they can durn well spring to get me a work phone/pager, which will have a different ringtone, be turned on/off at different times, etc.

It's also a matter of habits - if I don't want to talk I won't have my phone on or won't answer it. That makes me less interrupt-available, but gives my friends the freedom to call whenever they please, since they know if I don't want to I won't answer.

On landlines: I sometime use our landline for 800 calls because it doesn't use minutes off of my cell. I didn't count that because it's infrequent, and I could very easily do without it. The only time I can recall having used our landline for incoming calls is the week I lost my cellphone; otherwise, it all feeds to an answering machine.

Aside from work, I don't use IMing per se at all - but I make frequent use of IRC for social purposes, which includes the use of /msg for individually targeted private messages. I wasn't really sure whether to include that or not.

Re: Auxillary data

[jducoeur]

I swore when I got the thing that I'd rather throw the phone in a lake than have it turn into a leash

I've actually been pleased at the relatively responsible attitude my office has had about cellphones. Most of us provided our numbers in the "emergency contact" file, but they've never once used it. Indeed, in general the company has adopted an unspoken policy that, except in *serious* emergencies, you call people at home or on the cell only if they explicitly say, "I'm working at home -- here's how to contact me".

I wasn't really sure whether to include that or not.

I don't really think of IRC as a "push" technology -- I've always been of the impression that it's something you are involved with only at times that you say, "I'm doing this now", without true asynchronous interrupts. But I've never seriously tried that particular brand of crack, so I may be off-base...

Re: Auxillary data

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

The job wehre they wanted me to trian the person they hired instead of me also asked if I would give them my cell number so the new girl coiuld call me with any questions. I said no. I also said that I didn't keep my cell on at work (which is mostly true). The boss was pretty upset by this, but the assitant director understood it quite well. (If the Boss had been smart enough to realize that my cell number was on my resume, then he could have had the new girl call me. But I doubt Anne would have let him.)

Re: Auxillary data

[mindways]

[Take this reply with a grain of salt; I'm not a hardcore IRCer by any stretch of the imagination. Others may be better able to speak to it than I.]

I don't really think of IRC as a "push" technology -- I've always been of the impression that it's something you are involved with only at times that you say, "I'm doing this now", without true asynchronous interrupts.

Eh...yes and no. It can slide anywhere between IM-level and email-level depending on how it's used. IM and telephones are only "push" to a certain extent - there's some sort of "incoming communication!" alert that one can choose to heed (and take the message) or ignore (and deal with it later). IRC can easily be used that way, too - just leave the window running it such that the bottom few lines are visible beneath whatever else you're working on. If your screen name pops up surrounded by *s (or highlighted in red, etc, depending on your client), it means somebody's sent you a private message, which falls into the same category in my mind as an instant message. There's even an /away function one uses to mark onesself as away - anyone /msg-ing you gets told "so-and-so is away for reason X" (where reason X is provided as an argument to /away). Personally, I don't keep my IRC window continually visible most of the time...but will on occasion.

In many ways, I see the message capacities of IMing as rather like a subset of IRC, with the primary difference being that the "main channel" for a given provider doesn't permit messages that go to everyone thereupon. But AIM users are all effectively "on a a single channel" (if an immense one), and can see "who's on", private-message anyone on that channel, etc. Likewise for Yahoo or MSN or whatnot. Setting up a "chat" with >2 users is analogous to starting a new private channel. Logging in to an IRC server == logging in to one's IM account. Identity guarantees are much less strict with IRC, but they do exist - there are 'nick reservation' services which can provide some measure of "Nickname X corresponds to Person Y" assurances.

Granted, IRC and IM are oriented towards different uses, but from a functional capability standpoint, they're not really that dissimilar. (There are plenty of differences in auxillary capabilities - file transfers, userpics, etc - but those aren't the core person-to-person communication at the heart of each.)

If nothing else, there are programs (Trillian) which are both IM and IRC clients, and one of the prime reasons I don't IM outside of work is because IRC fulfills similar needs/desires on my part.

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I suspect the people who are annoyed by their own cell phones are people who either have phones for work (which they don't think they can turn off without consequences) or who have personal phones that people call for work. (I'm guessing that you suspected the same, considering the thrust of your poll.) I don't routinely give my cell phone number to co-workers, but have done so on occasion, and it's always been clear that it's only for *really* important things. Fortunately, in my work, those things are rare.

Likewise for IM; I've had several jobs (including my current one) where we communicate via IM, and in my experience we all have the sense only to IM someone about work when they're working.

[matildalucet.livejournal.com]

I keep saying I don't want a cell phone. I'm not sure that's totally accurate. I *think* I don't want anybody to be able to reach me when they choose to. But there are exceptions. If I've wandered off and Steve needs to reach me for some important reason, then it could be useful to have that capability. But that means trusting him to not bother me unless it's really important. And I'm terribly afraid certain friends and family members would be offended if I refused to give them a cell number, or if I refuse to turn it on so they can reach me when I'm tying up the land line with my computer. It's a lot easier to just say, "I don't have a cell, I don't need a cell, I don't want a cell," and let them look at me as if I've fossilized.

I'm starting to waver, though, because I've been in situations the last couple of months where I knew I was going to be delayed getting where I said I would be and have no way to let anybody know. Wonder if it's possible to get a cell that is outgoing only, and only charges me when/if I actually use it. Nobody else needs to know I didn't magically find a payphone that worked and didn't want my firstborn child as payment.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

Well, there are phones that you can treat like calling cards: you buy minutes and when you use those up, you buy more. Dependnig on how much you use it, it can end up being more expensive than a regular plan. Look at the Usual Cell Phone Provider Suspects websites for more info. As far as the "people calling you and you don't want to talk to them" thing umm... Don't answer the phone. It's really very simple, really.

[matildalucet.livejournal.com]

I like simple. I don't like ringing phones, though I put up with it on my landline. If I get a cell phone, I think the Off button will be my friend.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

But that means trusting him to not bother me unless it's really important

Knowing Steve, admittedly not nearly as well as you do, he'd probably convince himself that whatever it was wasn't sufficiently important, and you'd end up wasting your money on the cell.

There are prepaid cells, but they're rather a bit of a ripoff. They take incoming calls but you could always not give out the number (unfortunately, it'll probably show up on the other person's caller ID). I had one for a while in Iowa, for emergencies.

Intrusion management

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

My mobile phone is my only phone. I originally wanted it as a safety device, since I'm often travelling alone, frequently at night. In those days, I didn't use it much, and gave out the number very sparingly. No, my phone is always with me, and it's number is the only valid number anyone might have for me. Even so, the intrusiveness of it is rarely a problem, since there are various ways to manage that.

First, there's the on/off switch. When I'm in a situation where I don't want the phone to bother me, I can simply turn it off. Anyone who calls during that time will be sent to my voicemail, and can leave a message that I'll pick up when I turn the phone back on.

One feature I love about my current phone is accepted caller lists. I can give it a list of contacts (either individuals or groups) from my address book, and tell it to only accept calls from them. Anyone else is shunted to voice mail. I can have multiple such lists pre-defined for various situations, and easily switch between them. During the day, my phone routinely will ring whenever anyone calls. Based on caller ID, I can choose to answer or not. At night, my phone won't sound an alert for new messages or voicemail, and won't ring for anyone but my family and close friends.