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Let us face it; we, as humans, are selfish, individualists, and undoubtedly clinging to any privileges associated with power. Goodwill and sharing among peers follow Nielsen's principle, and most of us wouldn't even imagine acting differently unless oblig

crowdSPRING's blog about design, digital creativity, business strategy and more.

Jane Beard and Jeffrey Davis didn't realize how little they speak to their children by phone until they called AT&T to switch plans. The customer service agent was breathless. The Silver Spring couple had accumulated 28,700 unused minutes.

I was delighted to have presented at the Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology conference at the University of Colorado yesterday. This was my second

Very useful thinking about social media ROI. In my experience with business analytics, the "last mile" tends to be the toughest--getting the stakeholders to use metrics to make actual decisions. 

While this is an interesting article, i don't think it provides sufficient nuance to be useful. A person's ability to operate in a situation (their digital fluency, for example), the types of tasks that they are doing, and the intensity of the attention they need to apply in a situation should determine the degree to which they attempt to multitask. The more fluent people we've seen know when to shut down their laptop or crackberry when they know they won't be able to pay attention, and when the context calls for them to keep it open.

Though this study is informative and interesting, there are some serious limitations that should be taken into account if we are to generalize its results to all situations of collective action (like organizations). We may do a longer writeup some time in the future, but here are a few questions that it raises: Oh, and here is a link to the original paper: http://ow.ly/3VaS4 -----Is this a problem of the technology, or of fluency with the technology?---- "This is the danger with lean media, and is especially frustrating because it implies that if a willingness to cooperate can be effectively conveyed to other group members-perhaps an easier problem to fix than curing opportunistic intent-the problems of non-cooperation..they just did not know if they could rely on others to reciprocate." (p. 119) These conclusions suggest that fluency with a medium and the norms of communication through that medium may play a significant role in trust. In other words, if i am not good at communicating my intent to cooperate within the limitations of any medium (including face-to-face speech), i will have a hard time building trust. ----Are all digital media still as "lean" as email was in 2005?--- This study bases its concept of "media richness" on 1986 work by Daft and Lengel which suggested a continuum of media richness that contains face-to-face on the "rich" end and things like reports on the "lean" end. The assumption that social media, MMORPG's, digital collaboration platforms, etc are also at the lower end with email is very, very questionable.  ----Can we generalize the behavior of business students to all situations of collective action?---- The participants were all upper-level business students from the early 2000's, who are socialized and train to deal with colle

----Norms of anonymity may have changed since 2005---- There seems to have been an increase in people using digital technologies (especially social media) as a way to build their identity, rather than anonymize it. In fact, services have sprung up to provide people with personal landing pages (http://lifehacker.com/#!5534456/five-best-personal-landing-pages). If this is true, then there is likely a corresponding pressure to build and maintain trust in a world of digital trails and easy search.