Author Archives: David Pierce

Gizmodo has a guide that everyone in the entire world needs to read right this second, called A Practical Guide to Using Cellphones in Social Situations. It’s near-perfect, and this is my favorite:

When is it OK to bust out your phone in the company of friends? Size up your audience and the situation you’re in. Anna Post of the Emily Post Institute says, “Most of us know the friends that we’re close enough to that we can be a bit fluid with mobile device usage. The key is to know who those people are and *when* we can do that. A nice dinner? Not ok. Watching football, probably OK. It depends on who you’re with.”

So, if you’re hanging with a busy little member of Gen Y? Knock yourself out; it’s likely that these consta-texters won’t take issue with your divided attention. But if you’re with someone you’re trying to impress or show respect to, (a foxy lady, your mother, your boss), then it’s best to shut your phone up and give them the face time they deserve. (Note: face time, not FaceTime.) After all, they made an effort to be there—that should take priority over liking an Instagram of a brick wall.

Apparently I’m spending my day reading the Times. In the NYT Magazine, David Leonhardt looks at the difference between having a lot of followers on Twitter (like Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Britney Spears) and having huge influence. The difference is stark, and important:

But it turns out that counting followers is a seriously flawed way to measure a person’s impact on Twitter. Even one of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams, made the point to me recently: someone with millions of followers may no longer post messages frequently, while someone followed by mere tens of thousands may be a prolific poster whose messages are amplified by others.

So who are the most influential people on Twitter? We asked the people at Twitalyzer, an independent research firm, to study the question, and they came back with something called the Influence Index. It counts the number of times somebody’s Twitter name is mentioned by other users (including retweets, which occur when one user rebroadcasts another’s message). The Influence Index doesn’t merely measure who’s talking on Twitter, but it also measures how much someone is affecting the conversation.

The results are surprising, and wonderful. Chad Ochocinco as the second most influential person on Twitter? Faith in world and mankind, renewed.

Seth Godin, always the pithy-but-deep thinker, proposes that everyone use two devices, with a thick line between the two:

Simple but bold: Only use your computer for work. Real work. The work of making something.

Have a second device, perhaps an iPad, and use it for games, web commenting, online shopping, networking… anything that doesn’t directly create valued output (no need to have an argument here about which is which, which is work and which is not… draw a line, any line, and separate the two of them. If you don’t like the results from that line, draw a new line).

Now, when you pick up the iPad, you can say to yourself, “break time.” And if you find yourself taking a lot of that break time, you’ve just learned something important.

I like this idea, actually, but I’m convinced it’s practical. Even when we’re at work, “work” is interspersed with brief periods of Twitter, email, reading, surfing, and whatever other things we do to keep us from burning out working all day every day. To be switching devices every eight minutes isn’t exactly productive.

But I do like the idea of having one machine that’s primarily for work, and another that’s for play. That differentiation has happened for me, too, but kind of by accident: I rarely do things like read or play games on my laptop, but I rarely do real work on my iPad. It’s made my iPad a much more relaxing experience, because there’s no work lingering for me to do when I’m using it.

If you’re having trouble with the same thing Seth is (opening your computer to be useful, and instead spending nineteen hours playing Scrabble on Facebook), this is a clever solution. Learn to see your iPad, phone or whatever as your “for play” device and your computer as “for work.” It’s a subtle shift, and the divide doesn’t have to be complete, but it makes both the work and the play better.