Weekend Reading – September 26
E-liar: Emails don’t always tell the truthTwo new studies claim that email in the workplace is more deceptive than writing – and people feel justified about it when they do lie online. According to a piece on LiveScience.com, two different studies came to the same conclusion that email makes it easier to lie, mostly by hiding behind email and disguising verbal clues that might give them away. One study had students email information about a money amount to other students and “those students using email lied about the amount of money to be divided more than 92 percent of the time, while less then 64 percent lied when writing by hand,” according to LiveScience.com
Most employed Americans employ email or the Internet at work [that’s actually not a lie]. A new survey by Pew Research Center shows that 62 percent of adults who are currently employed use the Internet or email at work with mixed views about the impact of technology on their work lives. The good news is that those surveyed say they enjoy the benefits of “increased connectivity and flexibility that the Internet and all of their various gadgets afford them at work.” On the other hand, many workers say these tools have added stress and new demands to their lives.
One of the major impacts of the Internet and cell phones is that they have enabled more people to work occasionally from home. Some 45 percent of employed Americans report doing at least some work from home and 18 percent of working Americans say they do job-related tasks at home almost daily. The downside is that 50 percent of employed email users say they check their work-related email on the weekends.
A Twitter for the enterprise? Where Twitter asks “What are you doing?,” Yammer, a new tool for “making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers,” asks: “What are you working on?” How does this make employees more productive? Yammer works like this: As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and provides a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced. The basic Yammer service is free, though companies can pay to claim and administer their networks. Our only question is how secure are these sensitive conversations?
Texting more popular than calling? According to Nielsen Mobile it is. New research released shows that the typical U.S. mobile subscriber now sends and receives more SMS text messages than they do mobile telephone calls. As of Q2 2008, a typical U.S. mobile subscriber sends or receives 357 text messages per month, compared to placing or receiving 204 phone calls. Though the number of calls has remained relatively steady, the number of text messages is up 450 percent from the previous two years. The research also found that the typical U.S. teen mobile subscriber (ages 13–17) now sends or receives 1,742 text messages per month (compared to making or receiving 231 mobile phone calls).
Me! My favorite subject! New research from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin claims that users of social network sites [and in the study, specifically Facebook] may hint at a rabid case of narcissism. As reported on Scientificblogging.com the research says that the “tremendous growth of social networking sites has led psychologists to explore how personality traits are expressed online.”
The results indicate that not everyone on Facebook is narcissistic, just the ones with lots of Facebook friends and wallposts. Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, while others are more likely to use snapshots.
Best quote from the article:
It just turns out that narcissists are using Facebook the same way they use their other relationships – for self promotion with an emphasis on quantity over quality.
Isn’t that pretty much everyone on Facebook?
