Where Do You Live?

Abstract

is essential is invisible to the eyes. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Little Prince Where do you live? By this, I mean where do you spend your time? I realized recently that many of the people who coexist with me in my physical world actually live in different places. 1 spend much of my workday in web conferences. Many teams in my organization communicate among themselves using WhatsApp--they live chunks of their work lives in WhatsApp. I connect with my wife face to face or by phone. One of my sons doesn't answer his phone; he only texts. Another lives his social life within his multiplayer online video games; the game space is where he connects with friends to get together in physical space. Where you live affects how you think. When Marshall McLuhan wrote, The medium is the message, he made a distinction between the content expressed via a medium and the message of the medium--the pattern of thought it engendered over time. In his early days as a teacher, McLuhan had noticed that there was a difference between the way he thought and the way his students thought--a generation gap he famously attributed to the effects of the then-new medium of television. His students had lived large chunks of their lives in the context of television, and he had not. It changed the way they thought. As in everything else, the pace of change in communication media is picking up. New communication practices and tools are cascading into the workplace. Many of these new media started in the personal world and migrated into the business world. Texting with friends became texting with colleagues and then texting with supervisors, or using WhatsApp to connect teams. Twitter in our personal lives became Yammer in our business lives. content expressed in these media has not changed much--the issues of interest to us in management now are largely the same as they were decades ago--but the media change how things are said and (in subtle ways) the meaning conveyed. Because these new media afford it, sharing of content is generally more immediate and frequent, less linear and hierarchical; the content occurs in bursts, not according to reporting schedules, and the more casual, immediate context means that it's often less formal and breezier in tone and--another new affordance of these tools--more likely to engage multiple media. individual messages have shorter half-lives--they quickly become buried in message streams and news feeds--and yet have a persistence to them. What are the implications of these media for the ways we manage people in traditional R&D and innovation labs? I began trying to answer this question while watching my teenaged son play his video games. He lived much of his life in those games during high school. This was a great frustration to me and my wife because it seemed like such a waste of time. (Why not read a good book?) But his friends lived there, as well. They met in the video chat room the same way I used to meet people at the mall or at a meeting of a school club. In the environment of the video game, my son and his friends met, talked, formed teams, plotted and executed game strategies, had arguments, discussed politics, and sometimes made plans to meet in the real world--not so far from what I did at the mall. I wonder how these habits--this medium--will shape my son's life, and those of his friends. Are the video games of today harbingers of the work environment of tomorrow? …