Over the past few days, I have noticed that my phone is bothersome when I am in class or trying to work. When I receive a text message or phone call, I often feel compelled to respond or call back fairly quickly. I often find it hard to concentrate until I find out why the other person is contacting me. For these reasons, my cell phone can serve as a distraction during class or while I am working. I tend to turn my phone on silent when I am busy, however, I often forget to switch my phone to vibrate or ring afterwards, which causes me to miss calls and be late in responding to texts.
Technical systems are “rigid” and “lack the flexibility required by social life”, which is important to assess situations and adjust accordingly (Ackerman, 2000). My phone could have a function to manually switch my availability to a different status as well as enter daily times for when I will be attending class, which could allow me to assign my phone to ringtone, vibrate, or silent mode for a particular status. This feature could serve to bridge the social technical gap, which represents the “divide between what we must support socially and what we can support technically” (Ackerman, 2000). A resulting social technical gap could be the different roles that others may occupy, since I may wait until after class to respond to a friend while I may respond promptly to a family member who I speak to less frequently. The phone could allow users to “group potential information recipients together into roles” by applying different volume modes to different contacts depending upon their roles (Ackerman, 2000). Thus, the ambiguity of knowing which role each contact occupies could be resolved, which could further decrease social technical gap.
Another issue I found with my phone is receiving calls when trying to sleep. There is an “alarm only” setting where it rings only when the specified alarm time is reached. However, this causes me to miss calls that may be more urgent. To resolve this issue, there could be a keyword search function that looks for words that may imply urgency, such as “emergency” or “immediately” in messages. If these keywords were found, then the phone would ring regardless of volume setting. This feature could help reduce social technical gap by searching messages to deal with “exceptional situations” (Ackerman, 2000). Although this feature may deal with exceptions, it introduces the social technical gap of ambiguity in message content. For example, if someone sends me a message saying we should meet up immediately after class ends tomorrow, this is not urgent and I do not need to promptly respond. Assigning roles, dealing with exceptions, and decreasing ambiguity is important to reduce social technical gap.
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I agree that the tendency to forget to switch phone ringing modes happens annoyingly often. Your proposed “availability status” actually suffers from the same problem as the initial ring modes; that is, you may forget to update your availability status after e.g. leaving class. However, your solution does reduce the side-effect of forgetting to do this; your friends won’t be left wondering why you didn’t pick up the phone or respond to their text messages in a timely manner.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the difficulty concentrating. When I'm sitting in class (especially during an exam) and my phone vibrates with a text, I feel anxious if I don't immediately look at it. Sitting there wondering who it is and what they want make it next to impossible to focus on the original task. Especially with social norms that label us as rude if we delay in our responses, I definitely understand where you're coming from, and empathize
ReplyDeletei agree with will's analysis of the availability function, when it comes down to it, every system has to be implemented by people who are prone to forget. Many of the other solutions you suggested: the ability to have exceptions to the vibrate function and so on are actually all available on the old blackberry. you can program in certain contacts that will receive priority, so you could put your phone on silent/alarm only during the night, but if a call came in from your mother who was listed as an exception it would ring loud and clear.
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