Recently, there has been lot of coverage about a study by the University of Melbourne that states the casual usage of sites like Twitter and Facebook increases productivity at work. The study shows that short breaks allow the mind to rest and thus increase the total concentrate on the days' assignments. While this study makes me feel better about all the times my boss has caught me online, I'm curious what has happened to old fashioned water cooler talk at work?
Would we rather spend our escape from the daily grind catching up on tweets or playing a quick round of Mob Wars instead of having a little face to face conversation with the people we spend 8 hours a day with?
Personally, I enjoy chatting it up with coworkers, but in the age of the iPod, it's hard to find anyone who isn't pumping music into their ear at a ridiculous volume and virtually unable to hear the phone on their desk ring much less engage in idle conversation. Therefor, I get my mental break online as do a lot of employees who have a computer and Internet access. This raises another question: What will become of our social skills? Do we lose the ability to strike up conversation without being in front of a screen? Are we more or less social when our main form of communication with our friends is Facebook?
One factor may be more people these days are keeping their personal and business lives separate and not thinking of the workplace as a setting for making new friends. As I do, more people are eating their lunches at their desks and avoiding the break room in order to do personal browsing. While all this social networking may be good for productivity, is it the best thing for us?
UPDATE: Poll Results 4/6/09 - 4/13/09
Do you feel social networking makes you more productive at work?
55% Yes, it helps
11% No, it interferes with work
33% My job restricts sites
00% Meh
How does social networking affect our ability to communicate in real life?
11% Has no effect
22% People are more social
22% People are less social
44% Meh
Monday, April 6, 2009
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As far as your second question is concerned, I think the concept of social networking supports and enhances our real-life communications skills.
ReplyDeleteI was at a tweetup last week discussing social networking and one of the attendees brought up a great point about the difference between different social networking sites. According to her, social networks are either designed to bring offline relationships online (a la Facebook) or, through the efforts of the users, forge online relationships that then can be brought offline at the user's whim (Twitter through tweetups like the one I was at).
In either case, you're working on your speech and writing skills and sharing certain aspects of your life with others.
As for how this all plays out at work, I suppose it might be detrimental, but it depends upon the atmosphere your employer fosters. Perhaps, instead of everyone eating at their desks, the office has a set time and day of the week (or more) where everyone gets up and goes out to get lunch together instead of grabbing whatever carry-out or bagged lunch they have and catching up with their MySpace friends. (Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook will be there after lunch, and, perhaps more importantly, after work, too.)