Category Archives: Learning and Ideas

Articles I Like: The Pandemic Is Resetting Casual Friendships – The Atlantic

The PolyBlog
February 9 2021

A friend shared an article this week from the Atlantic written by Amanda Mull (The Pandemic Is Resetting Casual Friendships – The Atlantic) about the impact of the pandemic on social ties. The content isn’t revolutionary, cutting-edge, or original, but I really like the way she explains the breakdown. In essence, she uses the standard sociological explanations of people having different types of friendships, acquaintances, etc. radiating out from your “self” and talks about the tier 3 and beyond links that have been severed due to the isolation.

Tier 1 is your immediate social network and would normally include your family and best friends. In short, the ones that you likely included in your “bubble” or “pod”.

Tier 2 is your expanded network of friends, family and all your immediate coworkers. Some people put coworkers in Tier 1 since you see them every day, but one thing the pandemic has made clear is how those coworkers are different from people who are in your pod.

While Tier 1 is still restrictive, it mostly remains “in-person”. People you still see and interact with in-person, albeit in different ways. Tier 2, by contrast, has almost entirely gone digital with Zoom calls. Everyone knows about the impacts on those groups, it’s very clear, no big surprises left there.

Tier 3, by contrast, is the “extended” friends who might not even be considered “friends” in some cases, merely people who are regular acquaintances with whom you are friendly (the “weak ties” of social interactions in your normal in-person day to day life). Mull uses the example of a social group she used to see regularly at a bar to watch football games with, but lots of people have these groups. Trivia friends. Hobby or association friends. Another example from the article is the barista who knows your favorite drink and has it ready for you when you get to the counter. The little added touch that someone a bit distant socially says, “I see you”.

While Mull calls them “casual friends”, I often think of them as almost transactional friendships. For me, some of my best examples coalesce around food service.

When I was away at university out West, and living in residence, we had a small crew who regularly ate together. As we would go through the dining line, we would occasionally chat with the cashiers. We didn’t know them well, but if we were about to line up, we would often move to the line up of the one we knew, if she was working. For me, it was a bit of comfort too. The sense of familiarity. Our conversations never even progressed to names. We just said “hello”, or maybe if the line wasn’t too rushed, maybe we’d talk about the weather, or plans for the weekend. Idle chatter.

Later when I was living out of residence during the summer, and working full-time while most of my school friends had moved back home, I found dinner time a bit lonely. I didn’t want to go home, I wanted a bit of social interaction, and I would frequently go to a local family restaurant where there were about 30 tables, and a small set of waitresses, five or six regulars. While I liked all of them, I would frequently choose to sit in a specific section of one of the waitresses. Sometimes I would even ask to sit in Kat’s section. I didn’t know her well, it was just that we would normally chat for 2-3 minutes while I was ordering. Sometimes it was about law school — her father taught at the university, and she was thinking about trying for it, but she wasn’t sure if it was what she wanted to do. Sometimes it was about books, as I usually had one with me for reading. Or the weather, whatever. I suspect too that her coworkers likely teased her about me, because I would request her section. They likely assumed, incorrectly, that I had a romantic interest in her. I didn’t, I just liked interacting with her. I found her refreshingly lively when I was feeling a bit lonely. One night, our conversation seemed to have a different edge to it, almost like she was leading it somewhere. Since I’m generally dense about women, any thoughts I had at the time were likely to have been erroneous but there seemed to be a different feel to the conversation, including four or five directed comments that seemed to lead to her telling me what time she got off work. I suspected, but had no way of knowing, if she was hinting I should ask her out, which I did not do. Ironically, I would have been happy to have gone for a drink or something as a friend, just to get to know her better, but I wasn’t in a mental place to be dating anyone, if even that was what she was suggesting, if she was suggesting anything at all. I also know the limitations of friendships that start the way they did.

Amanda Mull’s article, though, suggested she does go deeper with her interactions:

Of the dozens of fellow fans and bar employees I’d greet with a hug on a normal fall Saturday, I follow only a handful of them on social media; for most of the others, I know only their first name, if that. But many comforted me through mutual, bone-deep disappointment, or sprayed champagne at me in exhilaration.

I did not, of course, ever greet the serving staff with a hug. Nor was I greeted by the regulars in the bar with a round of “Norm!” when I entered Cheers. And yet, I have had a similar “Cheers” experience of sorts, of being the regular barfly.

When I was still in the office, I would frequently stop by the restaurant downstairs multiple times a week for lunch. Some of that is laziness in that I don’t like heating up leftovers at work, but I do like hot lunches, and some of it is that I like the comfort of people being around without having to interact with them very much.

For work, I would go in, sit at the small bar with about 8 other rotating regulars, and eat my lunch. Usually I was also reading something, news or a book, or working on something from my website sometimes. The “buzz” around me was soothing, like being part of something without being part of something. It’s the same experience most people get in going to a coffee shop. There are people around but you don’t have to interact with them if you don’t want to do so. And if you do, well, most of them will quickly move away from you. 🙂

Anyway, back to work. For my regular visits, I would see 2-3 regulars fairly often, enough that I got to know their names and generally where they work. One is an IT guy named Chris, another was a lawyer. There were others, but they never said much. I’ve had regular conversations with Chris over, say, a five year period. I don’t know his last name, and outside of knowing he’s into Star Trek, most of our conversations were mostly superficial. If he died, I wouldn’t go to his funeral, I didn’t know him that well, but it would make me sad, and I would miss him.

For the workers, there were 2-3 who always had a friendly smile, a warm welcome, maybe an extra dose of fries when something in the kitchen was taking too long. They’d refill my drink faster, they’d stop by to chat, they check in on me. Friendly, sure, and attentive.

But, again, there are two giant factors in those interactions.

First and foremost, and going back to the example out west of the waitress who may or may not of been suggesting I ask her out, the entire relationship is, well, fake. She (and it is often a she) is literally paid to be nice to customers. Is she nicer to me than someone else? Maybe, or maybe she likes bigger tips, or it’s just because I’m low maintenance as a customer. I don’t make inappropriate comments, I don’t freak out if she forgets my drink, I’m not pissed if the kitchen is taking longer than normal. I don’t go for drama, and I don’t create drama. In, eat, get out. I want the noise and buzz around me, not a problem.

Second, and perhaps equally important, there is nothing invested in the relationship. Its nature, aside from being transactional, is also superficial. Who is going to get angsty about a passing comment about the weather? Like most people in casual situations, you don’t openly start conversations with strangers about income, politics or religion. And if there’s a drunk sitting next to you at the bar, they tend to shut up if you ignore them enough. So they are “problem-free” friendships because, generally-speaking, you don’t interact deeply enough for anyone to HAVE a problem.

And yet…

Even if I discount commerce-based friendships as real friendships, I miss them. I stopped in to work back in June to pick some gear up, and top of my list for the visit was to swing by the restaurant to see what was going on. I remember back in March, just as we were debating what was going to happen, the one waitress was asking what we thought would happen. And I said quite openly that I thought we were going to get sent home, and likely for an extended period.

Which of course was devastating news for her. She worked in a restaurant that mainly served people who worked in the building. If the building closed down, she would have no customers; no customers, no work; no work, no hours; no hours, no pay. The restaurant was still open in June, but there were no serving staff, they were let go long before then. It was the owner and a cook, that was it. And I wonder how she’s doing.

When I visited Victoria a couple of years after I was in Ottawa, just back for a visit, I made a special point of going back to the restaurant just to see who was still there. I knew nobody who was working, and it made me sad. More than a lack of connection at the university, more than the loss of friends who had all moved away, I was saddened by the thought that these “fake” commerce-based friends were gone. The sense of comfort of eating there was also gone. It was just food.

While I wish the article delineated between different types of those friendships, I feel the burn of the rest of the losses.

I miss a few coworkers from around work, not ones who are in the same team, but who are part of the broader work environment. Most of them were of the type where if we ran into each other in the hallway, we would stop, step off to the side for a few minutes and just chew the fat for a few minutes. Nothing deep, just catching up on each other’s lives. People who I don’t feel that I know well enough to follow on Facebook unless we were both accidentally on the same friend’s comments list. That would be a step too far, too regular of contact, too personal. True work-only friends. The ones who I will no longer see when I retire, unless I bump into them in a department store.

And I say this even though I’m an analytical introvert. I miss that social connection, however casual it might have been. I don’t necessarily need it at work, it could be through a community group, or a restaurant, or a coffee shop. Maybe an outing for breakfast with other retired people from work (a group I would like to join one day).

But I feel it. And felt it. I would regularly wander around the floor, just going for a walk to stretch my legs and get out of my cubicle. Experts would call it networking, but it wasn’t really intended that way. I would just wander. A DG or two that I knew, I would stop by and say hi. Maybe chat for 5m, just catch up. A director or four or five that I know, one in particular that I’m thinking of who I used to see once a month or so in his office at the end of a day. Just quickly catching up, nothing big. He retired last fall, and I don’t really have a connection to keep interacting with him. Facebook or a Zoom call would be “too personal”, too intrusive. We were drop-by friends, like chatting with a neighbour while walking to the mailbox. Okay, maybe a little more than that, but still, a somewhat contextual or transactional friendship.

And the article is right. We can’t replace those Tier 3 connections with simple digital options. We’ve boosted the FB connections, we have found some communities online, but generally speaking, we haven’t replaced those moments of personal connectivity that was part of our day. Sure, maybe you COULD phone them, but it would be weird to do so, for both of you. It’s why many people lament the loss of church — that WAS their community of Tier 2 and 3 connections, separate from the spiritual component.

I also think sometimes it is the biggest threat to people following isolation protocols and rules. When Tier 1 and 2 are insufficient, people crave Tier 3. Or without Tier 3, they need more Tier 1 and 2 to compensate, and suddenly you have large family get-togethers. Not because they’re disrespecting the rules, but because they feel the need and it helps them rationalize their choices.

Either way, I like the way the article explains it and how it made me think about more things today.

Articles I Like: It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?

The PolyBlog
July 13 2020

The New York Times has a great article from David Leonhart where he tries to predict what life in 2022, a scant 18 months from now, will look like in America. He assumes no vaccine arrives this year, and that we continue to see waves of outbreaks and lockdowns.

From a business perspective, he talks about which business models will likely prove less than resilient in weathering the storm. Some likely casualties are those who were already vulnerable businesses…newspapers losing advertisers, traditional department stores (Eatons, Zellers, K-Mart, WoolCo, Target have all bit the dust in Canada long ago) losing out to Walmart and Amazon, and malls closing when they lose their department store anchors.

While universities in Canada are unlikely to fail, the same budget pressures are hitting them as they are in the U.S. — enrolment stability, cancelled summer programs, residence and food service fees gone, parking revenue gone, and provincial and federal budgets are taking huge beatings. I follow Alex Usher on Twitter, and he has been actively watching which universities are planning for full virtual classes in September and which ones were hoping for some sort of mid-semester return.

I was a bit surprised Leonhart uses such pedantic examples and doesn’t spend more time on the hardest-hit sectors like health in general, agriculture and food processing, aviation and tourism, and restaurants. He notes in the intro that they may disappear, but there are entire sectors that present far more disruption to human life than the loss of paper newspapers, loss of department stores and malls, or disruption in higher education options.

In the area of habits, Leonhart identifies the importance for white-collar workers that working from home, working remotely in general, has been successful, and I couldn’t agree more. Education from home is less successful, but I love the quote from Microsoft:

As Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said this spring, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Where I work in government, we have accelerated our IT plans by 2-3 years for some major projects. Things that would normally have started in 2022 or 2023 and likely would have taken 1-2 years? They’re already 50% implemented or more. Doubling bandwidth, new platforms for collaboration, massive increase in mobile infrastructure for workers with huge increases in laptop deployments. We’re one department, in one government, in one country, and we literally have bought thousands of new laptops to get people connected from home. How are manufacturers keeping up with IT demand? The short answer in some cases is that they are not keeping up. If you were looking for video cameras in the first few weeks of WFH, they were scarcer than bread yeast. Months later, stocks are returning but only because everyone already has a webcam somewhere in their digital ecosystem. Many are just using their phones. I stopped by one of the computer stores last week, and some of their shelves are looking pretty empty, particularly for larger monitors. Not enough to declare a shortage, although again, that’s partly as they’ve restocked.

I’m less enamored of Leonhart’s predictions for the US political realm, not with a fall election hanging in the balance. Trying to do similar predictions for Canada without a set election date is probably equally useless. The Liberals are in a minority situation, and will likely to continue to be, as long as the NDP keeps getting what they want on various files. But they can only go to that well so many times before the Liberals can’t afford it, and the alliance / coalition / politician’s agreement falls apart. Just as with Leonhart’s opening question — how long does this last? — the political outcomes will be shaped by the health outcomes. Where I find Leonhart’s rationale lacking when he argues for sweeping roles for government in the U.S. if Biden wins is in the reality he talked about for higher education. Government budgets are taking a sh**-kicking and while they can literally print money, at some point, the bill comes due. Spending at current levels is not even remotely sustainable. And if you want to spend your way out of a recession / depression, eventually you also have to make serious cuts to government either during or afterwards.

Nevertheless, I hope there are more prediction articles I like these. If we crowd-source a couple of thousand of them, we might even approximate a forecast or come up with a to do list for contingency planners.

Metaliteracy – Week 4 – Creating a digital artifact

The PolyBlog
May 21 2020

The final assignment for the course, “Metaliteracy: Empowering yourself in a connected world”, is to create a digital artifact of some kind — a story, video, podcast, etc. — tied to the theme of metaliteracy, metacognition, and the topics of the previous 3 weeks. The goal is to help teach some aspect of it to someone else. For me, one of the most interesting areas of metaliteracy falls into the area of ethics. And I think I have something unique to say.

Metaliteracy and Ethics

It’s quite interesting that so many people talk about the “ethical use of information” on the internet and in journals, on talk shows and in lecture halls. Yet none of them seem to stop to ask themselves what they mean by ethics? In most cases, the explanation is quite simply “do no harm” or “don’t do bad things with the info”. It is akin to Google’s slogan, “Don’t be evil”. Except that isn’t really about ethics so much as simple right and wrong. Following the law, or just not doing something wrong, is not really an ethical dilemma.

Ethics is much better understood where two principles that are both positive come into conflict. For example, as a physician during Covid-19, you want to protect the health of other patients and citizens but you also want to protect the privacy of an individual. While it might be efficient to just publish the names of someone who was sick, and let anyone else know, the point is not “who” they were exposed to but that they were exposed by being in contact with someone. As such, much of the tracing behaviour for people doesn’t reveal who was sick, just that “someone” they came into contact with was sick. The ethical “solution” is to protect the privacy of the individual who was sick while still ensuring that the people they came into contact with are still notified. It’s the only ethical solution that satisfies both principles — privacy and protection.

Yet when it comes to the area of metaliteracy and our roles within the field, it is where those roles are in conflict that ethics is needed to help resolve them. If we look at the materials provided in the course, we can see nine defined roles for a metaliterate learner (in the outer ring):

(Coursera course, Metaliteracy: Empowering Yourself in a Connected World, Week 3, video resource, “Empowered Metaliterate Learning”, frame at 2m09s, as captured from https://www.coursera.org/learn/metaliteracy/lecture/rXsGo/empowered-metaliterate-learning-2-09 on May 21, 2020).

Many people assume, and the course reinforces this assumption, that most of those roles are played at the same time and that they are, for the most part, complementary. But are they completely complementary and if so, also at all times?

I’ll give an example from my undergraduate work at Trent University back in 1988-89. As part of a course on organizational theory, we were divided into some fairly large groups, and ours had about 20-25 people in it. Our project was to look at control structures, both informal and formal, in 2-3 companies and to use them as case studies to present to the rest of the class as “contrast and compare” examples. This put us all in a collaborative role, also all doing research, participating as well, and ultimately as author/publisher. It seems straight-forward, but we quickly found ourselves with an ethical dilemma in those roles and how we used information.

It may be a bit of a cliché to note that many of these group projects in business studies that work on topics such as control structures frequently become somewhat “meta-projects” themselves. The dynamics in our own group of 20+ business students, many with desires to “lead” or with Type-A personalities, as we tried to come to some form of working consensus on the way forward, how to assign work, who would nominally “lead” when we were all capable of doing so ourselves, turned into an interesting microcosm of the subject matter we were studying.

Five of us had a brainstorm. Wouldn’t it be cool if we created a shadow-report talking about our own experiences within the group? A sort of case-study of the case-study process, or a pseudo-Lord of the (Business) Flies analysis of how we instituted our own control mechanisms. Several of the students were heavily in favour of doing the study. For them, they felt we could resolve any potential ethical issues by removing names from the final report. For two of us, we felt an ethical tug-of-war that we couldn’t name or resolve, and we eventually killed the idea.

Now that I’ve taken the course, the definitions are clearer. It was clear that we were going to be both participant and author in our own research while working on two projects simultaneously — the larger actual project and the smaller meta-project. Yet to be a collaborator in the larger project required us to be collaborators, with key outcomes depending on our ability to form bonds together and to trust each other with what we learned. To share information openly, candidly, honestly with each other as we worked towards a larger project. Yet at the same time, we would be taking notes and hoarding information about the behaviour of our other collaborators in the team, evaluating them, breaking every aspect of that project trust.

At the time, we just felt that it was somehow underhanded and that we could be destroying any trust with our classmates for the coming 2 years of the business program. But if you use the metaliteracy wheel above, focusing on the types of information and the roles being played, the conflict is clearer. And so is an ethical solution that should have presented itself at the time, but didn’t.

The ethical “solution” that would have allowed both projects to continue at the same time and honoured the multiple roles while eliminating the conflicts should have been simple. We could have simply told them up front that we were doing it. We could take our notes, prepare something for the whole group to see and comment upon, and collectively decided whether or not it would be shared with the larger class. An ethical solution to do the same thing we wanted to do in the first place, made possible by simply identifying the clear roles being played, sometimes in overlap. That solution would have been the ethical use of our information, not simply “do no harm”.

There are, however, numerous other potential conflicts in the above model that could be analysed further. The collaborator who wants to share but also wants to publish individually (shared data, multiple artifacts); a translator who must respect the intent of an original creator’s work but who also plays a role as a teacher who transforms that work into more teachable, digestible forms; an author who has a desire to communicate their creations to others, and who has an existing publishing platform (perhaps a blog) that is easy for them to use, yet the ideal scenario for some of the creations may be more of a public domain wiki for multiple people to collaborate in openly.

And that’s it for the four-week course. There appears to be a sequel course, so I may look into that one too. I like auditing these MOOCs.

Metaliteracy – Week 3 – Telling your digital story

The PolyBlog
May 21 2020

This week’s materials are all about preparing a digital story. It starts with a simple example of telling something personal, maybe including some primary materials, adding in some secondary materials, doing research, planning, and ultimately creating the story in some form.

It takes the view that digital storytelling encompasses lots of different tools — text, pictures, video, etc. — and gives examples of how to do that creation, find the relevant materials, and shares a lot of examples from StoryCorps of how to do that creative process.

I have to say that I found it rather basic. Too much of it is about the tools you can use to tell your story, and not enough time is spent on what the story is…for me, all storytelling starts with the arc. A beginning, a middle, an end. And some sort of purpose to the story — or to sharing the story. Long before I figure out what I’m going to use to tell the story, I need to figure out what story I want to tell. Far too many of these stories that have been created through these digital archive stories are “interesting” but not very effective. Put differently, if they were written stories, they wouldn’t make it out of the slush pile as the stories are more “vignettes” or “slices of life” that don’t go anywhere.

I just didn’t find the week compelling.

Articles I Like: The Waves Of COVID-19 Insurance Claims

The PolyBlog
May 20 2020

Since I once loved the law enough to do my first year of law school, there are occasionally articles that attract my interest that most people would skip over. One I saw this past week on Above The Law was about insurance claims in the wake of Covid-19. The author noted that the topic isn’t interesting to everyone, but a factoid at the beginning caught my attention:

But I heard something interesting about insurance last week that I just had to share with you: Some European insurance companies are now seeing fewer automobile insurance claims than at any time since World War II. (On second thought, maybe my definition of  “interesting” and yours don’t match up precisely.) That gives you an idea of what the pandemic has done to travel across a big swath of the world.

The Waves Of COVID-19 Insurance Claims | Above the Law

But the rest of his article is pretty interesting too, as he noted what he sees as three likely waves of insurance claims:

  1. Travel — in the OP, it argues this one has already passed with people filing claims related to cancelled trips, etc. in the wake of the shut-down. I’m not sure about that, as lots of claims were denied, and now lots of people are fighting about it still.
  2. Property and business interruption claims — the OP notes that most insurance of this sort is geared towards catastrophes that cause property damage and therefore the business has to shut-down. It isn’t clear if insurance policies will cover a non-physical shut-down and the fighting is just beginning. What’s really cool is how it will play out because some of the shut down was legislative so they may order insurance companies to cover the losses!
  3. Working from home claims — cyber insurance for future losses from unsecured operations, employment insurance offered by companies if the shutdowns result in closures, workers’ compensation if employees become ill at work or injured at home, and if companies do shut down, then do they have options for bankruptcy or trade credits beyond the original business disruption insurance?

Looks like a fascinating area for the future…but for me, I think they are missing a huge area that is going to show up fast. Are any of the insurance companies going to try and balk at paying life insurance claims if someone didn’t practice social distancing i.e., they contributed to their own demise?