Max Atkinson's Blog

Should the BBC be encouraging people to surf the net during work time?

FROM THE BBC WEBSITE MAGAZINE:

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A few years ago, one of my clients told me that an unexpected side effect of moving their head office staff from individual rooms into an open plan arrangement was that their corporate phone bill dropped to about 30% of what it had been previously.

The obvious, and from their point of view rather worrying, reason was that their employees were not longer wasting so much time making private phone calls that might be overheard by people at nearby desks.

What the salary cost of paying staff to make such calls was, I have no idea. But I am intrigued by the question of how much time-wasting on computers at work must be costing companies.

Some of you may already have seen the post a few weeks ago with my calculation that the salary cost of managers attending boring presentations was costing the UK economy £7.8 billion a year (HERE).

Having noticed that the number of visits to this blog falls at weekends and goes back to its higher weekday level every Monday morning, a question I've been Twittering about recently is about the salary cost to organisations of paying staff to surf the internet during work time. So far, no one has come up with an estimate, and perhaps most employers would rather not think about it.

All of which leads me to the rather more specific question of whether the BBC should be using licence payer's money to encourage people to read the their website magazine during work-time - as sen above.

Claptrap 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre

(This is the third in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voicesand the televising of Claptrap, which you can watch HERE

Part 2: EUREKA! is HERE).

The first time I spoke in public about the clapping research was at a conference in Cambridge, where there must have been someone from (or with a hotline to) New Scientist magazine in the audience.

Hardly a mass-market publication, but, as I learnt when the BBC phoned a few days later, it’s one that the rest of the media regularly scour through for stories that might be or wider interest. What they’d picked up that Thursday was a short report on the findings I’d just presented in my talk on ‘Some Techiques for Inviting Applause’.

Could I come to London to appear on Nationwide, their (then) early evening news programme, to be interviewed about it by Sue Lawley?

Well, yes I could, except that I had two children to pick up from school that day – a problem quickly solved by allocating some BBC licence payers’ money to pay for a taxi.

When I got to the studio, I was surprised to discover that they’d abandoned their normal coverage of the final day of the Labour Party conference in favour of interviewing me about political speeches.

But, as has so often happened in similar brushes with the media since then, they’d already picked out some clips from the week’s speeches without any consultation with me. And this was live TV, so the ‘expert’ would just have to hope for the best and busk it.

Luckily, the findings about what triggers applause were so robust that there was a very good chance of there being some nice examples before any of the bursts of applause they’d chosen. And so there were, which made busking rather easier than I’d feared.

A BOOK?
Talking to other guests who were waiting in the hospitality room to be interviewed that evening, I learnt something else that surprised me: everyone else there had just published a book that they were there to be given a few minutes to plug in front of an audience of millions, whereas all I’d done was to have given a lecture to a few dozen academics at a fairly obscure conference (for more on BBC book plugging shows, see also HERE ).

That was the moment when the idea of writing a book first entered my head, as too did a quiet vow to myself not to go on television again until I’d finished it.

And, as there seemed to be so much interest from a wider public, maybe I should try to write a book aimed at a much general readership than had been the case with my previous academic ones.

SCIENCE?
Back in Oxford, there were plenty of regular New Scientist readers, one of whom invited me for dinner at his college a week or two later.

He was a zoologist interested in human-animal interaction and was thinking of doing some work how people talk to their cats and dogs. The problem was that, if they were going to be able to make any sensible observations or comparisons, they’d first have to know something about how humans talk to each other. Before reading the piece in the New Scientist he hadn’t been aware that there was a field of research called ‘conversation analysis’, so he’d invited me to dinner to learn more.

While drinking the regulation glasses of pre-dinner sherry, my host introduced me to one of his colleagues, a physicist who also read the New Scientist.

“Ah,” he said “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but, until I read about what you’re doing, I’d never realised that sociologists ever did anything as scientific as that.”

I didn’t mind him saying that at all.

He probably didn't have much idea at all about what most sociologists actually do. But after nearly 20 years of doing pretty much nothing else, I did. I also knew that many, and probably most, professional sociologists would have been grossly offended by what he said.

But I found his reaction thoroughly agreeable and very comforting. After all, what had drawn me into conversation analysis in the first place was that it’s approach to observing human interaction was so much more rigorous than all the other methodologies on offer.

So to hear a natural scientist recognising anything at all from the social sciences as ‘scientific’ was recognition indeed – and I decided to conveniently ignore the fact that a proper scientist ought really to have observed more than one example before coming to such a momentous conclusion!

OTHER POSTS IN THE CLAPTRAP SERIES

• CLAPTRAP 1: Claptrap - the movie
• CLAPTRAP 2: Eureka!

• CLAPTRAP 4: How to get a book published

• CLAPTRAP 5: In the right places at the right times

EARLIER BLOG POSTS ON APPLAUSE INCLUDE:
• Obama on Kennedy got more applause than ‘normal’
• Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama
• How to stay awake during a repetitive ceremony
• Disputing the meaning of applause
• Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time
• Applause for Dimbleby’s questions on BBC Question Time
• Obama’s rhetoric identifies with Martin Luther King but appeals to a wider audience
• Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages
• Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best

Einstein 'chalk & talk' competition reminder

In case you missed the original announcement of the Einstein 'Chalk & talk' competition, there are only a few days to go before the closing date.

Twitter has been sending some excellent entries in my direction, and judging is going to be more difficult than I'd expected.

All you have to do is to click the link from HERE, which will take you to a website where you can write what you like on Einstein's blackboard - and then send your entry to me.

Rude remarks about PowerPoint are permitted, but won't necessarily ensure that you win the prize.

Claptrap 2: Eureka!

(This is the second in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voices and the televising of Claptrap, which you can watch HERE).

Such is the nature of the social sciences that 'eureka' moments are very few and far between. That’s why I count myself lucky to have had one, and there was only one of them, in the last 40 years.

WHY STUDY CLAPPING?
After starting to collect tape-recordings of political speeches during the 1979 UK general election, I started looking at bursts of applause about a year after that. It was prompted by a ‘methodological’ problem in the research I was doing into courtroom language.

We had plenty of tapes of court hearings, but the absence of any audible responses from jurors during the proceedings meant there was no way of knowing which parts of what was being said were having a positive impact on the audience that really matters.

The reason why applause in political speeches seemed a promising place to start was because it provides instant and unambiguous evidence that listeners are (a) awake and paying close attention and (b) approve strongly enough of what’s just been said to show their approval of it (by clapping hands, cheering, etc.).

Collecting the data was also extremely cheap and easy, requiring no more effort than recording speeches from radio and television in the comfort of your own home.

ORDERLINESS BENEATH THE SURFACE?
If I had even the slightest hunch that it might be worth the effort, it was largely thanks to Gail Jefferson, one of the founders of conversation analysis, who’d already come up with some remarkable observations about the organisation of laughter in everyday conversation.

After all, if something that seems, on the face of, it to be as disorganised as laughing can exhibit such unexpected regularities, there was at least a possibility that there might be something regular about clapping too.

Apart from being willing to look for orderliness in the least obvious places, another crucial lesson I learnt from Gail Jefferson was that by far the best way of observing the details of talk is to transcribe the tapes yourself (as she always did).

So the time-consuming part of the research consisted of finding a burst of applause, winding the tape back a minute or two and then transcribing it, then going on to the next burst of applause, winding the tape back and transcribing it, etc., etc., etc.

EUREKA!
The eureka moment came fairly quickly. I can’t remember exactly how many transcripts I’d done before noticing that the applause wasn’t just happening at random, but was occurring immediately after a small number of very simple verbal formats (e.g. contrasts, 3-part lists, etc.). But I do know that the main regularities had started to fall into place well before I’d got to the fiftieth example.

At about the same time, I got a phone call from the organisers of a sociology of language conference in Cambridge: one of the scheduled speakers had dropped out, and could I stand in for him? I agreed to do so on condition that they advertised my paper as ‘title to be announced’. Yes, I did have another courtroom language paper in the pipeline that would have fitted the bill, but I’d already started wondering whether it was time to try out the clapping data on a wider audience.

TIME TO GO PUBLIC?
When the conference flyers went out, the phone rang again. This time, it was John Heritage, my most regular partner in crime when he was still at Warwick University and I was still in Oxford.

Coming straight to the point, he demanded to know: “What’s all this nonsense about ‘title to be announced’?”

“I’m thinking of doing something on – er – clapping.”

“What?” he demanded, “Everyone thinks we’re mad enough already without you going around doing something as off the wall as that.”

There was no point in trying to tell the full story on the phone, but I was pretty keen to get an opinion from someone else before deciding whether or not to take the plunge. So we arranged to meet the next day when I’d be able to play him the tapes and show him the transcripts.

Which device I began with I can’t remember. But I do remember the gasps and startled expressions on his face as I kept saying “here’s another” and pressing the ‘play’ button, over and over again.

By the time I asked him if he thought it would be too much of a risk to air such stuff at the conference , he was more than a little encouraging: “That’s not just a paper you've got there; it could be the first of quite a few.”

It turned out he was right. Within a couple of years, I’d started writing a book and he was running a much larger scale follow-up study funded by the Social Science Research Council – and you can hear him talking to Ann Brennan about some of his findings in Part 2 of the Claptrap film.

Long before that, however, news of this first conference presentation, for which 'Title to be announced' had become 'Some Techniques for Inviting Applause', spread much wider than expected - as will be seen from the next post in this series.

OTHER POSTS IN THE CLAPTRAP SERIES

• CLAPTRAP 1: Claptrap - the movie
• CLAPTRAP 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre

• CLAPTRAP 4: How to get a book published

• CLAPTRAP 5: In the right places at the right times

Claptrap 1: The movie

This is the first in a series of posts to mark this month's 25th anniversary of a television documentary that completely changed my life and can now be watched in full below.

Before that, I’d spent nearly twenty years working in universities and doing research that was widely regarded at the time as being thoroughly 'useless' (i.e. lacking in any theoretical or practical implications whatsoever).

But a series of lucky breaks led to my getting the chance to take part in a World in Action documentary based on my book Our Masters’ Voices: the Language and Body Language of Politics World in Action series frequently attracted audiences of 15 million or more viewers - though 'attracted' is probably the wrong word, because it came on immediately after the nation's most popular soap (Coronation Street): it was also before everyone had remote controls, which meant that viewers still had had to make the effort of getting out of their chairs if they wanted to switch channels.

Such was the impact of the programme that, on the following morning, my phone hardly stopped ringing, with everyone asking the same question: "can you do the same for me?" Without realising it at the time, I had embarked on an irreversible journey from the peaceful seclusion of an Oxford college to the more hectic world of freelance consultancy.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about some of the background leading up the publication of Our Masters’ Voices and the making of the film Claptrap.

It was called ‘Claptrap’ because one of the definitions of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is a ‘trick, device or language designed to catch applause’. I’d originally thought of using it as the title of the book, but decided against it because it would be too much of a hostage to fortune for reviewers.

Gus Macdonald, the film's producer who'd dreamt up the idea in the first place, had no such qualms about using it as the title for the programme - but by then, of course he did have the advantage of knowing that the experiment had been a success.

You can watch the film here in four consecutive episodes (and I hope you're impressed by my new Apricot computer!).

P.S. A better quality version of the film can now be watched in full HERE.