Netlife: Living and Working with the Internet

Having spent more than 40 years in research and consultancy on the human aspects of information technology, I am well aware that the Internet has dramatically changed the way many of us live. I have written many times about being an early adopter but I think what surprises me most is how little any of us anticipated which technology would take off and what would be a ‘flash in the pan’. General Internet shopping is still for a minority (albeit at 12% in the UK, a growing one) but travel, especially air travel, is increasingly online. Recent estimates suggest that 92% of all airline tickets are e-tickets and although some of these are issued by traditional ticket and travel agents, most are purchased directly from travel websites. Of course, e-tickets are often printed at home so are not really paperless, although more and more airlines allow electronic boarding cards to be scanned from phones and tablets. What this means is that many travellers do not interact with another human being until they turn up at the airport to hand over the luggage or board the plane. For most, this works well and allows travellers the freedom to plan and book their travel in their pyjamas at a time that suits them. However, the lack of a travel professional in the process sometimes results in mistakes with dates and destinations. Simply Google ‘wrong airport booked online’ and you will find many stories of travellers discovering that the airport they booked is not the one they wanted. In some cases (and with one low-cost airline in particular) this is due to some misleadingly named airports which are some distance from the place you would expect (Frankfurt Hahn is an example which springs to mind being an extended bus trip from Frankfurt). In other cases, people have not spotted that the same name (but not airport code) is shared by completely different places. If a travel professional is involved, they might question why the destination airport does not match the rest of the trip, but self-booked flights run this risk. At a less dramatic level, it is very easy to book flights for the wrong day, especially since many different formats of calendar are used (at least that is my excuse!). But I cannot imagine going back to having to book travel by physically visiting a booking agent or spending hours on the telephone. As with many other aspects of Internet living (for example, Facebook), we simply need to learn the new etiquette and Internet survival skills. Most of us spent several years learning how to read and write (both long established and stable technologies) so spending some time (and making a few errors) learning how best to use the fast-developing Internet should not come as a surprise or represent an unacceptable burden. The papers in this issue of Behaviour and Information Technology all deal with different aspects of living and working with the Internet from using downloaded maps in unfamiliar places to shopping in Korea. Many people now use maps from the Internet to guide their car journeys. Although this allows them to navigate unfamiliar areas, it does add an extra dimension to the driving task. Changxu Wu, Guozhen Zhao, and Jonghoon Lee from Industrial & System Engineering, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA and Bin Lin from the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, report an experimental study which addressed typical multitasking driving behaviour (driving and navigation task) in a cross-culture context. Twenty-four native American-English speakers navigated a driving simulator in urban environments which involved three formats of language settings of the street signs (English, Chinese or no street signs) and two types of map orientation consistency (driving from south to north vs. driving from north to south with a north-up map). Their results indicated that female drivers made more wrong turns with Chinese street signs but not in the other two conditions compared to male drivers. Both male and female drivers benefited from English street signs and reported higher driver workload with Chinese street signs. The average glance duration of maps with Chinese street signs was significantly less than that with English street signs, indicating that although Chinese language is rich in graphical information, this was not particularly helpful in assisting the navigation task. Female drivers had more instances of collisions with other vehicles, greater deviation from a central line position, higher driver workload and a longer glance duration. For the main effect of map consistency, drivers made more wrong turns and perceived a higher driving workload when they drove with inconsistent maps. Further implications in the current study of transportation safety in globalisation are also discussed, including the improvement of street sign infrastructures and optimal ways of using and designing Internet maps for drivers navigating in an unfamiliar country. The Internet has not only changed our driving, it has also helped redefine what we mean by ‘neighbourhood’. Guendalina Capece and Roberta Costa from the Department of Business Engineering, University of Rome, Italy, present