THE EXPLOITS OF A WORLD WAR I ACE CAN TEACH US A LOT ABOUT navigating social media. A hundred years ago, the skies buzzed with men in rickety biplanes in fast-paced dogfights. When Europe went to war in 1914, aerial warfare was a new phenomenon. This was a time of experimentation, during which planes went from being slow, unarmed reconnaissance platforms to fast and deadly flying weapons. Over the four years of war, more than 100,000 aircraft and more than 55,000 air crewmen were lost. For the first two years, air combat was unplanned and erratic, until one German pilot came up with a novel approach that revolutionized aerial warfare.
Oswald Boelcke flew his first combat mission on September 1, 1914, and downed his first enemy plane ten months later, on July 4, 1915. The son of a teacher, Boelcke was not the top German ace of the war, but he was a master tactician who set the tone for aerial combat for decades to come. Boelcke wasn’t physically strong and was susceptible to asthma attacks. But during the first two years of the Great War, he was the scourge of the Allied air forces and celebrated as a German hero. At just twenty-five years of age, he was recognized by the German emperor with the highest honour for war services, the Blue Max.
What made Boelcke remarkable is that he was the first to try to understand this new form of fighting in the skies. He noticed that individual German aircraft, flying without any coordination, were easy pickings for Allied fighters. He drew on his aptitude for mathematics and physics to develop the concept of situational awareness in aerial combat. He figured out that it was not enough for pilots to be aware of what was in their immediate vicinity; they needed to understand the big picture so that they could anticipate what might happen next.
In the skies above Europe, pilots had to be always vigilant, monitoring the rudimentary instruments in the cockpit while remaining on the alert for the dot on the periphery of their vision that could signal the approach of an enemy. A hundred years later, we find ourselves in a similar position: our digital skies are filled with news and information, coming at us via television, radio, newspapers, magazines, computers, cell phones, tablets, e-readers, and even game consoles. Keeping up with the news is no longer a discrete activity that takes place first thing in the morning or in the evening. It is an activity that takes place throughout the day via different formats, devices and technologies, shared by journalists, bloggers, experts, friends or family.
By 2014, the average American adult was spending eleven hours per day watching TV, listening to the radio, checking their smartphone or going online on their computer. The figure is even higher for millennials: they’re spending up to eighteen hours a day skimming the web, using social media, watching TV, playing video games and more, doing several of these things all at the same time. Media is ever-present and ubiquitous.
The basis for situational awareness is knowing what is happening around you and understanding what the information means to you, now and in the future. Boelcke realized that in order to win in the air, a pilot had to be able to keep tabs on dogfights all around. He brought discipline and order to the chaotic skies by pioneering the idea of fighter squadrons and tactics training, coming up with the “Dicta Boelcke,” a set of basic principles for aerial combat that have guided fighter pilots ever since. The rules were designed to improve the situational awareness of his squadron in a rapidly changing environment. In the summer of 1916, he picked the most promising pilots, organized them into squadrons and trained them in his new tactics. The effect was immediate and dramatic. Over the two months of September and October 1916, Boelcke’s squadrons accounted for the majority of the 211 Allied aircraft shot down. The Germans lost only thirty-nine planes.
In a media environment that seems to be always on, always buzzing with information, the lament from many is that there is no time to think because of what the veteran British TV journalist Nik Gowing has called the “tyranny of real time.” Past generations felt the same way as new communication technologies altered flows of information. In 1621, the English scholar Richard Burton griped about “new news” he heard every day of “war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions” and more. Burton was writing during the explosion in publishing that came in the wake of the development of the Gutenberg printing press. The outcome was a rethink in how to cope with the abundance of published information, the results of which led to the development of tools such as indices and a realization that not every book needs to be read.
People living through the surge in cheap dailies and weeklies in the late nineteenth century felt similarly challenged by the speed and volume of information. Some U.S. cities had a dozen or more daily newspapers, where news jostled with a miscellany of tidbits, from household hints to historical factoids. An editorial in Harper’s Magazine in 1892 complained that people “cannot afford a quarter of an hour a day to glance at a newspaper, and to reflect for five minutes more upon the meaning of the intelligence of the whole planet which is daily spread before them.”
Grumblings about new media technologies turning us into a generation of skimmers are nothing new. Every generation finds a way of coping with what seems like a sudden leap in the amount of news and information around us. In response to the information overload of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scrapbooks became the Google and blogging of the day. Thousands made scrapbooks of news clippings to save and create their own record of events, often passing those books on to family and friends.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are just the latest media technologies to accelerate the pace of news and information. As with previous generations, we need new ways to cope with the tapestry of media of the twenty-first century. The pilots of World War I faced a comparable scenario and turned to situational awareness techniques to make sense of the whirlwind around them.
While situational awareness came out of aviation, it has spread to other fields in which individuals operate in a complex environment, from air traffic controllers to nuclear power plant operators. It has even surfaced in video games. In the third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line, players are rewarded with a situational awareness trophy when they stun approaching enemies by shooting a skylight and dumping sand on their heads. At a time when we are seemingly immersed in media during every waking moment, situational awareness can help to conquer the seemingly torrential streams of news and information all around us.
We humans have always needed to be mindful of our surroundings. Our prehistoric ancestors, eking out a living in a hostile and violent land, would have needed to watch out for and recognize vital cues to stay alive. The longer someone managed to survive, the better they became at situational awareness. In the industrial age, the need for situational awareness became ever more pressing as machines replaced people to perform simple physical tasks. The workplace became more complicated, requiring people to monitor, understand and assess information to make sure everything ran smoothly.
Power plant operators are a good example of a job where people have to keep track of multiple factors. Every day, they scrutinize charts, meters and gauges to monitor voltage and electricity flows, checking equipment and indicators to ensure that we can switch on the kettle in the morning, heat up our lunch and watch TV in the evening. The work is not physically strenuous, but workers have to pay attention all the time. The U.S. Department of Labor describes it as a job for people who are attentive and detail-oriented, with strong problem-solving skills. In other words, they need to be good at situational awareness—taking in a great deal of information, understanding what it means and foreseeing future consequences.
The presence of complex information systems in the workplace has been mirrored by the use of similar systems in our social spheres. Every day, people are exposed to streams of words, images, sound and video demanding attention and interpretation. “The problem with today’s systems is not a lack of information, but finding what is needed when it is needed,” wrote the renowned expert in situational awareness, Mica Endsley, in 2000. Endsley, with more than two hundred scientific articles and reports to her credit, made these comments before the dawn of social media. But her work on situational awareness can help in navigating these endless streams of information.
Situational awareness offers a framework to know what’s going on at any particular time. It is how people like pilots or power plant operators develop and maintain an idea of their sophisticated and dynamic workplace in order to be able to plan ahead and make good decisions. Endsley defines situational awareness as “the perception of elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future.”
There are three basic levels to situational awareness. Level one is being aware of what is happening around you, monitoring, detecting and recognizing actions and events. Level two is making sense of what is happening around you by taking what might be disjointed elements and putting them together to see the bigger picture. Level three involves taking that understanding to anticipate what might happen next so that you can make the best decisions.
The experience of pilots of commercial airliners illustrates the three levels of situational awareness. First, they have to be aware of the details of the flight plan, weather conditions along the way, the state of the onboard systems and the location of other aircraft, as well as a myriad of other details such as fuel reserves. The safety of the flight depends on how the flight crew deciphers all this information. Second, crew members have to understand how changes in the route may affect the flight. Will the plane have to climb to a higher altitude to avoid stormy weather, deviating from the flight plan? How will that affect fuel reserves? Pilots make sense of information by applying their knowledge and experience to create an accurate mental model of their environment. And third, the flight crew then needs to think ahead and anticipate future developments based on its members’ perception and understanding of the environment. Has the estimated time of arrival changed? Should the pilots burn more fuel to make up for a delay? If the aircraft misses its landing slot, how long will it need to fly in a holding pattern until another one opens up? All these considerations go into achieving the final goal of getting travellers safely to their destination.
Despite all the training, almost 90 per cent of accidents among major airlines involving human error could be attributed to a loss of situational awareness. An analysis of errors taken from U.S. safety reports found a heavy workload, a breakdown in communications, time pressures, weather or inexperience all undermined situational awareness. Planes deviated off course, changed altitude or came too close to another aircraft.
Given the importance of constantly knowing what is happening around you, flight crew members are trained to spot the factors that chip away at situational awareness. There are numerous factors that constantly undermine the perception level of situational awareness, such as tunnel vision. For someone driving a car, this might entail concentrating on a forthcoming turn-off and not noticing that other vehicles are coming up fast from behind. Other things include complacent behaviour or distracted driving. On long, boring journeys, it can be awfully tempting to reach out for the smartphone and just check messages. When it comes to sending and receiving information, obsessing about one message could result in failure to see the wider context.
The danger is compounded at the comprehension level of situational awareness. An informed interpretation of a situation depends on reliable information. The problem is exacerbated by scant knowledge or experience. The end result is misunderstanding a situation and drawing the wrong conclusions. Sometimes it is due to confirmation bias, when people interpret information to confirm what they already believe is the problem, in spite of evidence to the contrary. For a business, it could mean dismissing negative comments on social media as inconsequential, with potentially damaging results for a brand.
We can improve our situational awareness, given the will and discipline to do so. Anyone who has trained for a job that requires them to assimilate and process large volumes of data knows that the starting point is developing knowledge and experience. A power plant operator needs to know what all the dials and displays do in order to understand what it all means and work out what might happen. The more time you spend at the controls, the more familiar you’ll be with the system and the better able you will be to make good decisions. In the workplace, a new employee would expect to be trained and supervised. Power plant operators, for example, go through a program of rigorous on-the-job instruction and have to take more training courses regularly. Knowledge of the system is reinforced by experience, resulting in expertise in an initial level of situational awareness.
When it comes to sharing, it is all too easy to send an ill-advised quip that could land someone in court or an embarrassing photo that could backfire at work. A misunderstanding of Facebook or Twitter is often behind such a slip-up. Such services are deceptively simple to use, and this ease of use hides how social media blurs established boundaries between the personal and professional, the private and public. Using Twitter is child’s play. Sign up, write a message of no more than 140 characters and hit “Tweet.” Cue anything from photos of food and cute kittens to links to news stories and graphic videos of unrest in the Middle East. Sharing is so simple that it is easy to misstep, even for experienced journalists.
On the evening of February 5, 2009, Peter Horrocks, then head of the BBC newsroom, sent a tweet to another senior editor, Richard Sambrook. They were discussing senior newsroom appointments. The conversation had been taking place in private by using the direct message function in Twitter. But Horrocks clicked the wrong button, sending one of his messages out in a public reply. “It’s a very embarrassing cock-up and everyone in the newsroom has been having a lot of fun at my expense,” he said at the time. It was a rookie mistake, but one that is all too easy to make in the instant exchange of messages on Twitter.
The more we experience these tools, the more we develop our expertise in understanding them. The ostensibly shambolic and erratic torrent of seemingly random details on Twitter can be bewildering to someone who has just signed up. The information is all mixed up, with no apparent order, hierarchy or coordination. Part of the reason it seems so messy is that it is novel and very different to past forms of media, such as the newspaper. A newspaper front page makes sense to us, as most people have years of knowledge and experience in reading print. It has order and structure. Headline size serves as a pointer to work through the words on the page and decide where to allocate attention. It is a reassuringly familiar format.
In contrast, social media is in its infancy, and its forms shift from year to year. As more people use Facebook or Twitter for longer periods of time, their levels of knowledge and experience increase. What seemed mystifying becomes familiar. What seemed novel becomes a habitual part of the everyday. And the more people are immersed in social media, the more comfortable they are with getting news and information on these services.
Something novel places a heavy burden on our short- and long-term memory, affecting how much brainpower we have left to dedicate to observing and assessing a situation. Perception is shaped by our working and long-term memory stores. Working memory is where we process and keep information for a short period of time. Experience allows the development of long-term memory structures that can help to overcome the shortcomings of our working memory by providing shortcuts to quickly assess a situation. New information simply requires more of our human processing power. Expertise frees up mental resources to devote to figuring out what we need to know, when to seek it and where to find it.
Familiarity matters when it comes to situational awareness. Mental models help to process information quickly. For example, our mental model of how email works may be that we click to create a new message, type in an address, write a short note and then hit Send. The model helps us use email without having to figure out the steps every time we want to send a message. Mental models serve as cognitive shortcuts that allows us to allocate attention, integrate new information and project ahead without overload our working memory. Some of the burden of making sense of a situation is offloaded to long-term recall, leaving more working memory to turn information into knowledge.
Anyone who commutes by car to work is already applying techniques of situational awareness. Driving is a complex undertaking. We have to figure out the route, look ahead at road signs and signals, keep an eye on the vehicles and pedestrians around us and monitor the dashboard. There might be music playing or a radio host babbling on about the latest celebrity gossip. Driving engages the three levels of situational awareness. We observe the road to see what is happening around us, interpret the information and then project what might happen and make decisions. If we see a traffic light turning orange, we understand that the light will turn red, so we make plans to stop—or, sometimes, to speed up, hoping to make it through just in time.
To be a good driver means not paying attention, at least not to everything all at once. Instead, it involves being selective with limited mental resources. Psychology professor Leo Gugerty of Clemson University in South Carolina tested the idea with twenty-six experienced motorists in a simulator. For half of the experiment, the drivers were asked to remember the position of as many cars as possible. For the other half, they just had to recall cars in their immediate vicinity.
On average, drivers could only keep track of five vehicles, and then only for about fourteen seconds. Most concentrated on the cars closest to them. But there was a significant difference between those asked to remember as much as possible and those asked to limit their recall to the location of the closest cars. Drivers prompted to focus their attention on their immediate vicinity were better at remembering the position of the traffic. Motorists who tried to take in as much information as possible did far worse at remembering the location of cars behind them or farther in front. Striving for total recall worsens situational awareness. Focusing our attention on the most immediate hazards—in this case, the closest vehicles—improves situational awareness.
The value of partial recall was first stressed by cognitive psychologist George Sperling in the 1960s. He tested how many letters people could remember after briefly seeing an array of twelve in rows of four each. Sperling found that people could usually only remember three or four letters. But when he asked them to recall a particular row, the participants could accurately remember any set.
Cognitive training techniques can help allocate attention to the right thing at the right time. Psychology researchers Kerry O’Brien and David O’Hare tested one technique with students at the University of Otago in New Zealand. The students took on the role of an air traffic controller using a simulator called the Wombat Situational Awareness and Stress Tolerance Test. For the experiment, students were told to focus their attention on one plane at a time, while still being aware of what the others were doing. They were instructed to prioritize their attention by considering which was the next aircraft to deal with. Narrowing the priorities of the task, while maintaining a peripheral awareness of the bigger picture, helped weaker students allocate attention, process information and make better decisions.
In an information-rich environment, the temptation is to try to take it all in. There are constant cries for attention from email alerts, Facebook status updates or Twitter messages popping up on myriad devices. Ignoring them can prompt feelings of anxiety. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a state of mind that has always existed. But social media has fuelled the compulsion to be continually connected with what others are doing. It is worse among millennials, a generation who have grown up against a backdrop of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Trying to keep up with everything is counterproductive. Instead, don’t respond to every chime or ping. Adopt partial recall strategies and allocate attention to the most pressing and relevant elements at any given time. The result will be an improved awareness and understanding of the environment.
Knowledge and focus are of limited use in situational awareness without one more vital ingredient: purpose. Identifying goals is central to situational awareness. Defining specific goals helps to allocate attention and select relevant information. As goals change, so do the selection, interpretation and integration of information. In battle, clear goals can mean the difference between life and death. Officers face a barrage of information on the battlefield. They have to decide what to pay attention to, what it means and what might happen next. The volume of information is rising as the U.S. Army develops wearable computer systems that provide a nonstop stream of data, from the location of friendly and enemy forces to constant voice communications with other soldiers.
The aim of a mission will determine what sort of situational awareness the soldiers need at different stages of an operation. To avoid casualties, an infantry unit will try to avoid being detected by the enemy. To accomplish this goal, platoon leaders need to be aware of the enemy location, numbers and weapons, type of terrain, time of day and weather conditions. The officers then need to interpret the data, assessing enemy strengths and weaknesses, the immediacy and severity of the threat and the platoon’s ability to avoid it, and potential cover or exposure along a route. Based on the perception and understanding of the enemy presence, the platoon leaders can project the likelihood of enemy contact, the risk of being detected, the actions required to counter a threat and the likely outcomes of an enemy encounter.
The same strategy can be applied to sorting through the volume of information on social media. Before going to Facebook, stop and consider the purpose. It might be to check in on friends, for entertainment or just to pass the time. Defining goals can help you to decide what information to gather, how to understand it and what to do with it. Procrastinating on Facebook requires a very different level of attention than seeking specific information.
The same applies whenever someone hits that Share button. There is often a specific reason behind posting a status update or photo, even if people are explicitly aware of it. Sharing is a way of defining who we are, signalling what we care about and nurturing relationships. Sometimes we give little thought to how a shared story or photo will be interpreted by others. A mental exercise to improve awareness of the potential outcome involves running though a series of “what if” scenarios. The idea is to consider how the unexpected might affect initial assumptions and to think about how to adapt to changing circumstances. What if my friends don’t get my jokey tweet? What if my boss sees the photo of me passed out on the couch? What if a journalist quotes my comment in a story? Such an approach can mitigate the potential fallout for both individuals and businesses.
The layout of a cockpit or a car dashboard is designed to take some of the heavy lifting out of maintaining situational awareness. The setup of dials and displays is intended to reduce the cognitive workload and free up more resources to interpret and make good decisions. For pilots, the flight deck of an aircraft is meant to promote situational awareness by providing the appropriate data at the appropriate time in the appropriate format. The design of such interfaces is critical in roles where people have to keep an eye on multiple and variable sources of information. With the speed and volume of disorganized data on social media, the same techniques are now being applied in business to turn the plethora of tweets, likes and shares into actionable information.
Baseball, free food and a natural disaster came together a couple of years ago to highlight how technology can be used to improve situational awareness on social media. In October 2012, Taco Bell offered its popular Doritos Locos Taco for free if a player stole a base in the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers. During the second game, Giants outfielder Ángel Pagán stole second base in the eighth inning, triggering the Taco Bell promotion. When the company announced details about when to get the beef and cheese crunchy taco, there was an immediate jump in positive feedback on social media.
As Taco Bell geared up to hand out free snacks, it suddenly looked like the PR win might turn sour. There was another massive spike in buzz about the company on social media, from approximately 1,000 to more than 800,000 messages in two hours. This time, the comments were from people along the northeast coast, which was being battered by Hurricane Sandy. In the midst of high winds, torrential rains and flooding, fans were worried that they wouldn’t be able to get their free tacos.
Fortunately, Taco Bell had in place a system to monitor social media buzz in real time and a team on hand to interpret the data. The company quickly issued a statement, saying it would honour its promise of free tacos in areas affected by the hurricane. The result was another big spike in social media talk about the brand, most of it positive. Taco Bell averted a PR crisis by practising situational awareness. It proactively monitored the opinions and emotions of consumers by keeping an eye on social chatter. When it noticed something was going on, it investigated and interpreted the feedback, allowing it to take action before the promotion backfired. It could do this by using one of the new social media analytical tools developed in response to the speed and volume of data.
Over the past few years, tools to monitor and evaluate what people are talking about on Twitter or Facebook have become big business. Companies and organizations from Dell to Salesforce to the American Red Cross have set up social media command centres: dedicated areas with large TV screens displaying live streams of tweets, heat maps of sentiment, and more, monitored by staff trained in social media. With 1.5 billion people on social media, there is a potential treasure trove of information. Social media analytical tools offer ways to analyze and decipher the data so that businesses can make more informed and timely decisions.
Listening to what consumers say can show that there are more important things than taste when U.K. consumers choose between a KitKat and a Galaxy chocolate bar. Twitter chatter about both snacks showed similarly positive comments. Delving deeper into a year’s worth of tweets showed why people chose Galaxy—known as Dove outside the U.K. Marketing the Galaxy bar as a more sophisticated and special type of chocolate bar seems to have resonated with consumers. As many people talked about the chocolate as an indulgence as they did about its taste. Galaxy was considered much more of a treat than KitKat, at least according to Twitter users in the U.K. And two-thirds of those tweeting about Galaxy were women, compared with a third who talked about KitKats.
At other times, as was the case with Taco Bell, having systems and people in place can prevent feedback and criticism from turning into a crisis. By January 2014, almost two-thirds of marketing organizations were using social media analytics to track campaigns, monitor brands and gain insights into the competition. With social media less than ten years old and new tools and services springing up all the time, many companies are struggling to keep up. Two-thirds of business leaders admitted that their companies were unprepared to handle social media, given the fast pace of change.
Their bewilderment is understandable. When it comes to social media, current systems are incunabula—a term usually applied to early books printed before 1501 but that also means the first traces of something. When historians look back at the turn of the twenty-first century, they may consider current social media tools and services as incunabula. They are at the earliest stages of development. The German ace Oscar Boelcke would be bewildered by the complexity of the displays needed to handle the speed, agility and firepower of today’s fighter jets. In much the way that the cockpit of an aircraft has evolved since the early days of aerial combat, so too will the systems to navigate an open, vibrant and diverse information ecosystem.
On the afternoon of Saturday, October 28, 1916, Boelcke was on patrol over the Somme with his squadron when they encountered two British fighters. Boelcke, known as an aggressive pilot, set his sights on one of them. Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron, went after the other. As the planes dashed across the cloudy skies, Richthofen saw that his friend was gunning for his target. But so was another member of the German squadron, Boelcke’s wingman, Erwin Böhme. In his memoirs, Richthofen recalled how he thought the British plane would be shot down at any moment as the two German pilots closed in on it.
Then tragedy struck. Boelcke’s wing hit Böhme’s undercarriage. “The two machines merely touched one another,” wrote Richthofen. “However, if two machines go at the tremendous pace of flying machines, the slightest contact has the effect of a violent concussion.” The midair collision left Boelcke struggling to make an emergency landing. Buffeted by violent gusts, the German ace died when his fighter crashed into the ground. In the cut and thrust of the dogfight, Boelcke had failed to notice that his wingman was quite so close to his plane. For a few fatal seconds, he lost situational awareness.
Pilots in those early days of aerial warfare had to invent new ways to deal with a new reality. Changes in the methods and weapons of war changed the nature of conflict. Today, changes in the world of information are transforming the nature of communication. News and information have gone from being scarce to abundant commodities. They have become like the air we breathe—literally ambient, all around us all the time, coming in the shape of updates from friends, photos of cute animals or links to funny videos.
The sheer amount of stuff coming at us from friends, family and colleagues may seem overwhelming, and that’s without considering all the news from media outlets. A novice mistake is to try to be on top of it all. The goal is not to take in everything, paying perfect attention to every tweet or like; neither is it to be passive and let information simply wash over you. Techniques of situational awareness can help consumers reach equilibrium. In practice, it means being peripherally aware of information as it flows in the background, paying attention when something important and relevant, or pleasing and entertaining, pops up.
Social media requires a different mindset from the way we approached things like the newspaper. The daily paper was finite. It had a set number of pages, column inches and words. And even then, most didn’t read every single story and perhaps ignored some sections altogether. Social media is the ambient music of the everyday. Much of what is shared consists of the mundane details of life, the small talk and casual exchanges that are important in fostering societal bonds. It is flowing in the periphery of our awareness and doesn’t demand much attention. Like ambient music, we know is it there, but it is unobtrusive. Changes in the volume, speed and tone signal that something requires attention, much like a sudden change in background music catches our attention.
There is always a degree of fear and apprehension that comes with change. A century ago, the telephone was the new method of communication. An AT&T advertisement in the May 1916 edition of the Boy Scouts’ magazine Boys’ Life reflected the hopes and fears of the time. It heralded the telephone network as “the kingdom of the subscriber” and sought to reassure customers that “the telephone cannot think or talk for you, but it carries your thought where you will.” The ad attempted to reassure Americans that they were in control of the newfangled device they were letting into their homes. “It is yours to use,” it read. One hundred years later, the same ad could be applied to the myriad new and evolving ways we have to connect and communicate. Today’s constant flow of information is ours to use.