Are all the modern devices and digital conveniences we have at our disposal — from the web and social media to smartphones and tablets — making us more distracted and less able to concentrate? And is this harming our ability to think and be creative, and therefore by extension harming society as a whole? It’s a question that rears its head from time to time. One of the latest expressions of this fear comes from Joe Kraus, a serial entrepreneur who is now a partner with Google Ventures and gave a presentation recently about his concerns, offering an alternative concept he calls “Slow Tech.” But is this really something that we need to be afraid of?

In his presentation, Kraus argues that the incessant demands of cellphones and social media, not to mention email and other forms of distraction, are making it difficult for us to connect with other people — including our families — and also endangering our ability to think about anything other than the next jolt of stimulation from the devices we have all around us, which he compares to the constant stimulus of a slot machine at a casino. As he describes it:

We are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction where we are increasingly disconnected from the people and events around us, and increasingly unable to engage in long-form thinking. People now feel anxious when their brains are unstimulated.

We are losing some very important things by doing this. We threaten the key ingredients behind creativity and insight by filling up all our ‘gap’ time with stimulation. And we inhibit real human connection when we prioritize our phones over the people right in front of us.

Is multi-tasking just a myth?

Kraus says he has an “unhealthy relationship” with his phone and is constantly pulling it out to check things, and that if he lets it, that behaviour “fills up those gaps in my day — some gaps of boredom, some of solitude.” The effect of all of this, he argues, is that we are increasingly distracted, and less able to pay attention to anything for a reasonable length of time, and this distraction is a “worsening condition.” We may think that we are getting things accomplished or multi-tasking, he says, but brain studies show that multi-tasking is a myth, and in reality we are just trying to do too many things at once and overloading our brain’s ability to concentrate.

The Google Ventures partner and former co-founder of Excite.com also quotes sociologist Dr. Sherry Turkle, to the effect that: “We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
This explains the constant desire for virtual contact, Kraus says — and that contact gets in the way of real relationships.

Kraus is far from the only one to raise the warning flag about any of this: Turkle has written about how the internet doesn’t help form real relationships, but fosters a kind of fake intimacy. Nicholas Carr argues in his book The Shallows that the internet and social media are making us less intelligent — and less interesting — and are actually changing our brains in negative ways. Others have also written about how they are trying to minimize the distractions their phones provide in the way of notifications, and there are a host of apps to help you concentrate when you are using your computer.

I would be the first to agree that time without a phone or tablet is a valuable thing, and that it’s good to take long walks (or baths, the place where Archimedes famously discovered the law of hydrostatics) and think big thoughts. And I also wrestle — as Kraus does — with the desire to look at the phone during meals and other times when I am with my family. But is this really a social disaster waiting to happen? And is it changing us and our brains for the worse? I have my doubts about that, just as I have my doubts about Nick Carr’s argument that the internet is making us dumber and less interesting, or that Facebook or any other social network is making us lonely.

Distraction of all kinds can be good as well as bad

Is technology changing, and society along with it? Of course it is — but that doesn’t mean we are becoming worse in some way, or necessarily losing anything crucial. In fact, we are just as likely to be gaining as losing. When Carr made his argument about the distractions of the internet, I had just finished reading a piece that Paul Kedrosky wrote for The Edge collection, in which he argued that one of the things he liked best about the internet and social media was the way in which it bombarded him with random data and content — the way that molecules are bombarded with other particles during quantum research — and that this produced all sorts of wonderful combinations of ideas:

The democratization of connections, collisions and therefore thinking is historically unprecedented. We are the first generation to have the information equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider for ideas. And if that doesn’t change the way you think, nothing will.

Not everyone can consume (or make sense of) quite as many diverse information sources as Kedrosky can, but his point is a good one: the random information flow that we are bathed in when we are online or using social media and devices like smartphones can just as easily be a source of inspiration and creativity as a killer of those things. Why is looking out the window or going for a walk more conducive to reflection than browsing through a friend’s Tumblr stream? I am not against walks or daydreaming — but there are plenty of ways to daydream and think big thoughts, and the shower or the hiking trail is not the only place that happens.

Is there a need for moderation when it comes to phones or the internet or social media? Of course there is, and social norms are developing around those things, just as they developed around the horseless carriage and the telephone and plenty of other modern inventions. One of the devices that has historically drawn the most criticism from scholars and theologians for its corrupting effect on humanity seems to have worked out pretty well — it’s called the book. If we can figure that out, I’m sure we can figure out how to handle cellphones and status updates.

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The problem is that the characters of the applicant and company they want to work at usually only come out in the interview stage — and if those characters don’t match, both sides will have wasted time, effort and money in getting there. That’s why a startup called Somewhere is trying a new spin on the recruitment game that puts company culture front-and-center.

The brainchild of Berlin-based Australian entrepreneur Justin McMurray, Somewhere is no traditional job site – it doesn’t provide listings – but rather brings an About.me-style service for talent scouting.

Somewhere lets companies advertise themselves as cool employers, and with many creative and tech firms currently finding it hard to get the right kind of people, it’s an approach that may get, er, somewhere.

“The original motivation to explore this area was driven by my frustration at all the clichés people spout about doing what you love,” McMurray told me. “The problem is that this is so difficult to achieve, and no one tells you how to do this. Which is why we threw ourselves into the challenge of working out how to help people find things to do that they might love.”

Employers can set up a permanent profile describing what they are like and what kind of people they’re looking for, and their page includes a mechanism that not only lets potential employees express interest but also serves as an initial filter to cut down on wasted time.

Somewhere has been quietly testing its employer profiles since the end of February, and this week let potential job-seekers into the beta so they can also create their own “cultural profiles”.

The companies that have been involved so far are mostly Berlin tech startups and creative agencies in London and Sydney. And some have already embedded profile links and buttons into their recruitment pages as the preferred way for applicants to get in touch.

Tweek.tv’s profile provides a good idea of what Somewhere can do for businesses. The page shows pictures of the founders and the office, briefly describes who they’re looking for and what applicants might learn at the company. Then there’s the all-important “apply to meet us” button, which will be able to trigger a customised questionnaire designed to weed out unsuitable candidates.

The service is clearly targeting a certain kind of employer: one that sees company culture as key to its hiring process, for a start, which probably means small-to-midsized firms in the touchy-feely creative, marketing and tech sectors. In other words, a company that doesn’t quite need a dedicated HR department, but that also finds too much of its time and resources taken up in the hiring process.

“Traditional recruitment is too expensive and time-consuming, and doesn’t get it right,” McMurray said. “[Our] opportunity is to change the way companies think about, scout for, screen and build their talent networks. Because this is how they’ll craft company culture, which is increasingly the biggest determinant of a company’s success.”

Things are very early right now. But the real test of Somewhere’s approach will come in April, when the beta starts letting applicants and employers in London, Berlin, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney talk to each other — in what McMurray calls a “cultural marketplace”.

Down the line, McMurray’s talking about allowing greater customisation of the service and building tailor-made pages into company sites.

Somewhere’s still looking for the funding to allow that kind of development but, given the paucity of fresh ideas in today’s recruitment industry, the job site with no listings may be a concept whose time has come.

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Artists are entrepreneurs, too, and deserve to be able to monetize their work

SOPA is clearly too extreme to be a practical solution, and it threatens core pieces of what make the Web great. In spite of even the best-intentioned efforts of those in the film and music industries, I do not expect this legislation to pass. Still, the issues that the act seeks to address are very real, and the impact of non-action will continue to affect those of us in film, music and television. Those of us who are so up in arms about SOPA also risk forgetting that the underlying issues are nonetheless quite pressing — not just for the big media companies, labels and studios, but for the artists who produce great content, and whose livelihoods depend on viable monetization of their commercial work.

We forget that artists are entrepreneurs, too — every new record, and every new film production is its own startup, so to speak. Lost in all of the anti-SOPA backlash (whether you agree with it or not) is the fact that these artist-entrepreneurs create incredible value every day, and deserve much better from all of us. What if your proprietary source code was stolen, and shared freely with anyone? What about your underlying data? What about your breakthrough algorithm?

The technology industry has progressive cultural habits like open-sourcing that have proved out new modes of ownership, and community. Artists from Radiohead to Louis C.K. have taken notice, and experimented with radical new distribution models that challenge traditional notions of “free” and “commercial.” But technology also has more patent warfare than we know what to do with, not to mention uniformly sharp competition. Words like “moat” and “proprietary” are music to any VC’s ears.

The “discovery” benefit doesn’t actually translate to profits

The Internet is neither a panacea nor an imminent danger — it produces enormous benefits, and some unfortunate byproduct. We need to seize opportunity and mitigate risk simultaneously. SOPA swings the pendulum too far to one side. But this issue isn’t going away, either.

Why?

Because the “discovery” benefits, of free-flowing music, film, and TV, contrary to popular belief, do not generally trickle down to the actual artists who create these works. This is important to understand. There are exceptions, of course, breakout hits and outliers. But for most artists, the magic hand of discovery is never realized. New fans do not in fact materialize out of the Internet and start paying for content, as if on cue.

As general manager of Austin City Limits, I live this reality day in and day out. We’re a nonprofit, and for us and the artists we diligently work with to create unforgettable musical experiences, the discovery argument rings hollow in practice. The benefits are more directly realized by marketing departments, maybe, and top artists who are already trending. Stating that a Lily Allen or Arctic Monkeys were “discovered” or  that they “broke” via the Internet is a convenient copy point in a label-written artist bio, but for each of these valid success stories, there are thousands of artists losing the income necessary for them to live and dedicate themselves to their craft.  For every pirated download or freely shared file, there is not in fact a new fan created who will someday purchase a concert ticket or t-shirt.

Don’t believe me? Read this article and absorb the research. Take for example the number of record labels that have been shuttered, or the large number of layoffs at the music companies that are still in business, or the statistics showing the drastic decline in sales over the last 10 years  — it’s apparent that free online music discovery does not generate new fans — at least not fans who are interested in making purchases.

Now, some may say that that’s part of the creative destruction of the old music industry model, the big business run by a few major labels crumbling as a new model of all-digital distribution takes its place. That may be the case, but the artists don’t make money off the new model, either. In Forrester’s report, cited in the same article, it found that “just 44% of U.S. Internet users and 64% of Americans who buy digital music think that music is worth paying for.”

We do need reform, but we need the right reform

As an artist-first company, Austin City Limits endeavors to bring the highest quality live music programming to our weekly television audience. Beyond television, we are always looking at new ways to share the Austin City Limits experience with as many fans as possible through online and mobile technologies. We’re innovating on a lot of different fronts and 2012 will be a groundbreaking year for us. Certainly, innovation and reinvesting in great experiences is part of the path forward. And the proposed SOPA legislation, while targeting pirates, will also threaten the ability for legitimate content producers to innovate and bring great experiences to their respective audiences.

But at the same time, if zero limitations are put on the sharing of creative intellectual property — the internet will continue to harm artists, and the people and companies that support them, by hobbling their ability to be fairly compensated for their talents and work. The future of artists and filmmakers lies in the balance.

Legislation that chokes out the same creative flame that it seeks to protect is not the answer, but we’ve got to find some middle ground. The two extreme points of view being represented right now — on one hand, taking over the internet as regulatory infrastructure and punishing many for the acts of a few — and on the other, advocating royalty-free access with legal impunity under a deceptive “free and open” ethos — well, neither is going to work.

For those protesting SOPA for its shortcomings — you are absolutely right. But also know that reform needs to come, and will come, and that we’d all do well to collaborate and shape the right policy, instead of watching, and commentating.

Tom Gimbel is the general manager of Austin City Limits, the award-winning KLRU produced music television show.  Prior to joining ACL, Gimbel’s career includes more than 20 years in the music industry including senior positions at Arista Records and as serving an artist manager at High Wire Music.  In 2009, Gimbel founded Clatterhead, a social media marketing company.

Image courtesy of Flickr user BurgTender.

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Lowry explained that the human has been taken out of work at many large companies and led to a “hierarchical, document-centric culture.” But changing that culture to one that’s more collaborative and social requires people who are willing to admit that they don’t know everything, the so-called “naked intellectualists” who can expose their lack of knowledge and act as a model for other employees trying to learn how to switch gears after what might be a lifetime of thinking in terms of documents, and delivering goods once they are finished and having a very buttoned down mentality.

Of course, this assumes a company wants and benefits form having a human-centric model. In the panel discussion, Dennis O’Malley, VP of Services at Moxie Software explained that offering social and collaborative tools doesn’t always end up boosting productivity. In some ways it may help make a company more agile and improve quality, metrics that may not be easily measured and hard for managers to justify. Yet he believes that over time, implementing collaborative and social tools can help the bottom line by reducing waste or identifying problems early enough so they can be fixed.

He gave an example of a pharmaceutical company that reduced time wasted in its supply chain by 40 percent because employees could anticipate upcoming problems by looking at the social tools. Plus, even if the company doesn’t think it’s ready to be human-centric, employees may disagree and find their own ways around IT structures that force them to use document-centric tools. Lowry said she recently got a sales call form a social vendor who said that 800 employees under the Turner domain were already buying the company’s product, so it might make sense for Turner to buy the product at an enterprise level.

The overall gist of the talk was that social tools are not a panacea, nor are they a problem. When companies understand the value and help employees become used to thinking in a human-centric way as opposed to in a document-centric way, work changes, but ultimately it can change in ways that are beneficial.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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The New Yorker profile hints at these topics, rather than exploring them directly, but within the nine pages of the article, Sandberg’s decisions about going to Facebook, her leadership style, the life she has created in order to be the COO of a hot startup and the reaction she gets from women and her employees all paint a certain picture. Here’s a good example of how Sandberg views her work, from when she was evaluating moving from Google to Facebook:

“It was like dating,” says Dave Goldberg, Sandberg’s husband and the C.E.O. of the online company SurveyMonkey. Sandberg says they asked each other, “What do you believe? What do you care about? What’s the mission? It was very philosophical.”

It was philosophical, because the professional class today doesn’t join a company with a nine-to-five work ethic anymore. They are also joining a group of people that they will spend long hours with either at the office or online. They’re entering a relationship with these people, so those people better mesh with their values and ideals.

Work has become like a family

This isn’t just at Facebook. Many workers have been forced by an uncertain economy and an overall shift in employment to become more entrepreneurial, which means there are more people setting their own agendas and hours. But as Generation X and the millennials rise in the workforce, there also more people who are motivated and driven by their own goals, rather than a company’s goals.

So we have a shift in why people work and how they choose their jobs. How do you build a company and a culture that works with this shift instead of against it? Clearly forcing people to work from nine to five in a cube seems like it would be destined for failure, especially since self-motivated employees generally work best when left to follow their own ideas and projects. So options such as telecommuting, Google’s famed 20 percent time or Facebook’s Hackamonth are good for providing outlets for entrepreneurial people.

But I don’t think that goes far enough. I believe work is changing to be more like a family. Just like in families, where there is an ethos around everyone pitching in and working toward a common goal, a company needs to have people who are all dedicated toward a company goal. I’m not talking about some hokey mission statement, but rather a tangible result that everyone agrees with. At GigaOM, it’s delivering good analysis on major stories. We’re all pulling for the same thing, together. This also means people are more willing to work longer or odd hours when needed, because they believe they’ll get time off when they need it. Employees have a loyalty to the company that is rewarded with loyalty back to the employee.

And if something falls apart, just like your home-family, your colleagues will support you. In startups and entrepreneurial workplaces, there’s very little blaming and throwing people under a bus because of their “family values.” It may seem idealistic, but smart, creative people don’t have to hang around in bad environments, and they often won’t. In the Sandberg profile, plenty of people mentioned her ability to push junior staff members forward and encourage people to succeed. That’s the style of leadership required for creating these workplaces.

Today’s professional class are driven by their own goals, so like Sandberg did with Zuckerberg, they look for a deeper connection with their workplaces. They are looking for a good fit — in lifestyle and culture besides merely previous experience and career goals — not just a job. This change is seen as a good — especially within the tech community.

Not everyone wants two families

But there’s a darn good reason most people don’t want two families. It divides your loyalties, and it’s hard to prioritize when you have divided loyalties. To accommodate this, there needs to be a corresponding cultural shift in the home, something the Sandberg profile also illustrates.

She said, “The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home. . . . Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way — not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.” The second impediment is guilt, she said. “I feel guilty working because of my kids. I do. I feel guilty. In my TED talk, I’m talking to myself, too. I’m not just talking to other people. I have faced every one of those things myself.”

As women play a greater role in the professional world, they also tend to expect more from their partners at home. So when Sandberg talks about her husband sharing the workload, that’s not an idle comment — it’s essential to her success. But it also allows her husband to achieve a level of participation in his home life that many of today’s younger men say they want. And when both partners are trying to have it all instead of just women, the social dynamic changes, ideally in a way that allows more women to take on leadership roles without being stigmatized for having a family.

That works on a macro level. But it’s the day-to-day — or sometimes, minute-by-minute — conflicts that put the true pressure on both work- and home-families, making me (and I’m sure other people like me) wonder why we even bother trying to balance both. Something as simple as a huge story breaking on weekend when your husband is out of town creates instant conflict. But when it works, it’s the most satisfying feeling in the world, and as a skilled worker, I can’t imagine going back to some nine-to-five existence where my projects and priorities are dictated by others instead of something I care deeply about.

Image courtesy of the World Economic Forum.

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Crowdsourcing startup 99designs recently received $35 million in venture capital and is currently advertising six positions in its Melbourne and San Francisco offices. These hires will see the team grow by about 20 percent and expand management capacity, paving the way for the creation of additional operations roles.

The business has a strong culture and a flat structure. How does 99designs plan to manage its expansion without compromising collaboration or culture?

Collaboration

The tight-knit business was originally run from Melbourne, Australia, and Vancouver, Canada, so communication has always been a focus.

Says CEO Patrick Llewellyn, “We have a long history of collaborating with people all over the world. [Parent company] SitePoint has been connecting [people and contributors] forever and a day from different parts of the world. That’s part of our DNA.”

Indeed, growth has actually boosted collaboration. Since the business moved out of its startup phase, Llewellyn and COO Jason Sew Hoy were given more operational authority. A more formal management structure was put in place in August of last year, and Llewellyn notes, “We’ve been more collaborative than ever.”

Collaboration tools that the team favors include instant messenger, Yammer and Campfire for development problem solving. Email is also essential, as are scheduled and spontaneous video conferences.

But people are crucial to the process: The outcomes of management’s quarterly strategy meetings are fed back to the staff by both team leaders and business leaders. “We get some pretty wild debates, but that’s a good thing,” laughs Sew Hoy. “It’s definitely the variety of the different viewpoints that creates a really robust strategy.

“It’s a pretty open communication model. Everyone’s encouraged to share ideas and make contributions,” he adds. “It’s designed to help everyone have a voice and feel like they’re being heard, but it also helps to guide some of the decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis.”

Culture

The pair see communicating culture as a major challenge as the business grows in the coming months.

“From a cultural and team management point of view,” explains Sew Hoy, “it comes down to having a core group of leaders that represent the business and who we want to be.”

He says that the focus on creating the right management positions and putting the right people in them “will essentially set the foundation for how we communicate and manage the team as it gets bigger.”

As Llewellyn reveals, “The most important thing in our hiring process is making sure that we hire people that we trust. Unless you trust someone, I don’t think you can openly communicate with them.”

The pair also requires staff to have a collaborative philosophy. “It’s got to be a core competency for everyone to be an excellent global communicator,” explains Sew Hoy, “regardless of whether you’re a support person, a developer, a marketer or someone in senior management.”

Recruiting candidates with great communication skills is only part of the equation, he says. “It also comes down to the expectations that you set early on with that person.

“We’ve got two people starting together today, so one of the things we’re doing is getting them to sit down and meet all of the people in San Francisco on video chat.” The team does this, he says, “just to make sure that there’s a little bit more interaction there than seeing that there’s a bunch of people there on our ‘About Us’ page, and to break down those barriers toward getting conversations started.”

Moving team members between offices is also central to ensuring cultural consistency. “We see that as an important investment,” Llewellyn explains. “Even before we raised the money . . . we brought over four people for South by Southwest this year from Melbourne, and a couple of those guys spent another two weeks in our office. We’ll continue to bring some others across to San Francisco and we’ll take people from San Francisco to Melbourne, so that we get that cross-pollination,” he explains.

Competitive advantage

Llewellyn believes that the travel potential within 99designs represents a competitive edge for the business, especially when hiring in the Melbourne market.

“I’m really excited about the opportunities that this will open up over time,” he says. “One of the things about hiring talented Australians is that there’s always a significant wanderlust. And I think that by having offices in two pretty cool cities, we can . . . use that as a competitive advantage in the hiring process.”

The business has already relocated its CTO from Melbourne to San Francisco because, “In terms of new technology, and where things evolve the fastest, San Francisco and the Valley is in the heart of that. So there were definitely going to be advantages to having a technical leader stationed over there,” explains Sew Hoy.

Such relocations — Llewellyn himself was originally hired in Melbourne, Australia — have presented new collaborative challenges. “I don’t want to pretend that we’ve got all the answers,” Llewellyn says. “We’re iterating and learning and finding that there are complexities that we haven’t thought through.” But, he says, open, trusting team communication is key to the business’s future.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user murielle

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One of the notable things about the question-and-answer site Quora is the quality of answers that are posted to interesting questions. One recent example is the in-depth response posted to the question: “Which is better to work for, Google or Facebook?” The answer comes from David Braginsky, who worked as a developer at Google for four years, then moved to Facebook, where he’s worked for three years. His take? The search company is like graduate school, filled with big brains working on complicated problems, while the social network doesn’t think as much about the deep implications of things; it just does them.

Braginsky says when it comes to culture, Google is more technically focused, in that staffers there “value working on hard problems, and doing them right… things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive [and] on most projects, the engineers make the calls.” He adds that when projects are undertaken at the search company, “the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.”

At Facebook, however, the attitude is “something needs to be done, and people do it. Most of the time they don’t read the literature on the subject, or consult experts about the ‘right way’ to do it, they just sit down, write the code, and make things work.” This can cause problems at times when things are rushed into production, he says: “Sometimes the way they do it is naive, and a lot of time it may cause bugs or break as it goes into production. And when that happens, they fix their problems… and (in most cases) move on to the next thing.” Although he’s talking about programming, this seat-of-the-pants approach could help explain some of Facebook’s backtracking on privacy features and other elements of the service.

While engineers and technical specs rule the day at Google, Braginsky says, “Facebook values products and user experience, and designers tend to have a much larger impact. Zuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site’s look and feel.” Another interesting aspect of the developer’s take on the two companies is the way he describes how Google’s size has affected its culture and processes:

Google is really big. There are multiple teams doing the same thing and don’t know about each other. There are teams that strongly believe that other teams should not exist. There are giant sections of Google that have been described as “non-Google” because of culture drift and acquisitions.

It’s odd to think that parts of the web giant might be seen by others at the company as “non-Google,” but not surprising, given the rate at which the company has grown and the number of acquisitions it has made (something it has stepped up even further in the past year). Meanwhile, Braginsky says that at Facebook “there is sometimes duplication of work, but it is almost always intentional.” And from a developer’s point of view, he says that working at a giant technology company like Google has benefits because it does world-class research in computer science, which can pay off “if you are good enough to convince the Google management structure to not place you into one of the many critical but not very interesting teams.”

There are some other interesting observations in Braginsky’s answer, including the fact that Google employs “a noticeable number of people that should have never been hired, and the company seems reluctant (or unable) to remedy that” (although he says that’s based more on reports from friends at Google than personal experience). Facebook, he says, “is much more willing to fire people,” so the overall average quality of engineers is higher. While there are people at Google who’ve made the computer industry into what it is today, Braginsky says, “it is very unlikely that you will work with, or interact with, those people.”

While the engineer’s answer is just one person’s perspective on working at Google and Facebook, it is interesting to see the contrasts and similarities — and possibly a glimpse of the kinds of size-related problems that Facebook might wind up dealing with if it continues to grow at the pace it has been. If you have any experience working at either place, feel free to share your impressions in the comments.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user bfishadow

The Telegraph reports that, in addition to beating out Thomas Crapper’s 1880 siphon flush device and space travel, the iPhone was voted a more important invention than washing machines or internal combustion engines. In the Tesco Mobile survey of 4,000 Britons aged between 18 and 65, the iPhone ranked eighth — ahead of the toilet, which finished ninth (toilet paper was 22nd), and also higher than the automobile, camera — even shoes. What Tesco has provided here is a somewhat alarming snapshot of where popular priorities and preoccupations lie.

At least the wheel was acknowledged the most important invention in history, with the airplane in second place and the lightbulb third, but amazingly the Internet finished fourth and computers fifth. By contrast, roofs ranked a distant 44th.

Really,folks? Would you truly prefer to go back to using chamber pots and outhouses than give up web surfing in the rain barefoot?

Of course, inconsistencies abound in popular perception here. Internal combustion engines were an indispensable enabler of airplanes and made the wheel exponentially more useful, and without cameras we’d be staring at lines of text on our computer screens at best.

The iPhone also beat central heating (13), painkillers (15), the steam engine (16) and eyeglasses (205). Astonishingly, the printing press, which this writer would contend was a vastly more significant invention than either the web or computers or most of the rest of the survey picks, didn’t even make the top 100. Bizarre.

Notable finishers were refrigerators (14), freezers (17), the vacuum cleaner (23), microwaves (26), hot water (29). shoes (30) hair-straighteners (34??!), paper (38), the (presumably electric) kettle (40), remote controls (43), cats-eye spectacles (48) power steering (50) tea bags (54), spell-checkers (86), makeup (66), push-up bras (77) and mascara (80).

This survey indicates that Britons think the iPhone is quite literally the greatest thing since sliced bread (70).

Go figure.

Images courtesy of Flickr users ricardovillela and williamhook.

First and foremost, be prepared to wait. Whether you show up tonight to get in line (oh yeah, if the lines haven’t formed already, they will shortly) or try your luck tomorrow morning, you’ll be there a while. Those who get in the door first are likely going to linger a while. And while the line will regenerate as fast as it dissipates, it’s likely there will be no great time to go if you must be there tomorrow.

Take a page from the boy scouts, and be prepared. Bring a canteen, day pack, bed roll, etc. Well, I’m partially kidding at least. If you’re there tonight, you’ll want to be comfortable (and dry if you’re outside and there’s weather). Have some snacks on hand, and a plan for potty breaks. A dolly with a car battery, power inverter, and a power strip will make you mighty popular with your line mates too. Just saying.

Everyone around you has a story, so take in the scene. It’s easy to show up with your iPod/iPhone or MacBook and just plug into the free Apple Wi-Fi and wait. But it’s a safe bet that there’s a guy next to you who was working on the very first Mac prototypes, or a lady who programmed part of NeXT back in the day. I’ve only been to a few events, but each time have met folks with pretty amazing Apple stories and experiences.

The Apple Store doesn’t want your money for anything but iPad tomorrow. This may not be absolute, but last summer when the iPhone 3GS came out, I already had mine, and ran to the store late in the day to pick up an accessory or something only to be turned away — they were only servicing iPhone sales for the day. So if you need some little widget, plan to head over today, or wait until Sunday, otherwise you may potentially be turned away tomorrow.

Document your experience. New product releases and store openings aren’t a very regular thing. It’s pretty neat to say you were there when… What Apple’s doing these days is special, and not many (if any) brands are replicating the experience that comes with buying a product. Take photos, blog it, and share the experience with others.

Oh, and while I won’t count it as a specific tip, be prepared to answer the question over and over again when asked, “What in the world is everyone standing in line for?!” There’s probably a lot more to know, and we’d love to hear other ideas from our great readers who’ve been there and done that. Feel free to let us know how it goes tomorrow too. Enjoy the show everyone!