Are you a member of a tight and lively social group in your apartment block or are you a lone wolf, happy to keep interactions with your neighbours to a minimum.
Is your smartphone WhatsApping out of your pocket? Or does it remain so un-pinged that you have to keep checking to make sure it hasn’t switched itself to flight mode.
Perhaps you’d be happy to join in with other residents’ activities … if only there were some, or some way of getting in touch with the people who are already doing it.
Whether you are socially engaged with your neighbours or isolated and alone, the sociology department of Macquarie University wants to hear from you … and they’re offering a $20 sweetener just for taking part.
They are conducting a study into the social media and ‘real life’ experiences of residents who live in high-rise apartments.
In particular they want to hear about your experiences as a resident of a high-rise apartment and its social media community, if there is one.
“We want to find out how you connect to people in your apartment complex and immediate neighbourhood and the role social media plays in facilitating that connection,” they say in the explanatory notes on their survey web page.
“As a current resident of an apartment with an active social media group, your opinions and experiences are vital to this project. We would also like to hear your experiences if you are not part of one of these groups, and how you otherwise connect with people in your apartment complex.”
And the $20? If you complete the online survey, at the end you’ll get an invitation to participate in a short interview by phone, Zoom or similar.
Do that and you’ll get a $20 Coles/Myer gift card, which 99 per cent of survey participants say, is better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick (margin of error 1 per cent).
But seriously, participating in this kind of thing helps build the knowledge pool for future planning and development of social infrastructure and apps.
So, if you have ever said or thought “nobody asked me what I wanted”, click here to start the survey.