Tag: society

  • Friday 5 — 1.22.2016

    Friday 5 — 1.22.2016

    Facebook Messenger

    1. Messaging is the next big platform, and Facebook gets it. With 800 million Messenger users, Facebook is looking at the rise of messaging globally, and doubling down with new features.
    2. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is Google’s solution to slow-loading web pages on mobile devices. AMP goes live in a few weeks, and this post explains how publishers are coming on board with complex ad and paywall support. Google has consistently rewarded speed on search engine result pages (SERPs) and will soon preference sites that are faster on mobile.
    3. Pascal Briod recommends 11 digital tools he uses every week as Head of Product at a startup. His choices range from user research to design, and would be a useful toolkit in nearly every digital shop.
    4. This week World Economic Forum released The Impact of Digital Content: Opportunities and Risks of Creating and Sharing Information Online. It’s a dense read focused on the impact to global society, and includes exploration of business models and the privacy implications of social media’s “active and passive (over) production of data”.
    5. Last Friday Wikipedia turned 15. Wired examined its evolution over the years, including struggles to ensure entries’ accuracy, and to increase and diversity the population of Wikipedians. Don’t miss these 15 amazing things that happened since Wikipedia launched. My favorite: an early entry on the Standard Poodle that read, “A dog by which all others are measured.”

    Weekend fun: If you are mourning the news that the Star Wars VIII release has just been delayed, cheer up with this 8-bit recap of all the Star Wars deaths to date. Another fun Star Wars fact: “starwars” and “Solo” appeared on this year’s worst passwords list, behind perennial #1 favorite, “123456”.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Digital world and humanity

    Digital world and humanity

    It is not enough to be passersby on the digital highways, simply “connected”; connections need to grow into true encounters. We cannot live apart, closed in on ourselves. … Media strategies do not ensure beauty, goodness and truth in communication. The world of media also has to be concerned with humanity, it too is called to show tenderness. The digital world can be an environment rich in humanity; a network not of wires but of people.

    — Pope Francis, who recently referred to the internet as a gift from God, reflecting on the nature of digital and social connection for World Communications Day

     

  • Two must-read pieces on social media

    Two must-read pieces on social media

    This month, two articles explored real-life examples of some of the unintended consequences of popular social media services and the kinds of behaviors they engender. What does it mean for the presentation of self in everyday life if the technology ensures the public audience is getting larger, and everyone is tuned in?

    First, in Vanity Fair, Nancy Jo Sales reports on how pervasive social media contributes to a problematic culture of Friends Without Benefits:

    Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and new dating apps like Tinder, Grindr, and Blendr have increasingly become key players in social interactions, both online and IRL (in real life). Combined with unprecedented easy access to the unreal world of Internet porn, the result is a situation that has drastically affected gender roles for young people.

    In The Awl, a writer reflects on how a city park writing performance led to internet infamy in I Am an Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything:

    As a member of the first generation to freely and gladly share my pictures, videos and thoughts online, I’d always—until now, anyway—adopted a “What’s the worst that could happen?” attitude, mixed with an “Everyone else is doing it!” mentality towards my online presence. Many of the best things in my life couldn’t have happened without sharing these pieces of myself online—meeting favorite authors at bars thanks to Twitter, getting another chance at a lost crush thanks to Facebook. And yet, I still felt thrown when I was presented with an image of myself that I couldn’t control.

     

  • Friday 5 — 09.06.2013

    Friday 5 — 09.06.2013

    1. We know almost everything about the iPhone 5C except the most critical one: price. Mobile pro Benedict Evans breaks it down.
    2. Price point for the new iPhone is highly correlated to its global #2 performance in the face of Android’s dominance. Market share stakes are high with an estimated total of 1.8B mobile phones shipping this year, and 2.3B units predicted by 2017.
    3. Does it seem like you spend about twice as much time online as you did three years ago? Apparently, you’re right, and those smartphones and tablets are to blame.
    4. If you’ve ever sheepishly deleted your browser history, rest assured that you’re in the majority. According to Pew, 86% of internet users have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints. Perhaps more surprising was the news that 21% of internet users reported an email or social networking account compromised or commandeered without permission.
    5. At last — big data comes to the women’s sport pages! Check out this awesome rapgenius analysis of the New York Times wedding section. Weddingcrunchers.com is a database of ~60K wedding announcements published in the New York Times from 1981 to 2013.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.

  • Coming to terms with tech proliferation

    Coming to terms with tech proliferation

    The virtuality of the debate has made it difficult for us to grapple with the consequences of the proliferation of the world outside of this bubble …Now that the effects of the tech world invade the physical environment, we have to figure out the necessary philosophical and intellectual framework to deal with it.

    — Evgeny Morozov quoted in From Example to Excess in Silicon Valley

  • Morning Prayers @ Memorial Church

    Today I was lucky enough to speak at the morning prayers service, a Harvard tradition since its founding in 1636 (more here). Many thanks to Jonathan Walton, who is the Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences — and a true proponent of making connections on campus and on Twitter.


    Good morning. My name is Perry Hewitt, and I work on digital strategy for the University. I’d like to begin with a reading from E.M. Forster

    “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

    When Forster wrote that passage for Howard’s End back in 1910, he was, through the indomitable character of Margaret Schlegel, extolling connection as a means to an end, a way to live a fuller and more meaningful life. In the novel, Margaret’s lifelong attempt to get the stubborn Henry Wilcox to connect the prose and the passion within himself is for a long time met with deliberate obtuseness. Wilcox tells Margaret, “My motto is Concentrate. I’ve no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing.” What he meant by “that sort of thing” was looking away from the task at hand, to see all around him.

    Of course, Monday’s tragic events at the Boston Marathon put this exhortation into especially sharp relief. The violence of the bombings, and then the subsequent moments of hope and humanity cause me to reflect more deeply on these themes of concentration and connection. 

    When I arrived at Harvard College, like many young people, I knew a great deal more about how to live my life back then than I can lay claim to today. My stubbornness and world vision bore an unfortunate resemblance to that of Henry Wilcox. As a Slavic Languages student, I immersed myself in the inflexible world of word roots, noun declensions, and verb conjugations through the work of Roman Jakobson and Horace Lunt. I was a devoted disciple of the “concentrate” and by and large eschewed the “connect.” And “concentrate” up until that point had been an effective means to an end — through the girls’ school I attended, through Andover, and then through Harvard. After Harvard, I was certain, I would pursue a similarly focused life and career path.

    But as the Yiddish proverb says, man plans and God laughs. Through a variety of professional and personal circumstances, my life ended up revolving less around the concentrate, and almost entirely around the connect. Rather than becoming the hedgehog I had envisioned, knowing one big thing, life conspired to turn me into a fox, in the business of knowing many things, and many people, and of trying to make useful links among them all.

    As I spent more time on the exploration of digital channels, mobile devices, and social realms, the question I began to have, and pose for you all to think about here, is what does it mean today to connect? How have the capability and meaning of connection been enhanced or diminished by the digital world we now inhabit?  

    First, I want to talk about the immediacy and ease of connection.

    Never before have we been able to connect in a tactical way so easily and inexpensively. When I spent time in the former Soviet Union in the late eighties, a telephone call to “the West” involved a long wait in the Central Post Office in Moscow. Picture if you will a pre-technology RMV, with long rows of people sitting and waiting for their turn to enter what felt like a Revolutionary-era Russian phone box. You waited for hours for your call to come up, and were prepared for a mercurial babushka-bureaucrat to change your place in line or deny you entirely. Calling abroad was a significant undertaking and time commitment. Because of this, you planned what you wanted to say, disguised carefully for those listening in, with great care.

    Compare this to the casual and inexpensive connection of the internet-enabled present. Earlier this week, my son, Tim, now the same age I was in Moscow, missed a connecting flight in Spain. He opened up a videochat in Skype to alert me of his new plans. He used a laptop computer connected to Madrid airport wifi; I responded on a smartphone while out for a walk in the woods with a friend.

    Does this ease of connection somehow change its nature? Is a world in which we are potentially always connected an unqualified boon? It certainly prevented me from sitting in an airport and worrying. But is there a case to be made that we put less effort into choosing our words because they can always be corrected in a subsequent call, text, or email across any geographic boundary? I have no desire to turn back the clock on telecommunications, but often reflect on how the newfound ease may affect the quality or purpose of connection.

    Second, I want to talk about the meaning of connection in a digital world.

    Facebook has amassed over a billion worldwide users, and represents one out  of every seven minutes spent on the internet today. But perhaps most interestingly, Facebook has succeeded in turning the noun “friend” into a verb, and inventing its unfortunate corollary, the “unfriend.”  What effect does this kind of online connection have on the nature of friendship itself?

    Why are people signing up to connect through pixels rather than in person? For many, there’s a clear benefit to online connection, particularly in societies where family members are more widely dispersed geographically. Teens form affinity groups of future freshmen; former classmates reunite and compare both headlines and hairlines; and everyone shares photos of children, dogs, and luscious desserts. Large networks enable people to benefit from the strength of weak ties, surfacing more professional and personal opportunities for online friends to be helpful to one another. Recent research also reveals that social content is especially memorable — you are more likely to recall a status update than a news headline or a randomly selected sentence from a book.

    And yet people are creating and navigating the rules of online friendship very differently. Some are indiscriminate and enthusiastic friend-ers, eagerly collecting people they meet and adding them to their network. Others are skeptical of online connections, wondering if we are now replacing genuine friendship with a feed full of a baby pictures, inane internet memes, and political polemics. Most of us fall somewhere in between, with self-created rules of who we friend on Facebook, who we connect with on LinkedIn, and who knows our mobile phone number.

    Finally, I want to consider these questions in the context of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.

    On Monday, digital / social / mobile led the way in communicating, collecting, and commiserating. Tweeters broke news developments the traditional networks could only chase. Digital led the way for friends and family to find, check on, and encourage one another. Now FBI investigators are busy analyzing our crowdsourced digital data to divine signals from the noise. In this sense, especially at times like these, it’s our efforts to connect that are improving our our quality of life and perhaps even our safety.

    I began today with Forster’s admonition. “Only connect,” he wrote, “and human love will be seen at its height.” This week, this seems particularly apt. Since I stand here at the pulpit, I would love to follow Forster by offering you definitive answers on digital connection. But I can’t. We’re wading together into new territory, building new rules that fit for the immediacy and intimacy of online connections, and doing it in sometimes troubled times. I do not have a map, digital or otherwise, for navigating the correct course. But I believe if we hold fast to the overarching principle Forster introduces, together we’ll head in the right direction.

    So, I bid you today to go out and chat, like, link, pin, plus, poke, post, text, tumble, or tweet. Or write an old-fashioned letter, and drop it in the mail. But in the end, do what matters — only connect.

  • Techonomy recap: digital reach and repercussions

    Am just beginning to digest last week’s Techonomy conference – three days packed with discussions of the impact of digital technology’s acceleration and reach. Sessions focused on technology’s transformative effects on our daily habits, our society, and even our brains themselves.

    There were plenty of truly remarkable examples of the improvements – from predicting elections to curing cancer to enabling worldwide education (the Forbes magazine with Salman Khan on the cover was omnipresent). But the strength of the conference was examining tech’s effects from divergent perspectives. Three sessions in particular made it easy to envision longer-term uncertain outcomes of a technology-driven future:

    • When Ray Kurzweil spoke about the Singularity (still on track for 2029) and his new book about the rewriting of our brains, then it was easy to go to a dystopian future where humans are ruled by machines. (Apparently in a hallway conversation, he did allow that John Connor was in with a chance.) As computers come closer to self-aware – and the examples of IBM’s Watson’s Jeopardy answers were astonishing – what is the risk to the humans we intended them to serve?
    • Andrew McAfee convened a thought-provoking panel called “Where’s my robot”. Here the dystopian future was less about artificial intelligence installing our new robot overlords, and more about a world of 75% unemployment when the robots have served us all too well. When robots have intelligence and dexterity, how many jobs will be left? As McAfee aptly remarked, “If you’re a mid-skilled, mid-educated, mid-ambitious knowledge worker, I think things look pretty chilly.”
    • Finally, a crash course in geoengineering with David Keith and Andrew Parker from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center introduced an ethical and policy challenge. If sulfur can be manually added to the upper atmosphere to reduce the planet’s temperature, who gets to decide where the global thermostat is set – when as much as half a degree might have ruinous effect for one nation alongside benefits for another. (Lance Ulanoff remarked he and his wife couldn’t agree on the right room temperature for their home – how can India and China be expected to agree?). As technology decisions erode borders, and enable us to craft global solutions with vastly different regional effects, who gets to decide?

    If those were the longer-range future concerns, Techonomy also teed up immediate  examples of tech’s effects on policy and ethical considerations.

    • A panel on Transforming Social Enterprise covered the current use of microtasks distributed by systems like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Employment can be reduced, one presenter commented, in favor of a “flash workforce” available for piecework that could move beyond one-penny microtasks to more complex operations. There was little discussion of the potential societal costs – what happens to workforce stability? And what happens when the worker has no visibility into the overall job? Would you complete a small pattern recognition microtask for a nickel, knowing that the microtasks collectively might add up to a cure for cancer? How about if they add up to a capability for an authoritarian regime to better monitor its protesting citizens? (Watch Jonathan ZIttrain for a far more eloquent presentation of this argument.)
    • Finally, a discussion of Facebook product strategy saw David Kirkpatrick zeroing in on the newsfeed feature. If Facebook’s goal for the newsfeed is to become our newspaper of record, where is the transparency that helps us understand what the algorithm is filtering out on our behalf, and why? Kirkpatrick acknowledged the unprecedented global communications platform Facebook provides – but correctly pushed the question of the “invisible hand” of the algorithm and its effects.

    Technology is responsible for remarkable transformations – thanks to ever better, faster, cheaper computing power, we have previously unimaginable information dissemination and discovery opportunities created by big data. The positive implications in areas like global health are staggering. Unlike the breathless nature of most tech conferences, Techonomy forced some focus on all the consequences – explicit and unintended – that we often miss in the excitement of digital acceleration.

  • Facebook, individuality & loneliness

    Just re-read this thoughtful Stephen Marche essay in The Atlantic Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? about social networking in the current American social context.

    • Facebook arrived at a time when Americans were more alone that ever before. The article points out that in 1950 fewer than 10% of U.S. households contained only one person, and that number had reached 27% by 2010. We’re a culture that extols the individual, something I am reminded of constantly when I compare my own family’s daily or vacation habits and choices with those of friends who immigrated to this country.
    • Our hyperconnectedness leads to myriad but shallow connections with others. In-person connections still matter, and having a number of people we consider confidants reduces loneliness — and that number is dropping.
    • There’s a troubling paradox of how many people we are connected with online and our increase in social isolation. The effects of the latter are tangible — more mental health workers from psychologists to life coaches, and more professional carers needed as we age and become ill.

    What about time spent on Facebook, in particular, drives the loneliness in a constantly connected world?  Social media mavens cite the importance of authenticity. “Don’t mimic, that other guy with all those followers,” they tell us, “but be yourself.” Generally sound advice, but what they forget to add is that most people online are highlighting their best and most interesting selves “Here I am in Paris!” “Here’s the kind of witty banter that typifies an evening with my family.” The toddler beams into the camera, but the explosive tantrums are rarely captured and shared. It’s both widespread FOMO — at any given moment, someone in your network is guaranteed to be doing something more fabulous than you — and an underlying fear that perhaps almost everyone’s true selves are more adventurous and clever than your own.

    Perhaps we’re all just using Facebook wrong. The author refers to the work of Moira Burke, HCI graduate student and soon-to-be Facebook employee, who points to the behaviors of broadcasting and passive consumption rather than engagement with friends as a cause of loneliness. To a degree, that makes sense: We’ve all had the cocktail party experience of the person who speaks in paragraphs, and with it the dullness and loneliness of listening to a monologue in a venue built for dialogue. True engagement, in Burke’s opinion, is enhanced by writing to friends rather than resorting the “lazy like,” and being motivated by others’ sociability to enhance one’s own.

    Last year a Pew Internet and American life report asked ~1,000 technology stakeholders and critics about the ways millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives. The opinions were diverse — even among a wide range of people who think a great deal about the effects of the internet, it’s hard to find consensus on how our brains, behaviors, and happiness will change as a result. U.S. internet users spend about eight hours a month on Facebook, so the degree to which hyperconnectedness to Facebook itself creates or abets loneliness remains an important and unresolved part of the discussion.