Technology and Democracy - 2016

A new president has been inaugurated. The 2016 presidential campaign showed us just how vulnerable our country is to the misuse of our now-ubiquitous internet and communications technologies. Consider some of the abuses we have seen: 

• The Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee servers.
• They fed those documents to Wikileaks with the deliberate intent to undermine confidence in our electoral integrity and perhaps to help Donald Trump win.
• Fake news stories circulated on Facebook and Twitter to misinform and incite higher levels of partisan anger.
• Google search results were compromised by partisan groups to bring up negative stories first when searching for information. 
• The media provided virtually nonstop coverage of Donald Trump and his campaign across both television and mobile platforms.
• Twitter became Mr. Trump’s platform of choice to lead a cyber-bullying campaign against anyone who criticized him. And every Tweet became a news story.
• Smartphone videos and photos provided instant “evidence” at campaign events and rallies supporting partisan views that were shared on social media platforms. 

We live in a world where the technology that was promoted to bring us together has instead driven us apart. Instead of connection we ended up with polarization. We live in our own social media worlds listening to those we agree with. We are beginning to doubt almost everything else we hear, see or read. We are living in a “post-fact” world.

The campaign we have just witnessed could not have happened even as recently as fifteen years ago. We simply did not have the connectivity and bandwidth that allowed this digital assault to be shared instantly. The iPhone is only ten years old. Same for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. The connecting of the cellular network, the internet, and smartphones was the link that permitted this political monster to be born. 

On May 24, 1844, the first message that was transmitted on the newly-invented telegraph was, “What hath God wrought?” We should be asking the same question now. We have created a superb, virtually real-time, global information network. It can be used for great good or it can do great harm. We have not lived with this technology long enough yet to know how to manage it or to manage ourselves when using it. The average time between checking our smartphones is now about six minutes. Ten times an hour we can get a jolt, a fix. When it comes to politics, it almost always zaps our nervous system. Like lab animals in some Skinner Box, we learn which buttons to push to get our hit.  It makes us a feel crazy and we pay the price through our inability to focus, sleep, or think clearly. 

In my view, smartphones are much more like television than they are like telephones. They are a screen that we seem powerless to ignore. We watch that small screen constantly, even while driving!  And all of these hundreds of millions of screens demand new content which Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other social media sites are happy to provide. This can be problematic at any time but it becomes a real worry when it disrupts our political systems. Behind all this low-cost access and seemingly free content is money - eyeballs on advertising. While there is legitimate discussion regarding the corrupting influence of money in politics, no one talks much about the corrupting influence of the money being made off of political postings on social media platforms.

We have come to a juncture in our connected world. The questions we should be asking ourselves now are: how do we protect ourselves from the inherent vulnerabilities of this information network? How can we differentiate real news from fake news? How do we make our systems less vulnerable to being hacked? How do we reign in the urge to be isolate ourselves in our like-minded camps?  The challenges presented by our desire to be constantly connected will only grow. We can only hope to manage it better than we did in 2016.

Tech Almanac is on Facebook and Twitter

It might seem ironic for someone who writes about technology and innovation, but I have been resisting the use  of Facebook and Twitter.  Actually, I tried Twitter over a year ago but I quit because I found tweeting about what I had for breakfast to be a colossal waste of my time and boring to everyone else.  Facebook was a bit of a different animal.  I thought of Facebook as a semi-live chat for college and high school kids or maybe a good way to share pictures of the last vacation.  I have had a Facebook account for a year but have hardly used it.

Then I started following the Chicago History Journal blog.  Sharon Williams, who writes the blog, clued me in to the value of Facebook and Twitter as a way to enhance and connect a blog to a wider group of readers.  When I saw how interesting her own pages were, I took the plunge.

So if you don't know about it yet,  I have extended the Technology Almanac to Facebook here.  My Facebook page isn't the same as what you will find in the blog.  The blog links will show up there, of course, when they are posted but most of what is on Facebook are articles and links relating to topical stories about technology and innovation.  I follow the news pretty closely and when I see something that I think others might find interesting, I post it on my Tech Almanac Facebook page.

Similarly, I have a Twitter page for the Tech Almanac that more or less mirrors the Facebook page. They link back and forth so if you prefer one over the other, you can see what's up in stories relating to technology and innovation.  If you see a story that you think would be of interest, send it my way.

One of the things I have learned out of this experience is that Facebook and Twitter are more than tools to connect with friends.  The number of businesses and institutions that are on both of these platforms is astounding.  We are becoming ever more dependent on our social networking tools.  That is not to say that there isn't a lot of mindless clutter out there.  Arguably, the time that I spend minding the store on Facebook and Twitter might be more productively spent elsewhere.  But I do learn a ton by what I see passing by my Facebook and Twitter windows.

I'm not sure where all this is leading but I do know that the way we connect and communicate is undergoing seismic shifts.  I guess I want to go along for the ride.

The History of the Internet

I came across an interesting graphic via first the Resource Shelf website which sent me to the Online MBA.  Both sites are worth a look.  Here's the graphic:


Via: MBA Online

You can date your entry into online technology by where you intersect this timeline.  Few of us had access to ARPANET.  In fact, most of us couldn't even connect to the internet until well after the launch of the World Wide Web in 1992.  It took the first web browser, Mosaic, in 1993 to let people begin to explore.  I started using the World Wide Web with that first browser.  I can remember clearly how blown away I was with what I could find even then.

What struck me about the graphic was how "early" some things happened.  Pizza Hut gets the nod for jumping on the the e-commerce bandwagon as early as 1994.  But even more striking was how many technologies that we now simply take for granted have come about so recently:  Google in 1999, Wikipedia in 2001, and YouTube in 2005.  I use these services every day and never think of them as new.  Still, I often think to myself how incredible it is that I can find virtually anything from my networked computer.

As I write this, I am sitting on my screen porch connected over WiFi to my home network.  I have checked my e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS reader accounts.  I have looked at a product offering from Woot.  I looked up a very informative article on hummingbirds on Wikipedia (a hummingbird is at the feeder next to the screen porch).  I listened to hummingbird calls via the Cornell Birds website's mp3 files. I checked the weather forecast and the news headlines.  And I haven't left my laptop and my cup of coffee.  All this in only 17 years since the first web browser was launched. If you are younger than 20, you have no recollection of life before the web.  How quickly we take it all for granted.

What isn't on the chart, is the record of the Creative Destruction that has come with this new tsunami of technology.  All of this has come with a cost.  Not so much in the obvious impacts like the decline of daily newspapers (although that is pretty bad, especially if you are a journalist). The greater impact has been in the less visible world of corporate and government information systems which have shed layer upon layer of people whose jobs have been replaced with software systems.  Managing the transitions in technology is tough.  Maybe "surviving the transitions" would be a better description.  Still, I would not want to go back even if I could.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to check FaceBook and a Tweet has just popped up.

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. Penguin Press, 2008


[UPDATE:  I just read that Clay Shirky gave the keynote speech at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services, NFAIS, Conference.  He summarized his book in five words: Group Action Just Got Easier.  You can read an interesting post on his speech (which augments what I have written here) at the blog, What I Learned Today.]


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Ready or not, here comes the 21st Century!

   - From Lyrics of Virtual Party, by Noel Paul Stookey (Paul, of Peter, Paul, and Mary)

Paul Stookey's little comic song, Virtual Party, tells the story of a married man who decides to visit an internet chat room party late at night only to meet up with a mysterious woman who wants to get to know him better.  He loses his nerve and goes to bed only to discover that his wife, whom he thought was sleeping, had insomnia and is signed on to her computer and is that mysterious woman he met online.  As the title implies, we live in a world where the virtual is becoming the norm.

The song struck me as being particularly relevant having just finished reading Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody.  I don't know where I was in 2008 when it was first published but I recently found it on a table in Barnes and Noble and it looked interesting.  It was.  Mr. Shirky is a well-known contributor to many newspapers and periodicals. He mainly focuses on the impact of the internet as an agent of change.  This book is an extended exploration of the topic and he turns over some very interesting rocks for us to peer under. 

Mr. Shirky's basic premise is that the almost costless nature of connecting with each other on the internet has re-written our most fundamental assumptions about what is possible for people to accomplish by working together.  His examples, which range from the effort to recover a stolen cellphone to writing the largest encyclopedia in history (Wikipedia), bring his points to life.  The "costs" of bringing groups together has collapsed to the point where goals can be easily pursued that no corporation could ever afford to take on.