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.

iPhone: Computer in My Pocket

Two weeks ago, I (finally) bought an iPhone 4S. I had been debating whether to buy one for a long time. For someone who writes a blog on technology, I felt almost as though I was some kind of anachronism. How could I not have a Smart Phone? Many of my friends have had one for years.  I was still on my plain-vanilla cellphone which, in addition to making calls could even send text messages using a little keyboard! Ooooh.

So why so long?  Well, I didn't want to be one of those people who whips their iPhone out walking down the street or while they are sitting in a darkened movie theater or while they are at the dinner table. I am all for connectivity but is it necessary to check your email or text messages every ten minutes?  The answer, I think, depends on your age. If you are a twenty-something, your life revolves around social networking. The expectation is that you are always online. Your friends want immediate responses. If you happen to be a little older, the fact that you can email someone when you get back to your home computer seems like connecting at light speed compared to growing up with snail mail. For the most part, my friends are not hanging out on line waiting for instant responses on where to meet up for tonight's social event.  Social networking with yourself isn't very much fun.

I have also learned that most of my email is, well... , boring. I have signed too many email political petitions and now my mailbox is filled mainly with the seemingly-urgent Rant-of-the-Day from one action group or another. I am suffering from Rant Fatigue and mostly hit the Delete button. Having removed the political email, I next winnow out the Groupons and Living Social coupons. Most days, I don't need a Brazilian or a facial so those go in the trash. What's left is an all too meager number of real emails. So, I didn't get an iPhone to check my emails and text messages.

Why did I get the iPhone? I wanted a mobile Information Appliance. I wanted to be able to look up locations on Google Maps. I wanted to find a good restaurant with Yelp. I wanted to know the answer to some question using Wikipedia. I wanted to check movie reviews on IMDB. I want to know if it's going to rain in the next 30 minutes. Could I have done without any of those functions? Sure. I have done without them so far. But the ability to have a computer in my pocket (for that is what a Smart Phone is) gives me an odd sense of freedom. I can navigate through my day a little better. I can find the answers to questions I will surely forget to look up by the time I get home (senior moments).  I feel...I admit it... hip.

I worried that I would become a slave to my new iPhone but, so far, I have surprised myself at how infrequently I check my emails (maybe for all the reasons I already mentioned).  My iPhone just nestles down in my pocket ready to give me answers when I ask. Oh, did I mention Siri?  This little artificial intelligence gnome is someone I want to get to know better.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to check my iPhone. I want to know...

Twittered to Distraction

For the last month or two, I decided to try to see if Twittering on technology topics would be useful. The result of my test is that I think Twitter can drive you to distraction and not add much to the conversation.  Let me explain my observations a little more carefully.

I Tweet under the handle @techalmanac1.  I decided that in addition to my sporadic blogs, I would look at what was going on the Twitter-sphere and pass on the best and most relevant posts on technology. I was following a host of technology sites including Scientific American, the Smithsonian, Science aggregators, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, and many others. I was less interested in the "what I am doing right now" sort of Tweet compared to links to news articles and reports. Over the month or two I was doing this, I found it took me hours each day to scan even the 100+ feeds I was following and review them for distribution. My reward? I grew my Followers from under ten to maybe 50 or so.  I appreciated the followership. In the positive column, I found that I was reading more about current and future technology and was more aware of what was the buzz of the day.  The negative was that there was very little being written that appeared on Twitter about the history of technology - my primary interest.

I'm calling a halt to the experiment. If I see something particularly relevant, I will pass it on but I would rather spend my time developing my own ideas than re-Tweeting someone else's work.  So if you are one of my 50 or so followers, thanks for following. I hope that by focusing on my own ideas, I will add more value to the conversation. I will still put items up from time to time but I won't be as focused on it as I have been in the last couple of months.

This experiment leads me to ponder how much time is used up in general with little to show for it.  The constant scanning of Twitter, Facebook, Google +, let alone email, has lead to a huge loss of human productivity. I know there are those who would argue that the connectivity leads to innovation. Sometimes, it probably does. Most of the time, it is lost energy. I also realize that this sounds like the kind of argument someone from my generation, i.e., older, makes about the way young people live their lives - lives connected via their iPhones and computers to their friends and working colleagues.  I understand that I don't understand, but I will still argue for less distraction and fragmentation and for more focus and integration. It is impossible for anyone to keep up with the ever-growing amount of data out there on the web.  It seems to me that figuring out what you are passionate about and pursuing it with as much energy as you can muster is still the formula for making the world a better place.

So here's to focus! May it re-emerge into the mainstream of our daily lives.

Of Photos and History

I love old photographs.  They show the technologies of the past in ways that words often fail to convey. My last post described the Shorpy website which features a variety of images, mostly beautifully cleaned up images, from the Library of Congress Archives.  I wanted to highlight two other websites I came across recently that are mashups of Google Maps and historical photos.

The first website is historypin.  This recent entry out of the UK provides a unique way to combine old historical views (worldwide) of street scenes with the more recent Street Views available in Google Maps.  The historical images can be switched on and off to allow you to see them superimposed on the way the street looks like today.  The site encourages users to upload their own images although in the current beta release version uploads are limited to five per user. There is also a place to annotate the photos under what the site calls Stories. The site has a little over 29,000 photos "pinned" at this point and is definitely worth a look.  There is a map view that lets you enter an address to see if there are any photos in locations that interest you.  Your best bet at this point is to look at the larger cities.

The second website, similar in concept, is SepiaTown.  This site also encourages you to upload your own images and shows the historical image in a side-by-side comparison with the current Google Street View of that location.  The website allows viewers to leave comments or share the photos through various social networking sites.  SepiaTown is also a relatively new entry and I haven't seen much in the way of posted comments but the photos are interesting and seem distinct from those on historypin.

All of these site are getting at a new way of social networking historical images. If they can get enough users, the power of the network will allow all of us to benefit with the accumulated knowledge that is in our collective heads.  I hope they live long and prosper.  But I think these sites are just the beginning experiments in how to plumb the depths of our knowledge about the more recent past. The pictures are interesting but they lack so many other ways in which they could be made even better.  For example, how about building links to Wikipedia articles or automating a simple Google search of keywords.  Which brings up another point: none of these sites allow tagging the images which would help to build out a set of images.  Other connections could include the vast libraries of online images in Flickr, Picasa, or any number of other photo sharing websites.  Online databases of historical newspaper articles could supplement the images in some cases. Just some thoughts.

If you know of any other websites like these or have any other suggestions on how sites like these could be improved, I would appreciate hearing about them.  Drop me a comment!