Our Mediating Devices

September 10, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I started this post with two different impressions about the phone and computer screens that stand between us and what we want to realize or accomplish—that is, the devices that increasingly mediate our everyday experiences. I still don’t know where to take these impressions.

Two articles about technology gave rise to them. One was about how “smartphone-savy millennials and Gen Zers” answer the doorbell by sending text messages instead of opening the door and facing the person who is ringing it. The other came after reading an interview about Microsoft teams that are building products which try to respond to human needs instead of asking the end user to do all of the adapting. The first story illustrates how smart phones diminish human interaction, while the second suggests a role for technology that actually might enhance the human experience. One seems a warning and the other welcome news.

Who knew that young people don’t answer their doorbells, and may even be “terrified” when they ring. I would have put this article in the armchair anthropology pile, but its observations and conclusions came from Christopher Mims, who studied neuroscience and behavioral biology before he became a technology reporter around 15 years ago. He also posts regularly about the intersection of these disciplines, and I invariably find myself nodding to his conclusions. So maybe something more is happening in these awkward exchanges that young people are trying to have with cell phones in between them.

Instead of answering the doorbell that announces an expected delivery of, say, a pizza, this teen through 30 cohort apparently would prefer that the delivery person text them when arriving so they can text back with payment, a tip, and a request to leave the pizza by the door. Both would prefer never to encounter the other. The talking heads who commented on this behavior included:

– a so-called “teen-whisperer” who said that text means “friend” while a door-bell says “outsider;”

– the founder of Ring, a WiFi connected doorbell that enables those inside to communicate with those outside without making eye contact; and

– a psychology professor who says this behavior suggests a further decline in face-to-face interaction by teenagers and young adults, with implications for their emotional closeness and mental health.

While young people may be on the leading edge of this kind of social change, I think what Mims is observing effects everyone who uses mediating technologies and not just young people. Do I bank on-line because I don’t want to deal with tellers? Do I click on a website’s customer service bot because I prefer it to conversation with an actual customer service representative? By doing so, am I slowly losing my ability to interact in an effective manner with other people?

And there are other questions too. What should parents do when their child rarely seems to interact with anybody live? What should I conclude from a table of college students at Shake Shack this week, all on their phones but never talking or making eye contact with one another? What do you make of people who email you at work when they could walk a few steps and either ask you or tell you something in person?

I don’t know what’s happening here, but it may be affecting our wiring at a very basic level. From a values perspective, it’s difficult to see how the “distancing” that our devices permit could be improving how we relate to ourselves or to one another.

Besides Mims, another voice in the space between human behavior and technology is Sherry Turkel at MIT. A TED talk that she gave a few years back catalogs similar concerns about the anti-social uses of mediating technologies.

On the other hand, when a mediating device tries to respond to human needs and create new possibilities it leaves a better impression.

Dave Nelson is Microsoft’s lead designer, and he makes many interesting statements in an interview he gave recently, including how early exposure to Flash technology allowed him “to make things come alive and get rich feedback from screens, which were traditionally hard to interact with.”

By the time he got to Microsoft, the desire for even greater responsiveness led him and his designers to focus more on meeting customer needs than on how to get people to adapt to a device’s limitations. As he put it: we began to look at “how we can get the computer to be more human-literate rather than making people more computer literate.”

The break-through came during exchanges between Microsoft engineers and customers while developing a new platform called Compass.

The engineers saw firsthand the range of emotions that real people had while working with their product. They saw the setup, the trepidation of trying to get in, the pain points, and the joy…This became the central turning point for our culture today. Now every single person in the [design] team has gone on site and spent time with our early customers. This has never happened before at Microsoft. The change in perspective for engineers and other personnel has been huge…It has put people at the forefront of our processes.

It should also be said that Microsoft’s designers had never been this integral to a product’s development before. They were suddenly interacting with people who don’t sit in front of screens all day—baristas in coffee shops, construction workers, health care professionals—who needed interfaces that streamline everyday work functions like scheduling. In a way, Nelson’s designers were learning how people speak so they could teach new Microsoft programs how to understand what was needed and be more responsive to those needs.

This story made me ask some additional questions.

– If new devices can sense our needs for better scheduling and work flows, can they also support and even encourage qualities that make us more human and less like machines?

– Can they enable richer human connections instead of making us increasingly isolated from one another?

– Will devices allow us to expand our capabilities at work or will they marginalize us until they eventually replace us in the workforce?

– Will our technologies enable greater human freedom and autonomy or herd us like sheep to buy certain things and behave in particular ways?

When I read this week about doorbells and Microsoft’s design team, I realized how little I’ve thought about these questions and that the future of technology for me extends no further than the features I’m likely to find in my next iPhone. Maybe it’s because this future comes so fast that all of our energy is spent trying to absorb what’s here instead of anticipating what might be coming next or thinking about its implications.

Still, concerns are being raised about the impact of recent technologies on human behavior. Frank Wilczek (from the “Learning By Doing” post two weeks ago), Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others recently signed an open letter about the urgent need for a debate about advances in artificial intelligence. But beyond this plea, few have been bold enough to propose how the human future should unfold in the face of these innovations, or to publically debate the proposals that have been made. It should also be said that almost none of the rest of us seem to be clamoring for such a debate.

Oscar Wilde famously said: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always headed.” Wilde said that a century ago, but instead of visions of more humane futures all we seem interested in today is the entertainment value of post-apocalyptic worlds. Articles about avoiding doorbells and technology that begins with human needs provide grounds for concern as well as hope when it comes to what’s next. Maybe they are as good a place as any to start the process of dreaming ahead.

“Dreaming Different Dreams”

December 12, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Along with all the other reasons that were given, Jang Song Thaek was purged from North Korea’s leadership this week for “dreaming different dreams.”

According to a government statement, he “used drugs;” left home to “squander foreign currency at casinos;” had “improper relations with several women;” was “wined and dined at back parlors of deluxe restaurants;” and “was engrossed in such factional acts as dreaming different dreams.”

The official indictment capped his specific transgressions with an existential one. It wasn’t just what he did. What he believed in and hoped for also damned him. In the tick off of charges, Jang went from being the second most powerful person in North Korea to becoming non existent.

JANG DELETED FROM OFFICIAL VIDEO OF FEARLESS LEADER KIM JONG UN

The literal translation of Chinese, Japanese or Korean phrases sometimes provides an oddly distilled perspective, along with a glimpse of a worldview quite different from our own. Of course, it should be expected when we eavesdrop on places that are called the Hermit Kingdom (North Korea) or where the seat of power used to be the Chrysanthemum Throne (Japan). Yes the world is flatter, but certain expressions reveal a startlingly divergent view of reality.

The gap in our understanding often has to do with whether individuals belong (that is, contribute to the “harmony” of the physical and spiritual world) or, in this instance, have stopped belonging. If I am “dreaming different dreams,” it is not only my actions but also my thoughts and aspirations that are dangerously out of sync with the order of things. If Jang’s excommunication seems ludicrous to us, it has as much to do with our personal views about individuality and privacy as it does with North Korea’s leaders.

Of course my dreams are my own….

But not so long ago, we shared our dreams with others, and our “inner life” was something we regularly brought into the broader conversation. Engaging with our communities through our politics or religion, we debated and envisioned a more perfect world together. We had more collective ways of organizing our reality then, our habits of living. We had something approximating a common worldview–all the stuff packed into that wonderful German word Weltanshauung–and were busy building into that world a proper place for minorities, women, and honoring the environment.

Not so long ago, common dreams for a better world were part of the fabric of our daily lives.

“Why don’t we have a shared project like putting a man on the moon anymore?” is how our nostalgia for America’s aspirations is often expressed. A quest like that was a way to declare our confidence and keep fear at bay instead of allowing that insecurity and fear to dominate our behavior and civic discourse.

One thing that a culture does is to give people ways of thinking about what they are doing. They can see the connections among their work, their talents, and the needs of the world. They perceive their work as belonging to a whole, some of whose possibilities are good which they help to sustain.

(Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today, at 40, emphasis added) It wasn’t so long ago that we dared to wage a War on Poverty and believed we could eliminate racial inequality because of values that we shared. But even 9/11 couldn’t jolt us back into a sense of common purpose.

What we need are dreams that are big enough for who we are today.

Of course, you have to belong to, believe in, dream about something that’s bigger than you are before you can feel the pain of being excluded from it. You need some of that experience, I think, to begin to imagine the oblivion of being “taken out of the picture,” like Jang was. Sharing a vision of the future with others in a community of dreamers brings purpose into your life and your work, while being off on your own (often as not) leaves you colder and more afraid. (On Being Part of Something Bigger Than Yourself)

“Dreaming different dreams” describes a transgression that we no longer have words for. The only cultural sins we have left are infringements on individual freedom, rights or privacy.

It is left to a strange, oppressive place like North Korea to remind us, with compact eloquence, how small the dreams we have for ourselves have become.

(Note to readers: After this post was published today, I learned that Jang Song Thaek had been executed by the North Korean government as a traitor.)

The Regret-Free Encore Career

February 14, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Sometimes regret is what you feel when it’s too late to do much about it—your deathbed, most commonly. But we also feel regret when there’s plenty of time left. All that stands in the way is our reluctance to recover the opportunities that are still out there, waiting for us.

The voice of regret over the road not taken most often has the whine of excuse about it. I couldn’t afford to take the chance. I’m over-extended. I’m too tired. I need to be better prepared. I can’t do this alone. I have too many obligations. My family won’t be on-board. What will other people think?

What if I fail?

By the time the excuses begin, the flirting with the new and unfamiliar has usually passed. You’ve pulled yourself back into the comfortable territory where you started. Your heart rate is back to normal, what you feared is now safely behind you. The only residue that remains is regret around what might have been. What if I had pushed a little farther, taken the chance, grabbed the brass ring when it appeared, trusted my instincts, trusted myself?

I spoke to an accomplished group of senior managers this week. In their fifties and sixties mostly, all were in or between Big Jobs. Some of them were also caught between seeing themselves doing those Big Jobs and, well, just sitting at home not doing them.

These are pretty stark alternatives. The good news is that there’s a way to get to the productive work all of us still need to do, and it doesn’t involve trapping yourself between this kind of all or nothing.

Limiting your future to a corner office is unrealistic if there simply aren’t enough corner offices to either barricade yourself in or catapult yourself back into. Your chances may simply be better elsewhere.

Moreover, if you’re not in that corner office today, maybe there’s a good reason that you’re not, a reason that involves your temperament, your skills, or your inability to read the handwriting on the wall. So why not step back and make a plan for your future work now that squarely confronts your deficits, acknowledges the value of your native talents, and aligns your next job with the best vision that you have of yourself?

Honestly confronting your deficits could mean honing existing skills or mastering new ones. But as often as not it’s learning to be more adaptable to changing circumstances. That is, a lot more resilient than you are today.

If you’re too rigid, you may simply need to become more adaptable. Stated differently, if your Boomer Balloon is filled with too much stale air, it may be time to let some of the stale air out and some fresh air in.

The best way to do so is by throwing yourself into circumstances where you’re not comfortable, where the particular improvements you need to find can only come—one dogged attempt at a time—with failure as your teacher. That’s the path to resilience. The question is really a pretty simple one: Are you tough enough to know when you need to toughen up?

On the other hand, time spent on deficit reduction should never mask what fueled your accomplishment in the first place. Identify the skills that have always given you the most pride when you’ve exercised them, and build your future on the highly transferable talents that have always set you apart. It’s a waste of time being bitter that strangers in the job market aren’t valuing these talents enough, but you’d be a fool to undervalue them yourself.

Finally, while you’re busy being honest with yourself, also consider investing some of the optimism you’ve been mustering as the candidate for the next Big Job around those things you always wished you had done, but were never brave enough or wise enough to have done before.

The land of your regrets is where you think about the grreat job that got away, the kind of work that quickens your heart beat and makes your palms sweat when you think about it, like helping to solve a real world problem, or meeting real needs for different products or better services than anyone else is providing.

There are challenges out there with your name on them. With focus and tenacity, you can figure out a way to not only make a living by confronting them, but also to live more fully and to find a better balance of effort and fulfillment than you have ever enjoyed before.

It’s the time in our lives when age, experience and self-confidence can also be good teachers, when we let them.

The irony, of course, is that once you build yourself a regret-free encore career, you’ll find yourself wondering why you ever spent your time putting all your eggs in the basket of that next Big Job.

On Having Courage and Dignity Under Fire

June 22, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

You pursue work that matters because you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. By doing so however, you

inevitably run afoul of those who want to keep everything more or less like it is.

Attracting controversy also pushes you into the spotlight. With the lights in your eyes and a welter of voices clamoring around you, the heat of the moment calls upon you to say and do things that can either advance your goals, or set them back.

How you’ll respond at such times is important. It’s helpful to think about it, start visualizing how you want these moments to play out before they arrive.

While there are many who have handled these situations badly, there are also those who have summoned up the kind of amazing grace we can learn from. This past week brought just such a lesson.

Margaret Farley is a nun, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and the emerita professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she has taught for 40 years. Throughout, she has been a celebrated teacher as well as the author of numerous books and articles, including Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York, 2006).

Last week, after concluding an investigation that had lasted 3 ½ years, the Vatican’s Magisterium (or Teaching Office) condemned Just Love, because it “affirms positions that are in direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality” and therefore “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling or formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”

In other words, the views Margaret Farley expressed in her book put her outside the boundaries of her faith. Her teaching itself—through argument and discussion in her book—was found to be an improper path for believers to follow in seeking either truth or understanding.

A half century ago, Margaret Farley chose to commit her life to a religious vocation of teaching within the Church. Since then, her work and her life have been united by this spiritual purpose.

Given her choices, the judgment she received last week is different than the rebuke of an employer, on the one hand, or the criticism of vested interests you are challenging, on the other. In each instance, what she has faced is more extreme.

The leaders of her own community of believers have publicly found that her work is incompatible with those shared beliefs. They have defined her as standing separate and apart from them. For a citizen, the word would be “traitor.” In a community of believers, it is usually “heretic.” Imagine standing where she stands today.

My aim here is not to take a side in this controversy but to comment on how Margaret Farley has conducted herself and continued her work in the midst of it. It is her courage and dignity—not her scholarship—that is teaching us today.

Her response was: Simple. Straightforward. Clear. Amidst a blizzard of media commentary (including in the New York Times and Washington Post) Margaret Farley issued one statement and gave one interview. She said her book was never intended to express “official Catholic teaching” but rather to help people “think through their questions about human sexuality.” It was an effort to move away from “taboo morality” and bring “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources” into the discussion.

Not Angry or Contentious, but Disappointed about issues never addressed and opportunities lost. The Church said: “Sister Farley either ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others.” She, in turn, asked: “Should power settle questions of truth?”

If we come to know a little more than we knew before, it might be that the conclusions we had previously drawn need to be developed, or even let go of. [To say that wasn’t possible] would be to imply that we know everything we need to know and nothing more need be done.

Not Seeking the Spotlight, but Standing her Ground once she was in it. Because the Church “is still a source of real life for me, it’s worth the struggle. It’s worth getting a real backbone that has compassion tied to it.”

Margaret Farley was my teacher at Yale. I know her as humble and earnest: engaged like the best teachers, careful like the best scholars. I sense enormous reluctance in her notoriety: for her to be taken as a champion for divorce or gay marriage, or even as a spokesperson for believers who are drifting from their Church because of its difficulties addressing questions of gender and sexuality. But her reluctance does not preclude her resolve—and this is where we find her today.

Once Margaret Farley was thrust into the spotlight, she knew what to do.

Recipe

March 29, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We all like feeling rewarded for work that makes things better. Many of us are finding this kind of satisfaction in social benefit games. At the same time, we’re also learning how to bring transformative change into the world by getting some practice first.

Your rewards include feeling good about yourself because of all you’re accomplishing and the abilities you’re developing while doing so. In social games like WeTopia, you reap other rewards too. There is pride in the growing productivity of your community, empowerment from your ability to support those in need, and your own increasing prosperity.

Games like this also bring the best ingredients of the for-profit and non-profit worlds together.

They give you the virtual experience of work where you can do well by doing good. They stir your imagination, and get you thinking about new kinds of work that you could be doing right now in the real world.

On the other hand, it’s disquieting to feel that someone is “behind our screens” watching us and gaining insights about human behavior because of how you, me (and millions like us) are playing these games. These social scientists and marketers are looking at how we respond to different sounds, colors and kinds of movement. They are even changing the variables we encounter in these games while we’re playing them to see if we do things differently or faster or better.

What’s going on here, and where is the upside for us in this kind of scrutiny?

Kristian Segerstrale is an economist and co-founder of a company called Playfish that makes on-line games. In an interview, he described the difficulty social scientists have traditionally had gaining reliable information from behavioral experiments because they can’t control the variables that exist in the real world. By contrast, in virtual worlds:

the data set is perfect. You know every data point with absolute certainty. In social networks you even know who the people are. You can slice and dice by gender, by age, by anything.

Segerstrale gave the following by way of example. If your on-line experience requires buying something, what happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? “You can conduct any experiment you want,” he says. “You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that’s just not possible to discover in the real world.”

What this means is that people who want to sell you things or motivate you to do something are now able to learn more than they have ever been able to learn before about what is likely to influence your behavior.

Being treated like ingredients to be “sliced and diced” has risks for us, but also possibilities.

None of us want to relinquish our freedom and become automatons, manipulated into doing what others want us to do. We do well to remember national experiments in social engineering, like the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in China and the choreographed death spiral in North Korea.

But we also need to recognize the potential in this brave new world for good.

The behavior of millions of men and women whose voices had never been heard before was changed by lessons learned on-line, ultimately producing the Arab Spring.

The behavior of individuals facing repression every day in places like Iran and Syria is fortified by the virtual support of those who are struggling with them.

Your behavior, and the behavior of millions of people who are playing these social games, is being shaped and reinforced in similar ways. It is a training ground for changing the real world with new and better kinds of work.

Social benefit games are giving us a recipe for transformation—and the ingredients are getting better all the time.