The processes by which technologies become adopted, accommodated, and normalized (and by extension, rejected, resisted, and marginalized) are incredibly complex. Existing culture, other technologies, demographics, and economics all interact, and all the while each of those factors also evolves over time. Taste-makers and the power of habit both play a role. Given that the latest wave of technologies affect people's minds and psyches in powerful ways that are not yet well understood, a few musings seem to be in order.
The MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle talks of our dependence on smartphones as a mechanism whereby people are reduced in importance; she says we expect more from devices and less from friendships. Despite the huge communications matrix in which we live, it’s common to fear that nobody is listening when we speak (or type). As a result, discourse can get amplified beyond healthy levels as people yell louder, literally and metaphorically, taking more and more extreme positions in the pursuit of clicks.
Turkle suggests that a fear of being alone is yet another of many paradoxes generating our communications practices. She posits, convincingly to my ear, that we need to learn how to be alone and to reflect before we can enter into meaningful, healthy relationships. Obviously the sheer volume of tweets, posts, and texts suggests that there isn't a lot of time for reflection, in the industrial west anyway, especially among those whose identities are still forming.
At the same time, we also leave more digital bread crumbs than ever before, making being alone a dubious proposition. I'm told school-age kids now routinely walk into a room and ask if Amazon's Alexa is present. Weirdly, we may feel like no _body_ is listening even as multiple _devices_ may be doing so. Numerous apps surreptitiously trigger the smartphone microphone without notifying the user; in one instance, sports fans were unwittingly turned into beacons alerting rights-holders to pubs broadcasting games without paying for the required license.
What will be the consequences of being tracked by what Shoshanna Zuboff (professor emerita at Harvard Business School) calls "big other"? What will be the personality traits of young adults who grow up on and around screens? What will be used for shaming, both publicly and privately? It’s instructive to consider that after electric lights came into household use, housewives were exhorted to keep kitchens sanitary, in part by buying white appliances (that are still called "white goods" in the trade). To probe just one facet of the comparison, will our kitchen counters get the equivalents of Fitbits, broadcasting germ or ant counts to waiting audiences?
What will potential feedback from everyday use (generated by these listening devices) mean for design? Today, if I'm responsible for a steering wheel or office chair, I have little sense of how people actually use it in life. Given how cheap sensors are becoming, who will collect the usage data, package it, and sell it back, potentially to my competitors or (as today) to advertisers? As of a year or two ago, Internet-connected Roombas were sending maps of their owners' houses back to the mothership, to take but one example. Will our physical world parallel the wide use of A/B testing in digital user experience design? What might such an environment look and feel like? (Disneyland might be one guess.)
What will become acceptable that was problematic only a few years ago? How will we know who's watching, listening, measuring, counting? What will be the legislative responses, and how much will they reflect massive lobbying by Facebook, Google, Amazon, games companies, insurers, and other businesses with many billions of dollars at stake? Google alone has been fined more than $9 billion for privacy violations by the EU in the past 3 years and it's hard to see any change in the company's culture or behavior. If fines don’t change anything, what will?
Will there be backlash, possibly in the form of a return to analog? A paper diary is invisible and thus worthless to anyone outside the author, and letters may be found to have a new-found charm compared to phone calls, texts, and emails. Movies and songs from streaming services can disappear suddenly: will more people want the certainty of physical ownership? Will any other deep-seated emotions overcome the fear of missing out that drives so much attraction to social media among my students who realize some of the costs of their use of the various services?
Never before have so many people been micro-targeted in massive behavioral experiments with little or no regulation or accountability. This is deeply concerning. Given the resilience of the human psyche, it's unclear what will turn out to be injurious, enhancing, and/or background noise in the long-term view of these matters: at the same time that people can survive horrific experiences, little nudges can also add up. Looking back from 2030 or 2050, what will people view of today’s world with amusement, horror, disgust, or bewilderment? What will be the equivalent of Big Tobacco, asbestos, margarine, or the moon landing?
One question looms large: given the pervasiveness of this stuff, how will anyone be able to find control populations for meaningful research? That is, how can anyone compare a psyche that is under constant surveillance and manipulation to that of someone with fewer external factors at work? That leaves us where we started: what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” appears to have become normalized, another extension of Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy’s 1999 admonition to “get over it” when people asked him about privacy.
The fact that such an attitude was shocking 20 years ago feels almost quaint in light of the intervening revelations about Facebook, the NSA, and dozens of entities in between: what McNealy controversially saw as routine was significantly less invasive than what is done today. It feels a bit like the parable (now well debunked) of the frog in boiling water. Whether the metaphorical water is heating fast or slowly, it does seem like some jumping out of the pot might be in order, and quickly.
Posts
