Attack of the Trip Advisors

One of the inventors of the Web told me, back at the 20 years celebration we hosted at CERN in 2009, that “the Web gave a voice to a lot of socially challenged people”.

Seeing this documentary on Trip Advisor reminded me of that. It shows two kinds of extremists going head to head. One one side, the reviewers who enjoy the newfound powers the web gave them. One the other, business owners who think customers should all be quieted unless they have something positive to say.

Of course these two words collide abruptly on the web, and the documentary is quite interesting and even a bit disturbing, when you understand that one of the reviewers is actually using his reviews as a way to rebuild his ego after going through a bullied childhood. He is the guy you see being so picky about things, creating a sense of usefulness through more-than-reasonable attention to details.

Catch Attack of the Trip Advisors if you can, it is running on channel 4 these days, and in VOD if you live in the UK here (YouTube preview here).

Dream jobs of pre teens: today vs 25 years ago

A fascinating comparison of pre teens aspirations, today vs 25 years ago. Much of the evolution of society can be seen in these numbers. From middle class, scientific, requiring-long-studies jobs to entertainment, instantaneous, artistic professions.

Careers in teaching, banking and science have suffered the biggest fall in popularity over the last 25 years according to a new generational study which reveals a seismic shift in career aspirations within the space of a single generation.

The study reveals that for many of today’s pre-teens, traditional careers have been superseded by the desire for fame, stardom and celebrity and suggests that the media is now just as influential, if not more so, than parental advice when it comes to potential careers.

Top ten career aspirations of pre teens
Today	25+ years ago
1 Sportsman 12% 2 Popstar 11% 3 Actor 11% 4 Astronaut 9% 5 Lawyer 9% 6 Emergency services 7% 7 Medicine 6% 8 Chef 5% 8 9 Teacher 4% 10 Vet 3%	1 Teacher 15% 2 Banking/ finance 9% 3 Medicine 7% 4 Scientist 6% 5 Vet 6% 6 Lawyer 6% 7 Sportsman 5% 8 Astronaut 4% 9 Beautician/hairdresser 4% 10 Archeologist 3%

Link

Automation vs piloting skills

Interesting article about how “automation addiction” has eroded pilots’ flying skills, to the point that it is has contributed to “hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years”. Scary, one more point for the whole “technology is making us stupid” (example here) point of view.

Pilots’ “automation addiction” has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don’t know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.

Some 51 “loss of control” accidents occurred in which planes stalled in flight or got into unusual positions from which pilots were unable to recover, making it the most common type of airline accident, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Link

Myths of the near future

Here is an interview I did for Canvas8, to discuss our constantly changing, sometimes troubled relationship with technology and the impact it has upon our lives. I explain why we already use the technologies of the future every day but barely notice them.

What are the biggest cultural shifts/drivers influencing technological innovation at the moment?

I think people themselves are making the most impact on technologies. It has been quite a shift, one that took a lot of time to happen. Back in the early days, technologies would show up without much effort being put into their usability. As users we simply had to adapt to them, and because technologies were mastered by a small elite, there was barely any feedback coming from the bottom to the top. Technologies provided such a leap from the past ways of doing things – the leap from the typewriter to the word processor, for example – that the general attitude would be “it’s good enough, I can live with the unfriendly interface and limitations”.

Then users started to be more savvy, to feel better about their own capacity to have an idea that could make a particular technology better. Many technologies became the work of teams open to feedback, and some projects even turned completely transparent and open source (not only in software, but also in hardware). Today, innovation is really driven by users, in all their diversity, with all their specific needs, and they are changing technology more than the technologists themselves, creating new uses for a specific tool by  translating it into their own languages, contributing bug reports and new ideas, and hacking commercial devices to make them better suited to their needs. For example, Twitter has developed into its own self-perpetuating ecosystem through the input of ordinary users.

What were the hot topics at Lift ’11 – the ideas that particularly resonated with people?

Two ideas really struck me: one speaker, Kevin Slavin, talked about the importance of algorithms. I heard again a couple of days ago an expert on financial markets explaining how the recent movements in the markets were “driven by computers” who “probably lacked some form of human supervision because of the August vacations”. Machines are playing a huge role in our society, to an extent that I was not aware of, and this raises a lot of questions. For example, who will be responsible when an accident happens involving an automated car?

The second idea which I found fascinating emerged from the talk of Hasan Elahi. He showed how technologies can be turned back, and provide a form of privacy through over-sharing. He basically games the system of surveillance, and gives us a nice hint for the future. We might not be losing our privacy; privacy is simply not something you are granted at birth as in the past. Now you have to build a smokescreen around your identity.

Why do technologies fail? Is it enough to create something that’s relevant or useful – and how do you define those terms?

Because we mostly think about technologies, rarely about their usage. For a long time, innovation was in the hands of people who could not necessarily show the appropriate level of empathy. What I mean is that it takes a certain mindset, and some distance, to be able to say “this is how people will use my product”. Most of the time, we fall in love with the technology we create, and we forget to take that love out of the equation when evaluating whether our work will be used by people or not. It is a basic mistake, very true in video games for example. People get fascinated by their own creation, only to find out that it has no appeal to the general public. The truth is, users determine whether a technology is successful. They don’t care about the technical achievement, or the beauty of a particular solution. They want answers to their problems, and some technologies provide that, while others bring more complications than solutions.

To what extent does adoption of technology play into social dynamics?

Adoption mirrors social dynamics. Think of Facebook or Google+: if you are the only user, these technologies have no interest at all. Just like in social dynamics, we need groups to achieve certain things, and technologies do not allow us to escape life’s fundamental rules. We are connected, but still talking about views, attention, feedback, likes, visits. Technology mirrors ‘real life’ most of the time.

There’s been lots of discussion and development but, beyond science fiction, why are robots relevant to us now?

Robots are not science fiction. They are part of our daily life, but we barely notice them. Movies brought the dream of having an humanoid helper in every home – and the bestselling robot in 2011 is an autonomous vacuum cleaner. This revolution is happening, but most people (and the media) are missing it for two reasons: it has been promised to us for such a long time it is hardly at the front of many people’s minds, and what we expected is not what is happening, hence a false sense of inertia while it is one of the most active fields today.They are relevant to us because their logic is increasingly part of our lives. Robots are basically a way to automate tasks we don’t want to do, or that can be done better by computers. And when we look around us we see more and more automation, more and more self-controlled devices.

There’s an emerging trend for quantifying the self and others, driven by a desire for self-improvement. How might this evolve?

We are not just using machines to do what we do not want to do, but rather to do supplementary things, to augment our lives. This opens new possibilities that I find interesting, because we could become more aware of how we live. At the same time, this quantification is scary. I believe all the technology in the world will never replace a good discussion between a patient and a doctor, and this computerisation of our lives also disconnects us from more natural processes. It’s like talking to a friend to know that you are not doing enough sport, rather than having your watch remind you your body fat just went up.

What, to you, is the most significant technological development of the last five years and how do you see it evolving in the next five?

I think open and free-for-all collaboration was massive. The evolution of Wikipedia is interesting. At first, it made sense to open contributions to all, as there was no structure inside the community. There were no experts, nobody had a track record of providing consistently good information, nobody wanted to vandalise the pages because a Wikipedia page was meaningless. That was the first step, when we discovered the potential of opening things up, and letting people collaborate.
But then success came in, and brought with it a number of side effects: a link from Wikipedia was worth a lot, so people started to pollute articles with links to their own sites. Vandals defaced some pages and many debates opened up on controversial topics. Rules had to be put in place to limit openness, and several fundamentals had to be reinvented. People were not equal any more, and super users began to appear.

I find it fascinating how collective intelligence will evolve under the attacks of ‘massification’ and success, how those processes of open collaboration and trust will scale to millions of people and projects around the world. That’s a very, very hard problem and I believe a new order will emerge in the next five years.

How do you see technology use shifting in the near future, and what’s driving it?

I believe one of the things that will happen is that we will push back technology. An increasing number of people are worried about the effect of technologies on their life. For example, the more we connect on Facebook, the more we seem to disconnect from the things that matter to us (real friends). Or the time it takes to deal with email, which at this pace will soon become an ‘unproductivity’ tool.

The next evolution I see happening with some early adopters is that technology is put back in its place: as a tool, not an end in itself. People control how many networks they participate in, choose to shut down their phones more often, declare some ‘no-email days’, and decide to delete all emails that came during their vacations. More and more signs point to us reclaiming a bit of space from those technologies that have invaded our lives to an extent that was barely imaginable 15 years ago.

Interview conducted by Debbi Evans

Full article on canvas8.com

Social networks “are creating a vain generation of self-obsessed people with child-like need for feedback”

I am afraid the following claims contain a certain level of truth, despite the sensational tone that forces the reader to take the whole piece carefully. I am convinced there is a form of addiction to social feedback, and that we are just starting to find out the extent of changes this will trigger “in real life”.

Let’s wait and see if other “top scientists” back these claims. I still find it amazing that there are not more studies on social networks users, and the impact on actual social life. Have you seen such research?

Facebook and Twitter have created a generation obsessed with themselves, who have short attention spans and a childlike desire for constant feedback on their lives, a top scientist believes.

Repeated exposure to social networking sites leaves users with an ‘identity crisis’, wanting attention in the manner of a toddler saying: ‘Look at me, Mummy, I’ve done this.’

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, believes the growth of internet ‘friendships’ – as well as greater use of computer games – could effectively ‘rewire’ the brain.

Link

Why countries should innovate

Two recent examples of why, as a country, you should always try to take the lead on technological innovation.

The first comes from the recent ICANN decision on allowing “.anything” domain names. A US organization decides what is possible or not for the internet, puts a process in place that will force all the world’s companies to bid for their own names at the price of 185’000$ a pop. Most countries must be wishing they had more input on the way the internet’s address system is working.

 The organization that governs the Domain Name System, ICANN, voted this week to launch the new application process for an unlimited number of new top-level domains, despite lingering doubts and objections from trademark owners and others. This has been controversial, first, because many believe that ICANN has failed to justify the need for new top-level domains; second, because some fear that an explosion of new registries will threaten internet security; and third, because of the vast headaches it will cause brand owners who will face increased costs of monitoring and dealing with cybersquatting. ICANN‘s press release calls the development “historic” and “one of the biggest changes ever to the Internet’s Domain Name System.”

Link

The second example comes from the list of content removal requests from governments Google received over the past semester. LeMonde has interesting facts on the rate of approval these requests receive.

 The US dominate the rankings, with 4061 requests of which 94% received a response. Brazil is second, with 1804 requests of which 76% received a partial or complete answer, followed by India with 1699 requests (79% of response), UK (1162 requests, 72% response) and France (1021 requests, 56% responses).

Link

If Google was French, would the government have more success on its requests, from 56% up to what the US get (94%)? Probably.

This shows again that for governments, it is critical to understand the impact of technology much faster, because these tools inevitably end up having an effect on our daily lives. Innovating is the only way to “control” progress. It reminds me of the old law of online conversation: you can’t control it, so improve it. Become a better voice to become the voice that will be in charge tomorrow. Let’s hope this important lesson of the first phase of the digital revolution will be learned.

Real age vs perceived age

Interesting graph showing how people, at certain age, perceive themselves. As we get older, the gap widens and we seem to feel much younger (green line) than we really are (red line).

Found on pluslonguelavie.net

Generation Y vs Baby boomers

The tradition of western societies is that older generations always deny younger generation the right to their own culture and behaviors, in the name of things like “we worked harder than you ever will, our times were much harder”. Now what happens if things go the other way around, if the older generation leaves the younger folks with a world close to bankrupcy? Which way will the blame go?

Check this op-ed by David Brooks in the NYT, he nails it, and reflects on the challenges facing those graduating this year:

But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured.

Link

Evolution of empathy over a medical career

I recently watched Bridget Duffy’s talk at the GEL conference, where she presents her work as “Chief Empathy Officer”. She mentions at one point the evolution of doctor’s empathy over a career, and I find it pretty fascinating to see this key skill evolve with time. Doctors start by being idealistic, then lose empathy after their study, probably confronted with the reality of a job that can be tough, and where it is easy to treat people as numbers when you face the constraints of a modern health system. Then life kicks in and teaches a few lessons, bringing empathy back to the picture. Pretty much summarizes the evolution we all go through isn’t it?

The evolution of empathy over a medical career, and Bridget Duffy at GEL 2008.

Cyberbullying, coming to a social network near you

I wrote in 2007 that cyberbullying would reach us in 2-3 years (other articles on the topic here and here). Well, it is now spreading through Facebook, and as Dave Pell writes on the Huffington Post, “while it used to require a certain set of characteristics to thrive as a bully, the internet makes it simple for almost anyone to graduate from cowering weakling to kicking virtual sand in the face of friends and strangers in no time”. But the playing field can be leveled with a bit of creativity.

The connection between bully and target is so seamless that hate speech can often spread more rapidly than its originator ever intended. One assumes that’s the case with UCLA student Alexandra Wallace, who recorded a three-minute rant against Asian students, in particular those who use cell phones in her school library. In the video, which she posted on YouTube, Wallace shared her version of the Asian language (including several ching chongs and ling longs), urged Asians who come to UCLA to first adopt “American manners,” and for good measure even managed to work in a reference to the tsunami in Japan.

The video went viral. Its contents and the reaction it generated made it all the way to the pages of the New York Times. In a previous era, it would have taken Alexandra Wallace several lifetimes to even encounter as many Asian students as she managed to offend in three minutes. [...]

Modern victims of bullying have a much broader arsenal of tools with which to defend themselves. I’m reminded of those old match box covers that featured a Charles Atlas advertisement with the line: “Tired of having sand kicked in your face?”

Back then, the ad was for a muscle building program. [Today's] version of that ad could read: “Tired of having sand kicked in your face? Get a video phone and learn to develop snappy retorts that are shorter than 140 characters.”

None of this is intended to suggest a future free of bullying or a panacea that helps all the little guys win in the end. But in some ways, the playing field has been leveled. It’s not just about being physically tougher or being the type of person who thrives on conflict. Sometimes it’s about being smarter, funnier or more creative.

Link

Another one of these moments where the media will be tempted to say “technologies are evil”. Truth is, technologies just mirror the real world, and sometimes with a certain delay (who would expect that). At least we had 22 years of WWW without that becoming too much of an issue. I’m in a glass half full mood as you can see ;)