Technology 14 | unobtrusive lucidity

How Can I Assist You?

Remember the scene at the end of Vanilla Sky? The one where Tom Cruise’s character is running down the hallway screaming “Tech Support!!!” I really liked that scene. It was one of those literal “laugh out loud” moments in the theatre.

The irony is that, were I experiencing an existential crisis in which the technology and psychopharmacology used to re-structure my life were malfunctioning, I can’t imagine actually having to contact “tech support.” Because, based on most experiences, I think I would be screwed.

Take, for example, a recent support request that I filed with my ISP. I was requesting a simple change in options. As a result, they disconnected my service entirely. A day later it was back on, but only after three stressful phone calls. Then I receive an email link asking me to verify my primary email address. The link didn’t work. So I receive a nasty-gram saying I still need to verify. I try again. The link doesn’t work. Rinse and repeat. I email tech support. My response was a lengthy form-letter email explaining why they need to my verify email address, without taking any steps to solve the issue that I can’t.

An absolute vacuum in which intelligence cannot exist.

Now, not all tech support is created equal. Take Apple, for instance. Not only do their Genius Bar techs know exactly what to do with my devices, they’ve actually known more about other manufacturer’s devices in the past than the other manufacturer’s tech support. If only every experience could be like that.

Alas, however, when we call tech support…or customer service of any variety…we generally receive a reply that is obviously automatically generated (no, automated email, I don’t believe you were really written by “Kerri”). When we call, and speak to a living person, they are almost always not permitted to think for themselves, but must follow a rigid script that always begins by telling me how they would be happy to assist me.

And, actually, I know you’re not happy to assist me! I know you’re just doing your job. And I’m okay with that. So just do that job, and speak to me like I’m a person, without doing me the insult of reading to me off of a glorified teleprompter. I don’t need an emotional warm-fuzzy to be a satisfied customer…I just need you to support your product (And, no, I don’t believe your name is Roger, what with your accent and all).

Why is it that corporations force those who are assisting us by phone or email to not think for themselves? How can they not realize that having someone read a script to make them sound genuine and polite is actually the antithesis of permitting them to sound genuine and polite? Why are they so afraid to tolerate individual personalities? Has the industrial age so elevated the status of automaton that individuality and humanity can’t be tolerated?

I wish we were in a post-industrial age, but we’re obviously not, because corporate culture will not tolerate creativity, at least not in my experience. And when creativity is encouraged, it is strictly controlled, and thus, by definition, not true creativity. I hope we move toward the post-industrial at some point in the near future. And, I think I know when I’ll be able to tell that we are. I think it will be when every experience of customer service is like the one I experienced Monday evening at a locally-owned small business: matter-of-fact, but genuinely polite and outside-the-box, while also quick and efficient.

When someone isn’t forced to say, “My name is ______ and I’d be happy to assist you with that today, Mr. Brown.” Or forced to try to sell me something else at the end of a transaction.

If employers don’t permit employees to think for themselves, to learn and grow from mistakes, and think outside of the box, then we may just experience a generation incapable of assuming leadership professionally because they have never developed critical thinking skills. Especially because those skills aren’t taught in our public schools anyway.

And who knows what we’ll be met with when we’re running down the corridor of life screaming for tech support?

A scary thought, indeed.

Photo Attribution: upyernoz

The Book of About-Faces

Because I can count on one hand the number of my close friends who don’t use a social network, and because Facebook has been a dominant online presence for me for some time, Facebook’s announcement last week caught my eye. I’ll say up front that I’ve been disillusioned with Facebook for some time, and each of the “improvements” that they make to their user interface and website design leave me grumbling and trying to figure why they, like Microsoft, never actually improve anything, but merely make it more difficult to get to. Now, I’ve read several opinions about how positive this latest overhaul of Facebook will be, and I’ve heard at least one colleague say that this is the best thing Facebook has ever done. However, as I’ve come to use Facebook less and less (at least as far as my personal page is concerned, if not so much this blog’s Facebook page), I’m struck by the rationale behind this change.

Karen is much less of a sharer than me. I readily post details on Facebook about myself and us, including “checking in” to particular spots that I frequent. However, I post less intensely personal information on Twitter. Part of the reason I have chosen to use Facebook for this purpose instead of Twitter is because Facebook is a “walled garden;” that is, I have (at least until recently) had careful control over who sees this information. I know that my Twitter feed is open to the public, so I filter the information I post there more carefully. When we were in the hospital last week delivering our baby, I kept family and friends updated via status updates on Facebook in detail, but gave much less detail on Twitter. This is because I knew exactly who was going to see my Facebook updates, but not my Twitter updates. Part of Facebook’s overhaul, as I understand it, is to make sharing more automatic. I hear this to mean that my online activities will be fed into Facebook without my thought or ongoing permission. There is such a thing as too much sharing. I post a lot of the books I read, but not all of them. I share several links I find interesting, but not all of them, and certainly not all of them on Facebook. I want to give more awareness to what I share, not less. This seems to place me at odds with Facebook’s new strategy.

And, honestly, that form of sharing wasn’t the reason I set up a Facebook profile to begin with. Real-time sharing has always been Twitter’s strength, whereas a Facebook page, for me, is a static place to be able to communicate with friends and family even though their phone numbers of email addresses may have changed. I began to dislike Facebook when it began trying to copy Twitter…that is, when it tried to become a stream of real-time updates like Twitter was. I’ve always been a fan of a business being good at its specialty, and not trying to spread into multiple specialties. At some point, things become diluted until nothing is done well.

What grabs me more than disagreeing over the approach of Facebook, however, is the culture of sharing that has launched the changes. The mentality of our culture, and apparently of Mark Zuckerburg, seems to be that true happiness is only found when we’re completely transparent with everyone around us. As an introvert, I find the idea of everyone around me knowing everything about me to be remarkably similar to hell. Perhaps this is another way in which our culture rewards extroverts and prizes them as the examples of “good people,” but there is such a thing as too much sharing. I resonate with a comment that I read on Google+ recently to the effect of transparency being a good thing with politicians because we pay them, but opaqueness for the rest of us being an equally good thing. I think we forget that anything we post online has no expectation of privacy, and that its online forever, somewhere. Still, I have no obligation to be transparent to my neighbors. I only share what I choose to share, and I don’t like the idea of someone sharing things that I don’t agree to being shared.

My fellow-blogger, Ami, recently said that she intentionally never posts pictures of her children online, for any reason, and becomes upset when others post photos of them and tag her in them. As my daughter joined the world last week, I thought about this. I shared photos of her with my friends on closed networks, but not here, which I leave open to anyone who wants to read, and not on my Twitter feed, where I do the same. And, I was specific and careful about which photos I shared. When she’s old enough to make the decision of how much of her life she chooses to share, then she can, but I’m not going to rush that for her. Perhaps, after all, she’ll be an introvert like her dad.

My answer to the whole thing? Move away from social networks that don’t protect and respect my privacy. I’m over Facebook. I’ve found myself using Twitter much more fruitfully for some time, but I have to recognize that I use the two networks for different things. Earlier misgivings aside, I’m particularly taken with Google+, where I can meld my pubic and private sharing with a much greater degree of control than Facebook permits. I’m also considering creating a Tumblr page, and would gladly remove myself from the Facebook world altogether and make Google+ (and potentially Tumblr) my primary network(s).

Here’s the issue with that strategy, however, and its one that concerns me: Facebook, as a sort of patriarch of social networks, has achieved a “too big to fail” status. This manifests to me most readily in the fact that I find myself forced to keep using Facebook because that is where most of my friends remain. A social network, after all, is only as effective as how many of your friends, family, and colleagues with whom you can be social. So, for now, I continue to touch base with my Facebook page, but with much less frequency than I have in the past. I’m waiting patiently until more (or even most?) of my friends begin to use Google+, in the hopes of leaving Facebook behind forever.

What are your social network preferences? Are you tired of Facebook’s privacy abuses? Tell me what you think.

Photo Attribution: Nikke Lindqvist

Paper Treasures

I grew up in a small town. There was this little, locally owned store there, a craft store, as I recall, that my mother frequented, as she was a creative, arts and crafts type. I don’t really remember so much about that, because I remember the second half of the store, in which, in the back, was a section composed of bookshelves that took up two entire walls. Each shelf was crammed with books, floor to ceiling. They formed a corridor of books. These were old books, books or editions of books that you didn’t find in the new book chain stores. I found some treasures there.

A few months ago, I was walking around a local bookstore. In the back, in the pre-owned section, lost in a similar floor-to-ceiling book environment, I found an old copy of a Pulitzer-winning play by one of my favorite playwrights.

I suppose I’m sort of tackling a subject yet again that I’ve talked about here on more than one occasion, but this is back on my radar, so to speak, after this poignant article that I read Monday about the closing of Border’s first bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You should take the time to read the article, because it says something that’s worth saying. I found myself appreciative of the public’s sense of loss, about how the passion for the knowledge of literature became lost as the company transitioned to a “big box chain store.” I particularly love the story about how someone could stand in a spot at the front of the store, and call out the sort of question that we would type into Google today, and someone within earshot would know the answer. I’m left thinking of the loss of knowledge and growth of illiteracy in our culture.

I’m also finding myself re-exploring this conundrum, though. I love that, as ebook selections grow, I can find more and more obscure titles that I can read wherever I happen to be when I have time to read, without having the physical book with me. I love that I can find most of my book club’s monthly reading choices and download them virtually instantly. I’m enamored with the idea of being a doctoral student and having a semester’s worth of textbooks in a slim little device weighing less than a pound.

Yet, all the while, I remember my undergraduate days. There were no Borders in my college town…there, it was their imprint, Waldenbooks. I knew the manager of the Waldenbooks well, because I spent a lot of time there. He nearly always found the books I needed for papers and my own reading. He loaned me books that I needed for papers but couldn’t afford on his own account. I even got a friend a job there on my recommendation. Being connected to that bookstore was part of an experience. Regardless of how much I love the convenience of digital reading, part of the experience is missing. Even though I use a Nook, and thus receive special incentives to go to my local Barnes & Noble, there’s still something missing from the complete experience. It’s more present than Amazon, but still not totally complete.

So, here I am again. I love the progress of technology, but somehow I see more to lose as we move books to our digital realm. I have a friend who insists that you should treat books like friends. I think what he’s saying there is that there’s a different sort of relationship that we have with books than we have with music, for example. The time commitment is different, the intellectual engagement is different. I’m not placing one over another, I’m just saying that it’s different.

I’m sort of in this place where I want to have my proverbial cake and eat it, too. I want to buy books by downloading them to my Nook, but I want to go to local bookstores and find treasures in back corners in which I’ve lost myself. If the transition that the music industry made is any indication, this will likely not be the case. Record stores, after all, have vanished. I just don’t think we’ve lost with that what we stand to lose if bookstores suffer the same fate.

I’d like to see this ideal solution: Frequently, special edition DVDs include a code that can be redeemed for a download of the same film via iTunes. What if publishers included a code with new, hardcover books, that would give me an ebook edition to accompany the physical purchase? As a writer, I plan to publish my first novel as an ebook, and I’m thrilled about the self-publishing opportunities that are available now. I don’t want to do that exclusively, though, because I really want there to be physical copies of my book to pass on to my daughter.

Sort of like how Karen and I spent time in a local bookstore this weekend…the same bookstore in which I found that old play…purchasing physical books for our soon-to-be-born daughter, carefully choosing the editions in anticipation of when she’s old enough to read.

Sort of like how, some months ago, I entertained the idea of one day buying a Nook Color for our daughter, so that could enjoy multi-media children’s books. Karen scoffed at that idea, thinking that there’s just too much to lose. Somehow, I think she was right.

Eyes Wide Open?

If we find ourselves able to look back on anything from the last twenty years to identify as something that forever altered the landscape of culture, and even of national and international law, that thing will be the Internet. I’ve found it a point of interest, as I’m sure have many of you, that culture and legal systems, two things that historically experience slow and incremental changes, have experienced profound difficulty keeping pace with the change that the Internet is causing to occur at such a rapid pace. The number of technological changes that my generation has witnessed in its lifetime is largely unparalleled in history. But, before I start to sound like I’m writing a textbook, let me say why this is on my mind this week.

The reason was this article from the New York Times that ran earlier in the week, discussing how European citizens want the ability to delete personal information from the web, finding themselves deeply disturbed at how easy it is to discover facts (at times unsavory, as they are) with a few keystrokes, regardless of what that might mean for a person’s reputation. The article discusses how American philosophy departs from this, considering the right to speak the truth and one’s opinions far more valuable than the privacy of someone else.

I’m not sure where I fall on the continuum of which is most important; I think likely somewhere in between. As much as America likes to malign the UK as a surveillance state, the amount of information we are compelled by law to have on our person simply in the form of legal ID would be considered (as I understand it) an egregious breach of privacy in the UK. Traffic cameras have nothing on the fact that, in America, there is no expectation of privacy in a public place. I’m not applying a value judgement to that, simply making the observation.

Stieg Larsson’s protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, raises interesting questions in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and its sequels. As a master hacker, she can quickly discover anything wrong that anyone has ever done if it was ever recorded on the Internet. While Salander is a fictional character, she represents a very real skill set in existence today. And, as we know, the fact that we all are extremely dis-inhibited about what we post online (or are friends with someone who is dis-inhibited about posting things about their friends online), means that our poor judgement and mistakes will end up recorded on the Internet at some point. Its inevitable. As medical records and legal records move into the cloud, the sheer amount of information about us that can be discovered through potentially malicious intent will become even more of a frightening probability.

The questions that Larsson raises with Salander’s character, at least in part, revolve around forgiveness. The Western legal system is all about punishment, and very little about grace. How much more will this mindset be perpetuated when all of our mistakes are available at a few keystrokes? As the question was posed in a discussion I once heard, is forgiveness possible in a world where forgetting is impossible?

The Times Article points out that there is history on the side of the much older European states that America simply hasn’t experienced. Specifically, the article discusses regimes such as Hitler’s that held onto the skeletons in individuals’ closets forever should the need to ensure their compliance with the government ever arise. As frightening a concept as this is for a government, I’m left frozen in fear of this information in the hands of private enterprise, whose sole motivation may be corporate profit.

At the same time, I’m left considering the articles’ points about lawsuits against Google for its street view project, which many in Europe consider a gross privacy breach, and that I think is an incredible convenience. Similarly, I like that ads in sidebars can be customized to me. I think that this is an innovation, a step forward. I wonder, though, at what cost? I also wonder about counting that cost, and ending up in a position such as Massachusetts, where recording the police performing arrests has resulted in legal consquences. This, I fear, sets up an atmosphere where abuse of power is inevitable.

As information has achieved a fluidity that we have never before seen in history, privacy has accompanied it in achieving a fluidity of its own. I’m both amazed at this, and concerned. I recognize the concept of personal responsibility; that is, I recognize that anything on the Internet can be seen by anyone and stays there forever, and that you shouldn’t post it if you don’t want that to happen. I also, however, recognize that humans make mistakes, and those mistakes shouldn’t haunt us forever if we are to believe at all in forgiveness and grace. Certainly, they shouldn’t haunt our friends or colleagues who might have chosen to not post something, but which we have posted without knowing their wishes. I think that there has to be room to take back our mistakes, to have a record, as it were, expunged. Even our punishment-driven legal system makes space for that. As it, and our culture, rush to keep abreast of the explosion of innovation around us, I think that the places that we entrust with our data should make space for that, as well.

Photo Attribution: GothCandy

What Are We Going to do Tonight, Google?

When I was an undergrad, I moved off campus somewhere around my junior year. I used to make absolutely certain that I was home by 4:00 every evening, because the ultimate in escapism was awaiting as my reward. The thirty minute reprieve for which I longed as sweet relief from the stresses of undergraduate life? Animaniacs.

One of my favorite refrains from this classic piece of animated history was the exchange between Pinky and the Brain (who would later move on to their own thirty minutes of stardom), which went like this:

“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”

“The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!”

Yes, that was good comedy.

I mention this because I couldn’t help but hear these gene-spliced lab mice discussing their evil machinations when I read over the weekend that Google is in talks to purchase Hulu. I understand that (unfortunately) where profit is to be made, corporate giants will play. I just wish that there was more of a focus on doing something well, rather than making millions upon millions by doing everything one can that happens to be closely related to what they do well.

What I mean is this: Google is synonymous with search. Search is what they’ve always done better than anyone else. Recently, as the trend of the information age has shifted to the cloud, Google has positioned themselves (arguably very well) to become synonymous with cloud computing. What’s more, nearly everyone can access their web applications because these applications are free for the end user, supported by Google’s ad revenue. This is because ad placement is something else with which Google has attempted to make themselves synonymous. So, you see where I’m going with this? In one paragraph, I’ve counted three things that Google has positioned themselves to do better than anyone else. And I haven’t even discussed mapping, streetviews, geo-tagging, and book scanning and sales (some of which have resulted in some legal issues that are still playing out).

Now, obviously (as this blog is hosted where it is) I use Google. In fact, I live in my Google account for various daily functions, because its relatively simple, and Google makes it intentionally easy to export your data to other services whenever you so choose. Google also makes for the best email experience ever by general consensus. And, while I see the advantages of the cloud, its primary use in my life is in my role as a blogger. Otherwise, I use the cloud for basic data syncing, and often not even that (as a paranoid writer, I refuse to entrust pre-copyrighted manuscripts to cloud-based servers). I don’t even have much use for cloud-based music servers that are becoming all the rage, other than perhaps as a secondary back-up solution. Still, one has to recognize that the cloud offers enormous simplicity for many reasons, and, ultimately, more and more of our daily lives will find themselves migrating there simply because that’s the natural progression of our current technology.

Which leads me to my concern over Google.

There is much talk of Google’s corporate culture in the tech world. One of the corporations’s central values, apparently, is “Don’t be evil.” I scratched my head when Google bought YouTube. I deeply considered the Google Books project, but concluded that they were trying to do something for the greater good. If, however, Google purchases Hulu (a site that has replaced cable television for the tech-savvy…and did I mention that Google has a foray into the television world already?), I begin to suspect that they’re trying to take over the world. Well, the digital world, at least. If one digital provider assumes too much power, can we not legitimately hold some trepidation that absolute power will corrupt absolutely? Providing competition in the consumer technology sphere is admirable, but controlling an enormous number our everyday media outlets is a bit scary (one can make the ethical argument that any one source controlling the entirety of our media thus controls the thoughts of a culture…and its a short leap from there to search domination, as well).

Also at issue (as anyone who has struggled with time management will attest) is the fact that doing too many things results in doing none of them well. Google currently dominates search. They have the best mapping applications, both mobile and desktop. They created the mobile OS that is the only serious competitor to iOS. They own the largest video streaming site in the world, and are linking themselves to televisions in living rooms. They are valiantly attempting to make the world’s literature accessible to anyone with a web browser. They do chat, they do video calls, they do email, they do calendars. They do word processing. They do blogs. Is it possible to continue to do all of these well? We’ve already seen Google (arguably) fail with its attempt at micro-blogging, and only recently have they launched themselves into the social networking sphere.

I like Google. I use many of their cloud services, and I use them happily. No one can touch their search capability, and I like hosting this blog here. Honestly, however, there are some things for which I use other providers, based simply on the fact that I’m just paranoid enough to not want any one provider to have that much data about that much of my life. I wish that, instead of expanding into brave new worlds, Google would concentrate on the handful of things that they do better than anyone else.

I’m going to suspect that they’re having another night in the lab planning their next grandiose scheme at world domination when they launch their own music store.

Oh, wait. They already have.