Monthly Archives: June 2016

What Would a “Time Well Spent” World Look Like?

I’m worried about us. And it’s not just because we seem bent on death by ultra-conservative parochialism and xenophobia. I’m worried because I believe we’re spending all our time doing the wrong things. We’re fiddling while Rome burns.

Technology is our new drug of choice and we’re hooked. We’re fascinated by the trivial. We’re dumping huge gobs of time down the drain playing virtual games, updating social statuses, clicking on clickbait and watching videos of epic wardrobe malfunctions. Humans should be better than this.

It’s okay to spend some time doing nothing. The brain needs some downtime. But something, somewhere has gone seriously wrong. We are now spending the majority of our lives doing useless things. TV used to be the biggest time suck, but in 2015, for the first time ever, the boob tube was overtaken by time spent with mobile apps. According to a survey conducted by Flurry, in the second quarter of 2015 we spent about 2.8 hours per day watching TV. And we spent 3.3 hours on mobile apps. That’s a grand total of 6.1 hours per day or one third of the time we spend awake. Yes, both things can happen at the same time, so there is undoubtedly overlap, but still- that’s a scary-assed statistic!

And it’s getting worse. In a previous Flurry poll conducted in 2013, we spent a total of 298 hours between TV and mobile apps versus 366 hours in 2015. That’s a 22.8% increase in just two years. We’re spending way more time doing nothing. And those totals don’t even include things like time spent in front of a gaming console. For kids, tack on an average of another 10 hours per week and you can double that for hard-core male gamers. Our addiction to gaming has even led to death in extreme cases.

Even in the wildest stretches of imagination, this can’t qualify as “time well spent.”

We’re treading on very dangerous and very thin ice here. And, we no longer have history to learn from. It’s the first time we’ve ever encountered this. Technology is now only one small degree of separation from plugging directly into the pleasure center of our brains. And science has proven that a good shot of self-administered dopamine can supersede everything –water, food, sex. True, these experiments were administered on rats – primarily because it’s been unethical to go too far on replicating the experiments with humans – but are you willing to risk the entire future of mankind on the bet that we’re really that much smarter than rats?

My fear is that technology is becoming a slightly more sophisticated lever we push to get that dopamine rush. And developers know exactly what they’re doing. They are making that lever as addictive as possible. They are pushing us towards the brink of death by technological lobotomization. They’re lulling us into a false sense of security by offering us the distraction of viral videos, infinitely scrolling social notification feeds and mobile game apps. It’s the intellectual equivalent of fast food – quite literally “brain candy.

Here the hypocrisy of for-profit interest becomes evident. The corporate response typically rests on individual freedom of choice and the consumer’s ability to exercise will power. “We are just giving them what they’re asking for,” touts the stereotypical PR flack. But if you have an entire industry with reams of developers and researchers all aiming to hook you on their addictive product and your only defense is the same faulty neurological defense system that has already fallen victim to fast food, porn, big tobacco, the alcohol industry and the $350 billion illegal drug trade, where would you be placing your bets?

Technology should be our greatest achievement. It should make us better, not turn us into a bunch of lazy screen-addicted louts. And it certainly could be this way. What would it mean if technology helped us spend our time well? This is the hope behind the Time Well Spent Manifesto. Ethan Harris, a design ethicist and product philosopher at Google is one of the co-directors. Here is an excerpt from the manifesto:

We believe in a new kind of design, that lets us connect without getting sucked in. And disconnect, without missing something important.

And we believe in a new kind economy that’s built to help us spend time well, where products compete to help us live by our values.

I believe in the Manifesto. I believe we’re being willingly led down a scary and potentially ruinous path. Worst of all, I believe there is nothing we can – or will – do about it. Problems like this are seldom solved by foresight and good intentions. Things only change after we drive off the cliff.

The problem is that most of us never see it coming. And we never see it coming because we’re too busy watching a video of masturbating monkeys on Youtube.

Dad: Unplugged

I went off the grid last week. It wasn’t intentional. First we changed ISPs and the connectivity we take for granted had a hiccup. We were soon back online, but it was irritating none-the-less.

As luck would have it, it was a warning of what was to come. The main logic board on my laptop packed it in the next day and I was once more cut off. I realized how dependent I am on that little 10 by 15 inch slab of brushed aluminum and electronics. My world was unplugged. It felt like it was a very big deal.

Given that I felt like my right arm was lopped off, you would think this might impact the quality of my Father’s Day. And it did. But it was all for the better. I didn’t have to check emails. There were no task reminders beeping. No Google searches itching to be launched. No Facebook posts to like. I was off the grid. And the day was glorious.

I realized that the things my daughters were thanking me for on last Sunday had little to do with the thousands and thousands of hours I have spent online in my life. They seem to appreciate my sense of humor. That predated the Internet by at least three decades. They like that I’m fairly calm and levelheaded. To be honest, being online generally has a negative correlation with my current state of calmness. I’m a pretty good listener but I’m a much better listener when my attention is not being distracted by a nearby screen. I try to be thoughtful. I’ve previously gone on record as saying that I fear the thoughtfulness of our species is eroding in the world of wired instant gratification. And finally, I try to be a good and ethical person. While being online helps inform those ethics, they are mostly the product of that off-line thoughtfulness I try to set time aside for.

I certainly felt the pain of being off-the-grid, but I realized that much of the urgency that caused that pain was a by-product of my being online. I think technology is creating it’s own cloud of noise that continually intrudes on our lives. These things all seem urgent, but are they important? Are we ignoring other, more important things because of the incessant noise of our digital lives?

If we sat down and made a list of the values that we hold to be important to us, how many of these would require being connected? Would being online make us a better parent? A better husband or wife? A better son or daughter? Probably not.

Technology should be a tool we use to help express the person we are and what we hold to be valuable and true. Technology should not define us. It should not be it’s own truth. It should not create it’s own values. But when technology becomes as ubiquitous as it has become, I fear the line is becoming permanently blurred. Our being online may be changing who we are. I’m pretty sure none of us intend to be distracted, short tempered, disconnected or intellectually shallow but the world is increasingly being filled with such people. I sometimes am one of these people. And I’m usually online when it happens.

This Sunday reminded me that there are things that can wait. This includes about 99% of what we do online.

And there are things that can’t wait. Like children who grow up way too fast. My kids are now 22 and 20. I’m pretty sure neither of them wish their dad had spent more time doing things on his computer.

 

 

 

Can Stories Make Us Better?

In writing this column, I often put ideas on the shelf for a while. Sometimes, world events conspire to make one of these shelved ideas suddenly relevant. This happened this past weekend.

The idea that caught my eye some months ago was an article that explored whether robots could learn morality by reading stories. On the face of it, it was mildly intriguing. But early Sunday morning as the heartbreaking news filtered to me from Orlando, a deeper connection emerged.

When we speak of unintended consequence, which we have before, the media amplification of acts of terror are one of them. The staggeringly sad fact is that shocking casualty numbers have their own media value. And that, said one analyst who was commenting on ways to deal with terrorism, is a new reality we have to come to terms with. When we in the media business make stories news worthy we assign worth not just for news consumers but also to newsmakers – those troubled individuals who have the motivation and the means to blow apart the daily news cycle.

This same analyst, when asked how we deal with terrorism, made the point you can’t prevent lone acts of terrorism. The only answer is to use that same network of cultural connections we use to amplify catastrophic events to create an environment that dampens rather than intensifies violent impulse. We in the media and advertising industries have to use our considerable skills in setting cultural contexts to create an environment that reduces the odds of a violent outcome. And sadly, this is a game of odds. There are no absolute answers here – there is just a statistical lowering of the curve. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the unimaginable still happens.

But how do you use the tools at our disposal to amplify morality? Here, perhaps the story I shelved some months ago can provide some clues.

In the study from Georgia Tech, Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison used stories as models of acceptable morality. For most of human history, popular culture included at least an element of moral code. We encoded the values we held most dear into our stories. It provided a base for acceptable behavior, either through positive reinforcement of commonly understood virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity) or warnings about universal vices (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride). Sometimes these stories had religious foundations, sometimes they were secular morality fables but they all served the same purpose. They taught us what was acceptable behavior.

Stories were never originally intended to entertain. They were created to pass along knowledge and cultural wisdom. Entertainment came after when we discovered the more entertaining the story, the more effective it was at its primary purpose: education. And this is how the researchers used stories. Robots can’t be entertained, but they can be educated.

At some point in the last century, we focused on the entertainment value of stories over education and, in doing so, rotated our moral compass 180 degrees. If you look at what is most likely to titillate, sin almost always trumps sainthood. Review that list of virtues and vices and you’ll see that the stories of our current popular culture focus on vice – that list could be the programming handbook for any Hollywood producer. I don’t intend this a sermon – I enjoy Game of Thrones as much as the next person. I simply state it as a fact. Our popular culture – and the amplification that comes from it – is focused almost exclusively on the worst aspects of human nature. If robots were receiving their behavioral instruction through these stories, they would be programmed to be psychopathic moral degenerates.

For most of us, we can absorb this continual stream of anti-social programming and not be affected by it. We still know what is right and what is wrong. But in a world where it’s the “black swan” outliers that grab the news headlines, we have to think about the consequences that reach beyond the mainstream. When we abandon the moral purpose of stories and focus on their entertainment aspect, are we also abandoning a commonly understood value landscape?

If you’re looking for absolute answers here, you won’t find them. That’s just not the world we live in. And am I naïve when I say the stories we chose to tell may have an influence on isolated violent events such as happened in Orlando? Perhaps. Despite all our best intentions, Omar Mateen might still have gone horribly offside.

But all things and all people are, to some extent, products of their environment. And because we in media and advertising are storytellers, we set that cultural environment. That’s our job. Because of this, I belief we have a moral obligation. We have to start paying more attention to the stories we tell.

 

 

 

 

Where Should Science Live?

Science, like almost every other aspect of our society, is in the midst of disruption. In that disruption, the very nature of science may be changing. And that is bringing a number of very pertinent questions up.

Two weeks ago I took Malcolm Gladwell to task for oversimplifying science for the sake of a good story. I offered Duncan Watts as a counter example. One reader, Ted Wright, came to Gladwell’s defence and in the process of doing so, took a shot at the reputation of Watts, saying with tongue firmly in cheek, “people who are academically lauded often leave an Ivy League post, in this case at Columbia, to go be a data scientist at Yahoo.”

Mr. Wright (yes, I have finally found Mr. Wright) implies this a bad thing, a step backwards, or even an academic “selling out.” (Note: Watts is now at Microsoft where he’s a principal researcher)

Since Wright offered his comment, I’ve been thinking about it. Where should science live? Is it a sell out when science happens in private companies? Should it be the sole domain of universities? I’m not so sure.

Watts is a sociologist. His area of study is network structures and system behaviors in complex environments. His past studies tend to involve analyzing large data sets to identify patterns of behavior. There are few companies who could provide larger or more representative data sets than Microsoft.

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Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google

One such company is Google. And there are many renowned scientists working there. One of them is Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research. In a blog post a few years ago where he took issue with Chris Anderson’s Wired article signaling the “End of Theory”, Norvig said:

“(Chris Anderson) correctly noted that the methodology for science is evolving; he cites examples like shotgun sequencing of DNA. Having more data, and more ways to process it, means that we can develop different kinds of theories and models. But that does not mean we throw out the scientific method. It is not “The End of Theory.” It is an important change (or addition) in the methodology and set of tools that are used by science, and perhaps a change in our stereotype of scientific discovery.”

Science as we have known it has always been reductionist in nature. It requires simplification down to a controllable set of variables. It has also relied on a rigorous framework that was most at home in the world of academia. But as Norvig notes, that isn’t necessarily the only viable option now. We live in a world of complexity and the locked down, reductionist approach to science where a certain amount of simplification is required doesn’t really do this world justice. This is particularly true in areas like sociology, which attempts to understand cultural complexity in context. You can’t really do that in a lab.

But perhaps you can do it at Google. Or Microsoft. Or Facebook. These places have reams of data and all the computing power in the world to crunch it. These places precisely meet Norvig’s definition of the evolving methodology of science: “More data, and more ways to process it.”

If that’s the trade-off Duncan Watts decided to make, one can certainly understand it. Scientists follow the path of greatest promise. And when it comes to science that depends on data and processing power, increasing that is best found in places like Microsoft and Google.