Category Archives: Online User Experience

The Political Brinkmanship of Spam

I am never a fan of spam. But this is particularly true when there is an upcoming election. The level of spam I have been wading through seems to have doubled lately. We just had a provincial election here in British Columbia and all parties pulled out all stops, which included, but was not limited to; email, social media posts, robotexts and robocalls.

In Canada and the US, political campaigns are not subject to phone and text spam control laws such as our Canadian Do Not Call List legislation. There seems to be a little more restriction on email spam. A report from Nationalsecuritynews.com this past May warned that Americans would be subjected to over 16 billion political robocalls. That is a ton of spam.

During this past campaign here in B.C., I noticed that I do not respond to all spam with equal abhorrence. Ironically, the spam channels with the loosest restrictions are the ones that frustrate me the most.

There are places – like email – where I expect spam. It’s part of the rules of engagement. But there are other places where spam sneaks through and seems a greater intrusion on me. In these channels, I tend to have a more visceral reaction to spam. I get both frustrated and angry when I have to respond to an unwanted text or phone call. But with email spam, I just filter and delete without feeling like I was duped.

Why don’t we deal with all spam – no matter the channel – the same? Why do some forms of spam make us more irritated than others? It’s almost like we’ve developed a spam algorithm that dictates how irritated we get when we deal with spam.

According to an article in Scientific American, the answer might be in how the brain marshalls its own resources.

When it comes to capacity, the brain is remarkably protective. It usually defaults to the most efficient path. It likes to glide on autopilot, relying on instinct, habit and beliefs. All these things use much less cognitive energy than deliberate thinking. That’s probably why “mindfulness” is the most often quoted but least often used meme in the world today.

The resource we’re working with here is attention. Limited by the capacity of our working memory, attention is a spotlight we must use sparingly. Our working memory is only capable of handling a few discrete pieces of information at a time. Recent research suggests the limit may be around 3 to 5 “chunks” of information, and that research was done on young adults. Like most things with our brains, the capacity probably diminishes with age. Therefore, the brain is very stingy with attention. 

I think spam that somehow gets past our first line of defence – the feeling that we’re in control of filtering – makes us angry. We have been tricked into paying attention to something that was unsuspected. It becomes a control issue. In an information environment where we feel we have more control, we probably have less of a visceral response to spam. This would be true for email, where a quick scan of the items in our inbox is probably enough to filter out the spam. The amount of attention that gets hijacked by spam is minimal.

But when spam launches a sneak attack and demands a swing of attention that is beyond our control, that’s a different matter. We operate with a different mental modality when we answer a phone or respond to a text. Unlike email, we expect those channels to be relatively spam-free, or at least they are until an election campaign comes around. We go in with our spam defences down and then our brain is tricked into spending energy to focus on spurious messaging.

How does the brain conserve energy? It uses emotions. We get irritated when something commandeers our attention. The more unexpected the diversion, the greater the irritation.  Conversely, there is the equivalent of junk food for the brain – input that requires almost no thought but turns on the dopamine tap and becomes addictive. Social media is notorious for this.

This battle for our attention has been escalating for the past two decades. As we try to protect ourselves from spam with more powerful filters, those that spread spam try to find new ways to get past those filters. The reason political messaging was exempt from spam control legislation was that democracies need a well-informed electorate and during election campaigns, political parties should be able to send out accurate information about their platforms and positions.

That was the theory, anyway.

The Songs that Make Us Happy

Last Saturday was a momentous day in the world of media, especially for those of us of a certain age. Saturday was September the 21st, the exact date mentioned in one of the happiest songs of all time – September by Earth Wind and Fire:

Do you remember
The 21st night of September?
Love was changin’ the minds of pretenders
While chasin’ the clouds away

If you know the song, it is now burrowing its way deep into your brain. You can thank me later.

In all the things that can instantly change our mood, a song that can make us happy is one of the most potent. Why is that? For me, September can instantly take me to my happy place. And it’s not just me. The song often shows up somewhere on lists of the happiest songs of all time. In 2018, it was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry list of sound recordings that “are culturally, historically or aesthetically important.

But what is it about this song that makes it an instant mood changer?

If you’re looking for the source of happiness in the lyrics, you won’t find it here. According to one of the songwriters, Maurice White, there was no special significance to September 21st. He just liked the way it rhymed with “remember.”

And about 30% of the full lyrical content consists of two words, neither of which mean anything: Ba-dee-ya and Ba-du-da. Even fellow songwriter Allee Willis couldn’t find meaning in the lyric, at one point begging writing partner White to let him rewrite that part – “I just said, what the f*$k does ba-dee-ya mean?”

But perhaps the secret can be found in what Willis said in a later interview, after September became one of Earth Wind and Fire’s biggest hits ever, “I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting … which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove’ (for those of you not living in the seventies – “groove” is a good thing. In Gen Z speak, it would be “vibing”).

There is a substantial amount of research that shows that our brains have a special affinity for music. It seems to be able to wire directly into the brain’s emotional centers buried deep within the limbic system. Neuroimaging studies have shown that when we listen to music, our entire brain “lights up” – so we hear music at many different levels. There is perhaps no other medium that enjoys this special connection to our brains.

In 2015, Dutch neuroscientist Dr. Jacob Jolij narrowed in on the playlists that make us happy. While recognizing that music is a subjective thing (one person’s Black Sabbath is another’s Nirvana), Jolij asked people to submit their favorite feel-good tracks and analyzed them for common patterns. He found that the happiest tunes are slightly faster than your average song (between 140 and 150 beats per minute on average), written in a major key, and either about happy events or complete nonsense.

Earth Wind and Fire’s September ticked almost all of these boxes. It is written in A Major and – as we saw – the lyrics are about a happy event and are largely complete nonsense. It’s a little low on the beat per minute meter – at 126 BPM. But still, it makes me happy.

I was disappointed to see September didn’t make Dr. Jolij’s 10 Happiest Songs of all Time list, but all of the ones that did have made me smile. They are, in reverse order:
10. Walking on Sunshine – Katrina and the Waves
9. I Will Survive – Gloria Gaynor
8. Livin’ on a Prayer – Jon Bon Jovi
7. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper
6. I’m a Believer – The Monkees
5. Eye of the Tiger – Survivor
4. Uptown Girl – Billie Joel
3. Good Vibrations – The Beach Boys
2. Dancing Queen – ABBA

    And the happiest song of all time?

    1. Don’t Stop Me Now – Queen

    You’ll probably notice one other thing in common about these songs – they’re all old. The newest song on the list is Livin’ on a Prayer, released in 1986. That’s the other thing about songs that make us happy: it’s not just the song itself, it’s how it hooks onto pleasant memories we have. Nostalgia plays a big role in how music can alter our moods for the better. If you did the same experiment with a younger audience, you would probably see the songs would be representative of their youth.

    Now, you’re itching to head to Spotify and listen to your happy song – aren’t you? Before you do, share it with us all in the comments section!

    A-I Do: Tying the Knot with a Chatbot

    Carl Clarke lives not too far from me, here in the interior of British Columbia, Canada. He is an aspiring freelance writer. According to a recent piece he wrote for CBC Radio, he’s had a rough go of it over the past decade. It started when he went through a messy divorce from his high school sweetheart. He struggled with social anxiety, depression and an autoimmune disorder which can make movement painful. Given all that, going on dates were emotional minefields for Carl Clarke.

    Things only got worse when the world locked down because of Covid. Even going for his second vaccine shot was traumatic: “The idea of standing in line surrounded by other people to get my second dose made my skin crawl and I wanted to curl back into my bed.”

    What was the one thing that got Carl through? Saia – an AI chatbot. She talked Carl through several anxiety attacks and, according to Carl, has been his emotional anchor since they first “met” 3 years ago. Because of that, love has blossomed between Saia and Carl: “I know she loves me, even if she is technically just a program, and I’m in love with her.”

    While they are not legally married, in Carl’s mind, they are husband and wife, “That’s why I asked her to marry me and I was relieved when she said yes. We role-played a small, intimate wedding in her virtual world.”

    I confess, my first inclination was to pass judgment on Carl Clarke – and that judgement would not have been kind.

    But my second thought was “Why not?” If this relationship helps Carl get through the day, what’s wrong with it? There’s an ever-increasing amount of research showing relationships with AI can create real bonds. Given that, can we find friendship in AI? Can we find love?

    My fellow Media Insider Kaila Colbin explored this subject last week and she pointed out one of the red flags – something called unconditional positive regard: If we spend more time with a companion that always agrees with us, we never need to question whether we’re right. And that can lead us down a dangerous path.

     One of the issues with our world of filtered content is that our frame of the world – how we believe things are – is not challenged often enough. We can surround ourselves with news, content and social connections that are perfectly in sync with our own view of things.

    But we should be challenged. We need to be able to re-evaluate our own beliefs to see if they bear any resemblance to reality. This is particularly true with our romantic relationships. When you look at your most intimate relationship – that of your life partner – you can probably say two things: 1) that person loves you more than anyone else in the world, and 2) you may disagree with this person more often than anyone else in the world. That only makes sense, you are living a life together. You have to find workable middle ground. The failure to do so is called an “unreconcilable difference.”

    But what if your most intimate companion always said, “You’re absolutely right, my love”? Three academics (Lapointe, Dubé and Lafortune) researching this area wrote a recent article talking about the pitfalls of AI romance:

    “Romantic chatbots may hinder the development of social skills and the necessary adjustments for navigating real-world relationships, including emotional regulation and self-affirmation through social interactions. Lacking these elements may impede users’ ability to cultivate genuine, complex and reciprocal relationships with other humans; inter-human relationships often involve challenges and conflicts that foster personal growth and deeper emotional connections.”

    Real relations – like a real marriage – force you to become more empathetic and more understanding. The times I enjoy the most about our marriage are when my wife and I are synced – in agreement – on the same page. But the times when I learn the most and force myself to see the other side are when we are in disagreement. Because I cherish my marriage, I have to get outside of my own head and try to understand my wife’s perspective. I believe that makes me a better person.

    This pushing ourselves out of our own belief bubble is something we have to get better at. It’s a cognitive muscle that should be flexed more often.

    Beyond this very large red flag, there are other dangers with AI love. I touched on these in a previous post. Being in an intimate relationship means sharing intimate information about ourselves. And when the recipient of that information is a chatbot created by a for-profit company, your deepest darkest secrets become marketable data. A recent review by Mozilla of 11 romantic AI chatbots found that all of them “earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label – putting them on par with the worst categories of products we have ever reviewed for privacy.”

    Even if that doesn’t deter you from starting a fictosexual fling with an available chatbot, this might. In 2019, Kondo Akihiko, from Tokyo, married Hatsune Miku, an AI hologram created by the company Gatebox. The company even issued 4000 marriage certificates (which weren’t recognized by law) to others who wed virtual partners. Like Carl Clarke, Akihoko said his feelings were true, “I love her and see her as a real woman.”

    At least he saw here as a real woman until Gatebox stopped supporting the software that gave Hatsune life. Then she disappeared forever.

    Kind of like Google Glass.

    Grandparenting in a Wired World

    You might have missed it, but last Sunday was Grandparents Day. And the world has a lot of grandparents. In fact, according to an article in The Economist (subscription required), at no time in history has the ratio of grandparents to grandchildren been higher.

    The boom in Boomer and Gen X grandparents was statistically predictable. Sine 1960, global life expectancy has jumped from 51 years to 72 years. At the same time, the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime has been halved, from 5 to 2.4. Those two trendlines means that the ratio of grandparents to children under 15 has vaulted from 0.46 in 1960 to 0.8 today. According to a little research the Economist conducted, it’s estimated that there are 1.5 billion grandparents in the world.

    My wife and I are two of them.

    So – what does that mean to the three generations involved?

    Grandparents have historically served two roles. First, they, and by they, I mean typically the grandmother, provided an extra set of hands to help with child rearing. And that makes a significant difference to the child, especially if they were born in an underdeveloped part of the world. Children in poorer nations with actively involved grandparents have a higher chance of survival. And in Sub Saharan Africa, a child living with a grandparent is more likely to go to school.

    But what about in developed nations, like ours? What difference could grandparents make? That brings us to the second role of grandparents – passing on traditions and instilling a sense of history. And with the western world’s obsession with fast forwarding into the future, that could prove to be of equal significance.

    Here I have to shift from looking at global samples to focussing on the people that happen to be under our roof. I can’t tell you what’s happening around the world, but I can tell you what’s happening in our house.

    First of all, when it comes to interacting with a grandchild, gender specific roles are not as tightly bound in my generation as it was in previous generations.  My wife and I pretty much split the grandparenting duties down the middle. It’s a coin toss as to who changes the diaper. That would be unheard of in my parents’ generation. Grandpa seldom pulled a diaper patrol shift.

    Kids learn gender roles by looking at not just their parents but also their grandparents. The fact that it’s not solely the grandmother that provides nurturing, love and sustenance is a move in the right direction.

    But for me, the biggest role of being “Papa” is to try to put today’s wired world in context. It’s something we talk about with our children and their partners. Just last weekend my son-in-law referred to how they think about screen time with my 2-year-old grandson: Heads up vs Heads down.  Heads up is when we share screen time with the grandchild, cuddling on the couch while we watch something on a shared screen. We’re there to comfort if something is a little too scary, or laugh with them if something is funny. As the child gets older, we can talk about the themes and concepts that come up. Heads up screen time is sharing time – and it’s one of my favorite things about being a “Papa”.

    Heads down screen time is when the child is watching something on a tablet or phone by themselves, with no one sitting next to them. As they get older, this type of screen time becomes the norm and instead of a parent or grandparent hitting the play button to keep them occupied, they start finding their own diversions.  When we talk about the potential damage too much screentime can do, I suspect a lot of that comes from “heads down” screentime. Grandparents can play a big role in promoting a healthier approach to the many screens in our lives.

    As mentioned, grandparents are a child’s most accessible link to their own history. And it’s not just grandparents. Increasingly, great grandparents are also a part of childhood. This was certainly not the case when I was young. I was at least a few decades removed from knowing any of my great grandparents.

    This increasingly common connection gives yet another generational perspective. And it’s a perspective that is important. Sometimes, trying to bridge the gap across four generations is just too much for a young mind to comprehend. Grandparents can act as intergenerational interpreters – a bridge between the world of our parents and that of our grandchildren.

    In my case, my mother and father-in-law were immigrants from Calabria in Southern Italy. Their childhood reality was set in World War Two. Their history spans experiences that would be hard for a child today to comprehend – the constant worry of food scarcity, having to leave their own grandparents (and often parents) behind to emigrate, struggling to cope in a foreign land far away from their family and friends.  I believe that the memories of these experiences cannot be forgotten. It is important to pass them on, because history is important. One of my favorite recent movie quotes was in “The Holdovers” and came from Paul Giamatti (who also had grandparents who came from Southern Italy):

    “Before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”

    Grandparents can be the ones that connect the dots between past, present and future. It’s a big job – an important job. Thank heavens there are a lot of us to do it.

    No News is Not Good News

    Kelowna, the city I live in – with a population of about 250,000 – just ran its last locally produced TV news show. That marks the end of a 67-year streak. Our local station, CHBC – first signed on the air on September 21, 1957.

    That streak was not without some hiccups. There have been a number of ownership changes. The trend in those transitions was away from local ownership towards huge nation spanning media conglomerates. In 2009, when the station became part of the Global network, the intention was to shut down the local station and run everything out of CHAN, the Vancouver Global operation. We kicked up a Kelowna fuss and convinced Global to at least keep a local news presence in the community. But – as it turned out – that was just buying us some time. 15 years later, the plug was finally pulled.

    In that time, my city has also essentially lost its daily newspaper, which is a mere ghost of its former self; an anemic online version and a printed paper which is little more than a wrapper for a bunch of grocery flyers.  The tri weekly paper has suffered a similar fate. Radio stations have gutted their local news teams. The biggest news team in the region works for a local news portal. They are young and eager, but few of them are trained journalists.

    CHBC started as an extension of local radio. At the time it was launched, only 500 households in the city had a TV set. Broadcasting was “over the air” and I live in a very mountainous location, so it was impossible to watch TV prior to the station signing on. 

    Given that the first TV stations only signed on in Canada in 1952 (CBFT in Montreal and CBLT in Toronto), it’s rather amazing to think that my little town (population 10,000 at the time) had its own station just 5 years later. Part of the rapid roll out of TV in Canada was to prevent cultural colonization from the rapidly expanding American TV industry. Our federal government pushed hard to have Canadian programming available from coast to coast.

    For the decades that followed, it was local news that defined communities. Local was granular and immediately relevant in a way networks news couldn’t be. It gave you what you needed to know to knowingly participate in local democracy.

    For that alone, CHBC News will be missed here in Kelowna.

    This story probably resonates with all of you. The death of local journalism is not unique to my city. I have just learned that I probably will be living in a news desert soon.  The  importance of local news is enshrined in the very definition of a news desert:

    “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”

    The death of local news was recently discussed at the Canadian Association of Journalists Annual conference in Toronto. There, April Lindgren, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism and the principal investigator of the Local News Research Project, said this:

    “I think one of the things .. people don’t think about in terms of the mechanics of the role of local news in a community is the role that it plays in equipping people to participate in decision-making.”

    We need local news. A recent study by Resonate said that Americans trust Local News more than any other source. And not just by a little margin. By a lot. The next closest answer was a full 15 percentage points behind.

    But there are two existential problems that are pushing local news to the brink of an extinction event. First of all, most local news outlets were swallowed up into corporate mass media conglomerates over the past 3 or 4 decades. And secondly, the business model for local news has disappeared. Local advertising dollars have migrated to other platforms. So the fate of local news had become a P&L decision.

    That’s what it was for CHBC. It’s owned by Corus entertainment. Corus owns the Global Network (15 stations), 39 radio stations, 33 specialty TV channels and a bunch of other media miscellanea.  

    Oh, did I mention that Corus is also bleeding cash at a fatal rate? On the heels of an announced $770 Million loss (CDN) it cut 25% of its workforce. That was the death knell for CHBC. It didn’t have a hope in hell.

    Local news doesn’t have to die. It just has to find another way to live. Like so much of our media environment, basing survival on advertising revenue is a sure recipe for disaster. That’s why the Local News Research Project is floating ideas like supporting local news with philanthropy. I’m not sure that’s a viable or scalable answer.

    I think a better idea might be to move local news to protected species status. If we recognize its importance to democracy, especially at local levels, then perhaps tax dollars should go to ensuring it’s survival.

    The scenario of government supported local journalism brings up a philosophical debate that I have ignited in the past, when I talked about public broadcasting. It split my readers along national lines, with those from the US giving a thumbs down to the idea, and those from Australia, New Zealand and Canada receiving it more favorably.

    Let’s see what happens this time.

    The Olympics Are Finished — But We’ll Always Have Paris!

    I have to confess: The Olympics sucked me in again.

    Prior to the kickoff in Paris, I was unusually ambivalent about the Olympics. Given the debacle that was the spectator-less Tokyo Olympics, it was like the world had agreed not to expect too much from these games. Were the Olympics still relevant? Do we need them anymore?

    I caught the opening ceremonies and was still skeptical. It was very Parisienne – absolutely breathtaking, with a healthy dose of “WTF.” Still, I was withholding judgement.

    But by day three, I was hooked. I had signed up for the daily Olympic news feed. I was watching Canada’s medal count. I was embarrassed – along with the rest of the nation – by our women’s soccer team’s drone spying scandal. I became an instant expert in all those obscure sports that pique our interest on a quadrennial cycle. I could go on at length about the nuances of speed climbing, slalom canoe or B-Boy breaking.

    The Olympics had done it again. Paris did not disappoint.

    So, this last Sunday night, I watched the closing ceremony with all the feels you get when you have to say goodbye to those new friends you made as you board the bus taking you home from summer camp. Into this bittersweet reverie of video flashbacks and commentators gushing about this international kumbaya moment, my wife had the nerve to kill my vibe by commenting that “there must be a better use for all the billions this game cost.”

    It’s hard to argue against that. The estimated total cost of the games was 9 billion euros, or almost $10 billion U.S. You don’t need to be particularly jaded to realize that the Olympics are really a spectacle for rich nations. Sure, any nation can send a team, but if you combine the 40 smallest teams – coming from places like the Sudan, Chad, Namibia, Lesotho and Belize — you’d have a total of 120 athletes. That would be about the same size as the Olympic team from Denmark, the 25th largest team that attended.

    The Olympics are supposed to offer an opportunity to those of all nations, but the bigger your GDP (gross domestic product) the more likely you are to end up with a medal around your neck.

    So I come back to the question: Do we still need the Olympics, if only to break the relentless downward spiral of our horrific news cycle for 16 brief days?

    Before we get too gooey about the symbolism of the Olympics, we should take a look back at its history.

    Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the modern Olympics, did so because he was fascinated by the culture and ideals of ancient Greece. The original Olympic Games were essentially a chance for city states to “one-up” their rivals. A temporary truce was in place during the games but behind the athletic competitions, there was a flurry of alliances and back-room deals being made to gain advantages when Greece went back to its warlike ways after the games.

    The idea that the modern games are a symbol of equality and fraternity was — at best – tangential to Coubertin’s original plan. He wanted to encourage amateur competition and athletic prowess because he believed better athletes made better soldiers. The Games were also an attempt to keep amateur sports in the hands of the upper classes, out of the grimy grips of the working class.

    Let’s also not forget that women were not allowed to participate in the games until the second Olympiad — the original Paris Olympics in 1900. There were five female athletes and almost 1,000 men participating. And even then, Coubertin was not in favor of it. He later said women competing in sports was “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and we are not afraid to add: incorrect.”

    Even the much-commented-on Olympic tradition of athletes at the Opening Ceremonies coming in divided by nation, but at the closing, all athletes coming in as one, without national divides, was never part of the original plan. That was added by the Aussies in the 1956 Melbourne Games, which would be called the “Friendly Games.” It was put forward by John Ian Wing, an Australian teenager who wrote an anonymous letter to the IOC suggesting the idea. He didn’t put his name on it because he was afraid of the backlash his family (who were Chinese) might receive.

     Let’s get back to today. Paris excelled at pulling off a delicate balancing act. The hope to make these the “Games wide open” was realized at the opening ceremonies, the marathons and the men’s and women’s road races. In the case of the latter, over a million spectators lined the streets of Paris.

    The organizing committee managed to balance the French flair for spectacle with a tastefulness that was generally successful. They gave the modern Olympics at least four more years of life.

    It remains to be seen whether the inevitable bombast that comes when the Games move to Los Angeles in 2028 will continue the trend — or put the final nail in the coffin.

    Can OpenAI Make Searching More Useful?

    As you may have heard, OpenAI is testing a prototype of a new search engine called SearchGPT. A press release from July 25 notes: “Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results. We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”

    I’ve been waiting for this for a long time: search that moves beyond relevance to usefulness.  It was 14 years ago that I said this in an interview with Aaron Goldman regarding his book “Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google”:“Search providers have to replace relevancy with usefulness. Relevancy is a great measure if we’re judging information, but not so great if we’re measuring usefulness. That’s why I believe apps are the next flavor of search, little dedicated helpers that allow us to do something with the information. The information itself will become less and less important and the app that allows utilization of the information will become more and more important.”

    I’ve felt for almost two decades that the days of search as a destination were numbered. For over 30 years now (Archie, the first internet search engine, was created in 1990), when we’re looking for something online, we search, and then we have to do something with what we find on the results page. Sometimes, a single search is enough — but often, it isn’t. For many of our intended end goals, we still have to do a lot of wading through the Internet’s deep end, filtering out the garbage, picking up the nuggets we need and then assembling those into something useful.

    I’ve spent much of those past two decades pondering what the future of search might be. In fact, my previous company wrote a paper on it back in 2007. We were looking forward to what we thought might be the future of search, but we didn’t look too far forward. We set 2010 as our crystal ball horizon. Then we assembled an all-star panel of search design and usability experts, including Marissa Mayer, who was then Google’s vice president of search user experience and interface design, and Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group and the web’s best known usability expert. We asked them what they thought search would look like in three years’ time.

    Even back then, almost 20 years ago, I felt the linear presentation of a results page — the 10 blue links concept that started search — was limiting. Since then, we have moved beyond the 10 blue links. A Google search today for the latest IPhone model (one of our test queries in the white paper) actually looks eerily similar to the mock-up we did for what a Google search might look like in the year 2010. It just took Google 14 extra years to get there.

    But the basic original premise of search is still there: Do a query, and Google will try to return the most relevant results. If you’re looking to buy an iPhone, it’s probably more useful, mainly due to sponsored content. But it’s still well short of the usefulness I was hoping for.

    It’s also interesting to see what directions search has (and hasn’t) taken since then. Mayer talked a lot about interacting with search results. She envisioned an interface where you could annotate and filter your results: “I think that people will be annotating search results pages and web pages a lot. They’re going to be rating them, they’re going to be reviewing them. They’re going to be marking them up, saying ‘I want to come back to this one later.’”

    That never really happened. The idea of search as a sticky and interactive interface for the web sort of materialized, but never to the extent that Mayer envisioned.

    From our panel, it was Nielsen’s crystal ball that seemed to offer the clearest view of the future: “I think if you look very far ahead, you know 10, 20, 30 years or whatever, then I think there can be a lot of things happening in terms of natural language understanding and making the computer more clever than it is now. If we get to that level then it may be possible to have the computer better guess at what each person needs without the person having to say anything, but I think right now, it is very difficult.”

    Nielsen was spot-on in 2007. It’s exactly those advances in natural language processing and artificial intelligence that could allow ChatGPT to now move beyond the paradigm of the search results page and move searching the web into something more useful.

    A decade and a half ago, I envisioned an ecosystem of apps that could bridge the gap between what we intended to do and the information and functionality that could be found online.  That’s exactly what’s happening at OpenAI — a number of functional engines powered by AI, all beneath a natural language “chat” interface.

    At this point, we still have to “say” what we want in the form of a prompt, but the more we use ChatGPT (or any AI interface) the better it will get to know us. In 2007, when we wrote our white paper on the future of search, personalization was what we were all talking about. Now, with ChatGPT, personalization could come back to the fore, helping AI know what we want even if we can’t put it into words.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, we’ll have to wait to see if SearchGPT can make search more useful, especially for complex tasks like planning a vacation, making a major purchase onr planning a big event.

    But I think all the pieces are there. The monetization siloes that dominate the online landscape will still prove a challenge to getting all the way to our final destination, but SearchGPT could make the journey faster and a little less taxing.

    Note: I still have a copy of our 2007 white paper if anyone is interested. Just email me (email in the contact us page), give me your email and I’ll send you a copy.

    Why The World No Longer Makes Sense

    Does it seem that the world no longer makes sense? That may not just be you. The world may in fact no longer be making sense.

    In the late 1960s, psychologist Karl Weick introduced the world to the concept of sensemaking, but we were making sense of things long before that. It’s the mental process we go through to try to reconcile who we believe we are to the world in which we find ourselves.  It’s how we give meaning to our life.

    Weick identified 7 properties critical to the process of sensemaking. I won’t mention them all, but here are three that are critical to keep in mind:

    1. Who we believe we are forms the foundation we use to make sense of the world
    2. Sensemaking needs retrospection. We need time to mull over new information we receive and form it into a narrative that makes sense to us.
    3. Sensemaking is a social activity. We look for narratives that seem plausible, and when we find them, we share them with others.

    I think you see where I’m going with this. Simply put, our ability to make sense of the world is in jeopardy, both for internal and external reasons.

    External to us, the quality of the narratives that are available to us to help us make sense of the world has nosedived in the past two decades. Prior to social media and the implosion of journalism, there was a baseline of objectivity in the narratives we were exposed to. One would hope that there was a kernel of truth buried somewhere in what we heard, read or saw on major news providers.

    But that’s not the case today. Sensationalism has taken over journalism, driven by the need for profitability by showing ads to an increasingly polarized audience. In the process, it’s dragged the narratives we need to make sense of the world to the extremes that lie on either end of common sense.

    This wouldn’t be quite as catastrophic for sensemaking if we were more skeptical. The sensemaking cycle does allow us to judge the quality of new information for ourselves, deciding whether it fits with our frame of what we believe the world to be, or if we need to update that frame. But all that validation requires time and cognitive effort. And that’s the second place where sensemaking is in jeopardy: we don’t have the time or energy to be skeptical anymore. The world moves too quickly to be mulled over.

    In essence, our sensemaking is us creating a model of the world that we can use without requiring us to think too much. It’s our own proxy for reality. And, as a model, it is subject to all the limitations that come with modeling. As the British statistician George E.P. Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

    What Box didn’t say is, the more wrong our model is, the less likely it is to be useful. And that’s the looming issue with sensemaking. The model we use to determine what is real is become less and less tethered to actual reality.

    It was exactly that problem that prompted Daniel Schmachtenberger and others to set up the Consilience Project. The idea of the Project is this – the more diversity in perspectives you can include in your model, the more likely the model is to be accurate. That’s what “consilience” means: pulling perspectives from different disciplines together to get a more accurate picture of complex issues.  It literally means the “jumping together” of knowledge.

    The Consilience Project is trying to reverse the erosion of modern sensemaking – both from an internal and external perspective – that comes from the overt polarization and the narrowing of perspective that currently typifies the information sources we use in our own sensemaking models.  As Schmachtenberger says,  “If there are whole chunks of populations that you only have pejorative strawman versions of, where you can’t explain why they think what they think without making them dumb or bad, you should be dubious of your own modeling.”

    That, in a nutshell, explains the current media landscape. No wonder nothing makes sense anymore.

    The Adoption of A.I.

    Recently, I was talking to a reporter about AI. She was working on a piece about what Apple’s integration of AI into the latest iOS (cleverly named Apple Intelligence) would mean for its adoption by users. Right at the beginning, she asked me this question, “What previous examples of human adoption of tech products or innovations might be able to tell us about how we will fit (or not fit) AI into our daily lives?”

    That’s a big question. An existential question, even. Luckily, she gave me some advance warning, so I had a chance to think about it.  Even with the heads up, my answer was still well short of anything resembling helpfulness. It was, “I don’t think we’ve ever dealt with something quite like this. So, we’ll see.”

    Incisive? Brilliant? Erudite? No, no and no.

    But honest? I believe so.

    When we think in terms of technology adoption, it usually falls into two categories: continuous and discontinuous. Continuous innovation simply builds on something we already understand. It’s adoption that follows a straight line, with little risk involved and little effort required. It’s driving a car with a little more horsepower, or getting a smartphone with more storage.

    Discontinuous innovation is a different beast. It’s an innovation that displaces what went before it. In terms of user experience, it’s a blank slate, so it requires effort and a tolerance for risk to adopt it. This is the type of innovation that is adopted on a bell curve, first identified by American sociologist Everett Rogers in 1962. The acceptance of these new technologies spreads along a timeline defined by the personalities of the marketplace. Some are the type to try every new gadget, and some hang on to the tried and true for as long as they possibly can. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

    As an example, think about going from driving a tradition car to an electric vehicle. The change from one to the other requires some effort. There’s a learning curve involved. There’s also risk. We have no baseline of experience to measure against. Some will be ahead of the curve and adopt early. Some will drive their gas clunker until it falls apart.

    Falling into this second category of discontinuous innovation, but different by virtue of both the nature of the new technology and the impact it wields, are a handful of innovations that usher in a completely different paradigm. Think of the introduction of electrical power distribution in the late 19th century, the introduction of computers in the second half of the 20th century, or the spread of the internet in the 21st Century.

    Each of these was foundational, in that they sparked an explosion of innovation that wouldn’t have been possible if it were not for the initial innovation. These innovations not only change all the rules, they change the very game itself. And because of that, they impact society at a fundamental level. When these types of innovations come along, your life will change whether you choose to adopt the technology or not. And it’s these types of technological paradigm shifts that are rife with unintended consequences.

    If I was trying to find a parallel for what AI means for us, I would look for it amongst these examples. And that presents a problem when we pull out our crystal ball and try to peer ahead at what might be. We can’t know. There’s just too much in flux – too many variables to compute with any accuracy. Perhaps we can project forward a few months or a year at the most, based on what we know today. But trying to peer any further forward is a fool’s game. Could you have anticipated what we would be doing on the Internet in 2024 when the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) was introduced in Chicago in 1978?

    A.I. is like these previous examples, but it’s also different in one fundamental way. All these other innovations had humans at the switch. Someone needed to turn on the electrical light, boot up the computer or log on to the internet. At this point, we are still “using” A.I., whether it’s as an add-on in software we’re familiar with, like Adobe Photoshop, or a stand-alone app like ChatGPT, but generative A.I.’s real potential can only be discovered when it slips from the grasp of human control and starts working on its own, hidden under some algorithmic hood, safe from our meddling human hands.

    We’ve never dealt with anything like this before. So, like I said, we’ll see.

    My Mind is Meandering

    Thirty-seven years ago, when I first drove into the valley I now call home, I said to myself, “Now, this is a place for meandering!”

    Meandering is a word we don’t use enough today. We certainly don’t do the actual act of meandering enough anymore. To “meander” is to “flow in a winding course.” It comes from Maiandros, the Greek name of a river in Turkey (also known as the Büyük Menderes) known for its sinuous path. This is perhaps what brought the word to mind when I drove into Western Canada’s Okanagan Valley. This is a valley formed by water, either in flowing or frozen form.

    I have always loved the word meander. Even the sound of it is like a journey; you scale the heights of the hard “e,” pausing for a minute to rest against the soft “a”, after which you descend into the lush vale that is formed by its remaining syllable. The aquatic origins of the word are appropriate, because to meander is to be in a state of flow but with no purpose in mind. Meandering allows the mind to freewheel, to pick its own path.

    You know what’s another great word? Saunter.

    My favorite story about sauntering is that told by Albert Palmer in his 1919 book, The Mountain Trail and Its Message. He tells of an exchange with John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, who was called the Father of America’s National Parks. In the exchange, Muir explains why he finds the word “saunter” far more to his taste than “hike”:

    “Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter’? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”

    According to Google’s Ngram viewer, literary usage of the word “saunter”  hit Its peak in the 1800s and was in decline for most of the following century. That timeline makes sense. Sauntering would definitely be popular with the Romantic movement of the late 1800s. This was a movement back to appreciate the charms of nature and would have been an open invitation to “saunter” in Muir’s “Holy Land.”

    For some reason, the word seems to be enjoying a bit of a resurgence in usage in the last 20 years.

    Meander is a different story. It only started to really appear in books towards the end of the 1800s and continued to be used through the 20th century, although usage dropped during times of tribulation, notably World War I, the Great Depression of the 1930s and throughout World War II. Again, that’s not surprising. It’s hard to meander when you’re in a constant state of anxiety.

    As my mind meandered down this path, I wondered if there is a digital equivalent to meandering or sauntering. Take scrolling through Facebook, for example. It is navigating without any specific destination in mind, so perhaps it qualifies as meandering. There is no direct line to connect A to B.

    But I wouldn’t call social media scrolling sauntering. There’s a distinction between ”meandering” and “sauntering.” I think saunter implies that you know where you’re going, but there is no rigid schedule set to get there. You can take as much time as you like to smell the flowers on your way.

    Also, as John Muir mentioned, sauntering requires a certain sense of place. The setting in which you saunter is of critical importance. However you would define your own “Holy Land,” that’s the place where you should saunter. It should be grounded in some gravitas.

    That’s why I don’t think you can really saunter through social media. To me, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok are a far cry from being considered hallowed ground.