Siri Backlash Begins

Apparently, Siri use is starting to annoy people:

Nick Wingfield, Virtual Assistants Raise New Issues of Phone Etiquette

Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.

“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.

Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.

“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”

[…]

People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.

“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.

But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”

This is just the normal backlash against new technology. It will dissipate in the next few years. As my fried, Jamais Cascio says, ‘technology is everything that was invented after you turned fourteen.’

(via underpaidgenius)

Open the Future: The Foresight Paradox

Jamais Cascio lays out the core paradox of futurism:

In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:

  • The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
  • The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen.

This is the foresight paradox: you can be completely accurate, or you can be completely engaging, but you can’t be both. As a result, every forecast (or scenario, or prediction) has to find the right balance between the two, trading off likelihood for believability.

How to bridge this seeming divide? Cascio — like me and others — thinks the best solution is to contrive a set of scenarios, 3-5 for example, that frame some business issue or market direction.This comes with its own set of problems, such as the getting people to consider a ‘field’ of alterntiaves, and to gain some insight from that in a world crammed with other things to think about.

Specifically, Jamais points out that this approach is becoming increasingly impractical in conferences, given the recent trend toward very short presentations:

There seems to be a trend in conferences right now (especially in Europe) to limit presentations to 15 minutes. Although there are definite benefits to this approach (most notably in maintaining audience interest), it means that any foresight-based presentation is crippled. A speaker simply doesn’t have the time to offer multiple scenarios in anything other than a bullet point/headline format, surrounded by lots of big idea framing to give the scenario headlines some context (the talk I gave at the Guardian Activate Summit in London last year is probably my best effort at doing this).

Unfortunately, audiences don’t respond as well to multiple scenarios as they do to single, detailed forecasts, even when they know the detailed forecasts will inevitably be wrong. Moreover, appearances limited by time (such as, in particular, television) make even the headline scenario approach difficult. The best one can do — in my experience, at least, and I’d love to hear better suggestions — is to be sure to offer caveats and use cautious language such as “appears to,” “likely,” and especially “one possibility” (or similar statements underlining that different outcomes are possible).

The modern spectacle-driven media loathes uncertainty, and will almost always give more attention to aggressive certitude (no matter the accuracy) than caution. Many business audiences feel the same way. Sadly, the foresight paradox boils down to this:

The futurists who get the most attention are usually the least accurate.

Snap.

In The Shadow Of Big Lies And Big Money

Malcolm Gladwell’s supposed takedown of social networks — they aren’t really revolutionary, he argues — continues to be paired up with ‘The Social Network’ as a one-two punch smack in the kisser of the web. Buried in the newest of these, an Op-Ed by Frank Rich, is a painful truth: for all the talk of transparency, openness, and change on the web, these tools haven’t slowed ‘big lies and big money’ in the American political circus:

Frank Rich, Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends

Just as “The Social Network” hit the multiplexes, Malcolm Gladwell took to The New Yorker with a stinging takedown of social networks as vehicles for meaningful political and social action. He calculated that the nearly 1.3 million members of the Facebook page for the Save Darfur Coalition have donated an average of 9 cents each to their cause. He mocked American journalists’ glorification of Twitter’s supposedly pivotal role during last year’s short-lived uprising in Iran, suggesting that the rebels’ celebrated Twitter feeds — written in English, not Farsi — did more to titillate blogging technophiles in the West than to aid Iranians in their struggle against totalitarian rulers.

“With Facebook and Twitter and the like,” Gladwell wrote, “the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will” was supposed to be upended, so it would be “easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Instead, he concluded, we ended up with the reverse: social media increase the efficiency of the existing order rather than empowering dissidents. In his view, social networking is far less likely to recreate the civil rights movement of the 1960s than to track down missing cellphones for Wall Streeters.

Gladwell’s provocative Internet critique is complemented by a much-buzzed-about independent movie — in this case, an actual documentary — that was released shortly before “The Social Network.” No one will confuse this ham-fisted film, titled “Catfish,” with a Fincher-Sorkin production, but it’s highly unsettling nonetheless. It tells of a 25-year-old Manhattan photographer who strikes up a devoted Facebook friendship with a small-town Michigan family whose 8-year-old daughter is a painting prodigy. When the photographer seeks out his virtual friends in the real Michigan, it’s inevitable that he and the audience will learn the hard way, as the Times film critic A.O. Scott put it, that cyberspace is a “wild social ether where nobody knows who anybody is.”

Even if Gladwell and “Catfish” are overstating the case, they certainly have one if you look at the political environment in our election year of 2010. The Internet in general and social networking in particular have done little, if anything, to hobble those pursuing power with such traditional means as big lies and big money. Perhaps what’s most remarkable this year is the number of candidates who have tried to create fictitious avatars like the Facebook impostors in “Catfish.” These candidates and others often fashion their campaigns to avoid real reporters (and sometimes real voters). Some benefit from YouTube commercials paid for by impossible-to-trace anonymous donors. In this wild political ether where nobody knows who anybody is, the Internet provides cover, not transparency.

Go online, and you’ll discover that many of those now notorious false fronts for oil billionaires and other corporate political contributors have Facebook pages. We don’t know who has written checks to Crossroads GPS, the more shadowy wing of American Crossroads, the operation concocted in part by Karl Rove to raise $50 million to attack Democrats. (There’s already $32 million in the bank, $10 million more than was spent by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004.) But the American Crossroads page on Facebook sure looks like a bottom-up populist movement, festooned with photos of thousands of ordinary folk voting their “like” of the site. The Save Darfur Coalition page may have infinitely more friends, but it’s American Crossroads that has real clout in the real world even if nobody knows who is behind the screen.

The web is powerful, but can be used to herd opinion based on faulty reasoning just as well as it can open people’s eyes to new perspectives.

Honestly, the web is dangerous. I don’t mean in the way most people worry about it — bullying teenagers into suicide, or deranged stalkers or burglars taking advantage of Foursquare check-ins — but on the contrary, to use the cracks in out cognitive wiring to control our behavior.

Fear mongering, xenophobia, and ignorance are all at work in the efforts of politicians to herd people off a cliff at the next election, using the body count as a way to get into office.

So, if the web isn’t a benign force ushering in the age of Aquarius maybe it is bad, the commentators are saying. But this is just holding up a mirror: we created the web to happen to ourselves, and what comes of it is up to us.

Our prejudices, cognitive limitations, and ignorance aren’t magically fixed by networking us together. There is mounting evidence that the social web is an amplifier, but the behavior you put in to be amplified can be from any slice in the human condition.

As my friend Jamais Cascio once remarked, there will someday be a hashtag used during atrocities in a genocide somewhere. But we won’t blame the hashtag, or hashtags in general.

The web isn’t just patty cake and beanbag, and it’s no longer some sidebar to human events: it is deeply enmeshed in everything, like nervous tissue is spread throughout all our bodies.

But we don’t wonder about the inherent downside of gray matter just because it is implicated in depression, hate, murder and deception.

So let’s turn our focus back on the actual groups and individuals who benefit from concealing their identities and true purposes — like Crossroads GPS — and stop scapegoating the web and social network applications. You might as well blame ink and paper for the printing of hate literature, or the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo.

At the same time, I would like to see more slimy doings exposed, and nefarious actors pulled out from under the rocks. Hey, Frank: you work for the New York Times! Should the Times be doing more, using the web as a tool of investigation, and rallying people to counter the herding going on by Fox News and the Koch brothers?

Louis Brandeis said ‘Sunshine is the best disinfectant,’ and our activities online can cast a shining light: but the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.

In the shadows of the web we will continue to find big lies and big money, trying to control us, and herd us. To them, the web is just more wool to pull over our eyes.

The Future Of Money: Jamais Cascio

Jamais Cascio is one of the world’s leading futurists, and spared me some time a few weeks ago to talk about money, especially alternative cash.

Some highlights:

  • Jamais starts by stating that “All money is a fantasy,” and then sets the stage for the problem for local, alternative money: you have to get a critical mass of people to agree in a new fantasy.
  • He points out that virtual currency doesn’t have to be geographically constrained, and so that groups with shared purposes could in fact have new currencies.
  • He hit on cell minutes being used as a virtual currency in Africa, and discusses how it counters potential governmental meddling, like intentional hyperinflation. His point is that these ‘practical’ currencies are in a sense apolitical. I draw the point that the unbanked are the source of many innovations in the world, right now.
  • Eve Online is one of the leading companies in the wounded economy of Iceland, and Jamais points out that their virtual currency has a fairly steady transfer to fiat currency, and it has become a large company in that very damaged market. But the Chinese government recently stepped in to block the conversion of virtual goods to real world goods. This is also where governments step in with gambling, for example: when you convert your chips into cash, they tell the government about your winnings. Jamais points out that this is really where governments start to care: when economies arise.
  • I think the question of anonymous money and the roll of cell phones in future money was the a big part of our conversation, and one that we could have spent hours more on.

A far-ranging and engaging discussion with one of the most thoughtful thinkers of our time.

The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org

Jamais Cascio on the Deathtrap Showers At The Meliã White House

I struggled with the same shower issues that led Jamais to take this picture in London: Deathtrap Shower! on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

/Work: The Open University’s Open Universities Project

Last week, I started work with the Open University in the UK on a new project. There is some bland, internal name for the project — ‘Phase 3 of Alternative Strategic Visions’ or some such — but the team relatively quickly started to call our effort “Open Universities”. This may sound like a manifesto for opening up existing universities, but in fact we intend something else altogether.

The team I mentioned include Tony Walton, a member of the strategic planning group at the Open University; Hardin Tibbs, a UK-based strategy consultant, formerly of GBN; Euan Semple, a social technolgy consultant and formerly of the BBC, Jamais Cascio, a futurist and consultant, Stuart Sim, elearning consultant and former chief architect of Sun’s elearning efforts, and Stephen Heppell, learning consultant and visiting professor at Bournemouth University. A great bunch of minds to throw at the future of online learning.

After only a few hours we had converged on a shared vision: an open, extensible online environment for learning, building on a purpose-built social networking platform. The core ideas include these:

  • Peer-based interaction among the participants, avoiding the hierarchical and stratified notions of ‘teacher’, ‘student’, ‘courses’ and so on. In the Open Universities model, a participant can play many roles: at times creating or mashing up learning modules, at times participating in learning projects (either accredited or not), and at other times perhaps leading a learning project, helping others to learn.
  • An “ecology of participation”, where individuals or groups can make money for their efforts, such as creating and/or leading purpose-built learning projects. Consider the scenario where Motorola (or any other organization) might post a call for proposals in the Open Universities environment, and various individual, groups, or organizations could offer proposals.
  • Portfolio-based learning, where each participant aggregates the history of activities within Open Universities, such as learning projects accomplished or created. Specialized portfolio templates could be created, for example by a real-world university or by a sponsoring organization like Motorola, and these templates could be used by participants to represent learning goals. As the various elements of these templates are realized, the progress being made relative to the template would be reflected in the participant’s portfolio.
  • It’s likely that the platform we envision would be created and then released as open source. We envision creating a global community of developers on the platform, and building extensions to it.

I intend to keep blogging on the project as we move forward. It’s very exciting, and I haven’t really had a chance to even read through the notes and photos of whiteboards from our meetings. More to follow.

I noted that one of the folks that we breifed at the end of the meetings has posted some observations:

[from New university model by Martin Weller]

The resulting suggestion was a social space, with the emphasis on helping others to learn. Such a space is populated by remixable, flexible content and also by learning narratives that guide learners and a range of social connections such as mentors, peers, experts, etc. None of this is particularly surprising given the people there - the solution wasn’t going to be a physical campus with lectures now was it.

The critical mass issue was significant for me. Such a system is very long tail - it meets the needs of the few people who want to learn about Ukrainian knitting patterns, radio programmes of the 1950s, the novels of William Boyd and the influence of Krazy Kat cartoons on modern culture. This is good, because such needs aren’t met in any current system, but it really needs a large mass to support. And this is where the Catch 22 is - if you have the critical mass the system works well, but the system doesn’t function until you get the critical mass. Sites such as YouTube could afford to be a bit more experimental, and just let their system grow since the investment on the part of the user was small. They could also populate it reasonably quickly with a mass of music videos. Learning is more complex, and thus getting the good content and the right connections is more difficult to establish.

Also, although the social networking stuff is important, I think the significance of content is underplayed in such a vision (I even got to use my ‘content may not be everything’ jibe I mentioned yesterday). For a lot of social networking sites, such as LastFM people don’t go there primarily for the social networking, what they go for is the content (ie to be able to listen to a good range of music). This is enhanced (and to some extent enabled) by the network effects. In short they go for the content and stay for the social networking.

While I don’t agree with Weller’s comment about Last.fm, per se, in general I agree with his conclusions: people will join Open Universities to learn, and if the social network supports that, great. I am less of a believer in the primacy of content, but content matters a great deal, so to a large extent, our visions coincide.