technology

Biased Screens and Us

We should always what parts of technology is true and false. In an attempt to identify what should be common knowledge among anybody who uses, or is dependent on, digital technology (this is basically all of us) Alex Krotoski has written a report The Personal (Computer) Is Political: Recommendations for the rest of us for the Nominet Trust. From the presentation

To be able to fully participate in our physical and digital communities requires a range of actions and understanding. The value of the technical skills of coding and programming and the creativity of making and designing digital products are well understood, but at the heart of our ambition to support young people’s digital making is understanding how digital technologies are made. This understanding can come about through the process of digital making, or of tinkering with existing digital products, but it is this understanding that is so important.

We are constantly drawn in by the convenience of our shiny devices but we seldom think about the ways in which our devices are biased. We tend to trust what appears in front of us on our screens despite knowing that the screen is a device capable of extreme manipulation. We need to be critical both to the content that is delivered by our technology and by the technology itself (the focus of Krotoski’s report). She writes:

Becoming a critical consumer of technology isn’t just the responsibility of our teachers, our policy makers or software developers: we need to arm ourselves with the knowledge and the know-how to break out of our technofundamentalist trappings, and to wrestle our lives back from the machines.

On her website she publishes four obvious, but often overlooked, points that we should always be aware of in relation to our technology.

  • Be aware that software developers do not necessarily have your individual wellbeing as their priority.
  • Demand more from developers. You are their customer, and if your interests and needs are not being met, don’t adapt yourself to the system; expect it to adapt to you.
  • Consider how well you are able to express yourself in software, and whether this is adequate. Assess if what you want and need changes in the future, that the software is flexible and responsive enough to allow you to change. Consider the implications of your interactions with the service should that service change its conditions for use.
  • In all of your interactions with technology, consider the assumptions and biases held by the developers.

fry-can-t-tell-meme-generator-can-t-tell-if-truth-or-lie-bf08edThe problem is that the convenience offered by our technology allows us to both know this and simultaneously believe that what appears on our screens is (mostly) true. It is easier for us to doubt the truth of images and facts we find online (because we have been fooled before) but we tend not to question the bias built into our systems.

Also check out Alex’s book Untangling the Web

 

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Artificial Needs of Technology

Most of the time I listen to Adam Gopnik in the Point of View podcast but I could not resist re-reading his recent piece for Point of View: Why I don’t tweet. Naturally I was interested as a researcher and an avid twitterer. It had to be something more than a “meh” or the even more annoying argument of its being pointless. And Gopnik didn’t let me down:

…while I merely like my computer, I love my smartphone. I clutch my phone tight to myself, I hold it in my hand like a talisman – a feeling of panic overcomes me when in a strange city I find I have mislaid it, or that I forgot to bring its charger. But though it has altered the shape of my days and hours, has it really altered the life those days add up to and achieve?

He goes on to list the needs that were fulfilled prior to the technology that are now filled with the technology. He is not a luddite but he recognizes a very important aspect of our love for all things new and shiny:

Like so much modern media technology, it creates a dependency without ever actually addressing a need.

mail overload

Surrounded by the devices we love and enjoy and become dependent upon the question is do they really address a need? They change our lives and we create needs that only they can fill but the real need was maybe an artificial one to begin with?

Take my e-book reader. It’s stuffed to the gills (?) with more books than I will ever read. Wonderful. But did when was the last time I had nothing to read? On the other hand it changes the way in which I read. With digital books I am more prone to be bored unless I am captivated immediately. It’s easy to be bored because I already have the next book right there. It doesn’t actually address a need, but it changes behavior and creates needs.

It’s not about denying the usefulness, but it is about understanding what the technology does to us.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Public shaming with technology

A question that has been bouncing around my head for a while, and maybe this is because of an article I’m working on now, is why do people use technology to shame, defame, slander or insult in ways that they would never do without technology?

This is not a new discussion. In the early Internet days part of the answer that was often used was the idea that people felt that they could be anonymous online and this made “bad behavior” permissible or possible.

The important thing about this anonymity was that it was a perceived sense of anonymity as opposed to real anonymity. This caused many to believe that if anonymity could be taken away technology users would behave themselves.

Surveillance would resolve bad behavior.

This thinking created the idea of enforcing real identities online.

Countries like China and South Korea and companies like Google and Facebook have for different reasons implemented real identities online.

Naturally policies and regulations such as these have been criticized.

But do we behave if we do not believe ourselves to be anonymous online?

Apparently not.

Look at the abuse that Marion Bartoli, the woman’s Wimbledon champion, faced.

With tweets like “Someone as ugly and unattractive as Bartoli doesn’t deserve to win” there is a direct connection between physical appearance and physical skill. Sadly, of course, this connection is more common when it is related to women.

What is interesting is that many of those who offered opinions like this (and worse) were not anonymous and yet they were still openly hostile, belligerent and maybe slanderous.

The Swedish clothes company H&M printed clothes with pictures of Tupac Shakur, a 21 year old Swedish woman, wrote to question on H&M’s Facebook page asking why they thought it was ok to use the picture of a man convicted of sexual abuse in their clothing.

As a result she received thousands of comments, she was threatened with, amongst other things, rape, stoning and drowning. The main discussion was whether or not H&M had behaved correctly by not being actively enough in removing comments.

But what is interesting is that the comments where all on Facebook, people seemed to be happily open with their misogynistic, threatening and illegal comments. There was no illusion of anonymity, the users were easily identifiable by everyone and yet this did not stop them.

Bad behavior online is not prevented by openly identifying everyone.

Posted on by mklang

Technology: older than we think

Technology is always older than we think. Recently XKCD published a wonderful series of quotes on how we perceive the changes technology brings on the pace of everyday life.

Then today I came across Mark Twain’s excellent use of the camera in King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule published in 1905.

The kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us, indeed… Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible kodak — and all the harmony went to hell! The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe… Then that trivial little kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!

Posted on by mklang

How to share wifi from wifi (without Ethernet)

If hotel rooms are supposed to become my home away from home then there is one thing that I absolutely hate: the unfriendly wifi.

  1. I dislike paying extra for wifi
  2. I dislike having to log on with superlong codes each time I need to use wifi
  3. I dislike having to buy wifi for each of my devices separately!

The first two are unfortunately not going to go away until hotels come to their senses but the third can be resolved by without relying on the hotels.

This is a guide to creating your own wifi in a room where the only Internet connection is wifi (i.e. no Ethernet). You will need laptop, wireless router, Ethernet cable. I have done this with my Apple equipment. I am sure you can do this in other connections but I have not tried it. I have not done this all too often and remembering these settings are the reason I wrote this guide.

Begin by Logging into the wifi with your laptop.

Go to sharing (Settings->sharing->Internet Sharing) Select from wifi share via Ethernet and turn it on. When troubleshooting turning sharing on/off again has sometimes resolved the problem.

Connect your Wireless router to the computer. I use the new small Airport Express its lightweight for travel. Connect you Ethernet cable from the laptop to the Ethernet WAN port.

Then its time to set up the Wifi

Go to the Airport Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> Airport Utility)

Base Station: pick a name and password for the base station. This is not the wifi net or password but the way to log into the base station to make changes if need be.

Network: You are creating a wireless network. Pick name for that wifi and password. Chose Bridge mode.

Note some situations may not like you doing all this so picking a wifi name that screams out whom you are may be unwise. Obviously be wise about passwords as well.

Internet Connection: This is the hotel wifi that you logged into in the beginning of this guide.

The update and you are away. You should now log all your devices onto the wifi you have created and they are all sharing the internet connection that you are paying for.

Posted on by mklang

GikII 2012 Call for papers

My favorite conference is GikII. it wins in weirdness of topic, depth of research and thoroughly nicely people. The call for papers for this year is out now: Check it out here. This is technology & law taken to the edge!

It’s harder than it used to be to write a Call for Papers for GikII, the so-cool-it-hurts blue skies workshop for papers exploring the interstices between law, technology and popular culture. Back in the day,  you could dazzle the noobs just by mentioning past glories like the first paper on Facebook and privacy, Harry Potter and the Surveillance of Doom, regulation of autonomous agents according to the Roman law of slavery, edible technologies and copyright in Dalek knitting patterns. But nowadays we live in a world where we routinely encounter unmanned surveillance drones used to deliver tacos, in commercial asteroid mining with Richard Branson, 3d printers used to create human organs and the fact that Jeremy Hunt still has a job. Still, if any of these or the other many phenomena of the digital age in desperate need of legal attention are digging a tunnel out of your brain, then send us an abstract for the 7th Gikii workshop!  Maybe this year it will be your paper which contributes the seminal GikII meme following in the honoured footsteps of LOLcats, flying penises, and knitted Daleks.

Posted on by mklang

Expressions in Code and Freedom: Notes from a lecture

Being invited to give an opening keynote is both incredibly flattering and intimidating. Addressing the KDE community at their Akademy is even more intimidating: I want to be light, funny, deep, serious, relevant, insightful and create a base for discussion. No wonder I couldn’t stop editing my slides until long after sundown.

Tweet: doubly useless

The goal of my talk was to address the problem of the increased TiVo-ization of life, democracy and policy. Stated simply TiVo-ization is following the letter of rules/principles while subverting them by changing what is physically possible (wikipedia on origins and deeper meaning)

In order to set the stage I presented earlier communications revolutions. Reading and writing are 6000 years old, but punctuation took almost 4000 years to develop and empty spaces between words are only 1000 years old. What we see here is that communication is a code that evolves, it gets hacked and improved. Despite its accessibility it retains several bugs for millennia.

The invention of writing is a paradigm shift. But its taken for granted. printing on the other hand is seen as an amazing shift. In my view Gutenberg was the Steve Jobs of his day, Gutenberg built on the earlier major shifts and worked on packaging – he gets much more credit for revolution than he deserves.

Tweet: Gutenberg

Communication evolves nicely (telegraphs, radio, television) but the really exciting and cool stuff occurs with digitalization. This major shift is today easily overlooked, together with the Internet, and we focus on the way in which communication is packaged rather than the infrastructure that makes it possible.

The WWW is one on these incredible packages that was created with an openness ideal. We should transmit whatever we liked as long as we followed the protocol for communication. So far so good. Our communications follow the Four Freedoms of Free Software, Communication is accessible, hackable and usable.

Tweet: Stallman

Unfortunately this total freedom inevitably creates the environment that invites convenience. Here corporations provide this convenience but at the cost of individual freedom and, in the long run, maybe at the cost of the WWW.

The risk to the WWW emerges from the paradox of our increasing use of the Web. Our increased use has brought with it a subtle shift in our linking habits. We are sending links to each other via social media on an unimaginable level. Sharing is the point of social media. The early discussion on blogging was all about user generated content. This is still important, but the focus of social media today is not on content generation but on sharing.

Focusing on sharing rather than content creation means we are creating less and linking less. Additionally the links we share are all stored in social media sites. These are impermanent and virtually unsearchable – they are virtually unhistoric. Without the links of the past there is no web “out in the wild” – the web of the future will exist only within the manicured and tamed versions within social network nature preserves (read more Will the web fail?)

On an individual level the sharing has created a performance lifestyle. This is the need to publicize elements of your life in order to enhance the quality of it. (Read more Performance Lifestyle & Coffee Sadism).

Tweet: coffee

This love of tech is built on the ideology that technology creates freedom, openness and democracy – in truth technology does not automatically do this. Give people technology and in all probability what will be created is more porn.

The problem is not that social media cannot be used for deeper things, but rather that the desire of the corporations controlling social media is to enable shallow sharing as opposed to deep interaction. Freedom without access to the code is useless. Without access to the code what we have is the TiVo-ization of everyday life. If you want a picture then this is a park bench that cannot be used by homeless people.

image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)

Park benches which are specifically designed to prevent people from sleeping on benches. In order to exclude an undesirable group of people from a public area the democratic process must first define a group as undesirable and then obtain a consensus that this group is unwelcome. All this must be done while maintaining the air of democratic inclusion – it’s a tricky, almost impossible task. But by buying a bench which you cannot sleep on, you exclude those who need to sleep on park benches (the homeless) without even needing to enter into a democratic discussion.Only homeless people are affected. This is the TiVo-iztion of everyday life.

The more technology we embed into our lives the less freedom we have. The devices are dependent on our interaction as we are dependent upon them. All to often we adapt our lives to suit technology rather than the other way around.

In relation to social media the situation becomes worse when government money is spent trying to increase participation via social networks. The problem is that there is little or no discussion concerning the downsides or consequences of technologies on society . We no longer ask IF we should use laptops/tablets/social media in eduction but only HOW.

Partly this is due to the fear of exclusion. Democracy is all about inclusion, and pointing out that millions of users are “on” Facebook seems to be about inclusion. This is naturally a con. Being on/in social media is not democratic participation and will not democratize society. Why would you want to be Facebook friends with the tax authority. And how does this increase democracy?

The fear of lack of inclusion has led to schools teaching social media and devices instead of teaching Code and Consequences. By doing this, we are being sold the con that connection is democracy.

Tweet: Gadgets

So what can we do about it?

We need to hack society to protect openness. Not openness without real function (TiVo-ization) but openness that cannot be subverted. This is done by forcing social media to follow law and democratic principles. If they cannot be profitable within this scenario – tough.

This is done by being very, very annoying:
1. Tell people what the consequences of their information habits will have.
2. Always ask who controls the ways in which our gadgets affect our lives. Are they accountable?
3. Read ALL your EULA… Yes, I’m talking to you!
4. Always ask what your code will do to the lives of others. Always ask what your technology use will do to the lives of others…

 

The slides are here:

Expressions in Code and Freedom

View more PowerPoint from Mathias Klang
Posted on by mklang

Is performance lifestyle harmful?

Many years ago while on holiday at the Versailles palace I noticed an amusing pair of tourists. He was tall, large and filming everything with his camera. She was short and slim and trying to hold the audio guide close to the camera while he panned over the ceilings – the effect was an amusing dance through the gilded halls. What struck me was that neither of them seemed to be enjoying the present but were more interested in producing a record of the trip.

When I talk about social media (which I seem to do a lot) I often refer to Performance Lifestyle. This is the documentation of our lives to an imaginary or perceived audience. One of the minor effects is to create the extra-ordinary in an ordinary life. Online people don’t (for example) simply drink coffee but they either drink terrible or fabulous coffee. Or maybe they create a special interest in coffee and create a type of art or research project around the mundane event of coffee drinking (I’m guilty of this). The point is that since we live normal lives we need to create a supernormal version of everyday events.

Some may find this silly, but silly does not make it pointless. Many find sport silly, but to those with the interest it is hardly silly. Silly is therefore not an interesting measurement. But what if our performance lifestyles could be harmful in some way? In a recent lecture I argued that

One of the interesting things about technology is the way in which it enables us to do things which we normally cannot do. But it is also interesting that technology encourages us to do things differently. For example there seems to be a change in the way in which we react today when we witness an accident or emergency.

1. Photograph the event
2. Tweet the photo
3. Update status on Facebook
4. Call emergency services

Naturally this is apocryphal but it has a sad ring of truth about it.

This is something I would like to study closer but it is difficult to find a methodology to prove or disprove this effect. But take a look at what happened during the Oslo bombing on the 22 July, 2011.

This is a screenshot portion of this page. Click view image to view full size.

Time 15:25 The bomb goes off at 15:25 and 22 seconds. At 38 seconds the blast registers on NORSAR seismic data equipment at Løten. At 45 seconds the tweet “Holy Crap did Oslo just explode?”

Time 15:26 The police receive their first notification

Time 15:28: 10 seconds tweet “Shit! Office window blew up! What happened?”, 21 seconds tweet “Loud band in center of Oslo, what was it?”, 44 seconds tweet “Bomb downtown”

Time 15:29: 3 seconds tweet “Lightning, bomb, terror? What happend at Youngstorget? Our office was crushed!”

This page has a fascinating chronological list of tweets.

This is fascinating stuff but there are several problems here. First is the time – how exact are these measurements, what could or should be the reaction times to expect? Is it fair to make generalizations from the communication of shocked people in an event of this magnitude? What about the more banal everyday accidents that occur in our lives? How could we effectively observe and measure the ways in which our technology changes the ways in which we react to everyday emergencies? It’s all good and well to say things we think to be true but how do we actually conduct research around this topic? Seriously, I’m asking you. Only then could I answer the question posed in the title.

Posted on by mklang

Democracy cannot ignore technology: Notes from a lecture

Not really sure if this should be called a lecture as it was part of a panel presentation where we were allotted 15 minutes each and then questions. The setting was interesting as it was part of the Swedish Parliaments annual conference about the future and the people asking the questions were all politicians. So for my 15 minutes (of fame?) I chose to expand on the ill effects of politics ignoring technology (or taking it as a stable, neutral given).

The presentation began with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.

It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.

What I wanted to do was to explain that the law has always been seen as playing catchup. This is not a bug in the law it is a feature of the law. Attempting to create laws that are before the time would be wasteful, unpopular and quite often full of errors about what we think future problems would be. I wanted to include a quote from Niels Bohr

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

But time was short and I needed to avoid meandering down interesting – but unhelpful – alleyways.

Instead I reminded the audience that many of our fundamental rights and freedoms are 300 years old and, despite being updated, they are prone to being increasingly complex to manage or even outdated when the basic technological realities have changed. This was the time of Voltaire who is today mainly famous for saying

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it

(Actually he never said this. The words were put in his mouth by the later writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall. But lets not let the truth get in the way of a good story.)

The period saw the development of fantastic modern concepts such as democracy, free speech and autonomy may be seen as products of the enlightenment. They remain core values in spite of the fact that our technological developments have totally changed the world in which we live. For the sake of later comparison I added that the killer app of the time was the quill. Naturally there were printing presses but as these are not personal communication devices they provide easier avenues of control for states. In other words developing concepts of free speech must be seen in the light of what individuals had the ability to do.

As I had been asked to talk about technology and society I chose to exemplify with the concept of copyright which was launched by the Statute of Ann in 1710. In Sweden copyright was introduced into law in the 19th century and the most recent thorough re-working of the law was in the 1950 with the modern (and present) Swedish copyright Act entering into the books in 1960. The law has naturally been amended since then but has received no major reworking since then. The killer app of the 1960s? Well it probably was the pill – but that’s hardly relevant, so I looked at radio and tv. The interesting thing about these is that they are highly regulated and controlled mass mediums. While they are easy to access for the consumer, they are hardly platforms of speech for a wider group of people.

Moving along to the Internet, the web, social media and the massive increases in personal devices have created a whole new ball game. These have create a whole new way of social interaction among citizens. The mass medium of one to many is not the monopoly player any more. So what should the regulator be aware of? Well they must take into consideration the ways in which new technologies are changing actual social interaction on many levels and also the changes in fundamental social values that are coupled with our expectations on the justice system.

The problem is that all to often regulators (as they are ordinary people) tend to take as their starting point, their own user experience. In order to illustrate what I meant I include one of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes (it’s from The Salmon of Doubt)

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Therefore it is vital not to ignore the role of technology, or to underestimate its effects. Looking at technology as – simply technology – i.e. as a neutral tool that does not effect us is incredibly dangerous. If we do not understand this then we will be ruled by technology. Naturally not by technology but by those who create and control technology. Law and law makers will become less relevant to the way in which society works. Or does not work.

In order to illustrate this, I finished off with a look at anti-homless technology – mainly things like park benches which are specifically designed to prevent people from sleeping on benches. In order to exclude an undesirable group of people from a public area the democratic process must first define a group as undesirable and then obtain a consensus that this group is unwelcome. All this must be done while maintaining the air of democratic inclusion – it’s a tricky, almost impossible task. But by buying a bench which you cannot sleep on, you exclude those who need to sleep on park benches (the homeless) without even needing to enter into a democratic discussion.

If this is done with benches, then what power lies in the control of a smart phone?

Here are the slides used with the lecture.

Posted on by mklang

What is good design for you?

In praise of analogue technologies

All of us are immersed in technologies but when we speak of technology we inevitably jump to the digital varieties. This is unsurprising as these are the new, new things of the day. It’s also unsurprising as we have been taught to be enthralled by shiny technology due to the ways in which Apple has designed and marketed their products.

In addition to this my own views of design and desire is warped by my workplace and research interests. This results in the creating of the idea that design must, almost exclusively, deal with digital technology.

But there is something very limiting in this worldview and I would like to get a better perception of the design of everyday things. One way to go is to read the design books – and I can highly recommend this approach – why not read, for example, Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things.

But I want to go another way and explore design through the things that surround us. We are in a period of design fetishism where good must be expensive and then gets priced that way. So price is involved but I would like to go beyond the dominance of price in looking for, and at, design.

So what I would like is to collect examples of good design with a motivation as to why it is good design. I am not looking for consensus but for stories. So to kick it off I would like to give some examples of good analogue design.

The Barcelona chair – this is a visual object that changes the room in which it is set. It pleases me to sit in it even if other chairs would do the job equally well. It’s affect on me is entwined with my ideas of the chair as well as the object itself.

Good kitchen knives. The balance of a “real” kitchen knife is extremely tactile. It fits and becomes an extension of the hand that uses it. Equally a bad knife makes cooking a chore.

The Merkur razor. At some point I got tired of being owned by Gillette and bought a real old razor with real old razor blades. It’s heavy and does not fit in the hand like the kitchen knife but because of its weight and the risk of cuts turns a boring everyday task into a meditative act. Sure, I may bleed a bit more but the morning ritual is totally different today.

So please let me know, what are your examples of good design?

Posted on by mklang