Racist Navigators

I remember hearing this story on NPR when it first aired and I've been meaning to post it here since then... if you've followed this blog at all, it should come as no surprise that it has taken me over four months to comment on it. The story itself isn't particularly interesting to me, but I suppose that is why I feel the need to comment on it. As usual, don't expect any clear lines of thought or consistent argumentation... Anyway. To begin: 

Microsoft is under fire this week over a patent it was granted that's been dubbed the "avoid ghetto" feature for GPS devices. The new feature is meant to help pedestrians avoid unsafe neighborhoods, bad weather and difficult terrain by taking information from maps, weather reports, crime statistics and demographics, and creating directions that, according to the patent, take "the user through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold."

The general uproar surrounding this application is saturated with charges of racism. But surely this is the kind of application we can expect since the general orientation of technology is to reduce friction, right?


Interestingly, there has been a lot written about the ethic of expediency within technical rhetoric (particularly concerning Nazi Germany - suffice it to say there are ethical ways to reduce friction with which Hitler was surprisingly unconcerned). The reason I mention this is because while I expect technology to serve a friction-reducing function, I am not advocating an unethical sprint down the slippery slope. That said...


Let's remember the technology we're talking about here. If any one gadget can be held aloft as a friction-reducing tool, it is a GPS. I can even decide what kind of friction I want to get rid of (e.g., traffic, tolls, highways, highly policed areas, distant/expensive gas stations, poorly reviewed restaurants, and so on). Microsoft is adding one more option to the ever-growing list of possible friction-causing phenomena (in this case the friction would be an increased risk of being harassed, robbed, or worse). Here is the fuller context of what the article quotes from the Microsoft patent:

The following is an illustrative example of operation of the system 100 according to an aspect of the subject specification. Historically, at 5 PM, a user can walk from his office to his home on weekdays; the gather component 102 can learn this history and obtain information related to the walk (e.g., paths previously taken by a user, available paths, user experiences upon the paths, etc.). For instance, the gather component 102 can extract information from a schedule that the user is to attend his daughter's recital in several hours, so it is likely he wants a quickest path. The generation component 104 can analyze the information and construct a direction set that allows the user to take paths that take him to his home in a quickest amount of time while keeping the user relatively safe (e.g., taking the user through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold).

The NPR story mentions other controversial applications including ASBOrometer which measures anti-social behavior near your location (if you are in England or Wales). The answer to this apparently depressing and discriminatory application is the Awesometer which "uses a wide variety of open data sources to find the number of positive actions, institutions and events near the current location." 


The even-slightly-discerning reader will probably notice that these applications are functionally identical. By pointing out areas where positive actions or events happen, you are establishing borders around areas where those actions don't happen. The only difference is the rhetorical thrust of an applications primary function. Interestingly, though the coverage of the application is framing the discussion in terms of avoidance (thus constructing a negative primary function), the patent largely frames things positively (as you can see in the section of the patent quoted above). 


Remember who is writing this post. I'm a fan of friction generally. We need it. But I'm not sure that this particular advance deserves all the uproar it received... it seems a "natural" evolution in an omnipresent technology that already discriminates so much. My underlying point in this discussion is to suggest some level of hypocrisy among those who would take an overly optimistic view of technology (while remaining ignorant of its friction-reducing function and all that that implies), and then call foul when the orientation of technology is realized. This ignorance is highlighted by rhetorical shifts between positive and negative functions (as I mentioned above), and popular reactions to those framings. At the end of the day, I don't think Microsoft's problem was reinforced racism, but poorly constructed rhetoric. 






This is not to say that technology can't be racist....

The Guardian and Dunder Mifflin

Dunder Mifflin and The Guardian face the same basic problem (even if the former isn’t a real organization): peddling paper-based products in the age of PCs, tablets, and smartphones. Granted, The Guardian’s problems are more complex than that, but in order for this comparison to work I begin on an overly reductionistic note. Interestingly, both parties decided to respond to this problem of increased irrelevance with advertisements. Please. Consider the following:

In the end branch manager, Michael Scott, couldn’t really escape the absurdity of running a company that sells paper: “Limitless paper in a paperless world.” But, of course, that is the joke and Dunder Mifflin is a corporate metaphor for Mr. Scott himself. R.I.P seasons 1-3 of The Office.  Anyway. The Guardian (which began in some form in 1821) has a bit more at stake as it faces more than a shift away from print but also cultural and technological shifts that are changing how the world receives, reacts to, produces, and understands news. (Of course, my 2.5 readers are up on all this since this topic has come up before.) Needless to say, The Guardian’s advertisement (though I fear calling it that will cheapen their rhetorical artifact) is a bit more effective than Michael Scott’s:

Pretty intense, huh?

We find ourselves in a time where publications are going paperless, every one carries an adequate news camera on them (so to speak), and the means of expression are increasingly available and frictionless. So the question facing every newspaper is one of relevance – to say the least. I want to walk through this video a bit and comment on the argument(s) it makes, but I fear that might get cumbersome for one post (I mean, who reads a blog post more than a paragraph long?). So. More to come. 

Marketplace's Technology Series: "Robots Ate My Job"

If you listen to APM's Martketplace at all then you've probably heard some of their stories within their "Robots Ate My Job" series. It has been a lot of fun and I've particularly enjoyed David Brancaccio's trip across America with no human contact. He made his final observations on today's episode and ends on the following note: 

It’s a lot of time to ponder existance sitting behind the wheel for that long. And I’ve got to take a vow of abstinence moving forward. I’m talking about some technological abstinence. It may not be that robots are eating my journey, it’s my own compulsion, really, to bury myself in technology. That’s got to change. I got to add some more real-life conversations to the general mix, pull my head out of the iPad screen and my smart phone and all that stuff. I mean, there’s a large country and a large world around us, and too often this technology just absorbs too much of our attention.

Interestingly, after attempting what should have been a virtually frictionless experience (an exaggerated form of his media-filled life before the project), he  decides that a bit of friction would do him good. I strongly suggest checking out some of the related articles and following David's road-trip journal. 


((As a side note, I also tuned in to hear about the automated cupcake robot in Beverly Hills and appreciated that the journalist, after trying out the machine for her producer, preferred to experience the friction of sight, scent, and perhaps even longer waits and lines when choosing her dessert.))

And We're Back! *update*

Between family visiting for the holidays and other winter-break-business, I haven't done much in the blogging world for some time. Now that the immediate shock of new semester is over (though it is looking like this will be one of my busiest), I am looking forward to getting a couple of things on here in the next few days.


So. To my 3.5 readers, sorry for the hiatus and stay tuned for some more ever-so-typically-underwhelming, and poorly-written digressions on digital rhetoric and the like. At least I'll leave you with videos from time to time:




*UPDATE - March 2* Seriously... I am back. I have a definite concept for a post closing up the frictionless facebook posts... before moving on to other aspects of frictionless experiences - I have some ideas that involve GPS navigation and a quick observation on online identity and friction-filled sharing. 

Frictionless Socialization - Part 2

People outside the realm of Facebook have talked about frictionless experiences before, but they have always talked about it in relationship to digital mediums. All the way back in 1996, Bill Gates was envisioning "frictionless capitalism" made possible by online, commercial communities.[1] Much more recently, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, said  that "when you reduce friction - make something easier - people do more of it." This is how he introduced the X-Ray feature on the new Kindle Touch which reduces friction in several ways. Now a reader who needs to know a definition, cross-reference, character bio, or other bits of reference information, they merely hold their finger over the word/character in question and are treated to a variety of sources instantly. Nicholas Carr, commenting on Bezos's address, outlines other points of reduced friction and gives his take on the new technology:

The friction in this case is the self-containment of the printed book, the tenacity of its grip on the reader. The reduction of the friction is the replacement of text with highly responsive hypertext. What people do more of is shift their focus and attention away from the words of the book and toward the web of snippets wrapped around the book - dictionary definitions, Wikipedia entries, character descriptions from Shelfari, and so forth. It's easy to see the usefulness of X-Ray, particularly for reference books, manuals, and other publications of a utilitarian nature. But Bezos is not X-Raying a cookbook. He's X-Raying a novel: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. He is, in a very real sense, treating a work of art as though it were an auto repair manual. Which is, of course, what the web wants a work of art to be: not a place of repose, but a jumping-off point.

When Amazon delivers a copy of The Remains of the Day to your Kindle, Bezos goes on to explain, the company "has pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases" and turned them into links. My, what a convenience! As a reader, I no longer have to waste a lot of mental energy figuring out which phrases in a book are interesting. It's all been pre-calculated for me! Here we have a preview of what happens when engineers begin to recreate books, and the experience of reading, in the image of the web. The algorithmical mind begins to run roughshod over the literary mind. Needless to say, there are also commercial angles here. Clicking on an "interesting phrase" will no doubt eventually trigger not just Wikipedia and Shelfari articles but also contextual advertisements as well as product recommendations from Amazon's store. Removing the edges from a book also serves to reduce friction in the purchasing process.

In my mind Carr picks up on a lot of important points here that will be relevant in our later discussions of Facebook. A book is no longer a self-contained entity with a clear beginning and end; now it serves as a launch pad for diversions into hyperlinked references. I grew up having to look at context to determine the meaning of unclear words or phrases which, could be argued, made me a better reader (and, perhaps, conversation partner). A frictionless version of that same predicament requires the opposite experience as it radically decontextualizes a word, phrase, or character from its literary surroundings - not to mention the interruption in style and mood that a hyperlinked book most readily provides. Here Carr makes a content/form distinction that we could categorize as genre. We don't teach (or rather, haven't taught) students to read a sonnet the same way they read a newspaper clipping. Our expectations of the two genres should be different with respect to literary style, message, and even accessibility. The way information is transmitted in this frictionless technology at least moves in the direction of flattening genres and their corresponding expectations.

Whether or not this kind of interface is bad is, I suppose, debatable. My saying that there is some benefit in having to work through a difficult passage rather than clicking on it doesn't make it true. Maybe people will still be able to be swept away in a novel without the semi-constant desire to click on words and characters (if only to see if they have an entry - a motivation I can personally attest to), but that isn't what Bezos is counting on. Remember that he said that when friction is reduced, frequency of use is increased. If that is true, there is no getting lost in compelling stories, other worlds, or quality prose. Instead, readers are led astray into a forest of hypertexts and their return is of no concern.

But at least everyone will be lost in the same, "pre-calculated" forests.

*****

So I wonder if we'll get to a point where students won't know how to use an index or gather meaning from context, but I fear the point when they won't be expected to. Maybe my academic interests are coloring this discussion. While I whole heartedly mean everything I've said here, I don't think I need to know how to do long division (though it would be helpful on occasion), or use a slide rule, or sundial. Would people on the verge of the next technology (calculators and clocks) rant like I am? Is there something special about literature or am I just sensitive to the subject and want students to go through the "friction" that I had to go through in order to understand Shakespeare or the frictionfull, Chaucer?

I'm probably biased in this discussion because I value literature and critical reading skills, but in either case it is important to see that the brains behind significant aspects of our online experiences are attempting to remove friction in important ways. And, I think, a lot of those reductions and (not yet fully realized) consequences are analogous to what is happening with social media, and Facebook particularly.

Even if there isn't something special about literature, would we say the same thing of community, relationships, and/or friendships? A lot of the same frictionless philosophy saturates Facebook. Zuckerberg's vision of frictionless experiences is a "perfected" form of Bezos's where it won't just be used more often, but it will be used constantly and unthinkingly (and, as it turned out, unknowingly).

We'll begin our frictionless-Facebook journey next time. 

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[1]. Chris Werry, “Imagined Electronic Community: Representations of Online Community in Business Texts,” in Online Community and the Future of Internet Commerce, 10. For more on friction and internet commerce see: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/antitrust_20.php

Frictionless Socialization - Part 1 - Introduction

“It is not accidental that teens live in a culture infatuated with celebrity – the “reality” presented by reality TV and the highly publicized dramas (such as that between socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie) portray a magnified (and idealized) version of the networked publics that teens are experiencing, complete with surveillance and misinterpretation. The experiences that teens are facing in the publics that they encounter appear more similar to the celebrity idea of public life than to the ones their parents face.”[1]

  

So reads one of danah boyd’s conclusions about teenage experiences in networked publics toward the end of her excellent (albeit dated) article “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites.” I have been talking about frictionless experiences ever since I heard about Mark Zuckerberg talk at the F8 conference, and there were several times in this article where this idea of friction struck me. The above quote, for example, refers primarily to the wide publicity that anyone and everyone receives now because of the internet generally and social media specifically. But I’m inclined to say that there is more similarity between teenagers’ public experiences and The Simple Life than publicity. The point of the show was to watch two second-rate celebrities, who had never experienced the kind of friction that regular folk do, perform menial, dirty, friction-filled jobs. They worked on farms, cooked meals, styled their own hair – seriously terrifying work. Their lives had been so cushioned and limited that watching them attempt these tasks or even talk to others who performed these tasks became painful. Introducing friction in the lives of two celebrities who had not previously encountered that level of resistance made for three seasons of snigger-worthy television.

Back to boyd. Her article basically explores a selected history of social networks and, specifically, the rise and fall of MySpace. Basically teenagers fled to online communities because they had nowhere else to go in the off-line world. Previously popular places like roller-skating rinks and malls started to over-regulate and increase authority presence. While kids could still be kids at Chuck-E-Cheese’s, teens couldn’t be teens at Skateland. So they took to the internet and found functionally similar spaces where they could be themselves. It didn’t take long, however, before parents started policing those spaces as well which led to multiple online identities (one for parents and one for friends) and a steady exodus of teenagers from MySpace. boyd's conclusion is that “teens need access to these publics – both mediated and unmediated – to mature, but their access is regularly restricted.”[2] She makes related points throughout her piece:

We are doing our youth a disservice if we believe that we can protect them from the world by limiting their access to public life. They must enter that arena, make mistakes, and learn from them. Our role as adults is not to be their policemen…[3]

While social interaction can and does take place in private environments, the challenges of doing so in public life are part of what help youth grow. Making mistakes and testing limits are fundamental parts of this. Yet, there is a pervading attitude that teens must be protected from their mistakes.[4]

While I agree with this philosophy generally, it seems to me that mediated public spaces aren’t designed for this kind of maturation. That is to say, if the interfaces with which teenagers (and other age groups) interact are meant to provide frictionless experiences, then are these mediated publics equal to unmediated publics in the role they play in socialization? Do people prefer mediated publics? If so, is fuller access to that social space priming future The Simple Life stars? I’m being purposely hyperbolic and exaggerating boyd’s metaphor – but there do seem to be some inconsistencies within this kind of argument. I’m interested in these questions as well as exploring the various arenas from which friction is being removed, to what extent, and to what end.

Many of my concerns and conclusions are highly speculative and reactionary, but if it makes for good fiction then it makes for a few good blog posts.

That is the kind of reasoning you can expect in the posts to come. Prepare yourself.

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[1]. danah boyd, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” in MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning: Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume, ed. David Buckingham (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 22.

[2]. Ibid., 22-23.

[3]. Ibid., 22.

[4]. Ibid., 19.

Sherry Turkle: Alone Together

If I had more time it would be fun to cover Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I actually found it to be the most convincing piece that I read which fell on the less optimistic side of the technology/social media spectrum. The structure reminded me a lot of the danah boyd piece that we read in RWS511 where she based her conclusions and analysis about MySpace (and Facebook, by implication) on her interviews and data collected from teenagers. Turkle's data is more up to date and she roots her analysis in these interviews and the themes that she sees in the data. This makes her work far less speculative than Postman, and I think more convincing than Carr. Some of her points seem redundant (not unlike boyd's article, though boyd was writing at the beginning of the social media revolution), but she does offer a lot of interesting insights into how teenagers approach social media and what their expectations are of their community and technology. Absent from a lot from a lot of other discussions are low-tech new media like phone conversations and how teenagers feel about that form of communication - in short, it is too transparent and demands too much effort from the users. 


I found the book really interesting and a very fast read; I highly recommend it. She has done an independent TED talk which introduces a lot of the main concepts and will give you some idea as to whether or not you are interested in her work.