Choosing Control

Bust of Emperor Augustus wearing the Corona Civica, on display in the Musei Capitolini (Rome). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The future really is almost here.

We now have flying cars, self-driving cars, and floating concept cars. Of course, the latter’s  technology would in my ideal world be used to create Back to the Future hoverboards just in time for 2015, but I digress…

The point is that our technological sophistication is extraordinary. Other examples would the powerful miniature computers we carry around (even if most people just browse Facebook, play Angry Birds, and make the occasional telephone call on them), the bionic exoskeleton that let a paralysed woman complete a marathon and motion capture technology that should make teleconferencing more useful. And as the sheer quantity of data exchanged across the internet increases, our ability to continuously access this data also advances by leaps and bounds.

Increasingly, the problem we face is one of control. The weakest link in all the above technologies are the human beings using them; we simply can’t crunch information as quickly as a computer. Our advantage lies in being able to prioritise data once we have a manageable amount to deal with. But we need help to winnow the initial mass down. This is why manipulating the flow of information is crucial. It explains the rise of search engines, automated control systems, and social networking sites. All of them personalise what information enters your conscious sphere; an invisible filter on the world.

The dilemma individuals face is how to retain a broad enough overview of the world to have a balanced perspective while not getting bogged down with excessive detail.

It’s impossible to ignore new technologies. Unless you are an avowed Luddite, you’re exposed to it daily. However, it is possible to prioritise. The world is tipping in favour of those who can correctly decide what is important. They can choose what data to exchange, adjusting their degree of privacy to accomodate this. And they can choose when to let automation run their lives and when to actively intervene to change course. These people will get the benefit of technological sophistication. Everyone else will be prone to becoming lost and homogenised within a morass of data and control systems.

What do you actually want to achieve, and why?

Life can be so fast-paced that people spend all their time running to stand still. Decide your goals. Then figure out what information you need to allow into life to facilitate them. For example, if you don’t need 100 different apps, don’t get them. It’s clutter; rubbish filling your mind and clouding it.

Do not be a human magpie attracted to the newest shiny object, and then instantly forgetting it.

Augustus Caesar’s personal motto of festina lente (“hurry slowly”) is more relevant than ever. A sense of control is not achieved by trying to do everything quickly, but by actively choosing when and how to act. Take the time to plan ahead and life simplifies. And technology returns to being a tool rather than a master.

Why do you take photos?

Image by Capt Kodak via Flickr

Watching the amusing Business Nightmares (BBC2, Monday), the interview with a former senior Polaroid executive stood out. Polaroid is of course a company whose core product simply became obsolete for the mainstream user. He commented: “We weren’t able to see that people wouldn’t want a hard copy print; it sure came as a heck of a surprise that people wouldn’t want one…”

Then he paused and sheepishly admitted “But I don’t either”!

For many, the physical photo album has indeed become quaint, but let’s face it, those physical albums were only rarely looked through anyway. Are their modern digital equivalents viewed more, for all their greater accessibility? Probably, but I suspect there is still only a spike of initial views and then increasingly rare subsequent views.

Some photographs are taken with artistic aspirations, though perhaps pretensions is a more accurate word for the many taken with this intent but in the absence of talent. Others are taken for purely documentary or illustrative purposes in mind, be they journalistic or commercial in nature.

But the majority of photos are simpler snaps; taken to solely to mark a transient experience and commemorate the passages of life’s rituals. The documentary quality of the image is almost irrelevant in these cases; the emotional power of these snaps are nearly all in the acts of taking and sharing the image. I don’t Facebook myself, having an aversion to acquiring yet another time sink, but I’m struck by the avid taking and sharing of images by those who are on such social networking sites. The sharing of a photograph has an interesting dynamic tension: it works to define the sharer’s identity, but simultaneously the highly communal act requires others to pay the photograph attention to render it this definitional power. The photograph can thus be seen as a social transaction between the taker/sharer and the community, where the utility of the transaction is a mutual strengthening of interpersonal ties and roles.

This is a similar role to that of photos in their former hard copy incarnations. The leafing through the physical photo album was a ritual done at time of social or emotional need, to remind self and others of their respective roles through a remembrance of the emotional content of times past. This is the mythic power of the photograph, where it is not the content that matters, but the symbolism.

The photo is a conduit to emotional social resonance, similar to ancient folklore passed on through the oral tradition, or engrained ceremonial ritual such as we recently witnessed in the Royal Wedding.

If you have a favourite photo, do you love it for the image, or the emotional memory it evokes?

Good Connections

What is a good connection?

Last time I noted the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world we live in. Our lives are improved incrementally by ever more delicately balanced and efficient systems. Little did I know that a couple of days after writing that entry, I would experience a personal example of the fragility of the modern world.

As I type, I have the good fortune to see blue skies, swaying palms and a clear blue sea beyond. It is hard to be anomic in the sunshine of Mauritius. But mankind has a way of bringing trouble with him. Due to various techinical glitches, it took me quite some time to get my internet connection working properly. I was surprised by how frustrated that made me feel.

After all, there is little better than the prospect of some weeks in the sunshine, with no greater hassle than deciding when to go for a swim. Yet here I was feeling irritated and frustrated by an inability to check my email. This is a wonderful example of dependency on a technological web of connectivity. I dare say I am not alone in this, and as our society becomes ever more finely balanced in our human supply chain, we will all experience a corresponding increase in our dependency on these logistics systems.

One of the hardest challenges in life is choosing to put aside difficulty and frustration. Mankind has a love-hate relationship with uncertainty, to the extent that when it is not present, there is a tendency to find something new to think about and become concerned with.

To prevent this constant receding from view of happiness, value judgements must be made about the challenges we face. In truth, going without regular internet and email access for a couple of weeks or so would have been no great trouble. In fact, it would probably have been a very useful exercise in some respects. And yet, I was very satisfied when I managed to get the settings working and my umbilical cord to the internet womb was re-establised.

Connections are important; they permit transactions (both personal and financial) that make our lives more efficient and so can drive up quality of existence. But they are also ties that bind; golden handcuffs that we can be irrationally unwilling to be released from. The true test of any connection – be it a personal or a business relationship – is not whether it can be made successfully or not. It is not even whether it delivers net happiness when present. It must also be weighed against the net unhappiness when it is not present and due consideration given to how reliably present it is.

Fear of discarding bad connections can lead to an accumulation of mental detritus, and limit our freedom. Look liberty in the eye, and welcome it.

Changing Minds, Changing Worlds

It’s an old existential argument to suggest that everything we believe to be real is filtered through our own human perception, making it impossible to be objectively certain that reality exists. What is less frequently remarked on is Man’s ability to change the world around him by changing our shared perception of reality. Which brings me to the Six Ads that Changed the World.

Those are not necessarily the advertising campaigns I’d pick (though I think De Beers and Nike certainly deserve their places) and I felt obliged to rectify the paucity of meerkats when choosing an illustration for this post. But it made me think about the power of an advertising campaing to change minds and influence people.

Advertising is far more complex than most people realise. Overt advertising that simply aims to get you directly interested in a product at the time of watching is nowadays restricted to children’s advertising (parodied beautifully here) and time-limited sales or special offers.

More commonly, advertising now is about brand management. Maintaining a market presence by ensuring a certain image of the product and company is embedded in the target demographic’s psyche.

Commercial advertising campaigns therefore do the same thing as political parties, or different philosophical schools. They attempt to alter the way we look at the world by applying consistent directional pressure on our patterns of thought. By repeating and reinforcing this underlying  message through many different channels, minds are gradually moulded. Everyone thinks themselves immune to advertising, but the bottom line rarely lies, and advertising expenditure regularly results in increased revenue.

The same principles can be used in daily life by individuals, on a smaller scale. It is possible to define your own personal brand through consistent management of the impression you create on others. This requires some degree of insight, forethought and willpower. But if you don’t expend that effort, your subconscious will create a brand for you anyway. It just may not be a particularly helpful one to you under all circumstances. Modifying the brand to suit changing conditions, while remaining true to yourself, is the central challenge.

Risk and Reward

Human beings cope best with causal black-and-white relationships: “if I eat that bright-red berry, I get sick”; “if I see a sabre-toothed tiger chasing me, I must run”; “if I have a job and a family; I will be happy”. They are much worse at understanding probabilities and weighing up opportunity cost: “red berries (and families) can either be tasty or poisonous; if I take the risk of having one at random, I need to know how debilitating the poison might be, before judging whether the potential benefit of being lucky enough to get a tasty one is worth it”.

This more nuanced view of the world requires a high level of both insight and cognitive processing, and an acceptance of uncertainty and risk. Most people can intellectually grasp the necessity of such an approach but recoil from implementing it in their daily lives. It is much simpler to operate under certainties, and most people’s daily lives are so busy that they lack the opportunity for reflection.

Modern society reinforces this intellectual laziness. We cram a vast quantity of multi-tasked activity into a day, and still feel the need for more. Adults have become infantilised, desperate for the reassurance of an umbilical connection to an omniscient and omnipresent mother, except this parental figure is now the disembodied social network of the internet, mediated via our phones and laptops, by Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and other media.

I note in passing that Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, has just been named Time’s Person of the Year, which reflects how pervasive his worldview of “connectivity = benefit” has become.

The similarity of our relationship to the internet to that of the child to the parent under Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and Mary Ainsworth‘s Strange Situation experiments is striking. When separated from the connection to maternal, even womb-like, presence of the internet, even adults show all the signs of a child bereft of a maternal presence: feeling somewhat lost, alone, unsettled, uncertain and ultimately glad of reconnection. Anyone who has lost their mobile phone will be familiar with this phenomenon.

This child-like regression shows that we have ceded more and more active processing of the world to intemediaries, and now expect those systems to solve our problems for us. Our willingness to take personal responsibility and balance risk against reward has diminished. Nowhere is this more striking in our collective response to the risk of terrorist atrocity. Since 9/11, there has been an implicit assumption that preventing another terrorist attack has overriding importance.

This is absurd. Terrorism is a fact of life, and its probability of occurence cannot be reduced to zero. Reducing its risk comes at a cost, both financial and societal. We recently saw this in the furore about airport security measures such as body-scanning and pat-downs. Defenders of the policy always fell back on a variant of “we must do everything we can to protect our skies” without acknowledging that this simply isn’t true. A more accurate statement would be “we must do everything we can to protect our skies, providing that doing so doesn’t damage our ability to live our lives freely any more than we as a society are willing to accept”.

In other words, when judging how much security is required, one needs to quantity the extent of the damage caused by 9/11, and compare that to the small but cumulative damage caused by irritating large numbers of passengers. Quantifying these matters is complex, and touches upon the difficulty of assigning worth to non-tangibles, something I discussed yesterday. The refrain of “if it saves one life, it’s worth it” is plainly false, as if that were true, the way to achieve it would be to ban all air travel completely.

IATA is now planning the introduction of a much more sensible, risk/reward based approach to passenger screening. It sounds a far better way to deal with the issue than existing systems, but when it goes wrong – and no system can be perfect, as the risk is always higher than zero – it will face criticism that “we didn’t do enough” and the temptation will again be to add more layers, rather than deciding what level of risk is acceptable.

Leaving air travel aside, the more fundamental point is that the best way to progress as an intelligent society would be to encourage the understanding of probability, risk and opportunity cost. Not to mention encouraging independence of thought and a willingness to take personal responsibility for one’s actions. I have my doubts as to whether a critical mass of the population will do so. As rewarding as it is, such liberty is also frightening and that may be a step too far for most.

Death of the Christmas card; lessons for social networks

Image via Wikipedia

That reliable old standby of annual fundraising, the charity Christmas card, is skating on thin ice.

Oxfam expect to earn £100k less this year compared to five years ago because fewer of us are sending out Christmas cards. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to them, or indeed anyone else, and they will simply have to find new revenue streams.

Christmas cards used to be a way of communicating with those we hadn’t spoke to in year, letting them know we were still alive and well, and the tradition of a little note summarising the year’s events added a little colour to that duty. These days, with the ease of long-distance communication through telephone, email, and internet, as well as the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the annual Christmas card seems archaic.

When you factor in concerns about the environment, and the sheer stultifying labour involved in writing and posting Christmas cards, it’s not surprising their circulation is in decline. There is no longer any novelty to contact with even distant friends and relatives, because contact is easy.

In fact, it can easily be argued that we have far too much information about them nowadays. Do people really care about what someone else – even a friend – is doing from one hour (or minute!) to the next?

We have replaced occasional superficial contact with frequent superficial contact. That is not an improvement.

Social networking does not encourage true conversations between human beings, but a variant of continuous transmission communication, with only coincidental and fleeting interaction. It is very efficient in terms of time, but wasteful in terms of effort.

The concept of continuous transmission communication is neatly described in Isaac Asimov’s short story “My Son, the Physicist“. The story revolves around the difficulty a physicist has in communicating with a team of astronauts sent to explore Pluto. Radio communications between Earth and Pluto take 12 hours each way, so meaningful conversation is impossibly delayed. The physicist is still struggling with this problem when his mother visits. In a somewhat sexist reveal, she tells him to instruct the astronauts to continuously send data to Earth, and that Earth should do the same. Arguing that it’s likely that both sides of the conversation will want to discuss similar topics, the rate of exchange of information would be greatly enhanced by this method. Each side would then be able to continuously modify their own transmissions in light of the time-delayed information received.

This compresses the time required to exchange information and so increases efficiency of transmission. However, a vast amount of redundant data will also be sent, and  truly meaningful interaction will be reducing to “glancing blows”.

This is very much the nature of much modern communications: in an effort to increase speed, the signal-to-noise ratio drops precipitiously, and filtering mechanisms are needed to weed out irrelevant garbage from the vast quantity of incoming data. These filters are being developed but are still in their infancy, and the long-term survival of social networking sites depends upon it.

There is still a belief that people want to share more, but really, they want to share better. Without better filters, I cannot think that people will put up with an incessant flow of triviality for long and Facebook and Twitter will eventually saturate and then decline.

I intend to continue to steer clear of most of these chaff-based social networking sites until these filters are more advanced, as I cannot be bothered to separate the wheat out myself.  Just as with Christmas cards, I value my time too much for that. But if I like you, rest assured that you’ll still get a nice present!

Related Articles

• Christmas card slump: High price of cards and stamps blamed for decline in festive greetings (dailymail.co.uk)
• Christmas cards in terminal decline (telegraph.co.uk)

100th Post – Reflecting on Beyond Anomie

100 blog posts and I haven’t got carpal tunnel syndrome yet!

I started writing at a time when I was just about to change career from a full-time job working as a psychiatrist in the NHS (which was safe and financially comfortable but ultimately unfulfilling and frustrating) to a portfolio career combining some ongoing clinical work part-time with other business and teaching interests. I thought that since I would have more free time as a result of the career change, it would be good to have a place to write about various things that interested me, and Beyond Anomie was born.

Nearly 4 months later, the portfolio career is developing better than I could have hoped (touch wood it continues in that vein!), I’m contented with life, and most shockingly of all… I have 100 posts here. Some have been funny, some have been serious, but most have allowed me to think about an issue in greater depth than I would have if I hadn’t written about it. Blogging is a great tool for reflection and understanding, combining as it does elements of journal-keeping with the intellectual rigour required for publication for a wider audience. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how wide that audience can be when using WordPress.

I lack the patience and motivation required to write books, but at the same time I find the more abbreviated nature of the social networking services like Twitter and Facebook too narrow a format. I don’t want to tell you what I’m doing or how I feel about it (and indeed, am not interested in a never-ending stream of bite-sized information chunks about what you are doing either), but rather prefer to explore why I’m thinking what I’m thinking.

Blogging is a great compromise between Twitter and a book; one can take an issue, turn it over with metaphorical hands to explore it from a few different angles… and then put it down again and turn to a different issue the next day. And if you feel like exploring the first issue again, a day, a week, or a month later, that’s OK too and you can link to the original entry. It’s always there.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, perhaps not quite feeling satisfied with other types of social networking sites, don’t hesitate. It won’t change your life. But it does help you think about it a tiny little bit more.

Here’s to more entries in the future; cheers!

Ironic by name…

… anti-knife campaigner DJ Ironik has been stabbed by muggers…

Source

OK, so technically it may not be irony, but does fit the common usage of the term. Or, as I prefer to call it, The Morissette Definition.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether situational irony like this is indeed irony or whether you prefer to stick to the original Greek definition of the term. You can do that while suppressing the evil chuckle that crossed your mind while reading the article and noting his name and the situation.

Related Articles

• Muggers use Twitter to attack English DJ Ironik (newstatesman.com)
• Rapper stabbed in jewellery raid (bbc.co.uk)

Searching for answers: the internet and evolution

Blogging is its own reward in many respects: it allows one to process and express opinions in a deeper way than might be achieved without the necessity of having to write them out. And it’s nice to get interesting comments from others that further the discussion. But I have to admit that the darker underbelly of blogging is monitoring the “site stats” page to see how many views one’s had and, perhaps more intriguingly, how they found they found my blog.

I’ve learnt that more people than you might realise are interested in “the symbolism of squirrels”, “berluti shoes”, “biomechanical arms”, “suicide” and “transhumanism”. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a clear unifying theme to all those search terms (although my more whimsical side might suggest there’s some kind of bizarre chronological progression to the terms) but it makes me think about the very act of searching for answers.

Active searching is a remarkably high-level complex cognitive process. It’s also quite unique to humans; many other lifeforms may seek out food, mates or other assorted environmental assets but the process by which they do so is a series of instinctive responses rather than intelligent design. Active searching requires defining a problem in an insightful manner, and then generating a series of questions that progressively draw us closer to a solution. Searching therefore requires insight, imagination, determination and being able to integrate new data into a conceptual framework.

Our ancestors certainly used these problem-solving skills, but they lacked access to the vast swathes of data we have today. I don’t just mean the internet (though obviously that is a large part of it) but also the exponential growth of information we’ve generated out in the non-digital world: books, advertising, procedures, protocols, manuals and so on. The need to be able to search intelligently is now more important than it ever has been.

Entire industries exist around developing algorithms for more efficient and targeted searching but in the final analysis our ability to search (and therefore function effectively in this new world of data) is limited by our ability to generate appropriate search terms. This is about being able to define the problem adequately enough to start the process of whittling the wheat from the chaff to generate useful solutions.

I suspect that increasing exposure to data will gradually improve our skill in searching, not just as individuals but also as a species. This is the next big challenge we face, because generating data is simple whereas interpreting and understanding it is not. The very fact that everyone with a computer is now overtly exposed to the need to search from a young age has potential to improve our problem-solving ability as a species.

By requiring us to think about the search terms we use, the internet trains us all to start thinking thematically and conceptually rather than literally. Like the improved reflexes and hand/eye co-ordination of children who play a lot of video games, exposure to internet searching may improve conceptual analysis and problem-solving ability. It may therefore be that the internet’s greatest long-term benefit will not be the provision of  widespread access to vast amounts of data, but its ability to subtly and continuously train us to approach problems as concepts to be tested rather than axioms to be followed.

Evolution requires the application of environmental pressure on a species. We’ve largely tamed our physical environments to the point that they no longer apply environmental pressure on our physical forms. But the environmental pressure we now face is psychological through exposure to data without meaning. It will be interesting to see how we evolve in response to that.