Uninfectious enthusiasm
The Spring 2013 issue of IEEE Technology in Society Magazine has Alexander Hayes writing about Google Glasses and other wearable technology that he says "is set to revolutionize the manner in which we interact with each other".
Putting yet another revolution aside for a moment, I vaguely recall reading some advice to the effect that writing fiction in the second person is unlikely to succeed. Reading the first few paragraphs of Hayes' article, I found that the same is probably true of non-fiction, and experienced the reason why: addressing someone in the second person makes risky presumptions about what that person thinks.
When Hayes asserts that "you [i.e., me] may agree that [Hayes' experience] is not dissimilar to your current relationship with this disruptive technology," he immediately seems hopelessly incorrect: I think my relationship with mobile phones is very little like his. (Daniel Kahneman, whose work I wrote about in my last entry, has a similar habit, though he usually at least qualifies his second-person assertions with "if you are like most people..." and some empirical research to back this up. And, when it comes to Kahneman's studies, I probably really am like most people.)
Apart from advice on writing, Hayes' article gave me cause to think about two things: the temptation for enthusiasts to project their enthusiasm onto other people, and the distinction between frequent communication and good communication.
When I'm grooving along to the gothic metal and industrial music that I love, for example, it's easy to forget that not everyone appreciates such grim and gloomy noise. I suppose that computer enthusiasts feel the same way: the latest gadget seems so exciting, and the revolution so palpable, how could anyone be blasé about it?
Hayes certainly seems to be a frequent communicator, to go by his own description of is mobile phone use, yet the opening paragraphs of his article completely mis-identified this reader. Of course Hayes had no way of knowing that I was going to be reading his article, but I was nonetheless reminded of the argument made in Susan Cain's recent book Quiet that talking a lot isn't the same as achieving a lot.
Yet excitement and noise attracts far more attention than sober reflection and quality time. More charitable commentators might describe such noisy excitement as "infectious enthusiasm", but I wonder if it only infects those who already have said enthusiasm.
Alone together and feeling used by communication tools
My recent difficulties with social networking inspired me to read Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. The book's subtitle neatly captures my dissatisfaction with LinkedIn and other supposedly social media: it's very easy to click a button that creates a record in a database stating that I'm "connected" with someone, but there's a whole lot more to do if I want to form and maintain a significant and effective relationship with that person.
Turkle makes a distinction between "performance" and "friendship". In the first half of the book, "performance" refers to robotic toys that are programmed to enact rituals that children expect from conscious beings: the robots say they are happy, hungry, etc. even though they (presumably) don't experience such emotions like humans do. In the second half of the book, "performance" refers to manipulating text messages and Facebook profiles to present the desired standards of coolness, connection and caring. She believes that
sociable technology will always disappoint because it promises what it cannot deliver. It promises friendship when it can only deliver performances (p. 101).
Turkle acknowledges critics who point out that we are always performing to one degree or another, in that we craft different personae for friends, family, work, school and so on. And how does one distinguish "authenticity" from a highly sophisticated and nuanced performance anyway? Of course Turkle contends that the performances exhibited by current robots and social networking sites are hopelessly inadequate to fully capture human emotion and relationships, and I find it hard to disagree.
It is, of course, conceivable that improvements in technology will one day overcome such inadequacy. But what to do in the mean time? Turkle doesn't recommend eliminating robots and social media and, indeed, seems to be quite comfortable with handing them out by the dozen as part of her research.
For me, the answer has to be about recognising the capabilities and limitations of particular media, employing them for what they are good at and dispensing with them for what they are not. The saddest stories in Turkle's book involve people feeling psychologically or socially compelled to use some tool despite its evident incapacity to meet the person's needs. Someone whose only tool is a hammer, as the saying goes, struggles with tasks that don't involve nails.
Most of the people in Turkle's studies are young -- children or teenagers -- and it could be that they simply haven't yet learned which tools work best for which tasks. Even older people struggle with how best to use new tools. Perhaps it isn't so surprising that things go awry in these situations.
Towards the end of the book, Turkle writes about people who have realised that the tools they have been using aren't working for them, and have consequently developed strategies like scheduling one-on-one phone conversations and deleting their Facebook profiles. Some of these strategies are fairly crude, but I think they demonstrate an important (and possibly under-rated) mind-set: a determination to make technology serve one's needs in place of passive acceptance of what technology happens to be in vogue.
Software interpretation of human communication and its discontents
I found myself using Google Mail today, having joined a company that uses it as its e-mail system. Aside from my typical frustration with the bloated, slow and browser-dependent interfaces sported by modern webmail programs, I was specifically annoyed that Google Mail, by default, hides part of the e-mail that I'm working on: namely, the signatures and quoted material. As a result, I found myself reading and sending e-mail messages without being sure how they appeared on the receiver's screen.
By coincidence, I also received an e-mail today from a friend apologising for the poor formatting of her previous e-mail. Apparently it looked fine in her e-mail client, but it was garbled by other people's clients (including mine). I recently received another e-mail with a signature containing two different e-mail addresses for the sender, one obviously wrong.
My experience with Google Mail illustrates why this might have happened: the e-mail clients of the victims in the above stories presented a view of an -mail that they deemed helpful, while other people's e-mail clients presented views that those clients deemed helpful.
The views disagreed. Instead of presenting the "true" content of the e-mail, the e-mail clients involved have presented their own interpretation of it. (By "true", I mean the universally-agreed encoding of e-mail messages, being plain text or at least HTML.) And, in doing so, the e-mail clients foiled human communication.
Regarding my particular complaint, I suppose that Google Mail's developers think they are being helpful by automatically eliminating "extraneous" information like quoted messages and signatures. As I said in my previous post, I'm all for eliminating useless distractions from user interfaces. But if signatures and quotes really are useless distractions, why include them in an e-mail in the first place?
I'm part of what seems to be a dwindling minority of people who adhere to the custom of selectively quoting the e-mails to which we reply. Once upon a time, Internet users would have been appalled at the wholesale quoting of earlier e-mails that seems to be current practice. If you're not going to use it, we thought, delete it and save the space.
Now, Internet bandwidth isn't as precious as it used to be, and one might say that only hoary old nerds would cling to byte-pinching practices developed in the days of 2400 baud modems. But I nonetheless think that selective quoting serves a more human purpose: it foregrounds what is important to the communication, and eliminates what is not.
Interventionist features like Google Mail's seem to me to at once encourage lazy communicators to fill their e-mails full of junk in the expectation that their software will correct it for them, and to frustrate careful communicators by making them fight against their software in order to send the message that they want to send. The winner is poor communication.
