Do we still need to think?

In my research into Young Adult fiction, I have chosen to appropriate the word ‘geek’ to describe a very technologically able individual in a world filled with digital insiders who understands the technology in their life rather than just being a user of the technology. While it would be interesting to canvas opinion on my choice and to explore what people perceive is meant by the word, a conversation I had last night reminded me of the need for us all to understand our technology, rather than just use it.

I was 18 in 1995 when the Internet started to become available to people outside academic and military institutions and I believe that having been an adult user close to its inception has helped me to think critically about it. At that time AltaVista and Yahoo! were the main search engines, with Google only joining the party in 1998. To find something, people had to parse their question, say ‘Which is the oldest college in Cambridge?’, to select the keywords in order of importance; the query would therefore become ‘cambridge college oldest’. Having grown used to this as the Internet grew, I still search this way and still expect to hunt through search results to find the answer. However, one of the aspirations of companies such as Google is to be able to understand natural language queries and even pre-empt the whole question. If you’re usually a keyword user, go and try typing the full question into Google: it suggested the whole question to me as I got to ‘college’. Watching children search for information at school, I regularly see them typing the full question as if they are simply talking to a human repository of facts.

The information I have given Google over the years helps it to guess my question as it knows I am in the UK and I assume it knows I look at .cam.ac.uk pages quite regularly. This must also be quite a common question as Google is able to find it in its archive of previous searches people have executed to find other old things.

Take another example: Amazon. How often are we told that people who bought the book that is just being downloaded to one’s Kindle also enjoyed a host of thematically related books? This is a great way for researchers to discover similar texts which may be of use, and a helpful way to find something which is unlikely to be a risky choice.

Again, our personally shopping history combined with millions of other people’s shopping history is combined, processed and spat out as recommendations.

These are only two examples out of many, but they exemplify perfectly the need to understand the technology.

Both Google and Amazon are providing an amazing and useful service in helping their users find what they want quickly, easily and efficiently. However, in doing so they are perpetrating the same questions and same recommendations to a wealth of different people linked only by a gossamer thread of curiosity or reading tastes.

Considering this in the broadest of terms, there are three things which worry me – and I believe should worry you – about this.

Firstly, moments of serendipity when we discover something by accident are excluded from the algorithms which predict what we want to know, and the likelihood of stumbling across something accidently is lost. (Communicating virtually through timed Skype meetings also has this effect as ‘watercooler moments’ are less likely to happen, but that’s for another day.)

Secondly, without serendipity, we are all being made into homogenous individuals who are privy to the same information and are expected to have similar consumer tastes.

Thirdly, an array of digital intelligences is growing on the servers of big companies dotted around the world that knows us as well as we do and is thinking for us and shaping our choices.

The technological singularity has been something of science fiction for decades. It wouldn’t be the first thing written about in fiction to become a reality.

Originally written for the Children's Literature at Cambridge blog and first posted there earlier today.

Personal pricing

This week, Facebook was valued at approximately £32,000,000,000. Initially, this may seem a phenomenal sum of money for a website that people merely use to keep in touch with friends, make witty remarks on status updates and peer voyeuristically into others’ lives.

When we remember we pay nothing to use Facebook, the question of what makes the company worth anything surfaces. Is it the hardware infrastructure running the site? Is it the programmers who make it all work? While these might form the tiniest part of the valuation, the £32 billion is what the information about its users is worth.

Think about it. In signing up for Facebook you entered, inter alia, your age, gender, location, schools and universities attended, courses taken, employers, personal beliefs and the interests you have. You then made virtual friends with people who you have encountered because they – usually – have something in common with you. Therefore, when one of your friends finds something new they enjoy or they are interested in, Facebook can recommend it to you as there is a good chance of you being interested in it too. In short, having shared your life with it, Facebook knows what will interest you before you do. Think about that from the marketing point of view.

Before you dismiss this as unrealistic, consider the last purchase you made on Amazon. Did you notice the list of recommended books or DVDs ‘that you may like’ which had been bought by other people who also bought the item you have just paid for? All you told Amazon was that you liked a certain book or DVD by purchasing it. The information you have chosen to give to Facebook covers far more of your life.

We would all like to believe that you cannot put a price on human life but this is what Facebook’s valuation has done. According to its own statistics, Facebook has more than 500,000,000 active users. This means that each of its users’ lives is worth around £64. For less than the price of a tank of petrol, you have been sold to the marketing executives of any forward thinking company which looks to Facebook for access to their target market. Unlike a traditional survey which might identify consumers at a single point in time, your profile on Facebook changes as your interests change and with this the forward thinking company either knows it is no longer worth chasing you or that they need to double their efforts in appealing to you.

Does this mean that I am going to delete my Facebook profile and stop posting online? No. I, like so many others, find the free service that Facebook provides both useful and fun. I am willing to tolerate the advertisements dotted throughout the site, but I would like think that I understand some of the implications – both for now and the future – of the privacy agreement saying what our data can be used for which we are obliged to accept when joining.