Author: JP

I’ve just finished reading The Second Machine Age for a third time. [Note: It’s how I tend to read nonfiction. Skim-read the first time around, bookmarking stuff for a more leisurely read at a later stage. Read cover-to-cover the second time around, no notes, no interruptions, no nothing, just absorbing the whole argument. The third reading then concentrates on following up the bookmarks and notes. And yes, I do this all “analogue”].

You should read it. At least once anyway, depending on your reading style.

Before I explain why you should read the book, some disclosures:

• I know both the authors reasonably well. I knew of Erik Brynjolfsson through his work on Incomplete Contracts in the early 1990s, and met him for the first time in 1997 after joining Dresdner Kleinwort (DrKW). I met Andy McAfee first off in late 2004/early 2005, while I was Global CIO at DrKW and while he was still at Harvard, when he looked closely at the workings of our department as part of his research. I’ve kept in touch with both of them since.
• I trained as an economist, with considerable emphasis on mathematics and statistics, and in all probability was influenced by those anchors and frames when reading the book.
• I believed, and continue to believe, that ubiquitous affordable connectivity (with the requisite compute power and storage) can transform lives and help us solve hitherto intractable problems in health, welfare and even government, principally through education and training. Which meant the core message of the book resonated strongly with me. You can see this reflected in the Kernel I wrote for my blog around a decade ago (and even in my belief that Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead taught me more about modern business models than anyone else did).

Most of you know all this already. It still behooves me to declare this, to show my biases openly, even though I have no financial interest in any of this.

And so on to the book.

 

I read a lot of reviews, usually in magazines I subscribe to. I tend to read Amazon Reviews only “after the fact”, having already decided to investigate a particular book or film or piece of music. When it comes to reviews, the ones I’ve liked the most have come from Kirkus; I’ve grown to rely on them over the years, despite changes in style and ownership.

When it comes to writing reviews, it’s something I do rarely. And when I do, I try and focus on reviewing rather than summarising. My intent is to encourage readers to buy/rent the particular item, rather than to provide a substitute. So let me move on. Why should you read the book?

The book is about something that matters to all of us

The basic thesis of the book is this: We’re creating, adapting and using digital technologies at an incredible pace today. As a result, we’re seeing many beneficial outcomes, and some that aren’t beneficial. How can we retain and grow the benefits while minimising the harms? The authors spend time on each aspect of this: the current state of digital technologies; how we got here, the history and background; where we appear to be headed.  The benefits that have accrued as a result, the benefits we’re accruing, the benefits we have yet to gain. And the harms: what hasn’t worked well, what’s disturbing in current trends, what the “default” prognosis is. What we should do about it, as individuals, as corporations, as governments, now and in time to come.

None of us is in a position to do much about the harms unless we understand the root causes and the benefits as well. Particularly when it comes to policy and regulation in the context of anything “digital”, the current track records of governments worldwide leaves much to be desired. If you add “jobs” and “inequality” to the mix, then the undesirability increases exponentially. So it is important for us to understand just what’s happening and why. This is not the first book in the world to look at this, nor is it the only one. But it frames it well, and focuses on the right issues.

Why the right issues? Because it spends time looking at the nature of the jobs that will be created as well as the nature of the jobs that will disappear. The inequalities that have grown as a result, the inequalities that will continue to grow if we don’t do something about it. What that something could be, how and why we should intervene. Why all this is happening now.

Yes, these things matter. And we need to be discussing them dispassionately and apolitically, with a true global perspective. Which is why this book is important.

You may feel you’ve read it all. Perhaps you have. What matters is not just the ground covered but the context and sequence in which it’s being covered. So even if you think you know it all, do read it.

It’s accessible, approachable, easy to read

You don’t have to be an economist or a statistician to read the book. Adopting a flowing conversational style, the authors take you through a journey in three parts: the origins and characteristics of the Second Machine Age, what we gain or lose as a result, what we can do about it. That may be enough for most readers. For the more curious, there are references and quotations peppered throughout the book. There’s also a 32-page Notes section at the end of the book, well worth delving into.

It comes in many formats: not just print and digital but audio as well (and I’m sure there will be video versions even if only in TED-talk format). To each his own. The key point here is that you can choose how you want to engage with the book. As far as I can make out, it is currently only available in English. I’m sure that will change, given time.

What I liked about it

The authors spend time looking into a number of issues of interest to all of us. Here’s a sample:

• reasons for exponential growth: the chessboard’s “second half” construct
• the importance of “recombination” in innovation
• differences between economic growth and GDP growth: where that matters, where it shouldn’t
• the things that computers are good/bad at, what’s changing in this respect
• why, in robotics, “hard problems are easy, easy problems are hard”: the implications thereof
• what happens in industries where the “first copy” is expensive, all others are cheap
• why innovation could be “used up” in the past, and why this is no longer the case
• reasons why inequality has increased, why winner-take-all models are common
• the share of economic return captured by capital rather than labour, how it’s changing

I was particularly taken with a quote from Garry Kasparov (incidentally, one of at least two misspellings I noted during my three reads, it’s the old proofreading journo in me). Kasparov was talking about a chess match with Veselin Topalov, in which both players were allowed to “consult” computers whenever they liked:

Since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage came down to creating a new idea at some point

In some ways, rightly or wrongly, I see this as the seminal idea of the book — The onset of digital technologies has some hard-to-bear consequences in terms of the commoditisation of skills that were historically valuable and in terms of sharply lowering prices of goods that were historically valuable. This onset is happening faster, more widely and more deeply than people expected, and inequality is growing as a result. To counter this, we have to teach people skills we’ve not paid attention to: creativity, ideation, invention and innovation, recombination; with the social, political and economic policies and infrastructure in place to support all this.

What I’m thinking about as a result (and what I will probably continue to think about for some time): examples

• The continuing shift towards our engaging with digital information using our senses, as the keyboard does its dinosaur dance: Siri and Kinect and Glass are just manifestations of technologies where we’re removing frictions like QWERTY from the process, and replacing them with our senses.
• Reconciling the Carlota Perez “Paradigms”, the Tyler Cowen “Stagnations”, the W Brian Arthur “Increasing Returns” and the Hagel/Seely Brown “Big Shift” models and bringing them all into this context. They’re not conflicting, I’ve learnt from all of them, but the time has come to look at the confluence with care.
• Looking more deeply into developing “filtering” as a new skill set in its own right, and thinking about the implications for jobs

But they’re not what’s important. What really really intrigues me is something altogether different, and that is this:

Today, I read that facebook has offered to buy Whatsapp for up to $19 billion. A classic example of a Winner-Takes-All market action, with the risk that inequalities will grow as a result….. unless the winners do something radically different. Which is where I think Marc Benioff (who is chairman and CEO of the company I work for) has the right answer in his 1+1+1 model. The Salesforce Foundation is part of the reason why I choose to work where I work, and I think this will increasingly be the case for job choices everywhere. We have to build into our chosen modes of employment, sustainable and scalable ways of reducing inequality.

Update: I have just seen this, a formal case study of the 1+1+1 model. Definitely worth reading in this context.

What I feel is left unanswered, or at least under-answered

• The role of ubiquitous affordable connectivity in all this: why access to the internet needs to become a universal human right … and how this can become policy.
• The role of platforms in all this: how the general purpose computing infrastructures will manifest themselves in future, why the concepts of APIs matter, how the democratisation of development will influence the redistribution of returns to labour (versus capital).
• The role of governments in all this (as opposed to government: this is a global issue requiring cooperation between governments). As an Indian living in the UK working for a global company headquartered out of the US, I face a regular problem. Many of the debates I’m really interested in become, more by accident than design, completely US-centric. It’s not surprising given the dominance of the US economy and given the predominance of Silicon Valley. But it’s a problem. Particularly when it comes to creating the right infrastructure, policies and regulations to allow people to think anew, to dream anew and to convert their dreams into reality. The institutions that come in the way are largely governmental in origin.
• The need to overhaul intellectual property regimes in order to reduce inequality. I won’t say any more about this other than to note that the previous sentence probably cost me a significant portion of my readership.

Please read the book. Let me know what you think.  And if you find that this review helped you, let me know. Who knows, I might even review another book.

I’m looking through you, where did you go I thought I knew you, what did I know You don’t look different, but you have changed I’m looking through you, you’re not the same Your lips are moving, I cannot hear Your voice is soothing, but the words aren’t clear You don’t sound different, I’ve learned the game. I’m looking through you, you’re not the same

I’m Looking Through You, Lennon-McCartney, The Beatles Rubber Soul, 1965

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My father had a tankard with a glass bottom, ostensibly for drinking beer. It looked like this.

He used to joke about the purpose of the glass bottom. He managed to convince me that the reason for the fundamental transparency was to prolong life. As in the life of a gunslinger. He made me imagine a bar somewhere like Tombstone. Batwing doors. Mirror lining the wall behind the bar, with the doors clearly in sight. Gunslingers could safely finish their drinks, looking at the batwing door, in the mirror, through the bottom of the glass. I believed him. Later on it even became a trivia question. Some people thought the glass was there so they didn’t miss even one second of their favourite TV programs. But the truth was more serious than that.

 

The King’s Shilling. Thirsty? Have a drink on me. Oops, is that a shilling in there? Welcome to the Army. (Or Navy).

Young men had reason to be wary of strangers buying them drinks. Pub landlords weren’t happy seeing their custom frogmarched out the door after being hoodwinked like that; they’d just about gotten over the shanghaied-by-having-a-burlap-sack-pulled-over-your-head time. So the landlords had to do something. Hey presto. Tankards had glass bottoms.

 

And so to tomorrow. Soon, we may have driverless cars that are paid for by other people. Advertisers. Cars that will spirit you away to wherever and whatever the subsidising body happens to be. Shops. Restaurants. Some slightly older professions. Patents get even more interesting. Soon, we may have anticipatory shipping. We’ve been watching you. You’re going to buy that rowing machine, aren’t you? We know you will. So we’re going to hide it somewhere handy, like behind your bike shed. Just waiting for you to place that order. I can just imagine all the different ways these things are going to be gamed. Literal free-riders doing their Georgy Girl impression:  always window-shopping but never stopping to buy…. Kids running league tables on the biggest and weirdest things they managed to get past the anticipatory-shipping-gaming-captcha. Oh frabjous day.

Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts I’m committed to writing about filters; I started with the principles of filtering, and will proceed to blow up each of the principles in as much detail as makes sense at this stage. Earlier I looked at network-based filters, and then spent time on routing, went on a tangent to look at bringing responsibility into publishing, then looked at “designing for serendipity”.  And now I’m going to spend a little time thinking about what it would mean for a person’s collection of filters to be transferable, even tradeable.

“The future of search is verbs”

There was a time, it must have been around 2 or 3 BG, when I used search engines with funny names. Names like Dogpile and Mamma and Copernic. I found each of them useful in different contexts. I moved off all Microsoft systems when OSX arrived, and that meant no more Copernic. If I remember correctly, Dogpile searched; Mamma searched across a number of engines, and let you choose which one(s) to use. But Copernic did some other stuff, really useful stuff. It let me put my search results into a folder, which I could save if I wanted. I could add one folder to another. I could subtract one from the other. I could mail the folder to others. And I could ask for the folder to be “updated”. Retain the old results, see the new ones that came in; compare the search output between two or more dates. I could even ask for the links in the search results to be revalidated, and mark some of the historical links as broken.

Those were the days.

Around 2008, I remember Esther Dyson quoted Bill Gates as saying “the future of search is verbs”. I have a lot of time for Esther, and if she thought something was important, it gave me pause for thought. And she thought that what Bill Gates had said was profound. I was then still stuck in my search/subscribe/converse/fulfil model from 2003, so that was the lens I placed on her comment. Aha. So the future of search is fulfilment. People don’t just look for things aimlessly: when they search, they hope to find something that they can do something about. For a search to be valuable, the output has to be actionable. Since that was why I had consistently included “fulfilment” as my fourth “pillar”, I was content.

Now, instead of relatively static web pages that need spidering and indexing, we’re in the business of filtering firehoses. The same rules apply. Filtering eases comprehension. But that comprehension is usually for a purpose, an action to be performed related to the filtered stream.

Maybe I’m warped. But sometimes I think of search and subscribe a bit like we’re taught to think of add and multiply. Multiplication is repeat addition. Subscription is repeat search. With an understanding of what’s changed between “searches”.

Acting in the stream

None of us can deal with firehoses. So we filter. When we filter, we do so in order to act. So filtering is part of learning how to do something. When someone watches you do something, that’s teaching. So much of what I learnt, at school and in later life, came from observing someone else who knew how to do something.So when it comes to a time when we’re all living in the stream, a person’s ability to do something depends on her having learnt how to do it. Which may come down to knowing about the right filters to use.

A person’s collection of filters becomes some sort of toolchest, where the instruments that allow that person to do the job are kept and looked after. This is as true for knowledge workers as it was for artisans and craftsmen.

I’ve been fascinated by craftsman’s guilds for decades now; the history of the guilds in London is incredible, particularly when you see just how they were committed to social change via education, training and apprenticeship.

Which brings me to my final point, how filter-sets can help transfer knowledge and learning.

Learning in the stream

Many years ago, as I began to lose all interest in email, I tried an experiment. I opensourced my mailbox to my team, allowed them access to all my mail. [In point of fact I set up a separate mailbox for “private” mail, off the beaten track when it came to spam, corporate or otherwise, and proceeded to make my “official” mailbox open to my team.]. And then I sat back and watched. Something very strange happened. Rather than spend time looking at my incoming mail, I saw my guys spend far more time looking at my “sent items”. Most of them had gotten used to what was in my incoming mail anyway, I would always involve one or more of them. So what they wanted to do was to look at how I handled the things they may not have been involved in. In effect, some of them chose to learn not by watching what came to me but instead by watching what I did as a result.

In the world of stream/filter/drain, filtering is part of how we do something. So there is something to be learnt by looking at how the filters are set and chosen.

Since filtering is something we do on the “subscribe” side, it would mean each of us had our own set of filters, hand-crafted to our needs. Filters we knew how to use, how to refine and improve. This makes for some interesting possibilities for new hire induction and training, and in fact for many types of role-related training. You could take the filter set of an exemplary knowledge worker in a specific role, and make it available to others you sought to train in that role. A transferable set of lenses.

There are other interesting possibilities; in a hierarchy I could try and “wear” the filter-lens of a colleague, a peer, a subordinate, a boss, “see” the stream from their perspective. In a flatter, networked organisation those  labels may not have the same meaning, but the principle remains. Make it easy for you to see the world from someone else’s perspective. Make it easy for someone else to see the world from your perspective.

We’ve seen some of this before, initially with stuff like blogrolls, then with bookmarks, then with sets of subscriptions. Filter-sets have value.

And if they’re in digital form, and they have value, then it’s only a matter of time before people find a way to standardise inventory exposure. Discovery processes follow, and before you know you have valuations and negotiations and trade.

More later. Have you had enough? Or should I go ahead and complete the set, I have only four more to write. Please keep your comments flowing.

 

 

 

 

Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts I’m committed to writing about filters; I started with the principles of filtering, and will proceed to blow up each of the principles in as much detail as makes sense at this stage. Earlier I looked at network-based filters, and then spent time on routing, then went on a tangent to look at bringing responsibility into publishing. Today I’d like to spend time developing ideas that can help us avoid tunnel vision, blinkers, groupthink, the madness of crowds, heresy, narrowmindedness, herd instinct and a slew of similar ills.

The background

It is normal and natural to spend time with people who have backgrounds similar to you; you get along better with people who share your interests, who have things in common with you. This is as true in the digital world as it is in the analogue world; it comes as no surprise that humans have tendencies to be tribal in outlook, to “flock” as “birds of a feather”, to form homogeneous groups.

In the past, when our ability to migrate quickly and affordably was somewhat constrained, we tended to live our lives within a short distance of where we were born, with our kith and kin and in communities that had been stable for a considerable while. When we did migrate we tended to ghettoise, we formed districts and neighbourhoods full of parvenus. It was hard to integrate easily into a homogeneous community, so the new entrants stayed together as well. Often they shared a common language, a common culture; in many cases they came from similar locations. So we had the Latin Quarters, the Chinatowns, the Koreatowns. We first formed relationships with people we had much in common with, then proceeded to integrate at glacial rates. Which was fine, so long as integration took place.

When it comes to the digital world, the cost of discovering people with similar backgrounds, interests, attitudes has fallen dramatically; the speed at which we can group thus has increased significantly. Our digital tribes form at breakneck speed, and run the risk of being too homogeneous and insular. Maybe it’s a variant of first-mover advantage, this tendency to form like-minded and closed groups, emphasis on the closed.

I don’t tend to meander into politics here at confusedofcalcutta, and don’t intend to start doing that now. What I will say is of late, as our ability to form digital tribes has improved in leaps and bounds, so too has our ability to polarise every debate. Which is not a  good thing in countries that have two-party systems in practice. Everything soon becomes about Blefuscu, about Big-Endians and Little-Endians. [I’ve written about this tendency before as I saw it evolve within the IT industry, spurred by the simplicity and speed of connecting to others]. I used to think that elections could be about Red or Blue, but government had to be about Red and Blue. That there was a distinction to be made between electioneering and governing. But nowadays it appears it’s all electioneering: the purpose of government has somehow been mutated into one of being re-elected and not much else.

[Enough politics! Ed.] When groups form with strong homogeneous characteristics, it’s easy to lose perspective. Our ability to look at multiple sides of an argument weakens, our ability to tolerate dissent erodes, our ability to take in ideas that challenge the status quo atrophies. The importance of diversity is not just in how we evolve and develop as flesh-and-blood humans, it holds as true in our digital lives.

When it comes to “business” there are a few more frills to consider. Firms have boundaries around them, walls build to keep the enemy out. Departments become silos as people with shared incentives optimise what they do to maximise their payoffs against those specific incentives. This tends to have the effect of making departments compete against each other within the firm, with appropriately negative consequences.

Innovative ideas tend to form when two or more well-bounded edges rub against each other; the frictions and latencies that get exposed through this contact become fertile ground for creative people to envision how to make their lives, and those of the people they care for, better.

It is important to ensure that the filters we set, as subscribers, are formed in such a way that the heretical consequences of extreme homogeneity are minimised.

I think it was Einstein who said that common sense is made up of the prejudices we collect by age eighteen. We all have anchors and frames that prevent us from looking beyond the promontories of our proboscides.

There’s also the issue of the filter-bubble, what Eli Pariser has been so eloquent on. It’s a natural consequence of supply-side filters. And it needs fixing.

All this leads me to the importance of serendipity and diversity in our streams. Allowing chance as well as differentiated viewpoints to emerge and surface, to teach us, to challenge our thinking, to inspire us.

Designing for Serendipity

It seems to me that you can do five things by design:

(a) Listen to people outside your cosy circle, starting with customers

When I was at Dresdner Kleinwort I had a fantastic team working for me, people who have gone on to do greater things because that was always going to be their destiny. It was a privilege to have been there. They were so good that I could spend time looking at unusual things, in efforts to try and improve our ability to create business value through teamwork and collaboration.

One of those unusual things was this: every now and then, I looked at the patterns thrown up by our email usage. How much of the mail we generated actually left the bank’s boundaries. Very little. How much of the mail sent by New York left New York (or for that matter any other location bar London”. Very little. London enjoyed “Head Office” status and therefore generated lots of mail for other locations, but in principle the pattern was the same. Most of the time, people sent mail to colleagues in the same location, to people they could have walked over to speak to. And very little of what they sent by mail went outside the firm. If you have the time, the inclination and the ability, take a look at what happens in your firm. It’s unlikely to be pretty.

Designing the network such that externals can participate is a good place to start. Making sure that you can recognise the presence of an external easily is very important, otherwise the environment becomes so error-prone that trust is weakened. Show the presence of externals using differentiated colours and fonts, as an example.

Build mechanisms that track how many of the people you follow are from the outside; from your partner and supply chain; from locations other than yours, from departments other than yours. If the only people you follow are people who look and feel and act like you, you’re not going to learn very much, your thinking isn’t going to be challenged, you’re not likely to spot the frictions in the handoffs.

(b) When listening to customers, bring in two dimensions beyond just traditional communications/conversation

Most companies get complaints from customers. There’s usually an abundance of complaints in comparison to unsolicited goodwill messages. So why not take advantage of this abundance? Make your complaints follow-able, embody them in the form of a person who publishes complaints into the stream. Make it even better, allow the complaints to be classified semantically. Follow the voice of the complainer, by theme or topic if possible. She’s unlikely to have the same biases as you do.

When you do this, try and retain the original words the customer used. Avoid the temptation to summarise-by-triage, throwing away useful and valuable information. Let me give you an example. Customer complains that her broadband is not working. Traditional scripted methods will go through a plethora of well-designed engineer-responses. And fail. Because the reason for her problem is she hasn’t paid her bill. You’re more likely to spot that if you see the words the customer used, rather than the “trusted” commentary that summarises what was said.

A second route is to use some way of collecting ideas from outside the firm and plugging that flow into the network. Companies like Starbucks and Dell have shown what is possible as a result of doing this.

(c) Always bring in some fresh thinking whenever possible

There are so many ways of doing this. Find out who’s joined the party recently (a new hire; someone from graduate intake; a new-name customer; a recently-formed partner). Start following them. In fact from a design perspective every time someone joins the network, they should be discoverable somewhere as newly-joined. Welcome them in by following them.

When someone follows you and you don’t know them, follow them back. I do this as often as possible, once I’ve verified that the person is a person and not a bot, and once I have checked that the person “speaks” rather than spams.

When you follow people, make sure you make a point of following people who are interested in the same subject but with a point of view that’s different from yours. If they’re interested in music and they’re all about country while you’re about folk, follow immediately; if they’re vegan-foodies while you think man and meat were destined as a pair, follow immediately. The point is to be in touch with people that have similar interests but not identical ones.

(d) Learn from the trends around you

Watch closely what’s trending in your network, amongst the people you know and trust. But keep an eye on what’s trending elsewhere. In a perfect world I would want to be able to say “Let me look at the stream as if I am in India; in Somalia; in Iceland”. Let me look at the stream as if I’m Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Pastafarian, atheist. Let me see how 18 year-olds view this. Let me see what a new joiner sees on day 1. This idea, one of being able to encapsulate and transfer lenses, is something I will come back to in a post very soon.

When you see something trending that you don’t understand, do something about it. Find out what it means. Who’s involved. When it began. Stretch yourself.

(e) Go for a random walk

Stumble, just as in StumbleUpon. Go somewhere different; do something that’s not habitual, with people who aren’t habitues, in places that aren’t your natural habitat.

Again, more later. I’m still building on the arguments, delighted with the comments and mails and tweets and links I’ve been given. Please continue.

 

 

 

Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts I’m committed to writing about filters; I started with the principles of filtering, and will proceed to blow up each of the principles in as much detail as makes sense at this stage. Earlier I looked at network-based filters, and then spent time on routing. Today I want to look at something a little broader. I want to look at the issue of publishing responsibly.

Background

We live in a world where soon everyone and everything will be connected, one where everyone will soon be able to “publish”.

When I enumerated the seven principles of filtering, I took care to state that we should not design filters on the “publish” side, we should only design them to be used “subscribe” side. There are good reasons for this, mainly to do with avoiding “censorship by design”: we do not want to build structures that allow bad actors to dictate what everyone can see, read, hear. And if we design publish-side filters, that’s what will happen.

But there is still a case to be made for publisher-level filters, an exception to the rule. It’s a filter that most journalists are well aware of. It’s a filter that is quite different from any other filter I speak of, because it is not programmatic. It is code-based, yes, but it’s to do with the code we live by as human beings, rather than a set of instructions for a machine.

Publishing responsibly

Liberty is not licence. As the right to publish becomes universal, we have to perceive the right in the same way that we need to perceive any other universal right. The right comes with a duty, a set of duties. Duties that we owe to society in exchange for the right to publish. As I said earlier, this is something the world of journalism has needed to understand for centuries (even if it not always clear that they act according to that understanding. But that’s another matter).

When I started blogging back in 2002, I had to be very careful what I said and where, given my role and how that role was perceived. So the bank I worked for weren’t too keen on my blogging publicly; that didn’t happen till 2005. Since the audience was largely constrained to Dresdner Kleinwort folk, I wrote principally about work. Then, as things began to open up, I had to think about this whole area differently.

Initially I took the view that I would not share anything unless I could figure out whom it would help and how they could gain value from what I was saying. Between late 2005 and early 2007, I first went public-open with my blog, then started with Facebook, then joined Twitter as well.

As I learnt more about how these things worked, I began to refine my thinking about why I would share anything. And for some years now, this is where I’ve landed up:

Now I use a different test. Before sharing anything, I ask myself “Could this hurt someone?” And if the answer is yes, I hold my (digital) tongue.

How can we hurt others through what we share? Let me count the ways.

Not hurting others

Way 1: Make sure what you’re saying is accurate. Look for corroboration. Check it out. Where relevant, point to the source as well. Learn which sources to trust. Use your noggin, sanity-check it. It’s very easy to help inaccurate rumours circulate. There are also a lot of trolls about, looking to attract attention to themselves and to sensationalise as part of what they do, often with exaggeration and paucity with the truth. Think before you retweet them.

When I was at university, my namesake and erstwhile godfather, Jayaprakash Narayan, was known to have serious kidney problems; he spent a lot of time on dialysis. Which meant my colleagues used to have fun at my expense if I failed to turn up. Roll 7? Gone for dialysis, sir. And then one day it was reported that he’d died. The BBC World Service, no less. But he hadn’t. There was then a localised mini-rumour that I’d died, my personal Mark Twain moment. Why did this happen? It was because the BBC had said that JP had died. If it wasn’t the JP, then it must have been some other JP. And so the rumours began, albeit short-lived. With trust comes responsibility.

More recently, I had to learn this lesson again for myself. I saw reports that Michael Schumacher had been badly injured in a skiing accident, then read a story, from a reputable source, that his injuries, while serious, were not that serious. So I linked to that story. Soon afterwards it became clear that the reputable source was wrong, and I had to correct my earlier tweet.

Which brings me to another important point about accuracy. If for any reason you publish something that isn’t accurate, correct it as soon as you know that to be the case.

Way 2: Respect the audience and context. Think about who’s going to be reading what you publish. Okay, it’s get-on-my-high-horse time, please humour me. Take the term Not Safe For Work or NSFW. I’ve been bemused by this, sometimes even mildly needled. Is work the only place where the “not safe” label has meaning? Why isn’t there a not-safe-for-home? Or a not-safe-in-front-of-the-children? Once you go down that path, you will soon lead to a list of not-safes. Before you know it, someone will decide it’s a good idea and then (heaven forfend!) legislate for it. And we will land up with forced labelling of everything as not-safe-for-something-or-the-other. Warning. Contains Nuts. So before that happens, we need to start using some other signal. Something closer to “May shock or offend”, something simple that covers a whole litany of not-safes.

This is particularly important when it comes to use of images, especially those of the “graphic” variety. Today, more and more of the streams we live in now open up the image and display it as default. Not a good thing. As subscribers we should be able to turn that off. Which reminds me of another awful irritant. Web sites that burst into song without being asked. Puh-lease!

Fairy tales can be scary. Grandmothers turning into wolves. Parents abandoning you and sending you into forests in the dark. The reason that children don’t find such stories scary is because their own imagination stops them from dreaming up stuff that can really scare them. There’s a self-correcting mechanism there. That mechanism worked fine when the stories were oral. It continued to work fine when we moved to text and reading. Early illustrators stayed with the program and drew non-scary scary things. But nowadays we seem to forget all that. That’s a problem.

We should think about what we share and whether it has the possibility of being seen by someone who can’t handle it…. and then it falls upon us to prevent that happening. As individuals, not as society. As individuals using social conventions rather than through regulation. Here’s a simple example. A few days ago, I saw a video to do with spiders. It was fascinating, all the more so because I have no fear of spiders. But my wife would have nightmares if she saw the video. Which means I would do everything I can to ensure that she is not exposed to that video. That’s the sort of reason why films and games are age-graded and certified. So when we publish “in public”, in common space, we need to think about who else is able to see what we publish, and to show some responsibility.

Way 3: Don’t spoil things: There are very few things people now read, listen to or watch “live”. We have had the ability to Tivo so many parts of our lives for some time now. So people record things and replay them later. Catch-up services make this even simpler, by recording it for everyone and then making it available for a limited period for replay. We all know that this happens. So why do we bother to tweet or post stuff that has to do with TV programme contest results, sports results, film plots, book plots? Obviously there comes a time when it’s not that easy to avoid mentioning a “result”. But we have to learn how to do this safely. TV news stations have been using spoiler alerts for a while, where they audibly warn that a result is about to be flashed on a screen, given people the chance to look away if needed. IMDB provides spoiler alerts within film reviews, warning you not to click further unless you want to run the risk of having the plot exposed to you. We have to learn how to implement spoiler alerts as part of our sharing practice.

Sometimes the “spoiling” is subtler and your responsibilities are far more serious. You could be playing with other people’s lives. Now that everyone has a smart always-on alway-connected mobile device 24×7, every public event can be live-tweeted. Say you’re watching a hostage crisis play out. Be careful what you say because you could inadvertently tip off the hostage-takers and accelerate extreme and unwanted reactions. This is serious stuff. A couple of times as I watched what was being said, particularly on Twitter, I wished I could yell to the tweeter to cool it.

Summary

Those, then, are the three main ways we have to show responsibility in what and how we share. Of course we have to obey the law as well…. except when the sole purpose of sharing is to protest against the law…. in which case it is reasonable to break the law, knowingly, and to face the consequences. That’s not what I mean here. I’m talking about avoiding being racist or sexist or ageist, stuff like that. We should not be in the business of fomenting hatred by “sharing”. But that’s why we have laws. Sometimes those laws are asses, and deserve challenge. These are exceptions. The rest of the time, what we share should respect the laws of the land in which we do the sharing.

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