As I said in my previous post, I don't think we can start to think about the ethics of technology nudges without recognizing the complexity of real-world nudges. So in this post, I shall look at how nudges are communicated in the real world, before considering what their artificial analogues might look like.
Once upon a time, nudges were physical rather than verbal - a push on the shoulder perhaps, or a dig in the ribs with an elbow. The meaning was elliptical and depended almost entirely on context. "Nudge nudge, wink wink", as Monty Python used to say.
Even technologically mediated nudges can sometimes be physical, or what we should probably call haptic. For example, the fitness band that vibrates when it thinks you have been sitting for too long.
But many of the acts we now think of as nudges are delivered verbally, as some kind of speech act. But which kind?
The most obvious kind of nudge is a direct suggestion, which may take the form of a weak command. ("Try and eat a little now.") But nudges can also take other illocutionary forms, including questions ("Don't you
think the sun is very hot here?") and statements / predictions ("You will find
that new nose of yours very useful to spank people with.").
(Readers familiar with Kipling may recognize my examples as the nudges given by the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake to the Elephant's Child.)
The force of a suggestion may depend on context and tone of voice. (A more systematic analysis of what philosophers call illocutionary force can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, based on Searle and Vanderveken 1985.)
@tonyjoyce raises a good point about tone of voice in electronic messages. Traditionally robots don't do tone of voice, and when a human being talks in a boring monotone we may describe their speech as robotic. But I can't see any reason why robots couldn't be programmed with more varied speech patterns, including tonality, if their designers saw the value of this.
Meanwhile, we already get some differentation from electronic communications. For example I should expect an electronic announcement to "LEAVE THE BUILDING IMMEDIATELY" to have a tone of voice that conveys urgency, and we might think it is inappropriate or even unethical to use the same tone of voice for selling candy. We might put this together with other attention-seeking devices, such as flashing red text. The people who design clickbait clearly understand illocutionary force (even if they aren't familiar with the term).
A speech act can also gain force by being associated with action. If I promise to donate money to a given charity, this may nudge other people to do the same; but if they see me actually putting the money in the tin, the nudge might be much stronger. But then the nudge might be just as strong if I just put the money in the tin without saying anything, as long as everyone sees me do it. The important point is that some communication takes place, whether verbal or non-verbal, and this returns us to something closer to the original concept of nudge.
From an ethical point of view, there are particular concerns about unobtrusive or subliminal nudges. Yeung has introduced the concept of the Hypernudge, which combines three qualities: nimble, unobtrusive and highly potent. I share her concerns about this combination, but I think it is helpful to deal with these three qualities separately, before looking at the additional problems that may arise when they are combined.
Proponents of the nudge sometimes try to distinguish between unobtrusive (acceptable) and subliminal (unacceptable), but this distinction may be hard to sustain, and many people quote Luc Bovens' observation that nudges "typically work better in the dark". See also Baldwin.
I'm sure there's more to say on this topic, so I may update this post later. Relevant comments always welcome.
Robert Baldwin, From regulation to behaviour change: giving nudge the third degree (The Modern Law Review 77/6, 2014) pp 831-857
Luc Bovens, The Ethics of Nudge.
In Mats J. Hansson and Till Grüne-Yanoff (eds.), Preference Change: Approaches from Philosophy, Economics and Psychology. (Berlin: Springer, 2008) pp. 207-20
John Danaher, Algocracy as Hypernudging: A New Way to Understand the Threat of Algocracy (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 17 January 2017)
J. Searle and D. Vanderveken, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Karen Yeung, ‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a Mode of Regulation by Design (Information, Communication and Society (2016) 1,19; TLI Think! Paper 28/2016)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Speech Acts
Related posts: On the Ethics of Technologically Mediated Nudge (May 2019), Nudge Technology (July 2019)
Updated 28 May 2019. Many thanks to @tonyjoyce
Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts
Sunday, May 19, 2019
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Ethical communication in a digital age
At the @BritishAcademy_ yesterday evening for a lecture by Onora O'Neill on Ethical Communication in a Digital Age, supported by two more philosophy professors, Rowan Cruft and Rae Langton.
Much of the discussion was about the threats posed to public reason by electronically mediated speech acts, and the challenges of regulating social media. However, although the tech giants and regulators have an important role, the primary question in the event billing was not about Them but about Us - how do *we* communicate ethically in an increasingly digital age.
I don't claim to know as much about ethics as the three professors, but I do know a bit about communication and digital technology, so here is my take on the subject from that perspective.
The kind of communication we are talking about involves at least four different players - the speaker, the spoken-to, the spoken-about, and the medium / mediator. Communication can be punctuated into a series of atomic speech acts, but it is often the cumulative effects (on public reason or public decency) that worry us.
So let me look at each of the elements of this communication in turn.
First the speech act itself. O'Neill quoted Plato, who complained that the technology of writing served to decouple the writer from the text. On social media, the authorship of speech acts becomes more problematic still. This is not just because many of the speakers are anonymous, and we may not know whether they are bots or people. It is also because the dissemination mechanisms offered by the social media platforms allow people to dissociate themselves from the contents that they may "like" or "retweet". Thus people may disseminate nasty material while perceiving themselves not as the authors of this material but as merely mediators of it, and therefore not holding themselves personally responsible for the truth or decency of the material.
Indeed, some people act online as if they believed that the online world was entirely disconnected from the real physical world, as if online banter could never have real-world consequences, and the online alter ego was an entirely different person.
Did I say truth? At the event, the three philosophers devoted a lot of time to the relationship between ethics and epistemology (questions of truth and verifiability on the Internet). But even propositional speech acts are not always easily sorted into truth and lies, while many of the speech acts that pollute the internet are not propositions but other rhetorical gestures. For example, endless repetition of "what about her emails?" and "lock her up", which are designed to frame public discourse to accord with the rhetorical goals of the speaker. (I'll come back to the question of framing later.)
The popular social media platforms offer to punctuate our speech into discrete units - the tweet, the post, the YouTube video, or whatever. Each unit is then measured separately, and the speaker may be rewarded (financially or psychologically) when a unit becomes popular (or "goes viral"). We tend to take this punctuation at face value, but systems thinkers including Bateson and Maturana have drawn attention to the relationship between punctuation and epistemology.
(Note to self - I need to say more about metacommunication, which is a concept Bateson took from Benjamin Lee Whorf.)
Full communication requires a listener (the spoken-to) as well as a speaker. Much of the digital literacy agenda is about coaching people to interpret and evaluate material found on the internet, enabling them to work out who is actually speaking, and whether there is a hidden commercial or political agenda.
One of the challenges of the digital age is that I don't know who else is being spoken to. Am I part of an undifferentiated crowd (unlikely) or a filter bubble (probably)? The digital platforms have developed sophisticated mechanisms for targeting people who may be particularly receptive to particular messages or content, nudges to action or inaction (including voter suppression). So why have I been selected for this message, why exactly does Twitter or Facebook think this would be of interest to me? This is a fundamental divergence from older forms of mass communication - the public meeting, the newspaper, the broadcast.
And sometimes a person can be targeted with violent threats and other unpleasantries. Harassment and trolling techniques developed as part of the #GamerGate campaign are now widely used across the internet, and may often be successful in intimidating and silencing the recipients.
The third (and often unwilling) party to communication is the person or community spoken about. Where this is an individual, there may be issues around privacy as well as avoidance of libel or slander. It is sometimes thought that people in the public eye (such as Hillary Clinton or George Soros) are somehow "fair game" for any criticism or disparagement that is thrown in their direction, whereas other people (especially children) deserve some protection. The gutter press has always pushed the boundaries of this, and the Internet undoubtedly amplifies this phenomenon.
What I find even more interesting here is the way recent political debate has focused on scapegoating certain groups. Geoff Shullenberger attributes some of this to Peter Thiel.
Clearly there are some ethical issues here to be addressed.
Fourthly we come onto the role of the medium / mediator. O'Neill talked about disintermediation, as if the Internet allowed people to talk directly to people without having to pass through gatekeepers such as newspaper editors and government censors. But as Rae Langton pointed out, this is not true disintermediation, as these mediators are merely being replaced by others - often amateur curators. Furthermore, the new mediators can't be expected to have the same establishment standards as the old mediators. (This may or may not be a good thing, but in a later article, Sophia Ignatidou argues that "removing regulated, accountable and experienced journalists from the equation can only be deleterious to the public interest".)
Even the old mediators can't be relied upon to maintain the old standards. The BBC is often accused of bias, and its response to these accusations appears to be to hide behind a perverse notion of "balance" and "objectivity" that requires it to provide a platform for climate change denial and other farragoes.
Obviously the tech giants have a commercial agenda, linked to the Attention Economy. As Zeynep Tufekci and others have pointed out, people can be presented with increasingly extreme content in order to keep them on the platform, and this appears to be a significant force behind the emergence of radical groups, as well as a substantial shift in the Overton window. There appears to be some correlation between Facebook usage and attacks on migrants, although it may be difficult to establish the direction of causality.
But the platforms themselves are also subject to political influence - not only the weaponization of social media described by John Naughton but also old-fashioned coercion. Around Easter 2016, people were wondering whether Facebook would swing the American election against Trump. A posse of right-wing politicians had a meeting with Zuckerberg in May 2016, who then bent over backwards to avoid anyone thinking that Facebook would give Clinton an unfair advantage. (Spoiler: it didn't.)
So if there is a role for regulation here, it is not only to protect consumers from the commercial interests of the tech giants, but also to protect the tech giants themselves from improper influence.
Finally, I want to emphasize Framing, which is one of the most important ways people can influence public reason. For example, hashtags provide a simple and powerful framing mechanism, which can work to positive effect (#MeToo) or negative (#GamerGate).
President Trump is of course a master of framing - constantly moving the terms of the debate, so his opponents are always forced to debate on these terms. His frequent invocation of #FakeNews enables him to preempt and negate inconvenient facts, and his rhetorical playbook also includes antisemitic tropes (Hadley Freeman) and kettle logic (Heer Jeet). (But there are many examples of framing devices used by earlier presidents, and it is hard to delineate precisely what is new or objectionable about Trump's performance.)
In other words Rhetoric eats Epistemology for breakfast. (Perhaps that will give my philosopher friends something to chew on?)
Much of the discussion was about the threats posed to public reason by electronically mediated speech acts, and the challenges of regulating social media. However, although the tech giants and regulators have an important role, the primary question in the event billing was not about Them but about Us - how do *we* communicate ethically in an increasingly digital age.
I don't claim to know as much about ethics as the three professors, but I do know a bit about communication and digital technology, so here is my take on the subject from that perspective.
The kind of communication we are talking about involves at least four different players - the speaker, the spoken-to, the spoken-about, and the medium / mediator. Communication can be punctuated into a series of atomic speech acts, but it is often the cumulative effects (on public reason or public decency) that worry us.
So let me look at each of the elements of this communication in turn.
First the speech act itself. O'Neill quoted Plato, who complained that the technology of writing served to decouple the writer from the text. On social media, the authorship of speech acts becomes more problematic still. This is not just because many of the speakers are anonymous, and we may not know whether they are bots or people. It is also because the dissemination mechanisms offered by the social media platforms allow people to dissociate themselves from the contents that they may "like" or "retweet". Thus people may disseminate nasty material while perceiving themselves not as the authors of this material but as merely mediators of it, and therefore not holding themselves personally responsible for the truth or decency of the material.
Indeed, some people act online as if they believed that the online world was entirely disconnected from the real physical world, as if online banter could never have real-world consequences, and the online alter ego was an entirely different person.
Did I say truth? At the event, the three philosophers devoted a lot of time to the relationship between ethics and epistemology (questions of truth and verifiability on the Internet). But even propositional speech acts are not always easily sorted into truth and lies, while many of the speech acts that pollute the internet are not propositions but other rhetorical gestures. For example, endless repetition of "what about her emails?" and "lock her up", which are designed to frame public discourse to accord with the rhetorical goals of the speaker. (I'll come back to the question of framing later.)
The popular social media platforms offer to punctuate our speech into discrete units - the tweet, the post, the YouTube video, or whatever. Each unit is then measured separately, and the speaker may be rewarded (financially or psychologically) when a unit becomes popular (or "goes viral"). We tend to take this punctuation at face value, but systems thinkers including Bateson and Maturana have drawn attention to the relationship between punctuation and epistemology.
(Note to self - I need to say more about metacommunication, which is a concept Bateson took from Benjamin Lee Whorf.)
Full communication requires a listener (the spoken-to) as well as a speaker. Much of the digital literacy agenda is about coaching people to interpret and evaluate material found on the internet, enabling them to work out who is actually speaking, and whether there is a hidden commercial or political agenda.
One of the challenges of the digital age is that I don't know who else is being spoken to. Am I part of an undifferentiated crowd (unlikely) or a filter bubble (probably)? The digital platforms have developed sophisticated mechanisms for targeting people who may be particularly receptive to particular messages or content, nudges to action or inaction (including voter suppression). So why have I been selected for this message, why exactly does Twitter or Facebook think this would be of interest to me? This is a fundamental divergence from older forms of mass communication - the public meeting, the newspaper, the broadcast.
And sometimes a person can be targeted with violent threats and other unpleasantries. Harassment and trolling techniques developed as part of the #GamerGate campaign are now widely used across the internet, and may often be successful in intimidating and silencing the recipients.
The third (and often unwilling) party to communication is the person or community spoken about. Where this is an individual, there may be issues around privacy as well as avoidance of libel or slander. It is sometimes thought that people in the public eye (such as Hillary Clinton or George Soros) are somehow "fair game" for any criticism or disparagement that is thrown in their direction, whereas other people (especially children) deserve some protection. The gutter press has always pushed the boundaries of this, and the Internet undoubtedly amplifies this phenomenon.
What I find even more interesting here is the way recent political debate has focused on scapegoating certain groups. Geoff Shullenberger attributes some of this to Peter Thiel.
"Peter Thiel, whose support for Trump earned him a place on the transition team, is a former student of the most significant theorist of scapegoating, the late literary scholar and anthropologist of religion René Girard. Girard built an ambitious theory around the claim that scapegoating pervades social life in an occluded form and plays a foundational role in religion and politics. For Girard, the task of modern thought is to reveal and overcome the scapegoat mechanism–to defuse its immense potency by explaining its operation. Conversely, Thiel’s political agenda and successful career setting up the new pillars of our social world bear the unmistakable traces of someone who believes in the salvationary power of scapegoating as a positive project."
Clearly there are some ethical issues here to be addressed.
Fourthly we come onto the role of the medium / mediator. O'Neill talked about disintermediation, as if the Internet allowed people to talk directly to people without having to pass through gatekeepers such as newspaper editors and government censors. But as Rae Langton pointed out, this is not true disintermediation, as these mediators are merely being replaced by others - often amateur curators. Furthermore, the new mediators can't be expected to have the same establishment standards as the old mediators. (This may or may not be a good thing, but in a later article, Sophia Ignatidou argues that "removing regulated, accountable and experienced journalists from the equation can only be deleterious to the public interest".)
Even the old mediators can't be relied upon to maintain the old standards. The BBC is often accused of bias, and its response to these accusations appears to be to hide behind a perverse notion of "balance" and "objectivity" that requires it to provide a platform for climate change denial and other farragoes.
Obviously the tech giants have a commercial agenda, linked to the Attention Economy. As Zeynep Tufekci and others have pointed out, people can be presented with increasingly extreme content in order to keep them on the platform, and this appears to be a significant force behind the emergence of radical groups, as well as a substantial shift in the Overton window. There appears to be some correlation between Facebook usage and attacks on migrants, although it may be difficult to establish the direction of causality.
But the platforms themselves are also subject to political influence - not only the weaponization of social media described by John Naughton but also old-fashioned coercion. Around Easter 2016, people were wondering whether Facebook would swing the American election against Trump. A posse of right-wing politicians had a meeting with Zuckerberg in May 2016, who then bent over backwards to avoid anyone thinking that Facebook would give Clinton an unfair advantage. (Spoiler: it didn't.)
So if there is a role for regulation here, it is not only to protect consumers from the commercial interests of the tech giants, but also to protect the tech giants themselves from improper influence.
Finally, I want to emphasize Framing, which is one of the most important ways people can influence public reason. For example, hashtags provide a simple and powerful framing mechanism, which can work to positive effect (#MeToo) or negative (#GamerGate).
President Trump is of course a master of framing - constantly moving the terms of the debate, so his opponents are always forced to debate on these terms. His frequent invocation of #FakeNews enables him to preempt and negate inconvenient facts, and his rhetorical playbook also includes antisemitic tropes (Hadley Freeman) and kettle logic (Heer Jeet). (But there are many examples of framing devices used by earlier presidents, and it is hard to delineate precisely what is new or objectionable about Trump's performance.)
In other words Rhetoric eats Epistemology for breakfast. (Perhaps that will give my philosopher friends something to chew on?)
J.L Austin, How to do things with words (Oxford University Press, 1962)
Rachel Barney [Aristotle], On Trolling
(Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2):193-195, 2016)
Anthony Cuthbertson, Facebook
use linked to attacks on refugees, says study (Independent, 22 August 2018)
Paul F. Dell, Understanding Bateson and Maturana: Toward a Biological Foundation for the Social Sciences (Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 1985, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1-20). (Note: even though I have both Bateson and Maturana on my bookshelf, the lazy way to get a reference is to use Google, which points me towards secondary sources like this. When I have time, I'll put the original references in.)
Sophia Ignatidou, The weaponisation of information is mutating at alarming speed (Guardian, 19 August 2019)
Alex Johnson and Matthew DeLuca, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Meets Conservatives Amid 'Trending' Furor (NBC News, 19 May 2016)
Robinson Meyer, How Facebook Could Tilt the 2016 Election (Atlantic, 18 April 2016)
Paul Lewis, 'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth (Guardian, 2 Feb 2018)
John Naughton, Mark Zuckerberg’s dilemma - what to do with monster he has created? (Open Democracy, 29 October 2018)
Geoff Shullenberger, Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection (Cyborgology, 13 August 2016) The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)
Zeynep Tufekci, YouTube, the Great Radicalizer (New York Times, 10 March 2018)
Channel 4 News, Revealed: Trump campaign strategy to deter millions of Black Americans from voting in 2016 (28 September 2020)
Wikipedia: Attention Economy, Disintermediation, Framing, Gamergate Controversy, Metacommunication, Overton Window
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: René Girard
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: J.L. Austin, Speech Acts
Related posts: Security is downstream from strategy (March 2018), YouTube Growth Hacking (November 2018), Polarization (November 2018), The Future of Political Campaigning (November 2018), Trolls are like ghosts (December 2020)
Updated 29 September 2020. Links added 27 August 2021.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Information and Affirmation
@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged - it is a positive act of communication.
So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show's success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.
The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell. But Brooker's material is basically the same as Cowell's, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.
"Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love."
Tim Rayner, The gift shift: what’s social about social media? (August 2012)
So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show's success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.
Daniel Smith, Spleen and Modernity: Baudelaire and ‘alternative’ consumption (July 2010)
The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell. But Brooker's material is basically the same as Cowell's, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.
Jonathan Harwood, Cowell and Morgan beaten by Brooker and Theroux (The Week March 2010)
Friday, January 18, 2013
Beyond Personal Knowledge Management
@hjarche via @Cybersal says "I'll show the same thing many times and people have various interpretations of it. Sharing knowledge artifacts is not transferring knowledge."
In other words, we don't actually share knowledge, what we share are documents and other artifacts that are supposed to contain knowledge.
If I send a document to Harold or Sally, they may or may not be able to extract some knowledge from it. There are many possible causes of knowledge impedance or attenuation, such as obscure language and specialized terminology, poor presentation, low motivation, and information overload. Even if either of them is able to glean some knowledge from perusing my document, what they get out may be quite different from the knowledge I thought I was putting in. Their interpretations depend on many things: their situation, their prior knowledge, beliefs and values, their expectations about what I'm trying to say, and their ability to read between the lines. (Even my closest friends and associates, who I imagine share a lot of my assumptions, read my documents in ways I find surprising, which is why I always greatly value their comments.)
Harold promotes something he calls Personal Knowledge Management, which describes knowledge management as an Input-Process-Output system.
Harold talks about Network Learning, which seems to be about taking advantage of digital connectivity and embedding the Input (Seek) and Output (Share) into a wide social network. What I don't see in Harold's account of Network Learning is any sense of collective sense-making - knowledge emerging from the collaboration rather than being generated by one person. I'm also troubled by the implication that knowledge is produced by thinking rather than doing, since I think the most useful knowledge is what emerges from practice.
So while there is undoubtedly a great deal of value in Harold's approach, I think it underplays some of the social and practical elements of knowledge management and organizational intelligence.
Harold Jarche's website: Personal Knowledge Management, Network Learning
See also Jose Baldaia, Who tells a story transfers tacit knowledge and creates new (May 2012)
Places are still available on my forthcoming workshops Business Awareness (Jan 28), Business Architecture (Jan 29-31), Organizational Intelligence (Feb 1).
If I send a document to Harold or Sally, they may or may not be able to extract some knowledge from it. There are many possible causes of knowledge impedance or attenuation, such as obscure language and specialized terminology, poor presentation, low motivation, and information overload. Even if either of them is able to glean some knowledge from perusing my document, what they get out may be quite different from the knowledge I thought I was putting in. Their interpretations depend on many things: their situation, their prior knowledge, beliefs and values, their expectations about what I'm trying to say, and their ability to read between the lines. (Even my closest friends and associates, who I imagine share a lot of my assumptions, read my documents in ways I find surprising, which is why I always greatly value their comments.)
Harold promotes something he calls Personal Knowledge Management, which describes knowledge management as an Input-Process-Output system.
- Input (Seek) - we gather knowledge from our environment, including other people
- Process (Sense) - we interpret, personalize and use knowledge
- Output (Share) - we pass on our knowledge to other people
Harold talks about Network Learning, which seems to be about taking advantage of digital connectivity and embedding the Input (Seek) and Output (Share) into a wide social network. What I don't see in Harold's account of Network Learning is any sense of collective sense-making - knowledge emerging from the collaboration rather than being generated by one person. I'm also troubled by the implication that knowledge is produced by thinking rather than doing, since I think the most useful knowledge is what emerges from practice.
So while there is undoubtedly a great deal of value in Harold's approach, I think it underplays some of the social and practical elements of knowledge management and organizational intelligence.
Harold Jarche's website: Personal Knowledge Management, Network Learning
See also Jose Baldaia, Who tells a story transfers tacit knowledge and creates new (May 2012)
Places are still available on my forthcoming workshops Business Awareness (Jan 28), Business Architecture (Jan 29-31), Organizational Intelligence (Feb 1).
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Dangling Conversation
@markhillary asks "When you follow company Twitter accounts, do you like being able to see who runs the account, like a named person on the profile?"
I think that depends how gullible you are. When I get a letter signed by an Important Person, I generally assume it was written by his staff and signed in his absence. And when I get a mass-produced "personal letter" from an Important Person, I assume it was generated by a computer and signed by a programmer.
I got an email recently, which claimed to be a "A Personal Message from Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO, OMG and Keith Steele, CEO, PrismTech and OMG Board Member". I wrote back and thanked Richard personally - not to the address on the email (which was omg_marketing@omg.org) but to his real email address. For some reason, he ignored this. I hope he's not ill or anything.
And corporate communications sometimes use a fictional identity. Gerald Kaufman MP once tried to phone a person in the Prime Minister's office who had responded to a letter, only to discover that "Mrs E Adams" didn't actually exist. [Source: John Walsh: Beware letters from fictional civil servants (Independent May 2011)] This kind of thing is convenient for bureaucracies, because it allows incoming communications to be sorted by topic and redirected to whoever happens to be on duty that day. I'm sure the same thing often happens with Twitter, to prevent a corporate spokesperson ever being confused with a private individual.
As for company bosses, politicians and other celebrities, it would be naive to imagine that they always write their own tweets. "Of course they don't", tweets @markhillary, "but allowing helpers to do broadcast stuff is surely OK if the conversational is genuine?" Well, that depends on your idea of a genuine conversation.
It seems to me that there are some serious sociological and ethical problems here - of public/private identity, authenticity and trust - and we are only just learning how to operate in this new world.
@markhillary goes on to ask another question. "If you were interacting with a brand like Virgin Media, are you happy conversing with the brand?"
My answer to that question invokes Freud's concept of transference. Our psychological state (happiness, frustration) may depend on what we project onto a given brand or persona that we are conversing with. I generally try to separate my feelings about the company/brand from my feelings about the human being who is standing between me and the company/brand - but I don't always succeed. When we are really angry about something, it is difficult to avoid being rude or sarcastic to the junior employee that picks up the phone, even when we know it's not really their fault. Conversely, if the sales assistant is charming enough, it is tempting to buy something we don't really need.
Of course the CEO never picks up the phone herself. Funny that. When I'm conversing with the Virgin brand, I may fondly imagine that I'm getting Richard Branson's personal attention, but there is a little voice inside my head saying that's unlikely.
There is of course one thing that is likely to make me very unhappy indeed. Suppose I am naive enough to imagine I am having a personal conversation with Richard Branson or Richard Soley. Then the screen falls over and I see it is just some little functionary and not the Wizard of Oz at all. Isn't that just going to annoy me? Isn't it Richard, isn't it? #OMG.
I think that depends how gullible you are. When I get a letter signed by an Important Person, I generally assume it was written by his staff and signed in his absence. And when I get a mass-produced "personal letter" from an Important Person, I assume it was generated by a computer and signed by a programmer.
I got an email recently, which claimed to be a "A Personal Message from Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO, OMG and Keith Steele, CEO, PrismTech and OMG Board Member". I wrote back and thanked Richard personally - not to the address on the email (which was omg_marketing@omg.org) but to his real email address. For some reason, he ignored this. I hope he's not ill or anything.
And corporate communications sometimes use a fictional identity. Gerald Kaufman MP once tried to phone a person in the Prime Minister's office who had responded to a letter, only to discover that "Mrs E Adams" didn't actually exist. [Source: John Walsh: Beware letters from fictional civil servants (Independent May 2011)] This kind of thing is convenient for bureaucracies, because it allows incoming communications to be sorted by topic and redirected to whoever happens to be on duty that day. I'm sure the same thing often happens with Twitter, to prevent a corporate spokesperson ever being confused with a private individual.
As for company bosses, politicians and other celebrities, it would be naive to imagine that they always write their own tweets. "Of course they don't", tweets @markhillary, "but allowing helpers to do broadcast stuff is surely OK if the conversational is genuine?" Well, that depends on your idea of a genuine conversation.
It seems to me that there are some serious sociological and ethical problems here - of public/private identity, authenticity and trust - and we are only just learning how to operate in this new world.
@markhillary goes on to ask another question. "If you were interacting with a brand like Virgin Media, are you happy conversing with the brand?"
My answer to that question invokes Freud's concept of transference. Our psychological state (happiness, frustration) may depend on what we project onto a given brand or persona that we are conversing with. I generally try to separate my feelings about the company/brand from my feelings about the human being who is standing between me and the company/brand - but I don't always succeed. When we are really angry about something, it is difficult to avoid being rude or sarcastic to the junior employee that picks up the phone, even when we know it's not really their fault. Conversely, if the sales assistant is charming enough, it is tempting to buy something we don't really need.
Of course the CEO never picks up the phone herself. Funny that. When I'm conversing with the Virgin brand, I may fondly imagine that I'm getting Richard Branson's personal attention, but there is a little voice inside my head saying that's unlikely.
There is of course one thing that is likely to make me very unhappy indeed. Suppose I am naive enough to imagine I am having a personal conversation with Richard Branson or Richard Soley. Then the screen falls over and I see it is just some little functionary and not the Wizard of Oz at all. Isn't that just going to annoy me? Isn't it Richard, isn't it? #OMG.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
WiFi in New Orleans (Katrina)
Ernie the Attorney has returned to his home in New Orleans to find the communications infrastructure is down and out. In an interesting echo of his earlier post What've got here is a failure to communicate (which discussed the signal/noise ratio in email and blogging - see my comment in the POSIWID blog) he now blogs about a much more serious problem What we have here is an inability to communicate.
Basically, the communications infrastructure in New Orleans is a mess. Ernie is one of the lucky ones, and he is sharing his good fortune with others.
But at the same time, there is clearly some serious mistrust of the authorities. It is not clear how the urgent message in Ernie's blog is going to get through to the people who might do something about it. (This is one of the political aspects of the point made in Ernie's earlier post.)
People in New Orleans are learning things it will take them a long time to forget. It will be interesting to see whether these events bring about a permanent shift in the trust geometry of these communities.
Basically, the communications infrastructure in New Orleans is a mess. Ernie is one of the lucky ones, and he is sharing his good fortune with others.
I'm glad to say that my home is one of the few that has high-speed internet. ... I have a Wi-Fi set-up for my internet, and it reaches to the front and back of my house. So pretty much anyone who wants to can use it. My friends often come by and sit in the backyard or on the front porch. Some of these cyber-junkies are friends of friends. I wouldn't think of making my Wi-Fi network secure. Too many people need it. [my emphasis]This is a commendable example of positive network trust. In the absence of top-down provision, people help each other.
But at the same time, there is clearly some serious mistrust of the authorities. It is not clear how the urgent message in Ernie's blog is going to get through to the people who might do something about it. (This is one of the political aspects of the point made in Ernie's earlier post.)
People in New Orleans are learning things it will take them a long time to forget. It will be interesting to see whether these events bring about a permanent shift in the trust geometry of these communities.
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