Ruth Stalker-Firth

A few years ago I attended a public lecture at the RSA and afterwards, a lady asked me what I did. I am a computer scientist, I said. And, she said: What makes you a scientist? I use a computer too. What’s the difference between you and me?

This is the interesting thing about computing, and in particular the field of human-computer interaction: Everyone thinks they are an expert in it, rather like they do in social psychology or design. Everywhere we go, we observe other people and how our and their behaviour affects our social interactions. We discuss it often and refer to it as pop psychology. Design is the same. We design our spaces in our houses and at our desks, we live and critique the results of design. We are all social psychologists and we are all designers and UX experts. We all use computers and our phones to get things done, so we can easily identify what’s not working in an app.

However, this does not equip everyone to be the social psychologist who designs clinical experiments, or the architect who builds a house, or the computer scientist like me who, as I explained to the RSA woman, has built and repaired computers, written and supported software, trained users, shadowed and observed how people work in order to close the gap between a computer and person – whether expert or novice in their field – in order for them to do their job more better, faster, more creatively. When I get it right, it seems obvious, when I get it wrong, it’s a difficult or terrible piece of technology which doesn’t seem worth the time/money/effort. Like most things in life, it is much easier to criticise than to create.

Computing though comes with a load of preconceptions. I talked about it in the women in technology blog. Marketers got their hands on the home computer and changed it from a place for women to work to the domain of the teenage nerd. They created stories and stereotypes to tell us how computing worked. There has also always been the myth of progress. Technology advances so quickly and changes our lives that we can barely keep up. People rarely ask: Is this progress?

After taking a career break, I said to some mums one day in conversation that I would return to working more, instead of encouragement and without any knowledge of the field of computing, they told me without hesitation that computers change so quickly and move on so fast that it was too late. They said that it was over for me as the ever changing technology had left me behind. Had I thought about doing something else, something I could get up to speed more easily? The thing is even though I hadn’t been earning money, I hadn’t really stopped thinking and writing and researching my field, as it’s not a job, it’s more a way of life – something I like to spend time on. I doubt I will ever stop thinking about how people use technology, and more and more how technology is dictating to people how they should work.

Nowadays, I feel that some of the research I was part of 20 years ago is making it into the mainstream and that is super exciting, technology like augmented or virtual reality back then seemed to a non-computer scientist rather like science-fiction as was more unwieldy, super expensive and rarely mentioned in the public domain. It belonged in a hi-tech lab. Almost daily now, I can pick up a paper or magazine and read about another latest VR application, a cheaper more accessible version for everyone, based on what we were thinking about years ago.

So, I am starting a blog series here to talk about human-computer interaction, how I became involved and how what I do has changed. From designing a straight up dialogue between one person and a machine, to humans online who were originally monologuing before Web 2.0, and then holding conversations with multiple machines, multiple users, to now what I believe is called for, which is a more symbiotic approach between humans and computers that considers more human aspects such as trust, intimacy, privacy first and foremost for the safety of humans – and different to safety critical systems which were designed to prevent disasters – now it is personal safety disasters which need to be avoided using, amongst other tricks of the HCI trade, psychological responsibility. And I would like to look at where I think this ever changing digital landscape and the ubiquity of our devices will take us in the future.

Come join me and journey through the dialogue, conversation and symbiosis of human-computer interaction. I can’t wait to get started.

[Part 2]

[Part 1]

In the last blog, I was pondering why there was such a reaction amongst social media experts when Wetherspoon’s chain of pubs shut down all it’s social media. I concluded that if a business takes to advertising itself on social media, then it should do so with a goal of being joyful, so that joy can be a reward in and of itself. Otherwise they might not be rewarded at all.

It seems to be that we all have this rule of life in business, in self-help, in spirituality, in dieting, in relationships, in health which is:

If you do the right thing you will be rewarded.

It is a fallacy. People with experience and wisdom can tell you what what worked for them, but they cannot guarantee that it will work for you. There is no fool proof way of getting the desired result.

Social media has only been around for about 10 years. I like the way people are describing it as the biggest social experiment in history but honestly, who knows if it is? In all the blogs and articles I read in which social media experts put forward their opinions on Wetherspoon, each had the same four points:

1. It was a big mistake and there will be consequences.
2. The reason they weren’t more successful was that they were doing it wrong.
3. The CEO/owner’s decision seemed to be based more on personal opinion than on proper analysis, and thus, implied it had to be wrong.
4. We’ll all have to wait and see what the impact, if there is any, will be.

These four points are so generic as to be useless and not worth the effort of the breath it took to utter them. I’ve heard them all before applied to many areas of life such as religion, self-help, business success, diets and fitness, health, etc.

People are unique so one size doesn’t fit all and people have almost killed themselves following rules which are not good for them.

We all love rules and theories to win, like game theory and how to write a bestseller and all the other how-to’s.  We have a hankering for order and for a reduction in uncertainty. This is because from birth we are conditioned to follow a lot of rules. We are also conditioned at school to compete as we believe that there is never enough to go around and there has to be a winner who takes all, losers and underdogs.

In the last blog I compared social media experts to the CofE because it struck me that social media experts are wandering around like the people in Deuteronomy trying to make order out of chaos by making up rules about what to eat with what and which cloth should be woven with another. The social media peeps are have rules about what to tweet and which facebook ads to buy. They are trying to make order out of the chaos of social media. They don’t know how it works really, no one does, in the same way we don’t know the reason for life, but we all want to make it manageable and have some control over what is happening.

For some followers their advice might be useful, for others it might be a complete soul sucking waste of time. To paraphrase, Iyanla Vanzant in a brilliant talk on the Hay House World Summit 2018, you can rub the Torah on your head for five years or read all the psalms (or tweet til the cows come home) it doesn’t mean you will gain enlightenment. And, by that I am using the Buddhist definition of knowing yourself and what is best for you and your business/health/spiritual practice. Just ‘cos an ‘expert’ said to do it, doesn’t mean it’s what you need.

I’ve already said that I think we take a lot of our patriarchal and bad behaviour online. I said it about women  viewed as objects and also about trolling and flaming. It seems that social media marketing has taken all it knows about what to do in the physical world and plonked that online too and called it the connection economy, just an empty fancy word for marketing. And, why do we believe that they know what they are talking about? Because we are so afraid of not getting our rewards. And we are afraid of missing out.

I can count on one hand people I know who have a genuine interest in other people and who listen and hear what other people say for no other purpose than to know all about them. It is powerful and captivating to be in the presence of these people. It is a special, dare I say sacred, experience.

And yet, in business active listening an ersatz version is taught so that people can pretend to listen and sneak in their (nearly always economic) agenda, which leave us feeling had, a lot like a  lot of social media marketing. All those ads in the space where people were just being social for no other reason than joy of connection. And, we’ve all see the articles: How to sell yourself without feeling grubby, and the one that gets me every time which is Be authentic, which doesn’t mean that at all, it is a sort of doublespeak about how to effectively spam people online with stuff they don’t want and get them to buy it.  There is nothing authentic about getting people to do stuff you want them to do regardless of what they want.

I love a bit of social media – the medium is the message – it extends my capacity as a human being in that I can talk to more people with the sole purpose of lighting up our days and feeling better about this shared experience called life.   But, when business people are literally spamming the whole of twitter with their ads ‘cos some expert told them to do it, it is time for that chaos to be ordered. It isn’t right, and mark my words, it won’t be rewarded.

Last week pub chain Wetherspoon announced that they would no longer be using social media which caused a furore amongst social media ‘experts’.

I like Wetherspoon’s pubs. There are three within walking distance of where I live. When I was vegetarian I liked that I could go get a quorn sausage butty for breakfast when no one else seemed to understand the need for veggie tastiness, and as a mother, I like the fact if I take my kids to Wetherspoon’s to eat, the menu is diverse enough to keep everyone happy. I also like the fact they have a wide range of interesting beers and lagers on tap and in the fridge. So say, I want a Kingfisher with my Chicken Tikka Masala, I can get a big bottle from the fridge.

I also like the fact that wherever I go, it is a similar set-up, and it’s not just the food and drink, it is the localness of it and a quick way of meeting community. You go in there and you see the regulars. And even if you go to a different town, you can meet regulars from there who like to have a chat. It doesn’t play music either which is nice, as sometimes I want to drink my beer without shouting like I am in a club, ‘cos if you are going to play loud music well you are going to have to let me dance. However, I have never followed Wetherspoon on social media ‘cos I can’t eat or drink Wetherspoon’s vittles on social media. I can only do that in a Wetherspoon’s pub.

It used to be that going to church would provide you with a community and a quiet space and food if you were needy. Nowadays, the Church of England is always talking about how to get more people through the doors and create a community of people. They could do a lot worse than take a look at the business model of Wetherspoon’s which is: Serving a (Maslow’s) fundamental need of reasonably priced food and drink all day, often in old and really interesting buildings.

The words community and need are bandied about a lot by social media experts too. What fundamental need does the CofE and social media experts give us? I don’t know. They seem to be following an arbitrary set of rules mainly made of Thou Shalt Nots in order to get people to do things, extra things, mainly for them to make money off.

It really irritated me last week that some of the US-based social media experts were giving their analysis (their words) having never set foot in a Wetherspoon’s, nor researched what Wetherspoon’s is about, and were hell-bent on telling everyone that social media is absolutely necessary to have as part of a business model and Wetherspoon’s will suffer. How do they know? They absolutely don’t as demonstrated by the BBC ‘commentary’ (using the term v loosely) in the link at the beginning of this blog. I have said it before: no one knows how social media works which is rather like religion.

I was in a restaurant in Sorrento, last month, and a guy with a super loud voice was ordering his dinner. He had loads of specific requests of which I couldn’t help but hear snippets: He couldn’t have cheese, I think it was with meat at the same time, but then he couldn’t have certain meats. He wanted wine, but he couldn’t just drink wine, he could only have it served with the meal, so he couldn’t have the wine on the table before the food, it had to be served at the same time. As the list of things he couldn’t do was very long and I didn’t listen to all of it, I concluded it was for religious purposes not allergies. Either way, his life (and his wife’s who sat silently near him) his business, but it did make me think: Do you really think that God will love you more because of all this effort? Love is patient and kind (1Corithinians 13). Love is unconditional. And we all know that no one who ever turned up with a load of rules and conditions for how you should be before they can love you has ever been good news.

It’s not just religion and social media marketing, it’s self-help too, and dieting, there are so many rules with what to eat and not eat, what to think, what not to think: your five a day, the green juice smoothie, the affirmations, the yoga classes, the meditation, a long list of things you have to do. I loved reading Danielle La Porte’s White Hot Truth which is a funny take on all the self-help, new age and therapy she felt she had to do to improve herself before she could become spiritual. I laughed out loud at a podcast when she said something along the lines of how she was a lot more balanced nowadays and then added: Just ask my astrologist.

When I had chemotherapy, I bought a cancer-fighting food book, which was all special food recipes for strengthening your body. There was a nice recipe for biscuits and I would say to my husband: I can’t believe you ate all the cancer biscuits. And he would say: Well they were tasty, which they were, but the idea that I had to fight cancer by eating cancer biscuits and think positively was less so, it didn’t make me feel better at all. I threw the book away, stopped thinking altogether, and ate fried egg sandwiches and chocolate cake, which my Oncologist said was hangover food, as that is basically what chemotherapy gives you, a big bad mother of a hangover.

Hangover food or comfort food or favourite like a curry and Kingfisher at Wetherspoon, a bit of a giggle on Twitter or Facebook, praying, dancing, or not thinking, makes me feel better and to feel like I am not alone in all of this. And to be fair, there are some Church communities who can do this for people too, but I have to say, never in my life have I looked at list of any rules of things I shouldn’t do and felt better. It makes me feel like I cannot breathe. The Thou shalt nots sap my soul.

However, as a society I know that rules are good for us, just take a look at the trolls on social media who seem to operate without them. But then it is not just them, it seems to me that it is the social media experts too who are just as dangerous making up rules as they go along about a thing they don’t understand, telling people what they should and shouldn’t do to be SUCCESSFUL! I know many business owners who say I hate social media and I don’t blame them, because they are trying to use a social tool as a marketing tool whilst being guided by people who don’t know how it works, especially if they don’t have a weightless product. The idea of marketing on social media is like a mailshot to randomers. It’s like putting things through peoples’ letterboxes in the neighbourhood, without knowing who lives there, and even then there’s a maximum 2% return, which is why Wetherspoon’s withdrawal is really refreshing.

Wetherspoon’s provides a warm place to go for food and drink and a chat. It’s already successful it doesn’t need social media to improve on that. It’s like preaching to the choir.

We can’t eat or drink on the Internet, though we can eat and drink with our phones or computers in front of us to chat in a space and call it a party. But it’s just not the same. The medium is the message but when your message is about something physical in a virtual space, well that just doesn’t always work.

As a business you need to get clear on what successful looks like and measure your returns on social media. Or, just do it for the joy, the love, the community you can create and throw away your measuring stick. Just please don’t do it and hate it. You are better off not doing it at all.

I don’t see Wetherspoon’s marketshare suffering. We don’t all need to be on social media. Don’t be taken in by the experts who tell you otherwise. They need you to be on it to buy their how to guides and Ten Commandments.

I have decided to compose my own Ten Thou shalts (instead of shalt nots) for social media, and following Wetherspoon’s example, I will begin with:

Thou shalt do what’s best for you to feel joy.

On second thought, I am thinking that’s the only rule we need. Don’t you?

[Part 2]