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Let’s talk! #broadcastsfrommybooth

I have been struggling to blog for a while now which was making me miserable as I like nothing better than to get a large cup of tea, swizzle round on my chair and tippety-tappety-talk into my computer.

So to wrestle back some sort of control over my writing, I began to talk tech over on YouTube and now I have embedded it here on a specially created Broadcast page. Ta daaa! The result is that I am feeling much happier.

The first time my girls caught me watching myself on TV and transcribing what I said, they thought it was really amazing and wanted their own channels but after a minute or so they started doing impressions of me falling asleep saying: I am very excited about technology. And, they have a point. I do sound a bit monotonous in What am I doing? but that is better than the video Our human experience on social media I seriously look like I am about to cry. It seems that I am not a natural in front of the camera.

My original idea was #broadcastsfrommybooth as I film myself in an old fireplace in my bedroom – my one fabulous go at interior design, even the carpet fitter thought I was mad – but it is a bit long to say in each video, and every word counts.

I use a Google Pixel phone. The camera is fabulous but doesn’t sound brilliant since the Pixel doesn’t allow you to use a plugin microphone, and if you change to a different camera app, the sound doesn’t really improve enough to make it worth the diminished video quality. Apparently, Pixel 3 will fix this problem but they said that about Pixel 2 and when I tested one, it didn’t seem to use the external mic. So, I will just use what I have.

I tried filming on my laptop with one of those headphone mics plugged in lying across the keyboard. It had great sound, but a terrible picture, I look like Voldemort (take a look – 1st Broadcast from the booth) so I turned off the softbox to get my nose back but then I looked like a guest on Most Haunted (check out Privacy and technology) although thankfully you can’t see up my nostrils. What is it with filming and noses? Softboxes are fabulous but it has taken ages to position them just right.

YouTube Creator Studio has lots of editing tools so you can trim your uploaded video, add notations and helpful graphics which I will do once I get my story straight. Currently, I don’t script my videos which I should do – it is a YouTube rule – but it’s a bit tricky talking about my own ideas in a couple of minutes. I just need to practice.

I manage to wear a lot of black even though that is a big no-no and try to follow the other YouTube rules like put face powder on to so as to not be shiny and distracting. I also stare right into the tiny lens and bring my energy to no one in particular which is easier said than done, believe you me.

Speaking into a tiny lens for a maximum of five minutes is very different from lecturing to computer scientists in a purpose built room for at least an hour where I get moment-by-moment feedback. However, I am enjoying the challenge. I gurn a lot and sometimes my hair looks a bit crazy though I bought a hairbrush this morning. This afternoon, I was drinking tea in between takes so my lipstick is all over the place. Yes that’s right, I look like I don’t know how to put on lipstick.

What can I say? YouTubing is much harder than it looks and I am in awe of those who make it look so great but now I have my first real subscriber over on YouTube who is not a member of my family and thinks I have useful things to say, I am inspired to talk more to my audience.

Today, I talked a lot about The Social Animal on Social Media and tomorrow I will tackle Web Design. I can’t wait!

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Augmenting humans with social media

Figure borrowed from http://www.cs.washington.edu
My first job back in the early 90’s was as a systems analyst. I was really excited about automating boring bits of peoples’ tasks so that they could get creative by accessing the extra brainpower of a computer in some wonderful human-computer collaboration.

Inspired by Doug Lenat’s AM (Automated Mathematician), where the computer was discovering mathematical proofs, I wanted to find a way to create some sort of integrated system with the computer discovering things and the human adding information to represent their feel for a given situation.

Of course, in the Accounts Department where I was ‘helping’ accountants, the reality was very different. Computers weren’t the powerful, easy to use machines they are today. So, by introducing technology to various user groups, I was actually telling people to do their jobs differently. I wasn’t making the world a better place, I was hampering everyone with computers. And elsewhere in the company I worked, computers were replacing people altogether. No wonder, computers were not popular. How times have changed.

For me, human-computer interaction was and still remains Gestaltian: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, by this I mean, that the collaboration of a human and a computer should be more than a human typing numbers into a computer and then waiting for the solution.

When I looked up Gestalt Theory, I learnt that Kurt Koffka’s original phrase was The whole is other than the sum of the parts, which works just as well. And did, when I was captivated by AI research, in particular constraint theory.

I loved the idea that if you had a space of solutions, you could explore it computationally by changing variables which represented specific design objectives such as the limit of the cost of the project, and then create other and varying solutions.

But, how often do we need something other and varying? The majority of users I have worked with love their jobs and have specific end goals for which they use computers.

When I was working alongside engineers my job was to interpret the massive data sets generated by fibre optic sensors on the bridges they monitored. I created GUIs which employed the terminology and symbolic language engineers are trained to use. The GUIs sat onto top of well-known models to interpret data. And to reflect this specific nature of engineer-computer interaction, I actually called it a sub-set of human-computer interaction. The engineers were doing something newish – monitoring bridges- but they were using the way they were trained because of the laws and health and safety when looking after the infrastructure society depends upon.

The engineers would only use something they could trust.

And that got me thinking about the whole creativity computational collaboration. Do we really need super extra powerful computers to have a creative collaboration? Or do we just need something trustworthy?

When I began this blog post – a long time ago – I had a first sentence which said: How to improve the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being.

Now, I can barely remember what I was going to say. But googling the phrase produces millions of articles and Doug Engelbart, who was a pioneer in computing. He invented the mouse and was very much into harnessing computational power to help humans and augment their capacities. This side steps the issue of trust, because ultimately the augmented human would decide whether the collaboration of computer and human produced the right solution. And humans normally trust themselves.

Steve Mann has been augmenting his capacity for over 20 years with wearables which overlay his world view with lots of information taken from the Internet. Stelarc augmented his reality by having an ear surgically attached to his arm so that he could hear random people’s conversations again via the Internet.

Their solutions don’t involve vast computational power and they are not really solving anything. They are looking differently at augmenting humans. But both use two things:

  1. Connectivity
  2. Other people

And this is what social media does, but in a quick and easy way. Via social media, it is so easy to access a) random conversation like Sterlac, or b) information about a new town you are in like Steve Mann.

But it is not just information we want, which was what clever computers and AI realised. We want intelligence and the expertise of someone else, who is constantly updating and refreshing their world view.

Social media gives us that in a way a clever computer cannot – yet!.

This morning alone, I tapped into three experts to help me do yoga, meditate and feel more at peace:

Those experiences augmented and enriched my life and left me more peaceful and happy. I could not have done without the help of those experts or social media unless I took time off and went off to find these experts.

So, it seems that social media is one amazing way of augmenting humans. And when I think of me back in the accounts department evangelising about how computers could transform our lives, I had no idea how right I was, just not at all in the way I imagined.

We live in amazing times.

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Social media explained

Corey Smith on Social Media
Corey Smith on social media

The above image by Corey Smith is great. It has many variations: doughnuts, wee, or a piss-poor explanation of social media, which have been doing the rounds for years now.

This is because, when humans are presented with anything new or old, they have to categorise, classify it and wrestle it to the ground, in order to understand and manage the world around them. And, then they like to tell others how to do it properly. Sometimes these humans are wise and are leaders, they are the culture carriers of society. Other times they are not, like the two people who told me, this week, that I am doing Twitter wrong.

The main problem they have with my wrong approach is that I like to read every Tweet. What a weirdo! Consequently, I don’t follow many people because I find it hard to keep up. Also, I don’t like everything I read, so if it happens repeatedly, I unfollow the tweeters who are filling up my feed. And, normally they unfollow me. This seems to me to be a realistic approach. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Isn’t that like life?

Apparently not, according to my Twitter advisors, I am supposed to follow zillions of people and dip in and out. And there is lots of software to help me do this including the who unfollowed me app. I tried it out – apparently, @Oprah, @DalaiLama, and @DeathStarPR unfollowed me. What? They never followed me in the first place. There has never been any reciprocation of my fandom and I didn’t expect it either.

But, like all things in life, the more you do, the more you are worth. On Twitter, the more followers you have , the more you are worth, especially if you are influential, because you can turn that into money. And then the more money you have, the more you are worth until you have an epiphany and give back to society and then become truly worthy. It is all about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Writer Jennifer Werner is a social media influencer and writes brilliantly about having her influence monetised in the New York Times.

I too had an influential moment, when I reviewed the first Iphone on the eve of its launch and had loads of companies contacting me to buy up links on my page. This was 2007 when SEO was the main thing to get seen. Me being influential in that tiny window of the Iphone launch was heady stuff! Not really, the companies weren’t anyone I wanted to dilute my brand for (*guffaws*).

Last summer, I went to a day of Sharing is Caring – social media strategies at Campus London last year. It was a very interesting (and exhausting) day – full of how to advice such as:

  • You have 15 minutes on twitter to build momentum.
  • You have 1 hour on facebook.
  • Speed is imperative.
  • Try to latch onto a world event to get noticed.
  • Peer to peer content is more valuable than anything else.

Everyone was furiously scribbling it down, and tweeting away on the hashtag #campuslondon. Just remembering that day, makes me want to tweet, facebook and generally rush about to get noticed. Even though I figured out a while ago that blogging is what I like to do.

One of the speakers was Malcolm Bell of Zaggora.com whose success is used by Harvard Business School as a case study in, I guess, social media success. He talked a lot about different strategies in particular using influencers like Jennifer Werner. But the thing he said which struck me the most was that:

No one has any idea how social media works.

Nobody. Not the CEOs of Facebook. Not the influencers of Twitter. No one.

And like most things which us poor humans don’t understand, we need an explanation, especially, when there are people who are making money from it. It is fascinating. Which is why there is big business in doing and being a social media strategist.

The twitter hashtags: #contentmarketing #socialmedia are full of:

  • Seven ways to get more ….
  • Use #contentmarketing to grow your…
  • Social media explained, etc.,

But, for me this all leads back to the thing I always say in every blog about social media. Actually in every blog about anything, which is: Whether you are a big business selling a product to make money, or you are an individual wandering around the Internet cocktail party looking for good conversation, it is all the same. We all want to be heard, we all want to feel like someone is listening to our story and we all want to hear a good story.

And for those of us who want to be rich and famous, well that is just a variation of being seen and heard. Money=power, power=people listening to us. Right now, social media seems to be the latest thing to make that possible.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle, has said that there is no proper conversation on Twitter. But, I disagree. I think that there is, it’s just that I haven’t completely found the conversation of my dreams yet.

But when I do, I will let the world know, well 64 of them anyway.

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Social media security: Sharing is caring?

social media pic

Recently, YouTube prankster Jack Vale searched the closest posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to his current location and introduced himself to the people behind them.

The resulting video is really interesting. Most of the people were amazed that a random stranger knew so much about them and one man even felt threatened enough to say he would call the police. Yet, all of the information Vale had ‘on’ this man had been put into the public domain by the man himself.

The dicotomy of people wanting to keep their personal life personal whilst posting it all online shows that we are still on a learning curve when it comes to sharing via social media.

In the past users may have been posting and inadvertently geotagging their location, but as Wikipedia says, enough celebrities have been mobbed at a specific location after posting online and, ebay sellers have had stuff nicked whilst on holiday, to make even the most security unconscious user turn off the location tagging on their smartphones.

When I lectured IT Security, I would use Jose J Gonzalez’s example of teenagers not practising safe sex as analogy for users compromising system security. Everyone wants to practice safe interaction but when the moment arrives, circumstances, time pressures, and the thought that others are getting on down without worrying too much about the consequences, causes safe practice deviation.

The teenage sex comparison was useful when we were worried about users inadvertently breaching security systems. Nowadays the worry is more about users themselves becoming the target of a security breach. What is a useful analogy for that?

I have given many a lecture saying don’t share your address, your phone number, date of birth, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, favourite pet, first job, etc., all things that are asked by systems and are used to create user accounts online. This information is often used to hack accounts and in a worst case scenario, identity theft. But today, in the brave new world of social media this advice seems quite quaint. A quick Google+ about and how much of this info is revealed?

The problem with social media is that we are sharing and caring with our friends who know all this information already, so why not have it online? Facebook is always telling me that I won’t forget another birthday if I use the relevant app and let others know when I was born too. Great! It only gets a little weird when complete strangers come up to you in the street and wish you ‘Happy Birthday’.

We are human, we want to be heard, we want to bear witness, we want to share. I know. When my daughter was born with kidney failure and it was super difficult for a very long time, I kept a blog to explain things to friends and family, and to myself. One day she might not thank me for the overshare. But hopefully, she will acknowledge that I stopped well before I typed: ‘Today, J got her first bra.’
And also, before each post, I thought carefully about an older girl reading her history online. I vetoed some media coverage of her which to me was insensitive. My imagined perception of her comfort with what was shared was more important to me that day than the help someone might have gotten from reading that article about her. Who knows though? As someone growing up in a social media world perhaps she won’t feel about privacy in the same way I do. I have blogged before that information is power but it only becomes powerful when you wield it. And you might ask why would anyone? And how could they use certain information? If people know things about you, so what?

When I had breast cancer, a few of my friends said: ‘Oh Ruth, why don’t you keep a blog about breast cancer?’. But, I didn’t want to share. I didn’t want anyone thinking about my breasts. I didn’t even want to think about my breasts. Even now typing ‘my breasts’ makes me blush (my breasts, my breasts, my breasts). But at the same time, reading other peoples’ blogs on breast cancer helped me in so many ways. Their sharing was caring. Some of those people were so candid and funny, they brightened my dark days. Did they overshare? I don’t think so, they shared what I wasn’t willing to, but that wasn’t oversharing, to me that was bravery.

The boundaries online are as fuzzy as they are in real life, except, as I have blogged before, in real life we know exactly who our audience is, and online it is hard to know to whom we speak and even more difficult, is being conscious of what exactly we are putting out there, if we are not at least a littlebit tech savvy.

The psychological acceptability that has traditionally accompanied system design, especially in IT security, which involves good usability, feedback, system transparency, and a sense that users are responsible for what they do, seems to be intentionally blurred on social media.

In an article on www.national.ae from 2010 Mark Zuckerberg is described as ‘Dr Evil’ for encouraging the thinking that privacy is an old fashioned concept. It mentions too that the Facebook privacy settings change all the time so that users have a hard time keeping information private. In contrast, Zuckerberg’s quotes on thoughtcatalog.com, make him sound completely naive and just idiotically ignorant of the need for user safety and security.

Knowing ourselves what to keep private can be a hard call and can change from day to day. However, not empowering the user to take personal responsibility for feeling safe and secure (the base level in the pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) is irresponsible. Social media moguls have a duty to make this really easy for everyone so that when a user presses that post button, they know what they have posted and who is reading it.

Until that happens, Jack Vale has definitely got me thinking about what I share on Facebook, and I have changed a few settings so that I feel more comfortable.

Sharing is caring, definitely. But, in the heat of the moment, a deep breath and a little bit of safety compliance never did anyone any harm.