People+Tech

Exploring how people deal with tech. By Andrei Balan, PhD

[peopletech]

Why drugstores don’t go out of business

It’s no secret the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable and turbulence-proof fields out there. And generally a safer-than-average bet for any investor. But why?

Let's put things into perspective. You peak intellectually at 22. Roughly the same time you peak sexually. That’s because your sole purpose in life, the reason you exist from nature’s point of view, is to reproduce. That’s about the only important thing you’re built for, everything else is secondary. You peak intellectually roughly at the same time you peak sexually because that’s nature’s way of helping you maximize your chances to reproduce successfully. Which means you need to be smart so you can get the best possible partner that’s accessible to you. What comes after that is rather depressing. As Irvine Welsh once put it, „the human condition is about failure, basically. We are always moving towards failure. We get old and die, which is the ultimate failure.” 

After the peak you gradually decay in just about every detail of your physical self. From nature’s point of view, after you’ve reproduced you need to take care of your offspring. Making sure he survives until he’s fine on his own, that’s about your sole utility. That would be around the time he gets to 15-20, which would make you about 40, supposing you’ve conceived him at your physical peak. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly the average age people lived throughout history. That’s the distressing way things are. Or were, until recently, when we started using science to increase our life expectancy dramatically. However blissful that may sound, the truth of the matter is we’re just not built to live that long. And the planet isn’t able to host and feed so many people living so weirdly long. From nature’s point of view, once we reproduce successfully (implying the offspring is alive and well on its own and ready to reproduce) we’re worthless and obsolete. We’re a waste of natural resources. We’re the old which should make room for the new. But we love ourselves and our lives too much to accept nature’s way without putting up a fight. So we desperately (and mostly unconsciously) hang on to existence in any way we can. We even invented uncanny concepts like reincarnation or afterlife because we just can’t bear the thought of our own nonexistence. Then, as we gradually realize we’re approaching the end, we start thinking more and more seriously about leaving behind a legacy of some kind. Be it money, objects or something more abstract, it’s still a rather pitiful way of extending our existence beyond our physical limit.

So although after one point we’re chemically-sustained beings that weren’t really built to be alive anymore, we’re kinda fine with it. So fine we’d gladly throw almost all our money into medicine just to push the final failure a bit further. And this is why I strongly consider investing in a drugstore someday. 

[peopletech]

The use and abuse of jargon

I was pointing out language traps earlier. I’m now adding one more to the list: jargon. Adopting a field or profession's jargon usually translates into adopting the attached patterns of thought. Just as language generally limits your thoughts by the amount of words it hands out to you, jargons limit creativity by confining your linguistic toolkit. Using the same narrow set of words will most often drive you into making the same connections between them.  

I advise the humble use of jargon as no more than a shortcut. It's wise to only use those words you can't find elsewhere in your language. Otherwise, try not to adapt and limit your language to a specific field. When thinking, it’s advisable to always use the largest amount of terms at your disposal. Make full use of the toolkit. This will allow you to access the largest amount of possible connections between them. And eventually drive you into making even the unlikely connections. And this is, you guessed, the definition of being creative. 

One thing I wish I did is to count down the words I used at the end of each day. And then count down the ideas I had. I bet I'd find a correlation there.

[peopletech]

The trap of having too many options

A is a friend of mine. Six days ago she started watching an old Japanese movie. 15 minutes in, she stopped it. The language was painful to her ears, the gestures were hysterical, everybody seemed to scream for no reason and nothing much was happening. Nothing about the movie seemed familiar to her. It was getting rather uncomfortable so she put an end to her suffering. She switched to something more digestible: a recent comedy starring Steve Carell. Six days and two contemporary movies later she still hasn't resumed the Japanese one. 

Choosing the culturally easy way is an option we make with the persistence of breathing. And by easy I mean the familiar way. People who behave as we'd expect them to, things happening in a way that makes sense. We only allow a tiny, predictable room for surprise. But not enough to surpass our logic. So how would one expect his logic to evolve, then? A is probably never resuming that movie. Sadly, I think she's rather trapped inside her cultural bubble. Having endless options can trap you, really. What if she were locked inside a room with no TV or computer and someone would bring her a DVD player and the old Japanese movie. Could she suddenly give up all her cultural restrictions and actually become anxious to watch it? Probably. Had technology not offered her easy and comfortable alternatives she would've gladly pushed her cultural boundaries on a daily basis.

But just like A we get to choose from almost countless numbers of cultural alternatives. We’re programmed to live by maximizing our comfort  so it’s only natural we habitually take the easiest paths. Why dwell into the cultural unknown when there’s so much familiar and almost certainly-satisfying stuff to choose from? We don’t read books anymore because the gratification doesn't come easy or fast enough. We go online instead. And most often end up looking at pictures or videos. Images are easier to digest, that’s why they gradually conquer the parts of our minds that were previously filled by text. Besides trapping us inside cultural bubbles technology triggers a shift towards visual culture.

Making the easy, unchallenging choices means surrendering to the comfort culture. Carl Sagan once said “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”. Resting inside our cultural bubble is the best way to avoid that. 

[digithoughts]

When to upgrade your gadgets | NYT                                                       

[peopletech]

Facebook's cooking a Want button

Latest news coming from Facebook's testing labs is they're playing around with a Want button. Meaning we might be soon seeing it near the like button on certain product pages. It's a move designed to boost commerce and take Facebook into the Pinterest and Fancy territory. Sure, marketing wise it does make sense. 

But aside from that, is it a smart move? Or could it turn us into a bunch of public cravers? Will we become more prone to broadcast our neediness? I can imagine seeing some of my friends updating their want lists before their birthdays. Things like that could eventually become bothering or even lame. And this is definitely not what Facebook wants to do to us.

As I've shown before Facebook is trying hard to show our better side to everyone. But how is that coherent with exposing our more materialistic sides? It's not. I think the quality of interaction it triggers is what drives Facebook away from competition. And it's also what keeps it floating, fashionable and profitable. It probably is Facebook's most important asset. And they should test the hell out of every new feature to make sure it orbits that philosophy.

Seemingly untouchable tech giants can and have been hurt by little things before. However reluctant, though, I will hold my horses until I see the Want button in action.  

[peopletech]

It's high time Twitter found a way to be more visual

[peopletech]

Do these ecards tell the story of the modern individual?

It's hard not to bump into one of these each and every day. Aside from their sometimes weird imagery, they do a good job of putting some of our most common thoughts and traits into a shareable layout.

But what do they say about us? Let's do a small round up.

We hate our jobs.

                                We're easily annoyed.

                                                   We're superficial.

                            We keep most of our social interactions by a minimum effort.

                           Naturally, we don't trust our peers.

                           We don't trust religion,

                          nor education.

                          We're lazy,

                          yet busy.

                          We overdrink,

                          and overshare.

                          We're well informed,

                          and it's no secret we want what we can't have.

                          So we practice escapism.

                          We're hateful,

                            and cynical.

                          No wonder we complain a lot.

                          So could this be the iconic portrait of the contemporary individual? Are we all ironic, cynical haters who trust pretty much nothing and nobody, who want whatever they can't have and lead unsatisfactory lives they need to escape once in a while? Let's blame it on the humor and say no. Hopefully, these are just some of the more shareable facets of our personalities. And the popularity of these ecards is coincidentally enabled by how social media works. But strip off their irony and they become an uncomfortable insight into the story of the modern, digital individual.

[peopletech]

Out of beta

People+Tech is turning one month today. We've got the layout and the plugins largely figured out. Also, the website will soon be indexed by Google and Bing and appear in search results. This means starting today we're going out of beta. 

Thank you for being here and please stay tuned. 

[peopletech]

Never be left out of a (news-related) conversation again

I was recently pontificating about interesting things that were likely to happen with news-oriented social networks. Jonathan Abrams, known as one of Friendster's co-founders, has recently announced his new startup Nuzzel, currently in beta. This is an aggregator of the news your friends shared in their social networks. It organizes everything into categories and points you to what you're most likely to have missed. So that, you know, you're always up-to-date and know what everybody's talking about. 

While it's not yet the network that I'm thinking one day will connect people to news feeds just as easily as Facebook connects people with other people, I sure find it promising. And going to sign up. And will hopefully never be left out of a news-related conversation again.

[peopletech]

We’re more than our language lets us know we are

It's common knowledge that language shapes our thoughts. We tend to think in our mother tongues, so we’re bound to use whatever toolkit that language offers us. For example, we do know there is at least one tribe that doesn't have the word or notion of time. Presumably, they don’t think too much about it. They feel it, they think in terms of successions of events, but they do not think about time per se. They couldn’t.

We may be used to thinking our language can describe everything (I bet those indians think the same). But it sure can't. For what we know, it may lack notions that if existed they would become as fundamental as the notion of time. It's entirely possible they just weren’t discovered yet. Remember most of the words we use are recent.

Ferdinand de Saussure wrote „Psychologically, our thought - apart from its expression in words - is only a shapeless and indistinct mass, a floating realm”. Some thoughts are doomed to remain unconscious (and thus never become thoughts) because we do not have a word or a combination of words that could encapsulate them. These are the little traps our culture sets for us, condemning us to never think about certain things. Yes, you can feel lots of things. There may be a huge, indistinct realm floating inside your mind but you might never be able to drag it out, to verbalize it entirely.

So language is far from being perfect. It’s a rather poor improvisation that coerces us to think in certain fixed notions. It's the simplified version of what goes on in our minds. And it’s utterly limitative. Simply putting our thoughts and feelings into a verbal form is an exercise of limitation. But until we fulfill Bertrand Russell’s idea of a logically-perfect language we should probably seek confort into guessing we're much more than language allows us to know we are.

[peopletech]

the WTC site seen from the International Space Station, exactly 11 years ago

[peopletech]

Facebook's not going down

Remember Second Life was once hailed as the groundbreaking online replica of the real life? Well, it didn't really work. Technically. But what I find more interesting is that it failed shamelessly at catching up with the complexity of who we are and how we interact. It was and remains utterly limited (although flying was a nice touch). But a workable online replica of our social life is here allright. With the introduction of timeline Facebook puts a history behind each of us. And in doing that it injects more depth into our interactions. While I don’t necessarily dig its cluttered design, it does make sense if you see timeline as a shortcut to knowing someone. Right now Facebook provides us with the most complete, yet customizable version of ourselves that we can run in the online realm. They have my utmost respect for their constant effort to grasp our complexity.

On the other hand, there’s Twitter. Because of its focused, limited and somewhat dull nature, Twitter is condemned to never escape its niche. It could never encompass the whole diversity of how we interact with others. It’s quite the opposite of Facebook and it will probably never truly become mainstream. And then there’s the business model. Facebook knows so painfully much about who we are, what we do and what we want. One day it might become able to predict the rest of our timeline just by analyzing the patterns in our lives and comparing it with those of people similar to us, but older. But until it works out who we'll be, Facebook already knows better than anyone else on the web who we are. It does that in order to sell us stuff. And it will only get better at it as we spend more and more time using it. Soon it may even become better than us at predicting what we want. Needless to say, there’s tremendous potential value in this. 

While I only hold a mere piece of the equation (and yes, I know Facebook's stock has been plummeting for a while now), I'm doing my job to regard things from a behavioral point of view. From where I’m standing it seems that unlike Yahoo, Myspace and other broken dotcom bubbles, Facebook is here to stay.

[peopletech]

the Marshall fridge

[peopletech]

Our history is technology-driven

We're into the habit of thinking about technology on short terms and experience it at microsocial scales. Meaning we're usually looking at it through bits and pieces.

Technological breakthroughs brought our fur down, put our morals in place and eventually set the stage for world peace. And these examples are only the top of the tip of the iceberg. But I'm trying to keep my posts short. However, one would legitimately conclude our history is driven by technology. The obvious question now is what evolutionary answer will the recent world-wide digitalization trigger. While it's too soon to answer, it's not too soon to speculate. But I'll leave that for a future post.

[splatf-blog]

Amazon’s amazing Kindle growth chart, 2012 edition

[peopletech]

beautiful Nokia leaks

[peopletech]

Advertising won't be fine until it stops being evil

Have you ever noticed how some things are cheaper if you accept them with advertising? I believe this might be the official demise of the aspiration to make advertising desirable. I mean selling something cheaper because it comes with ads carries in itself the assumption advertising is evil. But how much longer will advertising afford to remain evil?

  Look, it's getting increasingly easy to avoid it. Praised be technology, the right browser extension will keep you safe from 90% of the web adverts. And if you are the unlucky owner of an ad-supported Kindle, help is near. I mean if you absolutely hate advertising, you have a jolly good chance of getting your hands on the proper tools for avoiding it. And these tools are getting ever-more complex and efficient. Meanwhile, advertising is not getting pleasant. It might be shyly going in that direction, but it's certainly not holding up with the speed the avoidance tools are evolving.

Let's take a jump into the future and assume the present trends will keep their course. It's 2030. Everybody's so fed up with advertising and the tools for avoiding it have gotten so efficient it's a challenge to even create contact between people and ads. And most of today's advertisers are working in different fields.

  So how do we go about an alternative future of advertising? How do we reverse the trends and keep our jobs? From an advertiser's standpoint, the only actionable way is to make your work desirable to the public. Ideally, people should crave for our ads like they crave for the latest Batman trailer. Well, most of us already knew that. And already did our best to hit the masses with likeable advertising. But hey, that's still advertising. And people will continue to hate it as long as it's called that. Because it carries mercantilism (read evil) at its core. I believe the only way out is if your ad or product is contained into the Batman trailer. Or even better, if your ad is the Batman trailer. And, consequently, if your product is Batman. Yes, this is what I think 2030 should look like: an indistinctly blurry line between advertising and entertainment. I think a large part of advertising will be entertainment and vice-versa. Or, more simply, (good) advertising will equal content. Like Wally Ollins once said, Brazil's national football team should be the example of branding. Or Christopher Nolan’s Batman, I should add.

  Today’s largest online companies seem to have found a way to tweak advertising into being more useful or less intrusive. They started by making it pop up in better contexts, or to more likely-interested people. And built gargantuan stock value on the concept of usable (thus more desirable) ads. But is advertising less mercantillist? It isn't. Is it less observable? Not really. It's just an evolutionary step, but not the Omega point. Advertising's still not fine. Whoever manages to take the next step and convincingly blur the line between entertainment and advertising might be the one who extracts the evil from its core, the rightful exorcist of this concept. And, quite possibly, the one who builds the next corporate Gargantua.