Who's really to blame for the web's hidden bias?

Facebook has been much in the news recently. You may have followed the story: the tech site Gizmodo quoted unnamed former Facebook contractors who said they routinely suppressed conservative viewpoints in the “trending stories” news feed. This caused many (mainly conservatives, you might expect) to raise the hue and cry about the alleged liberal bias. Facebook has officially denied any such hidden agenda.

Now I could use this blog to question why anyone gets their news from Facebook in the first place, but that would be futile. The fact is they do. According to a 2015 Pew research study, 63% of Facebook users use it to get the news. And 40% of users agree that it is “an important way to get the news.”

Or I could make comparison of liberal and conservative thinking when it comes to suspected biases in the media and society at large. (“Why is it usually the conservatives who see these conspiracies at work?” I might ask – but I won’t!)

I might also reiterate some of what the Wall Street Journal concluded, saying “…using human editors to curate trending topics inevitably introduces biases, both conscious and unconscious.” The Journal (no hidden liberal bias here!) said that in this regard Facebook operated just like any other news room.

But in a larger sense, in my opinion, we’re chasing the wrong bogeyman. Facebook is not to blame; we are. The fact is that we reveal our own prejudices and preferences with every click we make, and the internet is designed to reflect that back to us. As Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times, in a column called “How Facebook Warps Our Worlds”, the internet is not rigged to give us a conservative or liberal bias, until we rig it that way ourselves. It is, he said “designed to give us more of the same.”

Every time we click like, follow a link, join a page or a group, we are telling the internet what we want, and the internet will give us more just like that. Just look at all the ads you see now, all chosen just for you. Every click you make determines what you’ll see next.

Google does this every time you search. It records the link you clicked on – all the links you’ve ever clicked on – and uses that knowledge to serve up search choices for you next time that more closely match your profile. It gives you what it has calculated you want. That’s part of Google’s secret sauce.

Eli Pariser wrote an eye-opening book in 2011 called the “Filter Bubble”, which described all the ways that the web’s hidden gatekeepers now build a bubble around us, all in the name of customization. We get the web experience just the way we want it, without even asking for it. More and more we’re living in a house of mirrors, in which everything we are is reflected back on us.

(By the way, I highly recommend Pariser’s TED talk about the Filter Bubble. It’s been viewed more than three and half million times and it’s worth nine minutes of your time too.)

So don’t each of us win when our likes and dislikes rule the web experience? I don’t think so. The danger is real that our minds will become increasingly narrowed by reinforcement of our opinions. The web will just continue to prove us right, in whatever we believe, from rigid political dogma, nutty conspiracy theories, prejudices of all kinds – you name it. It can’t be good to be shown only content that agrees with you.

The fact is that we need to have our beliefs challenged by differing viewpoints. And we need to be available when some serendipitous idea or story comes our way. We have to be there to see it.

I used to buy the New York Times every morning and “read” it from first page to last. I didn’t read everything, but at least I looked at it, bumping by chance into all kinds of stories I never would have sought out: cooking, travel, the chess column, whatever. Now, my news consumption is quite different. I subscribe to the Times web site and I only click on what I want to see. No serendipity here folks.

So don’t blame Facebook or some other online source for serving up a biased agenda. Look in the mirror.

When in doubt, JGI of course

Do you JGI?
 

I’ll bet you do, probably multiple times a day. It’s the first choice when facts are needed, whether it be some odd piece of data or a critical piece of information. Get into a dispute with friends, and someone (perhaps everyone) will do it to bolster their side or settle the argument. Ask a dumb question – on-line or even in person – a question that you should be able to find out for yourself, and you’ll be told (not always politely) to JGI: Just Google It.

It’s Indisputably great to have all the worlds’ information (at least that’s what it feels like) at your command at all times. Having a smartphone in your pocket, with links to Google (and Wikipedia), and perhaps even a human language interface like Siri, was the stuff of science fiction not long ago. We should be slow to shed the wow factor, because it is still a wow.

We use it for so many purposes, both material and trivial. This week I JGIed (I’m declaring that a word) “vision statements” to help during a strategic planning session for the West Chester Public Library. Just a few hours later, I JGIed “sylvester stallone age” after seeing a trailer for his latest action movie (yes he’s a little old for this role, Google confirmed). More than once a resort to JGI has soothed a dispute between me and my wife, that might have deteriorated into bickering. Contrary to what you may think, I haven’t always been proved right.

But witnessing JGI in action so frequently now, I’m becoming concerned we may be pulling the JGI trigger too quickly and too often. It’s nice to settle arguments (although not every resort to Google does), but some friendly disputes should be argued out, your best points vs. mine. There’s something to be said for making your case the old fashioned way, with what you know and how you can best express it, and then really listening to the other side. Of course when a plain fact is in dispute, certainly JGI can help, but even then I think it’s not always better that we press a button and the fact appears. Einstein is supposed to have said that he never committed anything to memory that he could look up. With Google always in reach, will we ever have to remember anything?

It’s also a mistake to confuse facts with knowledge. Google can pull up a million hits on every subject, but turning that into knowledge and understanding is something that still takes a human mind.

The always fascinating technology writer Nicholas Carr (you remember “Does IT Matter?”) wrote a recent book called “The Shallows”, based on an article in the Atlantic more pointedly titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It opens with the monolog by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey as he plaintively tells Dave that “my mind is going” as the astronaut relentlessly disconnects the components of his brain. Carr can feel his mind going too, as he recounts his early days as a thinker, writer and researcher who used to dive deep, like a scuba diver, for information and knowledge; now, he says, he’s like a guy on a jet ski, skimming across the surface. Access to an ocean of facts all at once can do that to you.

Carr’s argument is not that Google is making us stupid necessarily, but that it’s certainly making us intellectually lazy. Though many have disputed his thesis, I find it hard not to agree.

Like everything it seems Google is a double-edged sword. An incomparable tool for accessing facts at all times and in all places, but containing within it an intellectual sedative that can make us dull, lazy and addicted to someone else’s data, rather than reliant on our own memories and knowledge. We should JGI sparingly, and wisely.

Google Glass is an eye opener – and that's not all good

Not long ago I wrote a blog about Google’s foray into wearable computing, called Google Glass. In the blog, I was enthusiastic about what I saw as the groundbreaking functionality of this very close-up, almost intimate technology experience. A computer screen embedded in your glasses, a microchip in the frame, a forward-facing camera, a speaker close to the ear, a human language speaking interface and access to the net built in. What would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago, was on the drawing board now and just might be in our hands soon.  And the cool factor – well, I found the idea irresistible.

 

Well, now I’m summoning up the power to resist. Read on so I can tell you why.

 

Google Glass has moved from the prototype to the beta stage. Two thousand developers now have their hands on a test version of the device, and the glasses will soon be released to 8,000 beta testers (Google calls them ‘explorers’ and they’ve been picked from an avalanche of applicants). The glasses are very close to reality now.

 

In the early hype about the concept, reaction to Glass (including mine) failed to consider some of the legal, ethical and social impacts of the these devices. The potential for changing the social encounter and the way we interact with the world around us – and people around us – is not trivial. And that goes for the wearer but also for anyone encountering someone wearing them.

 

The glasses have a forward facing camera that can be used to take photos and videos just by looking and issuing a command. Developers have already demonstrated ways to bypass the spoken interface and, for example, take photos simply by winking. Posts to online sources and social media are just as easy. Interact with a Glass wearer and you could be online in seconds, or even be streamed live. And you won’t necessarily know it. I am not making this up.

 

You see the potential for privacy incursions. You see how this encourages the voyeur within us all, and also gives us, I think, well-founded concerns about being photographed without our knowledge. We could all be the victim of paparazzi, and not even know it – until later.

 

Another concern is distraction. You may be looking forward, but you can also be watching a YouTube video – or a full-length movie for that matter – in a small corner screen of your glasses. Not so good if you’re walking down a crowded street; even worse if you’re driving down a crowded highway.

 

Considerations like these are now surfacing in a big way and I hope the protests continue and we all become aware of the issues. The West Virginia legislature has already introduced a bill to ban Glass while driving; texting is already illegal, but using a ‘hands free’ device is not, and Glass slips through this loophole. But clearly the distraction factor is an order of magnitude higher with this device than with a smartphone. Las Vegas casinos have summarily banned wearing Glass while gambling – obviously use of recording and video devices are forbidden in the casinos and the gambling industry is not going to be fooling around with the niceties. I think many more restrictions and prohibitions are on the horizon.

The potential for Glass to change the social contract in virtually every environment and encounter – from the locker room at the gym, to the classroom, to a business meeting, a date, a sales counter, a party or the street – is tremendous. I’m not sure we’ve even imagined the full impact yet. We may not be able to, until it happens.

 

So would you wear a pair of Google Glasses if offered? In my previous blog I said that I would, but now I’m leaning the other way. I am also not going to be comfortable interacting with someone who is, presuming I could spot the difference. How do you feel now? Cool new gadget of the future, or dangerous example of technology going the wrong way?

 

Concerns about Glass were well-covered in a New York Times article called "Google Glass Picks Up Early Signal: Keep Out".

Google and publishers finally agree: it's a brave new digital world

I’m sure you all remember Google’s digital book scanning project. The project, started earlier this century, aimed to scan every book in existence (just about) and make them available on line. Publishers and authors went to court over copyright infringement claims, and they had a strong case. Or at least they did when it looked like digital formats were a threat to the traditional closed ecosystem of writing, publishing, selling, buying and reading. That was then, etc.

Today, things seem a lot different. Now we’re further along in the digital transformation of print media, and just about everyone recognizes that digitization of, well, everything, is pretty much inevitable. Just like the music publishers before them and the movie industry right behind them, book and periodical publishers have figured out that eBooks are at the very least a whole new way to sell content. In fact, in a future that’s closer than we all imagine, they may become the only way.

This is why the publishers – one half of the suit against Google – came to a settlement this week, in a news item that barely made the news. At least it got much less coverage than the start of the lawsuits back in 2005. In an agreement whose terms were not fully disclosed, the publishers agreed to let Google scan away, presumably for cash payments and access to the digital content themselves. Google thus provides a scanning service on older, pre-digital books, so the publishers don’t have to do the work. Google in turn agreed to let publishers opt out of the program and exclude their books from being scanned.

Still hanging over the project however, is one potential show-stopper, and one in which there is more at stake. That is the author half; they have not settled, although the publishers action this week now leaves them without a powerful ally. The authors of older works – e.g. out of print but still under copyright ownership – face a dilemma. Google will potentially reveal parts of their work (20%) to the billions of Googlers on the planet, diluting the authors control and introducing yet another middleman who can take monetary or some other kind of cut from the profit. But the other edge of this sword is the benefit authors may receive from the exposure of older work that would otherwise die a neglected death. All those Googlers are potential new readers, after all. This part of the issue has a lot of implications.

The future demise of printed books is not inevitable, but survival is not guaranteed either. As president of the board of the West Chester Public Library, I am part of a team that works hard to ensure our institution stays relevant, even while eBook readers become as commonplace as library cards. Library staffers ‘get it’ when it comes to digital formats, and they’re ready to serve the public’s demand for the written word in every form that can be provided, including eBooks. (WCPL has eight color Nooks available for circulation, along with a large and growing collection of digital books and magazine content.) I believe the library has a part to play in helping readers transition from the paper and ink world to the electronic.

So it’s no secret or surprise that many things are in a transitional state; book publishing is one of many. The laws of copyright were originally designed for a different universe than the one we live in now. I support 100% the concept that the creator should be the first to exercise ownership rights, and be the first to benefit from a created work, including the digital version of that work. But there are many paths to how a work may get to that format, at least until the transition is over. This is just one more disruption to a paradigm we thought would never change.

 The NY Times covered the Google suit settlement here.