My last post ended with the promise of a discussion of the highlights of John Stuart Mills free speech book On Liberty. However, that discussion will have to wait because today is amazingly the 30th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web! In commemoration, the Web’s birthplace CERN (yes the same CERN that created the Large Hadron Collider and discovered the Higgs Boson) has hosted a 30th Anniversary event featuring talks from Berners-Lee and other web pioneers. On a side note, strangely enough the first website / web server was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a computer from Steve Jobs’ “other company” NeXT Computers.
UPDATE (November 12, 2021): Recent events have made it clear that there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding both Rogan’s and Musk’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. In short, Rogan’s divisiveness, Musk’s “eccentricity,” and how they both gravitate toward extreme opinions are worth keeping in mind as you read this post.
To continue the theme of dealing with the stress associated with technology change, below are five situations that I have grappled with recently and a short explanation of how I resolved the stress for myself.
In my last post I cited Paul Ford’s concept of “Why Wasn’t I Consulted” (WWIC) as one of the reasons why technology change can be such a challenging emotional experience, but somehow I feel like I missed the deeper and more important implications of his piece. Mr. Ford’s explanation of WWIC was part of an article he wrote in 2011 called “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium” and that concept itself deserves more attention. Eight years later, much of “The Web” has solidified into closed communities like Facebook, iTunes, Amazon, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and various news outlets which by their very nature isolate users. These communities all exhibit the Filter Bubble (which I wrote about three years ago, promote Confirmation Bias, and push users further and further into like minded / closed minded groups. This situation begs the question, is the web really still a customer service medium or has it transformed into something else?
“It was working so well, why did they change it?!” If I had a dollar for every time I heard that plaintive cry from clients, friends, or family, I could probably buy a Tesla. Phones, social media websites, operating systems, messaging, ebook readers, cable / satellite TV boxes, TVs themselves, streaming video, mapping services (like Google Maps), email, commonly used websites, and many more things we use everyday are constantly changing and updating “automagically.” Even worse, it often feels like these things worked well before, so why were they changed? Is there a group of people who wake up every morning ecstatic that Skype now has Cortana integration (what?), that Google Maps now has a convenient “Foodie List” at the bottom of the main screen, or Photos has a new “memory” for them? Even the imaginary Tesla I recently purchased with my windfall is going to get “over the air” software updates and WordPress, which I am writing this post in, has controversially moved to the “Gutenberg new editing experience.” These companies must think they are making their product or service better, but maybe they do not realize the cumulative toll change exacts.
Sometimes the importance of a topic doesn’t become apparent immediately. Almost two months ago, part 1 of this series started with the quote, “The age of information is not the age of understanding” and it was only last week that I came across a related quote from the James Hillman book The Soul’s Code. Despite being written over 20 years ago, it rings truer today than ever:
“… and they left with mud on their shoes.”
UPDATE (November 12, 2021): Recent events have made it clear that there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding both Rogan’s and Musk’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. In short, Rogan’s divisiveness, Musk’s “eccentricity,” and how they both gravitate toward extreme opinions are worth keeping in mind as you read this post.
UPDATE (November 12, 2021): Recent events have made it clear that there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding both Rogan’s and Musk’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. In short, Rogan’s divisiveness, Musk’s “eccentricity,” and how they both gravitate toward extreme opinions are worth keeping in mind as you read this post.
“Change can be scary, especially when it’s not under your control, and it’s really scary when it threatens things that you find familiar and I think as the kinds of people we are… we have a really complicated relationship with the familiar and with change… we love changing things when we’re doing it. When someone else tell us “Don’t change that” we go “No no no wait, it’s good” but when they come over to us and say, “You should change this” we go “Hold on, hold on” and systemd represents a lot of disruptive change. And part of the problem with that is that getting a whole community to change, that’s really hard and it results in a kind of knee-jerk reaction to it and the problem with those kind of knee-jerks is that they lead to things like abuse and that’s not cool. You might not like systemd, but that doesn’t mean that you need to go and send death threats to Leonard.”
by Benno Rice (@jeamland) from the video below - 24 minutes