Why would I ever need that?

This week we talked about online identities, the influence of social media on these identities, and what is the authentic you. I wish I could say that Jim and I had planned everything that the seminar uncovered this week, but it’s not true. This is clearly a fast moving space, where we have much more to learn and discover about ourselves and each other. I strongly encourage everyone in the class to read each other’ blogs this week. They are a fascinating read.

This weekend I was catching up on some pleasure reading and came across the Wired.com article titled “Snap’s Spectacles Are the Beginning of a Camera-First Future” by David Pierce. (Apparently, these are a hot thing to buy right now too.) The Wired article talks about video blogger Jesse Wellens and his first experience with Snap’s Spectacles. Connected to this week’s seminar, I was intrigued to read the following paragraph from the article:

A few days later, Wellens published his first vlog in a while, shot entirely in the 10-second, circular Spectacles format. He says it felt different from any other episode. Before, he says, “I would film myself and other people, but when there are cameras out, you always get a different reaction from other people.” But with Spectacles, “You’re getting a real, inside look into someone’s life. This is a way that you’re getting real raw emotions, and interactions.” He only had to make one alteration to get there: he stuck a round piece of electrical tape over the spot above his left eye, where Snap put a spinning circle of LEDs that indicates the wearer is taking video.

There’s that authentic thing again. Clearly Wellens feels that the personality we show in front of a camera is not the “real” us. So, the thing we do in front of a camera, which in this day and age we know will persist probably long after we’re gone, is not who we are, but just what we want the generations that follow to think about us? (Please imagine me shaking my head in confusion.) I have seen that some people become more reserved in front of a camera, while others more gregarious and even outrageous. Are our unguarded moments more real? And how do we process the fact that these are 10-second moments placed on Snapchat, which promises us that they’ll be ephemeral glimpses of us shared with our friends? That wasn’t enough to get the “real raw emotions” that Wellens desired? I have to admit that I am nowhere near feeling like I have any understanding of this space and where it is going.

I want to share one other experience I had in the last two weeks. This related experience wasn’t in a new technology setting, but in what I think of as an “old school” setting. In particular, I had to give a deposition in a legal matter, and this deposition included not only a whole raft of lawyers packed into a small room with a court stenographer, but also a court videographer. It’s hard to forget that the stenographer is there during your 7 hours of grilling, since that person sits right next to you and between you and the lawyer asking you questions. I suppose that that location is best for the stenographer to hear both the lawyer’s questions and your answers. The videographer and her camera, however, sit at the other end of the room. You’re the only person shown in the video shot, as my lawyer explained to me. And interestingly, he said in preparing me for the deposition that I’d soon forget about the fact that the camera was there. As someone who dislikes being filmed, I had my doubts, but my lawyer was right. The video camera soon faded into the background (in a manner unlike my attention on the stenographer). Given that the purpose of a deposition is find out what the witness knows and preserve it, I find it interesting that the legal system doesn’t seem to feel that it needs to “place electrical tape” over the fact that the witness is being videotaped to get “real raw emotions and interactions.”

There is so much we still don’t understand.

This week we talked about cyber war, cyber conflict, and cyber crime. While definitions might remain in flux, it’s still pretty easy to tell when you’ve been ripped off through cyber crime or attacked in an online manner. I’d like to focus here on what we’ve learned is harder to understand: When have I been fed fake news? In the aftermath of our country’s recent presidential election, many are asking if the citizens of the United States were too lax about “fake news” being distributed to us through our social networks and especially around our comfort in getting our “news” from Twitter and Facebook.

With calls from many corners for Facebook to fix the problem of fake news, Mark Zuckerberg recently posted his thoughts on how Facebook might help combat misinformation. I agree with Mr. Zuckerberg that this is a hard problem and I was glad to see him say that he doesn’t want Facebook “to be arbiters of truth [themselves],” but I was not impressed with the ideas he threw out. Then again, I wasn’t surprised since Facebook believes that “[t]he goal of News Feed is to connect people to the stories that matter most to them.” If you start with the goal of making people happy and not with the goal of presenting what the person should know about what’s going on in our nation (or the world), you’re not going to be too interested in addressing fake news.

Perhaps we should try to agree what the problem actually is. I personally like Stephen Colbert’s comment about fake news. In a recent event with his pal, John Oliver, reported by the NYT, Colbert said, “What we did was fake news. We got on TV and we said: ‘This is all going to be fake. We’re going to make fun of news.’” Colbert went on to say, “The fact that they call this stuff fake news upsets me, because this is just lying.”

The media calls it “fake news.” Zuckerberg calls it “misinformation.” Colbert calls it “lying.” The truth is that what we decide to post on our news feeds and what Facebook decides to distribute to our news feeds is just free speech. The problem starts when we chose to believe that our Facebook news feed or our Twitter feed is all that we need to know.

Criminals are out there trying to rip us off. Terrorists and agents of enemy states are out there trying to disrupt our way of life. We need to remember that democracies function when their citizens take it upon themselves to be informed. We have a free press because the founders of our country didn’t trust the government to feed us the truth. If we didn’t want to trust our government to fed us the truth, why do we now trust our social media feeds to provide us with everything we need to know? I don’t think it is solely Mr. Zuckerberg’s job to police our news feed. It is our job as citizens to seek the truth in what we get through our social media. It won’t be easy, but neither is preserving our democracy for our children.

Before you read the paragraphs following this first one, please first click over and read Jim’s post on Technology and government. I want to add to his thoughts.

Ok, you’re back. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since Jim and I like to teach together, we have similar beliefs about running successful, collaborative projects. Co-teaching is a collaborative project as are the large technical/software projects that Jim describes. In my corporate life, I certainly experienced what Jim talks about as the process-focused projects, and I didn’t enjoy them as a member of those technical teams. This was not because I felt that I was just a cog in the machine, but because I believe process should be in service of the project’s goal. As a software developer on a large technical project, I knew I had a job to do, and a good process made my job easier and my good work more impactful to the project overall. Yet, it was when the process (or the latest software technology) became more important to our daily discussions than the project’s goal that I became worried.

Jim talks about his Magnificent Seven approach — great movie, by the way. We saw this approach used in the development of the ARPANET and the BBN IMP. People matter, and the best projects result from a small team that believes they’re responsible for delivering the best solution to the problem at hand. You want good people with uniquely appropriate skill sets, and you want them to care about the result. And you need a management team that listens to this team. The technical team can’t make every decision (i.e., run without oversight or constraints), but it knows things that management doesn’t.

Even more important, the intended user base “knows” things that neither management nor the technical team does. In the (successful) software projects I ran, we spent a lot of time gathering feedback from the user base and incorporating that feedback into our design and system documentation. Successful software projects aren’t imagined, they evolve. Jim mentioned “soft launches” in our discussion. You can gather all of the use-case information you can possibly gather by talking to potential users, but you quickly learn that users don’t actually know what they want. Things often look very different when you put something concrete in front of them. Telling the user that that’s what they asked you to build doesn’t matter one bit to them when they say they don’t like what they see.

So back to eGovernment. In a dean in academia, I have had to fight the natural inclination of the faculty to want to debate a topic to death and then craft and pass the “perfect” motion. It’s a lot of work to get the faculty to a point where they want to vote on a resolution. Faculty are trained to be critical; many move up in prestige by writing criticism. We’re good at arguing. Unfortunately, this is not the same as being good a delivering what is needed. Our first attempt at our current Gen Ed program is one example. We needed a real 5-year review because we didn’t get it right the first time. (Taking seriously your 5-year review is better than not having one at all, but it is not equivalent to a soft launch approach.) My worry is that government is more like academia than successful technology companies. Lots of arguing and then one big vote. Lots of requirement writing and then a big software development and then one big launch. The result has to be right because legislators argued for many hours. Sorry, it is right when users can successfully use it.

Two paragraphs back, I talked about incorporating user feedback into our designs and system documentation. This is something that I can’t emphasize enough. If you’re going to iterate your design based on constantly gathered user input, and you’re working on a large, multi-year collaborative project, you’d better make sure the lessons learned are documented somewhere. And the lesson must include the context in which the lesson was valid. New software engineers and new managers need to know the lessons of the past if they want to avoid repeating them in the future. Process in service of the project’s goal.