DaddyRoBlog

What A Computer Can--And Can't--Do

Over the years, I’ve known a number of people (both men and women) who were addicted to pornography. (Remember, a priest is always working with people in the community as well as people in his church, so no point trying to figure out who they are.) And If there is one thing I know about people who struggle with this, it is that they are filled with shame.

Actually, that’s true of all of addictions.  It is the dynamic behind denial. When you come right down to it, were just too ashamed of ourselves to admit we have a problem. For every person who admits they have a problem and seeks the help they need to recover from it, there are many more who don’t.

But whether we admit it or not, there is increasingly someone—or something—who knows only too well what our weakness, proclivities, and addictions are: the intelligent agents (algorithmic programs) who analyze our behavior. We might not admit to ourselves we have a problem with porn, for instance, but believe me—your computer knows. And it’s not just pornography. By analyzing text messages, Facebook posts, and e-mails, it’s possible to tell when someone is drunk (lots of typos, for a start).¹ As part of something called “persuasion profiling”, it means companies can market to us where—and when-- we are least able to resist.

In essence, then, a machine can know us better than we know ourselves, better than any other human being does. And that is at least in part because a machine is potentially paying more attention. It is rare that I don’t already know that a person is struggling with an addiction before they actually tell me; the clues are almost always there for the person who knows how to look for them. But all too often, we are too busy, preoccupied, or even frightened to learn what to look for and then actually see it.

And that brings me to my final thoughts on The Filter Bubble.  (If you want to know more, I highly recommend the book.)  The internet is a glorious things; it makes information available to us like we never dreamed possible (though these days we may have to work for it). It connects us to one another in fantastic way, and I for one see that as a great blessing.

But all that said, there is simply no substitute for a real life best friend, and beyond that for being part of a real life community that cares deeply about us. There is no substitute for real people who know us inside and out, for sharing life with them, laughing and crying together and holding one another’s hands when needed. There is still no substitute for the person who loves us more than he or she loves him/herself, and so would do anything to help us  get life right rather than take advantage of or exploit us, and so who would help protect us from those who do not share that commitment.

¹Pariser, Eli (2011-05-12). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You (pp. 121-122). The Penguin Press. Kindle Edition.

Rocky Road-ish

Left the house at  6 this morning, and walked back in at 10 tonight.  Skipped supper, but it turned out all right:  I finally found that latest flavor I've been looking for. My wife bought frozen spinach.

On first bite, this is an absolutely killer flavor.  It doesn't have any of the coconut under-taste that so many of their flavors have; it's just nice and very marshmallowy.   That said, by the time the pint was done, all that marshmallowiness got to be a bit much.

So as much as I enjoyed those first bites, I'm not sure I'll buy it again.  Still, it certainly beats spinach...

 

For Real Life

This one probably won't get the hype of the Ferris Bueller commercial, but I acutally like this one better.  See what you think--but  you have to stick with it to the end.

Food for the Heart as Well as The Eyes

If you haven't yet seen this, you really should.  And even if you have, it's probably worth watching again.  For parents who like to read this blog with their children and look at the nature pictures, I've been a little remiss lately.  So let me rectify that with this.  It has both hummingbird and monarch butterflies.  What more could one ask?

Let me also take this occasion to get on my gardening high horse.  Obviously, a variety of animals need pollen as well as nectar. From nectar they get sugar and water; from pollen they get protein and fat. That’s why you see bees, for instance, packing pollen onto their hind legs and ending completely covered with pollen in the process.

Sunflowers are one of the primary flowers that attract animals to their pollen . Bringing an already beleaguered bee to a sunflower without pollen is like feeding a hungry person a plastic hamburger or fake piece of fruit. So as good as some of the new sunflowers look, and as tempting as it is to grow them for cut flowers that won’t make a mess of tables and countertops, I hope you’ll join with me in sticking with those flowers that are old fashioned enough to offer substance as well as beauty. It’s the least we can do for bees, butterflies, and all the pollinators do so much for us.

Finally, I haven't used an insectide in my yard for years.  Insects are too important to me, not only because I like them, but because they are one of the building blocks of life.  They attract a host of other animals that fill a garden with life as well as beauty.  Frankly, I think my garden has only benefitted from refusing to apply pesticides (goes for the lawn too).  Perhaps that is worth considering as well.

An Endless You- Loop

In providing the same information to everyone, whatever country you live in or whatever strata of society you inhabit, and by providing information that is unbiased, objective, and true, the internet promotes freedom, right? That was the dream for the internet, but apparently, it is less and less the case.

In fact, chances are pretty good that the material we consume through the internet is pretty heavily censored and working to lock us in (“lock in” is the actual term)—hardly dynamics that are conducive to freedom. Only folks like Google or Facebook don’t use the word “censor”. They talk about “filters” and “personalization”. Unless I’m missing something, however, they all pretty much work the same. They all create barriers between us and data free from bias.

They do so through increasingly intelligent “agents” (algorithmic programs) that seek to define who we are so they can then figure out what we want. These agents analyze such things as what we click on, where we go (you do know your i-phone has a GPS, right?), the things we’ve done (email, pictures, credit card purchases,etc), the people and things we “like”, and so on.

Remember, if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold (Andrew Lewis). But the Internet can’t sell to us if we’re not “tuned in”, and so it has to keep our attention. How better to do that than “create a unique universe of information for each of us” that gives us exactly what we want?

So, what we’ve clicked on in the past determines what we see next, and that becomes a Web history we’re doomed to repeat. We can get stuck in a static, ever narrowing version of ourself—an endless you-loop.¹

And that’s what I find so deeply disturbing, because then the Internet in all its glory and possibility becomes just one more thing that is all about me. It becomes one more “echo-chamber” that just reflects my own voice back to me over and over again. It locks me in to my own political bias, religious or non religious beliefs, constricted interests, and so on.    It amplifies our “tendency to believe things that reinforce our existing views, to see what we want to see.”²

Think about it a moment. Think of all the times you’ve seen somebody make a politically charged statement on Facebook. In the comments that follow, where are the dissenting voices, the push back, those who strongly disagree? If they are not there, it is not because they don’t exist—it’s because they’ve been filtered out.

As Eli Pariser writes, consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult.³

Difficult it may be, but I can think of few things that are more important…

Pariser, Eli (2011-05-12). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You . The Penguin Press. Kindle Edition.  pages 16, 86, 88.

Too Much?

As it turns out, the era in which we are living is called The Big Data Era. And for good reason. The amount of data being generated right now is stunning.

Facebook, for instance, claims to generate more “news” (more on that Thursday) in a single day than any other media outlet has in its entire existence.

Consider the following: We are overwhelmed by a torrent of information: 900,000 blog posts, 50 million tweets, more than 60 million Facebook status updates, and 210 billion e-mails are sent off into the electronic ether every day. Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it’d take up about 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. Now we’re creating that much data every two days.¹

Or take a company called Acxiom, which needs FIVE ACRES OF LAND for its massive data banks that contain an average of 1,500 pieces of information on 96 percent of Americans. That data includes family members by name, pets (down to the breed), financial history, current and past address, any medications you take, whether you are right or left handed… and so much more. (It sells that information, BTW, to most of the largest companies in America).²

Here’s one final example. The National Security Administration is generating so much data that there is not enough electricity on the grid to support that much computing. The NSA is asking Congress for funds to build new power plants. By 2014, they anticipate dealing with so much data they’ve invented new units of measurement.³

The point of all this is that we have no hope of managing it all. This leads to something called “Attention Crash”, which simply means that we come to that place in time where we are so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information out there that we tune out.

Enter the Filter Bubble. Through intelligent agents (think the Matrix) and gatekeepers (a polite word for censors), it seeks to manage all this data for us. Since we can’t pay attention to it all, it will show us only the data on which we want to focus.  In other words, it offers us a vision of a custom-tailored world, every facet of which fits us perfectly. It’s a cozy place, populated by our favorite people and things and ideas.⁴   

In other words,If I never want to hear Newt Gingrich on one side or President Obama on the other, I won’t have to. But… is that really a good thing? That’s where we’ll go tomorrow.

All footnotes come from Pariser, Eli (2011-05-12). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You (p. 37). The Penguin Press. Kindle Edition.  Pages 37, 10-12

Atheism 2.0

It’s the nature of things to change, and it seems that atheism is among them. I find that encouraging because I find the old, self righteous form of atheism that is so focused on vanquishing the infidel (religion) as tiresome as the old, self righteous form of religion that was so focused on vanquishing the infidel (science).

I take my encouragement from a recent TED talk by Alain de Botton called Atheism 2.0 (don’t you love TED?!). Of course de Botton and I don’t agree on everything, but apparently we do agree on this: He finds the debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers as “boring” (his word for it) as I do.

Alain’s position in a nutshell is that although a person may not believe in God or religious doctrine, he or she can—and should-- “steal” the best that religion has to offer. These include things like morality, perspectives on art, and ways of ordering time.

Here’s the really good news. He doesn’t have to steal anything! In fact, part of what we who are religious have always understood our mission to be is to give these things away. Of course I hope that one day the folks who opt for Atheism 2.0 will come to realize the value of our whole system, and not just its parts. And of course I believe that it is God that gives this system its fullest and consistently rational meaning.   But I’m also happy for the common ground—which on his view (and mine) is quite considerable.

I’m happy for the polite and gracious way ahead it makes possible for all of us. To my mind—and I think Jesus would probably agree—that is far better than the kind of venom that, whether it comes from a religious person or an atheist, is so very destructive in our world today.

Extraction Engines That Mine... You

Have you ever wondered why certain friends drop off your Facebook feed?

Or have you ever done a search on Google where you couldn’t get to the information you want? Where you felt like you were just getting a certain subset of all the data you know is out there?

That happened to me recently. I wanted to know what age we are living in—is it still the Scientific Age, or the Information Age, or the Digital Age, or some other more recent designation? So I typed in “historic age”, “scientific age”, “time period”, and so on. All Google wanted to give me were articles on the age of the earth, most from a conservative Christian perspective.  That was decidedly not what I was looking for, so what’s that all about?

Well, it turns out that Google isn’t quite doing what I thought it was. It turns out that Google is a DATA COLLECTION TOOL first, and a search-engine second. Using advanced algorithms that solicit a host of “signals” it relentlessly gathers from my online behavior, it tries to figure out exactly who I am and then give me exactly what it thinks I want.

Only giving me what I want isn’t really the chief end of Google either. Selling to me is. It’s sort of like having a psychologist and a sales person all rolled into one. Extract the most intimate and extensive data from me possible, analyze it in ways that tell more about me than I even realize myself, and then use this “trusted information” to get inside my head, figure out what stuff I’m most likely to buy or what businesses and links I’m most likely to frequent, and then put search results and advertisements in front of me accordingly.

In a book called The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser writes that if you type a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with such things as ads for antidepressants.

He goes on to say that WITH LITTLE NOTICE or fanfare, the digital world is fundamentally changing. Maybe it’s time we paid more attention. Tomorrow I’ll give you some more reasons why that may be the case.

A Great Day For Freedom

Last week. I was visiting with some folks before an AA meeting at church. I could feel an incredible sense of energy present, and so I asked about it.  “I’m celebrating 23 years of sobriety tonight,” one of the people gathered said.

Knowing he would know the answer, I replied by asking him this question: “How many days is that?”

Without missing a beat he responded,  “8401”.

We embraced, and I couldn’t help but think that the beer commercial that says, “Life doesn’t get any better than this” has it dead wrong. It doesn’t get any better than celebrating 8401 days of freedom, friends. It doesn’t get any better than that.

And it made me think: What are the things in my life that I would do anything to be free of them, and then when I was, count every single day of my liberation? 

How about you?

Something is Filling Them, Something*

While doing some cleaning and organizing, I came across my first journals, written over 40 years ago.   They are small, spiral bound notebooks with bright red covers, and they cost 19 cents a piece.

They say emotions are timeless, and I tend to believe that. When old hurts come back, they come back with all the force they ever had. Time diminishes how frequently and pervasively we feel the pain, but it does not diminish the pain itself. Reading those journals brings it all back—the death of my grandmother when I was 13, the rage I was feeling at the disparity between the man I felt society wanted me to be and the frightened boy that I was, the loneliness of having different interests than many of my friends (they all played baseball; I went on long hikes, spending whole days traipsing through the woods).

I'm not sure why I seemed to write mostly about bad stuff when my life wasn't bad at all.  I think that perhaps the moments when I needed to write were those the moments when I felt like my gut was on fire or my head would explode or my heart would burst if I didn’t get the feelings out of me and into the words on the page.

I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two since then, though I am sure there are those who would consider that debatable.    And one of the things I've learned is that perhaps it is wiser to work on keeping the glory in rather than dwelling on getting the bad stuff out.

* A line from the poem "Men At Forty", by Donald Justice.  (and all the more true of men at 50)