Lecture at the RSA

Did a radio interview with the guys from Monocle about the new book today. I thought this was the first interview but I remembered after that I did a pre-record for the BBC World Service last week. I’ll post a link in due course.

If you are in or around London on the 21 October I’m doing a free talk at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce) at lunchtime (roughly 1.00-2.00). The event is currently sold out but I’m told that if enough people put their names on the wait list they’ll use the really big room.

Image is of me at the RSA a few years ago talking about my previous book. At that time I held the record for the most books sold at an RSA event so it will be interesting to see how it goes this time around.

Funny but I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to talk about. OK the book but which bits? Should I use images or just talk? Does the new map make any sense? I’m tempted to open it with the story about a six-year-old asking his mother whether he should put bread in the toaster landscape or portrait. We’ll see…

Why can’t we switch off?

Here’s a little something from someone called John Timpson writing in the Daily Telegraph today: “I took my BlackBerry on its first holiday in January 2005 and my wife Alex didn’t like it. “Don’t let that thing ruin our holiday,” she said “I thought you had come here to get away from the office.”

Here’s me on the same subject (extracted from Future Minds).

“A banker acquaintance of mine once spent a day in a car park above a beach in Cornwall because it was the only spot in which he could make mobile contact with his office. His firm had a big deal on and his virtual presence was required. “Where would I have been without my Blackberry?” he said to me later. My response was: “ On holiday with your family taking a break from work and benefiting from the reflection that distance provides”. But his phone proved that he was useful and important. Then again, I’m sure his wife felt rather annoyed by the fact that his entire office had come on holiday with them. He hasn’t spoken to me since we had this conversation, although he does send me emails occasionally. I usually pretend that I’m on a beach and haven’t received them.

It’s happening everywhere. I have a middle-aged female friend (a journalist) that goes to bed with a small electronic device every night. Her husband is fed up and claims it’s ruining their sex life. Her response is that she’s in meetings all day and needs to take a laptop to bed to catch-up with her emails.”

Almost there…

This is almost it. The final version has a few changes (no Steve Jobs with the iBook of Jobs). Geddit? No. Neither did anyone else, which is why it’s gone. There’s also a mistake on the final version attached to which is a great story (which is why I left it in). I’m just waiting on a hyper-link for the final version and I’ll put it up and tell all.

Busy today talking with some people (The Food People in fact) about a joint food trends map and doing an interview on the future of work for the Wall Street Journal.

Blind trust in technology

I was watching the television a few days ago and there was a story about a man that had taken a year off work and was driving his whole family across Africa in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The vehicle had everything for what promised to be a rough and demanding journey. One morning they set out very early to visit some sand dunes in Namibia and he rolled the vehicle over on a stretch of totally deserted road. There were no other vehicles around.

How did the crash happen? It was because he was watching the screen of his GPS rather than looking out at the road ahead. The GPS said it was a straight road and everything looked safe – only it wasn’t. The was a sharp bend he didn’t see coming.Back in May of this year a 45-year-old German man did something similar. His blind faith in his GPS sent him onto the wrong end of an Autobahn off-ramp. An 11-year-old boy was slightly injured in the resulting collision.

Smart as these devices undoubtedly are I slightly worry about where we will all end up if we totally trust technology in this manner. Is not a degree of caution sensible? Should we not use such intelligent devices in combination with human intelligence and not as a replacement?

BTW, book update. It’s printed. It’s on it’s way to bookshops in the UK, US/Canada, and Australia/New Zealand and is currently being translated in South Korea and Japan. Launch is mid-October.

Digital disconnection

I’ve just been watching How to disconnect from your online life on BBC World News America (15 September). Some pretty obvious stuff but there’s an interview with Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus, which I feel I must comment on.

I totally 100% agree that the cost of making something public used to be expensive. Now it’s not. It might as well be free if you discount the time spent creating the content (which, perhaps, we shouldn’t). But I totally disagree that the cost of keeping something private is now expensive. How? All you have to do is do nothing. Don’t take part in the first place. OK, once you’ve made something public it is now very expensive indeed (and I’d say almost impossible) to make it private again but that’s surely another point? 

What I do think has happened is that we have exchanged privacy for ego in many instances.

Max, what do you think?

New map (not mine)

Hello again. First of all I think I should apologise to members of the Outdoor Swimming Society (last post). I’m sure they are all lovely people and even I would agree that going for a dip (even in freezing cold and somewhat suspect British water) is much better than playing on an X-Box.

Anyway, here’s a new map from Tim O’Reilly via Ross Dawson. I can’t share my new map with you quite yet but it makes for an interesting counter-point.

More at http://map.web2summit.com/

Wild Swimming

This has nothing to do with the new book.

Having been absent from England for a while there are a few new things around, some of which I don’t fully understand. Health & Safety hysteria is one example. Tony Blair’s tax situation is another. Argos I’ve never understood.

There’s also something called Wild Swimming. The last time I noticed it was called going swimming or taking a dip. Now it’s been re-branded by bohemian media types as “Wild Swimming”. It’s got its own websites; its own book and (of course) its own TV show. Wild? It’s making me livid.

I slightly get it. It’s some kind of romantic throwback to Victorian bathing that appeals to the trendier middle-class members of the RSPB and the National Trust. Those “don’t tell me what to do” and “I can walk anywhere I please” types that have missed out on the extreme sports boom due to bad knees and a fear of heights.

Wild swimming is perfect for these out-to-prove-a-point people. It’s real, authentic, intense and has a definite edge over the Tooting Bec Lido – but only in the sense that Cath Kidson and Boden have an edge over Debenhams and the Grattan home shopping catalogue.

It’s also slightly stupid. Who in their right mind would want to go for a swim in the freezing cold waters that surround 90% of Britain for 90% of the year? If the cold doesn’t get you a Panamanian supertanker probably will. As for swimming in a river you must be joking. I’ve seen one clean river in Britain in my life and even that eventually turned out to have a dead sheep floating in it upstream. It had probably been hit by a half-submerged shopping trolley or had died from drinking water that contained agricultural chemicals from a near-by field.

Hopefully this lunatic idea will have evaporated by next year but if it hasn’t my advice would be to get on a plane to the warmer waters of the Mediterranean. After all, that’s what package holidays were invented for in the first place.

Members of the Outdoor Wild Swimming Society can post hate mail on the comments page below.

Is ‘FaceTime’ a good idea?

I was sitting on a train yesterday, reading a newspaper, when I noticed an advertisement for FaceTime video calling on the new iPhone 4. The idea of the videophone has been around for as long as I can remember, for at least thirty years, and here it finally is.  Fantastic. But I foresee a potential problem.

If you add video to audio you are adding another level of communication. Another layer cognitive processing you might argue. Thus, whilst it is wonderful to see the person you are talking to on the other end of the phone, surely the depth of our listening or understanding will suffer?

This reminds me slightly of a project I worked on alongside Mckinsey & Company about ten years ago. It was for United News & Media as they were then called (a FTSE 100 company). The brief was working out what to do with Express Group Newspapers, which they owned at the time. 

To cut a long story short, I asked someone called Theodore Zeldin if he’d like to get involved, not least because he knew the editor and I was convinced that there was a connection between newspapers and conversation, which was (and still is) a big theme of his.  However, Theodore was really busy and couldn’t make it up to London to share with us his thinking. So he telephoned into a meeting instead. And this is where it gets good.

Most big meetings involve written material or some kind of a visual presentation such as Power Point – all of which are another level of distraction. Because Theodore couldn’t make it (and because the iPhone 4 had yet to be invented) we were all forced to listen very carefully (he’s softly spoken too) to his voice on the telephone. I can remember almost every word he said to this day.

If you are wondering what exactly he said I’m not going to tell you but I can share with you the fact that he more or less invented the idea of user generated content years before anyone like OhMyNews came up with the same idea.

Too much filtering

Professor Michael Abramson at Monash University in Australia has found that: “repeated predictive texting is likely to be training young people to act fast without thinking”. Furthermore, we are starting to shy away from tasks that take too long, things with uncertain benefits, and processes that do not offer immediate results.

This, I believe, is a very slippery slope. I suspect that accidental encounters with information and ideas will become less common in the future because we will use technology to filter out individuals or screen out experiences that do not fit with pre-set patterns or opt-in requests. As a result, reality may become almost invisible to many individuals. We will be highly connected to the world around us but most of this connection will be through digital filters and virtual channels. Many subtle physical and emotional signals could be minimised or even lost. Fleeting eye contact with a stranger on a train will become a more remote possibility because we will exist in our own behavioural bubbles, our eyes and ears set on divert to various sensory and escapist pleasures (see “iPod oblivion” on wordspy.com).

It will be a world that is highly conformist in terms of structure and highly personalised in terms of experience. I believe our minds will become muddled and muddy as a result. And if we are not pre-filtering or personalising media, we will have it done for us. The news cycle is accelerating and information is already delivered in snack-sized packages that often ignore or misrepresent broad context and understanding.

This point is raised by the Pulitzer prize-winning writer Charles Feldman in his book No Time To Think. Feldman speculates that if our current 24-hour news cycle had been applied to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, there would have been tremendous pressure to act immediately – and this could have resulted in Armageddon.

We will almost never be alone either. Machines will anticipate what we want based on previous behaviour or they will predict what we need, based on the patterns hidden in vast trails of digital data that we, knowingly or unknowingly, leave behind us.