Month: May 2017

We Need More Alternatives to Facebook – MIT Technology Review

Source: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook – MIT Technology Review, by Brian Bergstein

Chastened by the negative effects of social media, Mark Zuckerberg says he will tweak his service and upgrade society in the process. Should any company be that powerful?

As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, … The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: … Newton Minow … called it “a vast wasteland.”
…
As for why it mattered, Minow told the TV executives:

Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership.

…
how to make a mass communication medium better for us? In 1961, Minow had a clear answer: “I believe that most of television’s problems stem from lack of competition.”

the problem is not that we need a slightly better Facebook. … What we need is to spend less time on Facebook.

Ideally, people would be able to form robust online communities and engage in the public square without letting any single company build a comprehensive dossier on them.

Economic Research | What’s Up with Wage Growth?

While most labor market indicators point to an economy near full employment, a notable exception is the sluggish rise of wages. However, this slow wage growth likely reflects recent cyclical and secular shifts in the composition rather than a weak labor market. In particular, while higher-wage baby boomers have been retiring, lower-wage workers sidelined during the recession have been taking new full-time jobs. Together these two changes have held down measures of wage growth.

Note: Four-quarter log change, four-quarter moving average.

As long as employers can keep their wage bills low by replacing or expanding staff with lower-paid workers, labor cost pressures for higher price inflation could remain muted for some time.

Source: Economic Research | What’s Up with Wage Growth?, by Mary C. Daly, Bart Hobijn, and Benjamin Pyle

‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It – NYTimes.com

“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Evan Williams says. “I was wrong about that.”

The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

Mr. Williams’s mistake was expecting the internet to resemble the person he saw in the mirror: serious, high-minded. … It was just another Utopian dream, Mr. Williams says. “The problem is that not everyone is going to be cool, because humans are humans,” he says. “There’s a lock on our office door and our homes at night. The internet was started without the expectation that we’d have to do that online.”

“I think we will fix these things,” Mr. Williams says. Just don’t hold your breath. The work has barely begun, he says. “Twenty years isn’t very long to change how society works.”

Source: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It – NYTimes.com, by @DavidStreitfeld

David Byrne | Journal | ELIMINATING THE HUMAN

I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has had an unspoken overarching agenda—it has been about facilitating the need for LESS human interaction. It’s not a bug—it’s a feature. … The tech doesn’t claim or acknowledge this as its primary goal, but it seems to often be the consequence.

I suspect that we almost don’t notice this pattern because it’s hard to imagine what an alternative focus of tech development might be.

I am not saying these developments are not efficient and convenient; this is not a judgement regarding the services and technology. I am simply noticing a pattern and wondering if that pattern means there are other possible roads we could be going down, and that the way we’re going is not in fact inevitable, but is (possibly unconsciously) chosen.

I’m also not saying that any of these apps and tech are not hugely convenient, clever or efficient. I use many of them. But from the automated checkout lines to self-driving cars, I see a trend that is accelerating, and I sense that as it does, human interaction will become rarer and therefore increasingly more difficult for people

Is there a downside?

There are arguments on both sides—some claim that jobs will arise for the technically unemployed, others say that they won’t.

The point is not that making a world to accommodate oneself is bad, but that when one has as much power over the rest of the world as the tech sector does, over folks who don’t naturally share its worldview, then there is a risk of a strange imbalance.

It’s a small step then from a worker that doesn’t care to a robot.

Source: David Byrne | Journal | ELIMINATING THE HUMAN