I'm Being Followed...

...by Nikola Tesla. I haven't thought about this man since my college Physics courses. Now he seems to be popping up a lot. First, it was with The Prestige via Netflix last weekend. Next, it was a demonstration of wireless power.

The thought of wireless power is an amazing one. Really. If you haven't already watched the video at the link above, go and do it right now. It's much more interesting than my blog.

The ability to dramatically reduce the amount of wires and batteries we use in everyday life would create a lot of freedom.

Anti-social networks

I recently read an article discussing social networks and their affects on relationships.

All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline....

But there's a danger here, too. If we're not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships.

The author lays some of the blame on the technology used for communicating in these venues, but I think she lets it off the hook too easily.

One of the big problems is how we converse. Typing still leaves something to be desired as a communication tool; it lacks the nuances that can be expressed by body language and voice inflection....But let's face it, the problem is much greater than which tools we use to communicate. It's what we are actually saying that's really mucking up our relationships.

While I agree that we all need to take responsibility for what we say regardless of the method of communication, I think the communication method drives the content considerably.

Body language and voice inflection are extremely important in communication. I can turn an expression of sympathy into a cut of sarcasm or vice versa without the words changing at all. The sight, sounds, and physical presence of other people cannot be underestimated in communication.

That's one of the reasons we've switched to using Skype to talk to far away grandparents almost exclusively. Our children benefit immensely for being able to see as well as hear them, and I believe it has strengthened the bonds between them.

But beyond the differences between text and "physical" communication, most social networks promote vapid and inane communication by how they are set up. The very construction of the tools is part of the problem.

Take Facebook. What's the first thing you see after signing in? A list of status messages, game scores, causes joined, quiz scores, etc. for all your friends. Most of which say nothing even remotely important. At the top of this list, I'm invited to type a short response to the question "What's on your mind?" Who cares what's on my mind? (Wait...I shouldn't say that on my blog.) What I mean is - shouting a sentence out to the world while everyone else is shouting doesn't exactly invite a meaningful dialog. Sure you can write longer notes, but they are not the focus of the tool - not by a long shot.

How about Twitter? While it reduces some of the noise compared to Facebook by providing only the equivalent of status messages, it only allows extremely short statements of 140 characters or less. Again, its the equivalent of shouting a 140 character sentence out the world while everyone else is shouting.

You'd think that the small messages allowed by these tools would encourage us to do everyone a favor by choosing our words carefully. But it seems to have the opposite effect. We've decided that quantity is better than quality - better to say the first thing that pops into our mind than to attempt to think of something meaningful to say.

Beware of the tools you use - their construction promotes certain uses over others.

Skeletons in my closet

Recently, I've had the benefit of helping a friend with his company's site. I used to work for him, and I was the original programmer for the site. As I'm working on it now, I'm almost amazing at how horrible the code is - it's almost embarrassing. I don't consider myself to be any kind of guru now, but this old code of mine is REALLY bad. It's enough to shake my head in disbelief that (a) I was allowed to write web applications and that (b) the site is still in use 8 years later. But while being embarrassed by my old work, it's been encouraging to work on it again for a few reasons.

First, I'm glad that I can now see how horrible the code is. It shows how much I've learned despite the fact that I've never had any formal training. As I said, I'm definitely no expert now, but I've definitely come a long way. Of course, it should also be said that their was probably nowhere to go but up with my skills.

I'm also encouraged by the fact that the site has continued to function for the company and meet their basic needs. In fact as I look back, no other job of mine has allowed me to be as big a benefit as I was to that company. I was able to literally change major portions of their business process to make the company much more efficient. It makes me smile to know that I helped that company so much.

Even though I was more than a little hesitant to dig up these old shameful bits of my past work, I'm glad I didn't pass it up.

Newspeak

I recently read George Orwell's 1984 for the first time on a friend's recommendation. One of the most interesting aspects of the book was Newspeak, the new version of the English language devised by the totalitarian government.

It was so important to Orwell's vision of terrible future that he added an appendix to the book to explain the concepts and purposes of the language. Newspeak was intended to restrict the range of verbal expression and thought - to actually make some things unutterable and therefore unthinkable. This was done by eliminating entire words from the language and eliminating all of the undesirable definitions of the remaining words. The creators of Newspeak worked hard to make sure that the language was a small one with a high degree of precision. If there were no words to express an idea contrary to the government's doctrines, the ideas would fade away or not occur at all. This was one of the government's chief methods of maintaining control.

At first I thought, Orwell given too much power to language, but then I realized that language is something people and organizations throughout time and the world attempt to control. Books have been burned in hopes that their ideas will go up in smoke as well. The political left and right (and all sorts of other types of organizations) attempt to define and redefine words on a constant basis to fit their uses. New words are constantly being added while other ones are being marked as undesirable while still more are having definitions removed or changed entirely.

Then it got me thinking about Newspeak as it relates to recent technology.

Consider computer programming. As a software engineer, I'm constantly trying to control the actions of a computer using a language designed for just that. These languages come with an extremely small amount of words - words that don't correspond to desirable actions have been eliminated. We want the words to be narrowly defined so there won't be any ambiguity and the computer will know exactly what to do.

Consider newer technologies aimed at enabling communication between people. Twitter limits you 140 characters for a single thought. Facebook begs you to give a short status message to tell the world about you at that moment. Texting has changed the face of language by changing the spelling of words and emphasizing short, precise words.

I've begun to be a little nervous that Newspeak is being brought about unwittingly and voluntarily by the creators and consumers of our latest technology.