Talk by Sherry Turkle, Feb. 3 @ 7:30pm

I mentioned in class that Sherry Turkle is going to speak about her book, "Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age" at ENR2, Room N120 @7:30pm on Feb. 3.

To understand why I think this is important, first a little about Dr. Turkle and her recent book.  Sherry's book is about the loss of face-to-face conversation.  I'm guessing you all experience is; the question is whether you know it, and do anything about it.  In the NY Times Sunday Review (from Sept. 2015), Sherry begins:

COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, “elsewhere.”

Sherry Turkle has been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, She had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? She goes on:

First of all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have to be bored. When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your phone. But the students also described a sense of loss. 

 For example, Turkle spoke to one college junior who tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

Read the article by Turkle based on her book, “Reclaiming Conversation” (also linked above).  Here she makes a case for face-to-face talk, and that direct engagement is crucial for the development of empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the place of others.   After you read this article, there is a link to her next article, as she reacts to the comments she received.  I found this related article, "Talk to Each Other, Not Your Phone" to be even more powerful.  We text because regular conversation is so "pedestrian" and boring.  In her book, Turkle asks Randall, 24, a real estate broker,

What happens when there is a lull in the conversation. He looked at me, seeming not to understand. Later he explained that, in his mind, he had just made it clear that there is never a lull in the conversation. Anything like that would be filled by turning to your phone. But I hadn’t understood this yet so I tried again. I said, “Like, if things got quiet among your friends?” Randall said, “Oh, if the conversation was not providing information, I’d check out some YouTube stuff I’m behind on … or take a picture of us and post it.”

After you read the articles (very short - not longer than 15 minutes) - with excellent links, what do you think?  What has been your experience? Are you comfortable with silence in conversation?  Or do you view conversation as  transactional; that it has to accomplish something or provide new information?

Bright Ideas

Manager: Daniel Imblum
Austin Anaya, Matthew Phetdara, Jensun Yu

The Three Amigos

Anthony Luciani, Bri Marek, Macy Zylstra

CPU's and Diet Mountain Dews

Manager: Cole Bennett

Ben Ampel

Chris Nguyen

Jake Aiello

Faris Abuzaid

Url: 

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Team Sleepy Panda

Team member:

Phillip Chan
Cosme Morga
Jingnan Li
Qingwei Meng

Biden Bros

Team Members:
Alex Smith

Connor Arendts

Craig Greiwe 

Addison Morgan 

Team Win or Lose, We Booze

Tyler Horton, Marissa Goldstein, Nick Gilkerson, Jacob Cusick

The Killer Whales

Luke Hathcock, Jake Plaisted, Matheus Accioly, Cody Biggs

Team Lone Wolf

Manager: Melissa Leon

Analysts:

Holden Gerber

Sean Furrier

Grady Hayes

Client: Diamond House Party Rentals

Nogales, AZ

Tech Briefing Ideas

In the comment below, propose the tech briefing you want to present.

THANKS for your comments.  I will go through them and your proposal to create a spreadsheet that I will share with you.  In the meantime, you can comment on others' ideas, as will I.  I will also post articles that I think will help some topics and inform others.

Netflix Goes Global and Its Profits Soar

Some of you mentioned an interest in Netflix and TV streaming. Well in a recent NYTimes business article, dated Jan .18, Netflix added more than 130 countries to its service map, and added a record 7.05 million streaming members in the three months that ended Dec. 31.

Netflix now has a total of 93.8 million members. Fueling the increase in subscribers was a rapid rise in Netflix memberships abroad. It added 5.1 million international members in the quarter, and now has 44.4 million members outside the United States, more than than 47 percent of its total membership.   The quarter was the 10th anniversary of Netflix’s streaming service, which began with the vision that internet television would ultimately replace traditional television.

So, has Netflix replaced traditional television?  What do you think is Netflix's future, given the competition it faces?   (Also, read the related articles about Netflix at the end of this article.)

What Lies Ahead in 2017

Some of you went to the talk by James Whitaker on the "The Future of Tech and the World." Here is another take in Wired of the 2017 Trends that will shape the very near future.  It's some of the same, but includes green energy, snapchat, devices that listen in, escalation of Russian cybertricks, and swarms of drones.  Click on the links in the articles for more on that.

I offer this to you, and there are other "top trends" in other e-magazines, but it will hopefully get you started on thinking further about your proposal ideas.  I also found this in the blog roll.  In general, Wired is a good resource for tech briefing ideas, and for a good read.   

Tech Briefing Example

As I mentioned in class, each of you will propose up to 3 tech topics that you want to teach others how to do, and learn more about.  All technologies have consequences, even the best ones.  Some of you went to the talk by James Whittaker, the opening talk for Hack Arizona.  In that talk, he presented the idea that every 10 years there is a new disruptive technology.  I liked the talk, thought it was provoking, but not once did he mention any of the consequences society now faces as a result of these disruptions.  This is not a criticism of the talk; that was not his intent.  He was trying to charge up the men (mostly men) in the room to develop new projects in the up coming Hack challenges.  (By the way, there is a separate Hackathon for Women, too.)

Here is an example of what you can post on the blog prior to presenting your tech briefing:

I recently heard a podcast of how vulnerable the Internet of Things is because they are developed with little security, "What Happens when Hackers Hijack Our Smart Devices".   Given that they are vulnerable, it speaks to devices that do not have a lot of regulation (or security) in place.  For example,  police in Arkansas are trying to use Amazon's Echo data in a murder investigation. Based on court documents in November 2015, a man in Arkansas had some friends over at his house to watch a football game and in the morning, one of the friends was found dead in a hot tub in the backyard. Police later charged the man who lived in the house, James Bates, with murder. He has pleaded not guilty.

As the police were investigating the crime, they found a number of digital devices in the suspect's house, including an Amazon Echo device that was in the kitchen. They have since seized the device and have apparently gotten some information from it, but what they want to check is what — if anything — the device may have recorded around the time of the murder.

For this tech talk, I will focus on security and privacy concerns about what companies are doing to to secure their IoT devices (see podcast mentioned earlier) and, more importantly, what kind of data are companies collecting about what goes on inside the home. What prevents these companies from giving up these data to law enforcement (including hackers or spies) any time they ask for (or take) it?