https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention#t-773574
Tristan Harris, former ethics designer at Google, speaks courageously and frankly about social media design practises that affect us all. He is essentially a whistle-blower in the spirit of Edward Snowden and talks of putting technology back in the place of being a tool, not as a master of what we think.
Should we kill the machines?
Technology has enormous potential to connect people and ideas, to, quite frankly, get shit done.
My favourite example of this was the women’s march against trump that saw people right around the globe get up, walk outside, shout NO, and then go quietly go home again. No central planning, no drama, and an unprecedented amount of people. Awesome.
So getting rid of technology isn’t the issue.
But making some ethical boundaries are vital. Right now the only people who are winning are advertisers and the platform owners, and they are winning at the expense of our daily lives and our minds.
“I learned when I was young, that the only true life I have is the life of my brain. And as the only true life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day, for their particular use, on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition.”
‘Frying Pan Jack’, quoted here by Utah Phillips in the prelude to his recitation of the poem Bum on the Rod was referencing labour conditions, but it seems to precede Harris' sentiment.
What I cannot unsee?
In the past decade I have worked in the heart of the world’s largest companies as they brought their internal activities online. As a usability designer, researcher and consultant, I have watched the behaviour of employees across the world and at all levels as their daily work activities became increasingly digitised, from file sharing to HR reporting. Very few workers on the planet now have a job that involves no digital interaction.
During this time i and my colleagues at Digital Workplace Welfare have been able to track and evaluate the positive and negative consequences of the technologies in place and their design, and some of the ways in which employees are personally affected by the need to interact digitally to get the job done. Often employee digital services are sub-par compared to the out-of-work experience and have the potential to create considerable stress in the workplace.
Working toward welfare
Innovation and development is happening in public-facing technology, and the employee services sector often seems to lag behind, borrowing or copying non-workplace experiences for internal employee use. We see this in recent developments to integrate social media platforms and apps into the employee experience.
As more and more evidence emerges to support the concerns that Harris and others have about the consequences of handing our attention to social media and app developers for increasing parts of our daily life, we see the scramble among the world’s employers of people to integrate the same technologies and scenarios into the workplace.
The digital workplace has been embryonic for a few decades and now has reached maturity. As this social development embeds itself we will be watching carefully to understand the research around how social media engagement, interface design and hardware are impacting, not just our thoughts but our physical bodies, and help companies and employees to ensure that their digital and physical workplaces remain healthy and effective places to work.
