India
has a population of 1.3B with 750M unique mobile users. Approx 350M are
feature phone users with another 400M being smartphone users. With the
data growth over the last 18–24 months we’ve seen the data users grow
tremendously to 200M users. However, a massive gap still remains. Why
aren’t all 400M users using data?
We
asked ourselves. Why are the rest of the people not in this 200 million
bracket? There are still many challenges that exist in the country to
bring the remaining 1B online.
On top of that the entire experience of someone coming online is a very tedious 15–20 step process:
It
was clear that to bring the next billion people online we would have to
do something radically new. Could we take this 15–20 step funnel and
collapse it into a few steps?
We think we’ve done it. Today we’re announcing a brand new product called ‘Total, built by hike’.
‘Total,
built by hike’ is a refined version of Android targeted at simplifying
the smartphone and internet experience for the next billion people. ‘Total’
lets users access essential services such as Messaging, News, Recharge
and more even without an active data connection and paves the way for
them to get on Data by providing packs at as low as Re. 1.
It has 4 key elements to it that combined together make the end to end experience extremely seamless:
1. News, Cricket, Recharge, Wallet & More < 1MB
2. Single Login for All Services
3. Works Without Data
4. Total Data Packs Starting at Re 1. Over 50% Cheaper than Market.
Total Data Pack Pricing vs Market
Over
the last 6 months, Hike has worked extremely closely with telecom
partners to enable the USSD Technology & Data Upsell on Total.
Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel & BSNL are the telecom partners which cover
over 42% of the telecom market.
Intex and Karbonn
are the first Smartphone partners that will carry ‘Total, built by
Hike’. Total will be available on 4 models across Intex & Karbonn.
The devices with Total are:
Intex Aqua Lions N1
Intex Aqua Lions T1
Intex Aqua Lions T1-Lite and
Karbonn A40 Indian.
The devices are scheduled to hit the shelves starting 1st March 2018 starting at a price point of Rs 3,000.
Closing Thoughts
We’re excited by the potential of Total, built by hike
to impact millions of people in India as well as other developing
nations. ‘Total, built by hike’ propels digital inclusion and furthers
the national agenda of financial inclusion as well as socio-economic
progress. It works well for service providers as it gives them access to
millions of people who can use their services offline.
To be one of the first to experience Total, built by Hike,
Sometime
in the mid-2000s, I was a freelance web developer in Philadelphia with
some pretty crappy health insurance. I started having occasional heart
palpitations, like skipped heart beats. My doctor said it was probably
not serious, but she could do tests to rule out very unlikely potential
complications for about $1,000. That seemed pretty expensive to rent a
portable EKG for a single day, so I googled around for some schematics.
Turned out you could build a basic three-lead EKG with about $5 worth of
Radio Shack parts (I no longer have the exact schematic, but something like this).
I didn’t really understand what the circuit did, but I followed the
directions and soldered it together on some protoboard, connected a 9V
battery, and used three pennies as electrodes that I taped to my chest. I
hooked the output of the device to my laptop’s line in and pressed ‘record’.
screenshot of my heartbeat in Audacity
Audacity
displayed the heartbeat signal live as it recorded. Sure enough, I was
having pretty common/harmless Premature Ventricular Contractions.
There’s one on the right side of the screenshot above.
Calling
the 1/8th inch connectors you’d find on pretty much every piece of
consumer electronics until recently “audio jacks” does them a
disservice. It’s like calling your car a “grocery machine”. Headphone
and microphone ports are, at their most basic, tools for reading and
producing voltages precisely and rapidly over time.
My
homemade EKG is a voltage converter. Electrodes attached to points
around my heart measure tiny differences in voltage produced by signals
that keep it beating. Those measured signals are amplified to about plus
or minus 2 volts. That new voltage travels through an audio cable to
the “Line In” on my sound card.
Sound cards happen to carry sound most of the time, but they are perfectly happy measuring any AC
voltage from -2 to +2 volts at 48,000 times per second with 16 bits of
accuracy. Put another way, your microphone jack measures the voltage on a
wire (two wires for stereo) every 0.2 milliseconds, and records it as a
value between 0 and 65,535. Your headphone jack does the opposite, by applying a voltage between -2 and +2 to a wire every 0.2 milliseconds, it creates a sound.
To
any headphone jack, all audio is raw in the sense that it exists as a
series of voltages that ultimately began as measurements by some tool,
like a microphone or an electric guitar pickup or an EKG. There is no
encryption or rights management, no special encoding or secret keys.
It’s just data in the shape of the sound itself, as a record of voltages
over time. When you play back a sound file, you feed that record of
voltages to your headphone jack. It applies those voltages to, say, the
coil in your speaker, which then pushes or pulls against a permanent
magnet to move the air in the same way it originally moved the
microphone whenever the sound was recorded.
Smartphone manufacturers are broadly eliminating headphone jacks
going forward, replacing them with wireless headphones or BlueTooth.
We’re going to all lose touch with something, and to me it feels like
something important.
The
series of voltages a headphone jack creates is immediately
understandable and usable with the most basic tools. If you coil up some
copper, and put a magnet in the middle, and then hook each side of the
coil up to your phone’s headphone jack, it would make sounds.
They would not be pleasant or loud, but they would be tangible and
human-scale and understandable. It’s a part of your phone that can read
and produce electrical vibrations.
Without that port, we will forever be beholden to device drivers
between our sounds and our speakers. We’ll lose reliable access to an
analog voltage we could use to drive any magnetic coil on earth, any
pair of headphones. Instead, we’ll have to pay a toll, either through
dongles or wireless headphones. It will be the end of a common interface
for sound transfer that survived more or less unchanged for a century,
the end of plugging your iPod into any stereo bought since WWII.
Entrepreneurs
and engineers will lose access to a nearly universal, license-free I/O
port. Independent headphone manufacturers will be forced into a
dongle-bound second-class citizenry. Companies like Square — which made
brilliant use of the headphone/microphone jack to produce credit card
readers that are cheap enough to just give away for free — will be hit with extra licensing fees.
Because
a voltage is just a voltage. Beyond an input range, nobody can define
what you do with it. In the case of the Square magstripe reader, it is
powered by the energy generally used to drive speakers (harvesting the
energy of a sine wave being played over the headphones), and it
transmits data to the microphone input.
There’s also the HiJack project,
which makes this whole repurposing process open source and general
purpose. They provide circuits that cost less than $3 to build that can
harvest 7mW of power from a sound playing out of an iPhone’s headphone
jack. Because you have raw access to some hardware that reads and writes
voltages, you can layer an API on top of it to do anything you want,
and it’s not licensable or limited by outside interests, just some
reasonably basic analog electronics.
I don’t know exactly how
losing direct access to our signals will harm us, but doesn’t it feel
like it’s going to somehow? Like we may get so far removed from how our
devices work, by licenses and DRM, dongles and adapters that we no
longer even want to understand them? There’s beauty
in the transformation of sound waves to electricity through a
microphone, and then from electricity back to sound again through a
speaker coil. It is pleasant to understand. Compare that to
understanding, say, the latest BlueTooth API. One’s an arbitrary and
fleeting manmade abstraction, the other a mysterious and dazzlingly convenient property of the natural world.
So,
if you’re like me and you like headphone jacks, what can you do? Well,
you could only buy phones that have them, which I think you’ll be able
to do for a couple years. Vote with your dollar!
You
can also tell companies that are getting rid of headphone jacks that
you don’t like it. That your mother did not raise a fool. That aside
from maybe water-resistance,
there’s not a single good reason you can think of to give up your
headphone jack. Tell them you see what they’re up to, and you don’t like it.
You can say this part slightly deeper, through gritted teeth, if you
get to say it aloud. Or, just italicize it so they know you are serious.
There aren’t any good stock photos of “ten thousand”, so this piece will just have lots of kittens
I
started writing a blog in May 2016, partly because I kept writing rants
on Facebook that apparently were “too good not to be online somewhere”,
and partly because I was bored after my Master’s degree and wanted
something to do with my Sunday mornings.
Sleeping in, of course, was never an option.
This is Luna. Luna is my 6am alarm clock. Every. Single. Day
18
months later, and I’ve written about 100,000 words, been published in
all sorts of places, and am now getting regular offers to pitch to major
publications — more on this in the coming months.
And
most importantly of all, I got to 10,000 followers. This time last
year, it was 100 and about half of them were related to me.
All in all, it’s been a good year.
Pictured: Getting what you always wanted
So
what’s in store for the Health Nerd? You’ll be happy to know that this
year I’ve applied for a PhD with the University of Wollongong, which is
actually super exciting and not scary like it feels to me sometimes. I’m
also going to be — hopefully — releasing some episodes of a podcast
that I’ve started with a brilliant co-host. The topic will be science in
the media and I’m really excited to introduce all of you to my dulcet
tones over the airwaves.
I’m so much less awkward than I am in text.
What
does all of this activity mean to the blog? Nothing! I’ll still be
aiming for my regular one health story a week on Medium, as well as an
extra member’s-only article a month for all you subscribers who love
that extra content.
Pictured: “Extra content”
To
sum up, I’d just like to say thank you to you all. I’d never have made
it here without all you brilliant people following me and making this
all worthwhile. It was a fantastic 2017, and 2018 shows every sign of
being brilliant as well.
The
past few years have been huge for voice-activated command services. It
seems like every major tech manufacturer has one on the market.
Whether
you’re using Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft
Cortana, it’s hard to ignore the hands-free revolution.
But
how secure are your communications? Are your commands really kept
between you and the device? Where is all of this information stored?
Answering
these questions is critical when determining whether or not you want to
use these personal assistants on a daily basis.
They’re also important when it comes time to access, manage or delete your command history.
Always On?
Contrary
to popular belief, most of these devices aren’t “always on.” Instead,
they only begin recording after the activation command, or “wake word,”
has been issued.
In the case of Alexa and the Echo device, the command is “Alexa.” For Google Assistant,
the phrase is “OK Google.” Some devices let you choose from several
different wake words. Alexa users, for example, can choose between the
default word of “Alexa” and one of two other options: “Amazon” or
“Echo.”
So
recording doesn’t begin until you’ve spoken the magic phrase. That
might even be enough to put your mind at ease. But it’s important to
note that these devices also store your voice commands in the cloud. As
such, they’re prime targets for hackers.
Turning the Personal Assistant Into a Personal Wiretap
Like most new technology, these voice-activated command services are prone to cyber attacks.
The
Amazon Echo device has already been hacked. Mark Barnes, a British
security expert, recently demonstrated how malware can turn the consumer
product into a live audio surveillance stream. You can find his
research on his official blog.
Mark’s
hack has a significant flaw — it requires access to the device and
involves physical modification of the targeted hardware. Nonetheless,
his proof-of-concept is enough to worry many consumers around the globe.
The Dawn of BlueBorne
Another hack — one which uses a Bluetooth exploit — was identified in late 2017.
Known as BlueBorne,
this attack doesn’t involve physical access to any device. It doesn’t
even require the end-user to click on any links or open any files.
As
such, BlueBorne has the potential to cause widespread havoc among
current users of devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home.
BlueBorne
only gets worse from there. The exploit also has the potential to take
control of a remote device and infect every other device on the same
network.
As if that wasn’t enough, most modern malware or antivirus programs wouldn’t even detect the attack.
Thankfully,
the majority of these devices have already received firmware updates to
patch the hole. According to recent estimates, there are still
approximately 20 million devices — primarily Amazon Echo and Google Home
products — that are susceptible.
Controlling and Managing Your Files
Most devices let you easily manage your files. Amazon Echo allows you to delete individual recordings by navigating into your device settings and your history folder.
From
there, just tap on a single item and hit “Delete voice recordings” to
finalize the action. To delete everything, sign into your Amazon Echo
account at Amazon’s official website and navigate to “Manage Voice
Recordings.”
Although Apple recently disclosed that Siri stores data for up to 18 months, you can turn off voice dictation and Siri’s assistance to prevent voice recording and archival.
Google Home users can delete past recordings
by navigating to the “My Activity” section of their Google account.
Just like Amazon Echo, Google Home lets you remove individual or entire
groups of files.
Using Voice Command Services Safely and Securely
While
devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home represent huge leaps forward
in smart home technology, they’re not without their faults.
To use these products safely and securely, make sure you update them with the latest patches and enhancements.
Deleting
your past messages is a good practice to minimize the damage if a hack
does occur, but this can also hamper the personalization of your device.
Ultimately, it comes down to balancing your security and privacy with the amount of functionality you need.
I
started programming when I was 13, thanks to my math teacher. Every
Monday and Tuesday, my friends and I used to go to his classroom to
learn and practice instead of having a meal at the cafeteria.
I spent one year building a very basic 8-bit OS from scratch and competing in robotics contests with my friends.
I
then got interested in VR and with my friends we agreed that it would
be really cool to create our own world in VR where we could spend time
after school. But facing the fact that an Oculus was $700 at the time,
we decided to build our own headset.
3D printed parts of the headset
Making VR accessible to everyone?
DARROW; J. R. EYERMAN/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
It was because of an anime called Sword Art Online where the main character is in a virtual reality RPG that I fell in love with VR. I wanted to understand every aspect of it.
I
bought the cheapest components I could and we started by learning the
very basics of the physics and math behind VR (proper acceleration,
antiderivatives, quaternions…). And then we re-invented VR. I wrote WRMHL, and then FastVR with Gabriel. Putting all of this together, we ended up with a $100 VR headset.
A fully hackable VR headset and development kit
To
speed up VR development time, we built FastVR, an open-source SDK for
developers that is easy to understand and customize. It works like this:
The core headset computes the position of the headset in space;
The position is sent from the headset to WRMHL, and part of the CPU’s power is dedicated to reading those messages;
Then FastVR retrieves the data and uses them to render the VR game.
Everything you need to build the headset has been open-sourced and can be hacked.
Why open source?
I want to make VR mainstream. So I reached out to Oussama Ammar, one of the co-founders at The Family. I talked to him about setting up a company and launching a Kickstarter.
But
he convinced me that for now, it’s better to wait on starting a
business, to keep meeting others who have the same goals, and to keep
learning.
We
took a trip to Silicon Valley and Oussama introduced me to the chief
architect at Oculus, Atman Brinstock. And they gave me some precious
advice: make all of this open source.
The Next Step?
There are still a lot of technical points that we want to improve.
Our big focus right now is on a standalone VR headset, which we already have as a simple version, and cheaper 3D tracking.
All of this will be released soon.
How do I get started?
If you want to learn more about the technical side and build your headset, just follow the guide by clicking here. Star the repo if you liked it ⭐️
How to Design Social Systems (Without Causing Depression and War)
Here
I’ll present a way to think about social systems, meaningful
interactions, and human values that brings these often-hazy concepts
into focus. It’s also, in a sense, an essay on human nature. It’s
organized in three sections:
Reflection and Experimentation. How do people decide which values to bring to a situation?
Practice Spaces. Can we look at social systems and see which values they support and which they undermine?
Sharing Wisdom. What are the meaningful conversations that we, as a culture, are starved for?
I’ll
introduce these concepts and their implications for design. I will show
how, applied to social media, they address issues like election
manipulation, fake news, internet addiction, teen depression &
suicide, and various threats to children. At the end of the post, I’ll
discuss the challenges of doing this type of design at Facebook and in
other technology teams.
Reflection and Experimentation
As I tried to make clear in my letter, meaningful interactions and time well spent are a matter of values.
For each person, certain kinds of acts are meaningful, and certain ways
of relating. Unless the software supports those acts and ways of
relating, there will be a loss of meaning.
In the section below about practice spaces,
I’ll cover how to design software that’s supportive in this way. But
first, let’s talk about how people pick their values in the first place.
We often don’t know how we want to act, or relate, in a particular situation. Not immediately, at least.
When
we approach an event (a conversation, a meeting, a morning, a task),
there’s a process — mostly unconscious — by which we decide how we want
to be.
Interrupting
this can lead to doing things we regret. As we’ll see, it can lead to
internet addiction, to bullying and trolling, and to the problems teens
are having online.
So, we need to sort out the values with which we want to approach a situation. This is a process. I believe it’s the same process, whether you’re deciding something small — like how openly you will approach a particular conversation — or something big.
Let’s start with something big: many teenagers are engaged in sorting out their identities: they take ideas about how they ought
to act (manly, feminine, polite, etc) and make up their own minds about
whether to approach situations with these values in mind.
Worksheets from “On My Own Terms”. Join our community to play these games!
For
these teens, settling on the right values takes a mix of
experimentation and reflection. They need to try out different ways of
being manly, feminine, intelligent, or kind in different situations and see how they work. They also need to reflect on who they want to be and how they want to live.
These
two ingredients — experimentation and reflection — are required to sort
out our values. Even the small decisions (for example, deciding how to
balance honesty and tact in a conversation) require experimenting in real situations, and reflecting on what matters most.
This process can be intuitive, nonverbal, and unconscious, but it is vital.¹
If we don’t find the right values, it’s hard to feel good about what we
do. The following circumstances interfere with experimentation and
reflection:
High stakes.
When deviation from norms becomes disastrous in some way — for
instance, with very high reputational stakes — people are afraid to
experiment. People need space to make mistakes and systems and social scenes with high consequences interfere with this.
Low agency. To put values to the test, a person needs discretion
over the manner of their work: they need to experiment with moral
values, aesthetic values, and other guiding ideas. Some
environments — many of them corporate — make no room for being guided by
one’s own moral or aesthetic ideas.
Disconnection. One way we judge the values we’re experimenting with is via exposure to their consequences.
We all need to know how others feel when we treat them one way or
another, to help us decide how we want to treat them. Similarly, an
architect needs to know what it’s like to live in the buildings she
designs. When the consequences of our actions are hidden, we can’t sort out what’s important.²
Distraction and overwork.
We also lose the capacity to sort out our values when reflection
becomes impossible. This is the major cost of noisy environments,
infinite entertainment, push notifications, and some types of poverty.
Lack of faith in reflection. Finally, people can come to consider reflection to be useless — or to be avoided — even though it is so natural. The emotions which trigger reflection,
including doubt and confusion, can be brushed away as distractions. One
way this happens, is if people view their choices through a behaviorist
lens: as determined by habits, reinforcement learning, or permanent
drives.³
This makes it seem like people don’t have values at all, only habits,
tastes, and goals. Experimentation and reflection seem useless.
Software-based social spaces can be disastrous for experimentation and reflection.
One
reason that private group messaging (like WhatsApp and Messenger) is
replacing virality-based forums (like Twitter, News Feed, and
increasingly, Stories) is that the latter are horrible for experimenting
with who we are. The stakes are too high. They seem especially bad for
women, for teens, and for celebrities—which may partly explain the rise
in teen suicide—but they're bad for all of us.
A
related problem is online bullying, trolling, and political outrage.
Many bullies and trolls would embrace other values if they had a chance
to reflect and were better exposed to consequences. In-person spaces are
much better for this.
Reflection can be encouraged or discouraged by design — this much is clear from the variety of internet-use helpers, like Moment and Intent. All of us (not just bullies and trolls) would use the Internet differently if we had more room for reflection.
Two lockscreens: one design encourages reflection, and one doesn’t. [from “Empowering Design”]
Exercise: On My Own Terms
In order to learn to support users in experimentation and reflection, designers must experiment and reflect on their own values. On My Own Terms is an exercise for this. Players fill out a worksheet, then socialize in an experimental way.
“On My Own Terms”. Join our community to play these games!
In
the experimentation part, players defy norms they’ve previously obeyed,
and see how it works out. Often they find that people like them better
when they are less conventional — even when they are rude!
Here’s
one thing this game makes clear: we discover what’s important to us in
the context of real choices and their consequences. People often think
they have certain values (eating kale, recycling, supporting the
troops) but when they experiment and reflect on real choices, these
values are discarded. They thought they believed in them, but only out
of context.
This is how it was for me with consistency, rationality, masculinity, and being understated. When I played On My Own Terms, I decided to value these less.⁴ My true values are only clear through experimentation and reflection.
For
users to have meaningful interactions and feel their time was well
spent, they need to approach situations in a way they believe in. They
need space to experiment and reflect.
But this is not enough.
Practice Spaces
Every
social system makes some values easier to practice, and other values
harder. Even with our values in order, a social environment can
undermine our plans.
Most social platforms are designed in a way that encourages us to act against our values: less humbly, less honestly, less thoughtfully,
and so on. Using these platforms while sticking to our values would
mean constantly fighting their design. Unless we’re prepared for a
fight, we’ll likely regret our choices.
There’s a way to address this, but it requires a radical change in how we design: we must reimagine social systems as practice spaces for the users’ values — as virtual places custom built to make it easier for the user to relate and to act in accord with their values.
Designers must get curious about two things:
When users want to relate according to a particular value, what is hard about doing that?
What is it about some social spaces that can make relating in this way easier?
For example, if an Instagram⁵ user valued being creative, being honest, or connecting adventurously,
then designers would need to ask: what kinds of social environments
make it easier to be creative, to be honest, or to connect
adventurously? They could make a list of places where people find these
things easier: camping trips, open-mics, writing groups, and so on.
Next,
the designers would ask: which features of these environments make them
good at this? For instance, when someone is trying to be creative, do
mechanisms for showing relative status (like follower counts) help or
hurt? How about when someone wants to connect adventurously? Or, with
being creative, is this easier in a small group of close connections, or
a large group of distant ones? And so on.
To take another example, if a News Feed user believes in being open-minded,
designers would ask which social environments make this easier. Having
made such a list, they would look for common features. Perhaps it’s
easier to be open-minded when you remember something you respect about a
person’s previous views. Or, perhaps it’s easier when you can tell if
the person is in a thoughtful mood by reading their body language. Is
open-mindedness more natural when those speaking have to explicitly
yield time for others to respond? Designers would have to find out.⁶
Exercise: Space Jam
To start thinking this way, it’s best if designers focus first on values which they themselves have trouble practicing. In this game, Space Jam, each player shares something they’d like to practice, some way of interacting. Then everyone brainstorms, imagining practice spaces (both online and offline) which could make this easier.
“Space Jam”. Join our community to play these games!
Here’s an example of the game, played over Skype with three designers from Facebook:
Eva says she wants to practice “changing the subject when a conversation seems like a dead end.”
Someone
comments that Facebook threads are especially bad at this. We set a
timer for three minutes and brainstorm on our own. Then everyone
presents one real-world way to practice, and one mediated way.
George’s
idea involves a timer. When it rings, everyone says “this conversation
doesn’t meet my need for ____”. Jennifer suggests something else:
putting a bowl in the middle of a conversation. Player can write out
alternate topics and put them in the bowl in a conspicuous but
non-interrupting way. (Jennifer also applies this idea to Facebook
comments, where the bowl is replaced by a sidebar.)
We
all wonder together: could it ever be “okay” for people to say things
like “this conversation doesn’t meet my need for ____”? Under what
circumstances is this safe to say?
This leads to new ideas.
In the story above, Eva is an honest person. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy
to be honest. She struggles to be honest when she wants to change the
conversation. By changing the social rules, we can make it easier for
her to live according to her values.
Games like Space Jam
show how much influence the rules of social spaces have over us, and
how easy it is for thoughtful design to change those rules. Designers
become more aware of the values around them and why they can be
difficult to practice. They feel more responsible for the spaces they
are creating. (Not just the spaces they make for users, but also in
daily interactions with their colleagues). This gives them a fresh
approach to design.
If
designers learn this skill, they can support the broad diversity of
users’ values. Then users will no longer have to fight the software to
practice their values.
Sharing Wisdom
I hope the previous ideas—reflection, experimentation, and practice spaces—have given a sense for how to support meaningful actions. Let’s turn to the question of meaningful information and meaningful conversation.
We are having a problem in this area, too.
Amidst
nonstop communication — a torrent of articles, videos, and
posts — there is still a kind of conversation that people are starved
for, because our platforms aren’t built for it.
When this type of conversation — which I’ll call sharing wisdom — is
missing, people feel that no one understands or cares about what’s
important to them. People feel their values are unheeded, unrecognized,
and impossible to rally around.
As
we’ll see, this situation is easy to exploit, and the media and fake
news ecosystems have taken advantage. By looking at how this
exploitation works, we can see how conversations become ideological and
polarized, and how elections are manipulated.
But first, what do I mean by sharing wisdom?
Social
conversation is often understood as telling stories, sharing feelings,
or getting advice. But each of these can be seen as a way to discover
values.
When we ask our friends for advice — if you look carefully — we aren’t often asking about what we should do. Instead, we’re asking them about what’s important in our situation. We’re asking for values which might be new to us. Humans constantly ask each other “what’s important?” — in a spouse, in a wine, in a programming language.
I’ll call this kind of conversation (both the questions and the answers) wisdom.
Wisdom,
n. Information about another person’s hard-earned, personal
values — what, through experimentation and reflection, they’ve come to
believe is important for living.
Wisdom
is what’s exchanged when best friends discuss their relationships or
jobs, when we listen to stories told by grandmothers, church pastors,
startup advisors, and so on.
It comes in many forms: mentorship, texts, rituals, games. We seek it naturally, and in normal conditions it is abundant.
For
various reasons, the platforms are better for sharing other things
(links, recommendations, family news) than for asking each other what’s
important. So, on internet platforms, wisdom gets drowned out by other
forms of discourse:
By ideology.
Our personal values are easily eclipsed by ideological values (for
instance, by values designed to promote business, a certain elite, or
one side in a political fight). This is happening when posts about
partisan politics make us lose track of our shared (or sharable)
concerns, or when articles about productivity outpace our deeper life questions.
By scientism.
Sometimes “hard data” or pseudo-scientific “models” are used to justify
things that would be more appropriately understood as values. For
instance, when neuroscience research is used to justify a style of leadership, our discourse about values suffers.
By bullshit.
Many other kinds of social information can drown out wisdom. This
includes various kinds of self-promotion; it includes celebrities giving
advice for which they have no special experience; it includes news.
Information that looks like wisdom can make it harder to locate actual, hard-earned wisdom.
For
all these reasons, talk about personal values tends to evaporate from
the social platforms, which is why people feel isolated. They don’t
sense that their personal values are being understood.
In
this state, it’s easy for sites like Breitbart, Huffington Post,
Buzzfeed, or even Russia Today to capitalize on our feeling of
disconnection. These networks leverage the difficulty of sharing wisdom,
and the ease of sharing links. They make a person feel like they are
sharing a personal value (like living in a rural town or supporting women), when actually they are sharing headlines that twist that value into a political and ideological tool.
Exercise: Value Sharing Circle
For designers to get clear about what wisdom sounds like, it can be helpful to have a value sharing circle.
Each person shares one value which they have lived up to on the day
they are playing, and one which they haven’t. Here’s a transcript from
one of these circles:
There
are twelve of us, seated for dinner. We eat in silence for what feels
like a long time. Then, someone begins to speak. It’s Otto. He says he
works at a cemetery. At 6am this morning, they called him. They needed
him to carry a coffin during a funeral service. No one else could do it.
So, he went. Otto says he lived up to his values of showing up and being reliable.
But — he says — he was distracted during the service. He’s not sure he
did a good job. He worries about the people who were mourning, whether
they noticed his missteps, whether his lack of presence made the ritual
less perfect for them. So, he didn’t live up his values of supporting the sense of ritual and honoring the dead.
In
the course of such an evening, participants are exposed to values
they’ve never thought about. That night, other people spoke of their
attempts to be ready for adventure, be a vulnerable leader, and make parenthood an adventure.⁷
Playing
this makes the difference between true personal values and ideologies
very clear. Notice how different these values are from the values of
business. No one in the circle was particularly concerned with
productivity, efficiency, or socio-economic status. No one was even
concerned with happiness!
Social platforms could make it much easier to share our personal values (like small town living) directly, and to acknowledge one another and rally around them, without turning them into ideologies or articles.
This
would do more to heal politics and media than any “fake news”
initiative. To do it, designers will need to know what this kind of
conversation sounds like, how to encourage it, and how to avoid drowning
it out.
The Hardest Challenge
I’ve pointed out many challenges, but left out the big one. 😕
Only people with a particular mindset can do this type of design. It takes a new kind of empathy.
Empathy can mean understanding someone’s goals, or understanding someone’s feelings.⁸ And these are important.
But to build on these concepts — experimentation, reflection, wisdom, and practice spaces— a designer needs to see the experimental part of a person, the reflective part, the person’s desire for (and capacity for) wisdom, and what the person is practicing.⁹
As with other types of empathy, learning this means growing as a person.
Why?
Well, just as it’s hard to see others’ feelings when we repress our
own, or hard to listen to another person’s grand ambitions unless we are
comfortable with ours... it’s hard to get familiar with another
person’s values unless we are first cozy with our own, and with all the
conflicts we have about them.
This
is why the exercises I’ve listed (and others, which I didn’t have space
to include) are so important. Spreading this new kind of empathy is a
huge cultural challenge.
Hardik Gandhi is Master of Computer science,blogger,developer,SEO provider,Motivator and writes a Gujarati and Programming books and Advicer of career and all type of guidance.
