Idyillic Nightmares

Norman Rockwell, Whispering Sweepstakes (1963)

Connectivity benefits everyone. Those who have none will have some, and those who have a lot will have even more. To demonstrate that, imagine you are a young urban professional living in an American city a few decades from now. (…) Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. (…) You take another sip of coffee, feeling confident that you’ll impress your clients. You already feel as if you know them, though you’ve never met in person, since your meetings have been conducted in a virtual-reality interface. (…) There’s a bit of time left before you need to leave for work – which you’ll get to by driverless car, of course. Your car knows what time you need to be in the office each morning based on your calendar and, after factoring in traffic data, it communicates with your wristwatch to give you a sixty-minute countdown to when you need to leave the house. (…) You think about having another cup of coffee, but then a haptic device (“haptic” refers to technology that involves touch and feeling) that is embedded in the heel of your shoe gives you a gentle pinch – a signal that you’ll be late for your morning meeting if you linger any longer.

This amazing look at our bright future was described in The new digital age: reshaping the future of people, nations and business (pp. 28-30), a 2013 bestseller penned by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Bill Clinton praised it, and Richard Branson described it as “a brilliant guidebook for the next century”. Schmidt and Cohen do love the Digital Age. Unfortunately, their judgement may be slightly biased by the fact that they both work for Google. The former is currently the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., the multibillionaire corporation parenting Google, while the latter is the CEO of Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by… Google. This implies that the future “of people, nations and business” they present in the book may be heavily influenced by the business plans of their own company.

The Finger and the Moon

One of the most daunting aspects about technology is represented by the highly unpredictable consequences it always implies. Mankind creates and shapes technology, but we may argue that the latter tends to produce – as we are reminded by Newton’s Third Law of physics – an almost “equal and opposite reaction”. Sometime, the outcomes are better than expected; sometimes, they are worse; sometimes, they are not expected at all, and they may even turn out to reverse the effect initially meant to be obtained. We could say, by using the own words of French poet Paul Valery, that we are increasingly embedded into a very complex ICT-led system “that is leading us… we do not know and can by no means imagine where”.

Take the internet, for instance. It was initially conceived to connect electronic devices and people by creating a horizontal network: the core idea was to communicate and share data and information in a simpler and faster manner. Economic elements appeared to be secondary, if not irrelevant at all. With the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, this idea was brought to the entire globe and gradually spread to a massive scale, ending up involving billions of people. After more than 25 years, many people are enjoying the advantages brought by the internet. But the incoming revolution so widely praised in the 1990s seems to be producing also unexpected and unintended outcomes.

American Heroes

Over the last few years, two American heroes such as Chris Kyle and Edward Snowden have been portrayed by two Academy Award-winning directors, Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone, in two features: American Sniper (2014) and Snowden (2016).

Both young and certainly brave, Kyle and Snowden decided, quite early in their lives, to serve their governments – the former in the US Navy SEAL, the latter in the CIA. What made them heroes was the common, strong, will to protect American people: but whereas Kyle decided to go to Iraq to fight an outer enemy in the so-called “War on Terror”, Snowden ended up leaking data and information to oppose the US government itself. Hence, we have two narratives which play with American founding myths and values in profoundly diverse manners.

“Apes, Together, Strong.”

The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. One viewpoint “wins out”. Then the people act out this view, or their representative are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do.
C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite” (1956)

This is the way democracies should ideally work, isn’t it? C. Wright Mills, one the most prominent American sociologist of the last century, presented this plain description in his seminal essay The Power Elite (1956) and defined it as a “set of images out of a fairy tale” if compared to the reality of the US political system. Mill’s observation was (and still is today) very difficult to contest: after all, the quotation above could have been used much more properly to describe a Greek model of ancient democracy. Such a model entails the presence of a public of free, equal citizens who, benefiting from their specific status, do have the opportunity of debating public issues, adopting decisions and (directly or indirectly) executing them. As discussed in a previous post, in the Greek polis this public domain (koinon) was based on two fundamental elements: speech (lexis) and action (praxis). The former requires communication; the latter implies the will to translate ideas into concrete outcomes; both need data and information.

Clinton vs. Assange: Hiding the Truth with the Help of Media

Australian journalist John Pilger has been bravely denouncing the “side effects” of Western foreign policies for many decades. In the following article, he offers a striking example of how a (very) partisan interview can intentionally manipulate the truth in order to back a narrative based more on fairy tales than on real facts. This excellent piece of journalism gives an idea of how the alliance between politicians and media can affect the development of a mature, aware public opinion through the dissemination of “alternative truths” conceived to legitimate the existing systems of power. If one believes to the story emerging from the interview conducted by ABC Australia and does not look for other sources of information, he/she will end up considering Hillary Clinton as a conspiracy victim and Assange as a Russian spy. A good plot for the next James Bond movie.

Democracy, Public Spheres and the Internet: a Tangled Relationship

In this period, I am reading plenty of things about the concept of public sphere (Habermas in primis) while reflecting on the very complex relationship between ICTs, society and politics. I am trying to find out what angle I may adopt to address such topic in a proper way. And it is not easy at all. Is a society defined more effectively by its inner clashes or by its more lasting bonds? Is it still correct to use the expression “information society” in 2017? Is politics “as we knew it” in the 20^th century still alive? Do formal representative democracies still make sense? Are public spheres agonizing together with a weaker and weaker (and poorer) middle class? Is it actually possible to build public spheres within mass societies where the boundaries between public and private/intimate are more and more blurred?

Rising Idiocracies? A Political Reflection

Whenever I think about contemporary politics (and about western political leaders in particular) there is always a movie sequence that comes to my mind: the final scene of Burn After Reading, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen almost ten years ago. The always excellent J.K. Simmons plays a CIA Superior who is questioning an Officer (David Rasche) about the result of an operation aimed at recovering a mysterious disk. The problem is that they have made an incredible mess, casualties included. The CIA Superior suggests they should learn something from the errors committed, but since they do not know exactly what they have done, there cannot be a lesson to learn. Next time, things will likely get even worse.

The Coen’s movie, full of dumb characters who cause serious damage while barely realizing it, may be interpreted as the portrait of a country (or, maybe, of the entire western society) whose politics has reached its terminal state: harmful idiocy. If one considers – just to make a few recent examples – the arrogant and devastating foreign policies of the Bush and Obama administrations, UK former Prime Minister David Cameron’s suicidal referendum about Brexit, the ineptitude of former French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s very questionable policies on immigration and the agonizing, ridiculous Italian political class, the doubt is as chilling as inevitable. Is there an epidemic of criminal idiocy spreading throughout our societies, or this is just the inevitable outcome of decades of bad education, greed and very short-sighted decisions?

Management Portfolio / Closing the loop. Reflect to learn, and learn to reflect (and act)

Whenever experience teaches us something, it is because we have had the time and the ability to reflect on it. What the American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey (1859-1952) observed about experience could be claimed to be true also for history, both collective and individual – after all, experience may be considered as a personal story which brings some useful meanings to our life. If learning is the outcome of reflecting, reflecting on learning is an effective way to come full circle and put us in front of a mirror. What do we see? I think that true learning always entails the ability of establishing new or different relations among things – in the same way our brain creates new connections (axons) among neurons. This process is vertical and horizontal at the same time, since depth and extension – both essential to knowledge – feed each other in a virtuous circle.

As pointed out by Schank (1990), stories play a relevant role in learning: and they do it precisely because of their ability to convey and link contents and meanings in a structured way that, by fostering our emotional involvement, makes learning much more pleasant and easier. It is not surprising to discover that two New Zealander educators, Janice McDrury and Maxine Alterio (2002), have written a book which theorizes the use of storytelling as a learning tool supporting reflective learning processes.

Management portfolio / The Thoughtful and the Pragmatic: John B. Howard’s managerial wisdom

“You never hire the cv, you hire the person”. This is a witty aphorism by John B. Howard, Librarian at University College Dublin, which offers a significant glimpse of his way of viewing the world. The man is brilliant without being pretentious, and during his most recent lecture at UCD he showed the ability to combine the mastery of many fields of human knowledge with a solid, many-sided working experience. In other words, he is certainly not the kind of person who may devote herself to a theoretical construction to the point of losing touch with reality: I guess there would no place for him on the weird flying island of Laputa.

Dr. Howard reminded his audience that management, to be effective, must be well grounded in the real world – a world that needs to be observed and understood as best as one possibly can. Reality requires to cope with real people, and real people – like it or not – are flawed on many levels (“Everyone is twelve” is another provoking Howard’s aphorism). If a manager forgets it, a number of problems are likely to be overlooked, especially when organizations must face radical changes and workers are not ready to cope with them. Over his long career, Dr. Howard has managed a few very challenging situations, and I think his dual approach – thoughtful as well as pragmatic – has helped him to deal successfully with them.

Management portfolio / Once upon a time: good narratives for better libraries

Why do we like good stories? Because, in many ways, they have the gift to make us feel better. Perhaps, their broadest and most relevant effect is sense-making of life. We need good stories and narratives to improve the comprehension of ourselves and of the world we live in. Brophy (2007) addressed a very significant point when he prompted libraries to use both Evidence and Narrative Based Practice to improve the quality of their services. By employing the best available evidence offered by research literature, a library can certainly found its decisions on a more solid basis; nevertheless, the combination between objective data and subjective narratives may represent a step further because “we are more likely to find meaning in the telling of how things have been experienced by others than in the formality of arid statistics and measures” (Brophy, 2007, p. 156).

In other words, numbers are essential, but qualitative factors like personal experiences allow to connect with people in a way that can really make the difference. Narrative Based Practice could also help libraries to show their value to stakeholders and to focus more on customers as suggested by Holt (2005), who claimed the necessity of “fighting back” against declining funding. In the very same direction, Calvert & Goulding (2015) pointed out the potential relevance of gathering narratives from patrons to communicate libraries’ worth in a more interesting manner.