Visions of the future

As part of the Guardian’s Generation Y series, four authors wrote short-short SF stories about the media of the future. All were dystopian, and interestingly two of the four focused on the issue of personalization (as distinct from customization, see below), taken to the extreme: where you can view only the online content which has been deemed suitable for you, not by some Big Brother central state but the commercial forces of advertising and profiling.

In “News hacking is the new glue sniffing” by Laurie Penny, teenagers gather in a seedy dive to read the news: “not only the news that’s been tailored to their age, interests and background, but any news” - for example, that Tottenham has been under military occupation for two months, which is blocked if you have a London login. They hack the internet service to create open logins, which is a risky pursuit; “companies can and do sue users for loss of potential advertising revenue”.

In “Paper” by James Smythe, a man on the underground is reading his own (digital) Paper, which is feeding him news and gossip about the Oscars ceremony and trying to get him to buy a suit similar to the one worn by one of the actors. He sees a woman reading about an unfolding war on her own Paper, but he can find no trace of it in his own (although he finds “war” occurring in the names of TV shows and films, and a story about a fight between two women on a reality TV show). A message comes up: “Based on your social profile, we have predicted that these will not be interesting to you. Would you like to know more about best actor at last night’s Oscars?”

Generation Y, it seems, has no truck with the happy hippy utopian vision of the internet as a free space for (hedonistically) sexual expression or (politically) democratic protest. Some of us old ‘uns never believed it anyway, but the younger generation sees perhaps more clearly – despite, or perhaps because, being more immersed in online social media – that the digital world replicates all the power structures and social tensions of the physical, though amplified and on a larger scale. Let’s be careful out there, as they used to say in Hill Street Blues.

Note

“Personalisation” and “customisation” are similar and the words are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction. In usual usage, “customisation” is what you, the user, do to select the things you want; for example, you can “customise” the Toolbar in Microsoft Office so that it contains the icons you want to see most frequently. “Personalisation” is the system choosing what to put in front of you, based on what it knows (or thinks it knows) about your and what you want; targeted advertising or, more benignly, Amazon recommendations, are personalisation.

Why do people do postgraduate courses?

I saw a surprising statistic the other day: about the study motivation of postgraduate students. They were given a choice of saying that their motivation was (a) mainly employment / career, (b) mainly personal development, or (c) employment / career and personal development equally important.

Now the result needs to be taken with a large barrel of salt. The main focus of the investigation was something else entirely (about website resources for postgraduate students), and the number of responses was low (42 out of a sample of 300). But there's no obvious non-randomness to the respondents, and the results are (I think) still surprising. These were:

• Employment / career and personal development equally important: 18
• Mainly personal development: 14
• Mainly employment / career: 3

Now would you have guessed that only 3 respondents would say that their motivation was "mainly employment / career"? For several years now, since the UK's new funding regime for HE introduced much higher fees, my university (like others) has been striving to focus courses, qualifications and student support on career advancement, and presumably higher income - on the assumption that that is what will most motivate students and justify their investment in their study. But now I'm starting to doubt this. How can "personal development" really mean so much to postgraduate students that they are prepared to pay so many of thousands of pounds in fees?

Here's a dark thought. Postgraduate students, at least at my university, are overwhelmingly in mid-career, already engaged in professional practice, and one change which has affected professionals in all disciplines over the past decade or so is the increasing buraucratisation of their working lives. Tight performance management, inflexible reporting systems, and management by targets and strategic cascade have all combined to make professional work more like that of a white collar production line, so that it's harder for professionals to keep in touch with the reasons why they entered the profession in the first place. Those who think of themselves as creative in their professional practice find this particularly difficult (as this Dilbert cartoon about management obstruction of creativity illustrates).

Under such circumstances, what does a professional do? Leave and do something else? But usually there are mortgages to pay and children to feed. And most of the time the reasons for doing the job are still visible and salvageable - but they need support outside of anything which the workplace itself provides.

And perhaps that is where postgraduate study comes in: supporting "personal development" in the sense of reaffirming the professional's identity as someone who is good at their calling, who shares core values and standards with other co-professionals, and is more concerned about perfecting their practice than advancement in a management hierarchy, which will usually mean doing less of what they love and doing more of what they hate. So the return on investment for postgraduate study may be not so much about career advancement but career sustenance: not enabling students to get a better job, but to live with the one they have.

Seen and heard: February 2014

Articles and postings

• Dear Mr Gove: here is a manifesto for your education reforms – Michael Rosen’s "Letter from a Curious Parent" column in The Guardian, 4 February 2014. “I would like to offer you and your party a manifesto to help you push on with your education reforms…. . 2. We won't wait for schools or local authorities to decide if schools wish to be academies or not. We will abolish all power that local authorities have over education, apart from dealing with excluded pupils and pupils with special needs. The role of local authority education will be to absorb the pupils who the academies don't want to educate. This will enable academies to improve their exam results, while offering employment opportunities to retired army personnel…. 4. Once all schools are academies, these will continue to be overseen by the secretary of state. To assist him, he will commission firms to compete for the Regional Management of Academies, running the five areas of England. We expect to see reliable market leaders coming from the banking sector, football ownership and security firms with a strong ex-army presence on their boards…. 6. We are aiming for all schools to be above average by the second week of the next government.
• What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t – [citation needed] [sic!] blog, referenced in Mind Hacks blog. “For reasons I’m not really clear on, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance over the past few months; it’s everywhere in the blogosphere and media…. the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are…. [In fact] the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.”  
• Finished that ebook yet? Hang on, sorry, it keeps updating – John Naughton's Observer column 8.2.14 (referenced in his Memex1.1 blog). “A Kindle book, in contrast to a printed work, can be fluid, malleable – fungible almost. In the print world, we are accustomed to the idea of discrete editions of a text. But an ebook [can] have a new edition every month, or indeed every week. For fast-changing subjects (such as information technology) that might be very helpful – in which case the argument for physically printing such texts looks increasingly shaky. It will be amazing if, in 10 years' time, undergraduates will still be lugging round the astonishingly heavy textbooks that weigh down the rucksacks of today's students. For authors, the fact that it will technically be possible continually to update their books may be a mixed blessing. After all, one of the consolations of traditional authorship is that when a book is published, it's finished.”
• Heroin, addiction and free will – Mind Hacks blog. “The death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman has sparked some strong and seemingly contradictory responses. What these reactions show is that many people find it hard to think of addiction as being anything except either a choice or a loss of free will. The fact that addiction could involve an active choice to take drugs but still be utterly irresistible seems difficult for most people to fathom.”
• The Reciprocity Principle: Give Before You Take in Web Design – online article from Nielsen Norman Group. “The reciprocity principle says that people respond in kind to nice behavior. If you want your users to trust you with their information and come back to you repeatedly, plant the reciprocity seed by being nice to them upfront and minimizing their interaction cost. Ask as little of your users as possible. On the web and elsewhere, start by giving before taking, and people will reciprocate.”

Shows and events, books and games

The Monuments Men - film drama about the US Army team charged with locating and rescuing Nazi-looted art treasures during World War II. Nice statement about the importance of art and culture even (especially?) in wartime, and people's willingness to risk (and occasionally give) their lives to protect it. Mirroring the on-screen drama, George Clooney has assembled and directed a crack ensemble cast, including Matt Damon, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchette, and Jean Dujardin.

To The Moon - unusual adventure game, low on puzzles and high on narrative, in which two "memory-retrieval specialists" attend the bedside of a dying man to run through his life memories and reconstruct them so that he fulfils his desire: to go to the moon.

The Beiderbecke Connection - the final drama from my Christmas present box set, which I never watched to its conclusion when first transmitted in 1988. A beautiful ending, with Trevor and Jill driving off into the sunset with their firstborn, having shared with us the secret of living in a mixed-up world - the trick being to listen to the music, which for Trevor (and scriptwriter Alan Plater) means his beloved jazz. "You do know how to listen don't you?" says Jill. "You put your ears together and..." Shhhh.

Treasures in MK – fun exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery, of curious and historic artworks and objects from collections near the city, including a couple of Dürers, a set of Hogarths, a beautiful but smug looking Jacobean lady, some plaster busts and cartoons of the Beatles, and an Aston Martin DB4.