Killing Myself Softly

Killing Myself Softly

When I was in college we had music and we had TV, but there were no home computers, no internet, no Worldwide Web, and certainly no social media. There are many things that these advancements have provided us and I have generally been a big proponent of technological advance. I would go so far as to say that I have positioned myself until recently on the bleeding edge of that change. I was an early adopter of home computers. I never bought a computer kit from Popular Mechanics like some solder nerds might have, but I was right there with the Commodore 64 (mostly for gaming), the Osborne “portable” computer (which was the size of a sewing machine), the Apple I, the IBM PC, the Apple II, and the PC Jr. (A bust to be sure). I veered mostly toward PC products versus Apple products thanks to Microsoft’s success at penetrating the business computing market while Apple focused on the education and design markets. At that point I start losing track of the actual hardware I was getting except to say that I ran through multiple laptops and then specialty tablets, not to mention PDA’s and various handheld devices including the ubiquitous Blackberry, right up until the combination of the Apple iPad and the iPhone smart phone (which keeps getting progressively smarter) and which beats the hell out of the Google-driven Android (and yes, I did try that one too) came to dominate my tech platform. One might say that I wasted a ton of money by staying out ahead of the tech march, but I like to think that money was well-spent to keep me as a change agent both at work and at home.

But back in college, actually in 1973, Roberta Flack was singing soulfully about killing herself softly. When people listen to the lyrics of that hit song, written by a confusing array of songwriters, they naturally think that its about a woman pained by the harsh words of her ex-lover. But in actuality, it was inspired by a song by Don Mclean of American Pie fame, and speaks to the broader issue of sadness and all of the troubles of modern life that we must all endure day-by-day. It can be said that lots of things are killing us softly and that technology is very much at the heart of that. Nothing epitomizes modernity and change more than technology these days. In fact, it has been 260 years since the introduction of steam power ushered in the first Industrial Revolution and that was the beginning of what we tend to think of as technology (the guy who invented the wheel in Mesopotamia is 4,000 BC might choose to differ). The First Industrial Revolution lasted 110 years and was replaced by the Second Industrial Revolution in 1870 with the age of railroads, mass production and a lot of what we think about as the mechanization of the world. The Third Industrial Revolution or Information Age started in 1950 or a mere 80 years later and that is the computer era I mostly lived through in my lifetime. The acceleration of change is a well-known phenomenon and so the Fourth Industrial Revolution is said to have begun in 2010 or only 60 years later with the introduction of AI and robotics technology. Without getting too fancy with regression analysis, I can reasonably predict that by 2050 or 30 years from now, we will shift into the Fifth Industrial Revolution, which is predicted to be about the full collaboration of man and machine. Yikes. Terminator. We may be moving from killing me softly to killing me digitally.

My biggest concern about technology is not dissimilar to the concerns of many people. In fact, it seems to be a galvanizing issue that brings liberals and conservatives to the same place (pro or con for different reasons). That area is the domain of social media and the use of big data to manipulate commercial and social outcomes. Everything from the use of Facebook by dark Russian trolls in the 2016 election and since, to the recent hub-bub over TikTok and the gathering of data on 150 million Americans by China, is all cause for concern. There are concerns about the deleterious impact on young social media users that are getting addicted to these pervasive vehicles and the feeding of misinformation to the population under the banner of the First Amendment. The list of issues ranges from invasion of privacy to image shaming to providing a self-enforcing surreality of hateful opinions. And no one is immune from these concerns. This insidious social risk permeates in all directions, to the left and to the right and upward as well as downward in our class structure. This is a problem for everyone and the biggest conundrum is to find the balancing act between personal liberty and the common good. We seem to know how to do that with harmful pharmaceuticals (or at least how to TRY to do that). We know how to do that with dangerous mechanical vehicles of the Second Industrial Revolution. We can do that with some harmful weapons that are at the extreme of weaponry, and are wrestling to do so with others like assault rifles and handguns. But things of the Third Industrial Revolution are more problematic. Autocratic countries do things like restrict access to the internet and forbid the use of social media. That doesn’t happen in the home of the brave and land of the free. At least it hasn’t up until now.

One of the attributes of modern tech-based life that we all understand by now is that personalization is where it’s at in marketing. When I turn on Netflix or Prime, they do not ask who is viewing for no reason, they ask so they can deliver you movies and shows that you are likely to want. We tend to think this is a good thing given the proliferation of content choices. But I can tell you for a fact that the viewing selection can get very limited by personalization and the value of it becomes clearly oriented towards the content provider rather than the viewer. But that is in the entertainment content arena. What about in the broader content area served by the advertising model or product sales model? The concept works the same way, tracking and gathering the data of your internet searches and then serving up to you the content or products that you want. Now we have products that seem to perfectly match our interests and our recent purchases or searches, being shown to us no matter what we are browsing.

If you are like me, you find that the products being offered are inordinately interesting to you and address a specific need that you may not have even realized that you either had or that you articulated openly. I must say, it works very well and I am forever thinking I should buy what is being offered. Note that they do not offer the products on a price point basis and it may even require you to go through several gates to get to the product price. These are not price sales and the price elasticity is very high. But now I see there is a new study that shows that purchases made through social media offerings are not only among the worst value, but that they suffer from inadequate quality as well since they are rarely branded products.

So, in an economic sense, social media is now doing even more to harm us than we imagined. The data it has gathered on me has been turned against me to induce me to buy something inferior or at an exorbitant price. To my thinking, this has taken something I thought might have harmful effects and has now been proven to be specifically targeting to take advantage of me. My use of social media, while limited, is nothing but a matter of me killing myself softly and quietly.