How technology is changing the face of social capital and why fewer people should care about Privacy… And Prisma!
“It’s not that we use technology, we live technology.”
— Godfrey Reggio
I read, write, and live technology. Yes, you read that right. I don’t use technology. I live technology. And so do you. You may not realize it but you do. No amount of complaining and worrying is going to change that. Our social capital has changed and will continue to change thanks to technology and the Science behind that technology.
I see a lot of people worrying about advancements in technology and claiming that robots will take away our jobs. Every time I hear this argument I facepalm cerebrally. Which jobs are you referring to? Those that don’t exist yet? How many digital marketers, bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers actually knew growing up that they were going to be making a living doing what they do? Almost none of them. Yet the complaining is incessant.
These people who complain have the exact same understanding of the current world as the people who complained about Rock and Roll and the advent of ODI cricket when our parents were growing up. There is a chasm between them and the likes of me. They perceive technology to have a few useful applications and a few terrible ones. Unfortunately for them, unless they change their minds they are going to be part of the next generation gap.
Harvard versus Treehouse
The social capital I refer to used to be very different 20 years ago than it is today. Back in the day when someone said they went to Harvard Business School, you and I were supposed to say “Wow! That is awesome!” How many people care about that stuff today? Fewer people than any other time in history care about which college or university you went to. Even fewer people will care about it in future. More people now care about what you actually know than what your college degree says you know. It’s a changing social dynamic.
The need for college education to make a career in the tech industry alone went out of the window over a decade ago. People who didn’t go to school or college have built some of the most important companies in the world. If you find yourself in a crappy job even after 4 years of college, what exactly has your college degree achieved?
If you are a career-pessimist and believe that the incremental grind is the only way to eventually make a good living then why not invest in skill acquisition for a few months and land yourself that same crappy job? Why not fail faster, learn quicker, and move up the ladder if that is how you feel careers should progress? That is exactly what millions around the world do now.
I know dozens of people who prefer Treehouse over joining a college that will cost them $US50,000 to acquire the same set of skills. High quality tech education does not cost a fortune anymore. A kid working a part-time job at McDonald’s can acquire the same skills for $US400. The social capital in education has changed forever and the sooner you realize it the better your chances of leading a good life will be.
What it means to own things is changing
The ownership trends are changing worldwide. A number of studies have shown that millennials increasingly prefer not owning a car. This is in part because of the rise of Uber and its clones worldwide. As it turns out owning a car is not as liberating as being driven to wherever one wants to go at the push of a button.
While this may seem too futuristic to those who aren’t in touch with the recent advancements in transportation technology the fact is that in the next 2 decades alone public transportation is about to change forever. Take for example, the Hyperloop, widely regarded as the fifth mode of transportation, is no more a distant dream and is actually more likely to see the light of the day in countries like India, China, and Indonesia before the US and Canada because of the urgent need of solving the broken public transportation problem in these countries.
As public transportation improves beyond recognition (compared to the current standards) owning a car that runs on fuel that the earth is sure to run out of someday will increasingly seem less important. I am not talking about 2050. More like 2025–2030.
In my own short lifetime I have already witnessed a global financial crisis that changed the world, a few years ago. In the current economic scenario unfolding around the world (read Brexit and Grexit) it is not unlikely that I may witness markets collapse and banks go bankrupt multiple times in the next decade or so. This is something that millennials take seriously, especially in developed or advanced countries.
The rate of house ownership is consistently higher in less-developed countries. This is an indication that prosperity and social status in more developed societies around the world are now perceived differently. The social capital based around ownership trends is changing, one demographic at a time.
Welcome to the future! Privacy is no longer a choice
Another great fear among those who are skeptical of the technological advances our species is making is the fear of privacy. While privacy concerns are common in this day and age, what people don’t seem to realize is — this is where we are headed.
Concerns over privacy, or the lack of it, seem like a growing trend. But my take on this is as following: You can like it. You can hate it. You can start campaigns against it. You are not going to be able to stop it.
Do the positive connotations associated with privacy trump the negative connotations? From where I see it, the answer is ‘yes’ and even if I am wrong I do not have a choice. Neither do you. So why not embrace it?
The problem with the current generation of privacy activists is in one blunt statement — they don’t get that it’s not a choice. We are headed towards a world that will be connected to an extent that not being connected will bring you more harm than good.
Wearable computing and Internet of Things are just two of the many examples that will require large sets of data about you to be able to serve you better. The more information you pass onto your Fitbit device the better it may be able to evaluate you. Or at least the next generation of activity trackers will certainly be able to evaluate you better.
While some people seem to freak out at the very thought of their bosses finding out about their social lives because their Facebook privacy settings somehow failed them, many others share the most private information about themselves without hesitation. Social validation has become a personality trait.
Your photos on Facebook and Instagram must get a certain number of likes for you to feel socially validated. Has it really occurred to the concerned online privacy advocates that this societal phenomenon is not going away?
In fact it can only grow with time and with the advent of Virtual and Augmented Reality manifest itself in ways that they cannot begin to fathom. Why else do you think Pokemon Go is the biggest story on the Internet at the time of this writing?
A shift in the way privacy is perceived is the need of the hour. And the only way forward is embracing it and not fighting a losing battle. I will repeat: we do not have a choice. We are in the midst of a semi-connected world that is about to change forever thanks to technology. The social capital around the lack of privacy has changed and those who do not care about it will be more empowered than those who care. The power dynamics in our society is changing.
I don’t want privacy. Do you?
It doesn’t matter if you do. And that’s the point.
Stop caring about Prisma. It’s irrelevant.
In the last 5 days the iPhone app Prisma has flooded my Facebook feed. Hundreds have posted their Prisma selfies. And some have claimed it is the coolest thing ever. The problem with every ‘coolest thing ever’ is that it doesn’t remain cool forever. If you are the man-child impressed by art filters on the 1000th popular photo app to launch in less than half a decade, you have no clue what the next big thing really is.
Prisma is irrelevant. Its metadata is not.
This further expands on the privacy argument I made earlier. How do we decide what’s really relevant? A trillion photos? Or the tags on photos that decide who sees which photo and who may be interested in seeing some other photos? Anyone familiar with data analytics will tell you that the only thing that counts is the interpretation of data. The interpretation of data is more important than the data itself.
We already have great everyday solutions that help us make better decisions. When we want to go on a vacation, airbnb is a nifty solution. To swiftly book tickets to a movie in India, we turn to book my show. Want to buy a new smartphone and don’t want to brave the traffic just to determine which phone fits your definition of a best buy? Worry not. iSpyPrice to the rescue.
But what if we could take all the data that these products and services offer and interpret them in such a way that the same data becomes far more relevant? For example, what if airbnb knew exactly the kind of stay you would prefer on a vacation in Spain? What if book my show could suggest the 3 best movies as per your taste or current mood? What if iSpyPrice could give you a list of the 5 best smartphones that you could choose from in your budget? All of these could be predictive analysis based features that would work based on the previous and ongoing inputs shared by you in a far more connected world than it is today.
Consider fitness trackers again. How useful do you think they are at the moment? If you have used them chances are you would say they are pretty useful. Now consider marrying data obtained from your Fitbit with another system that interprets that data. The information that you took 10,000 steps last week does not explain how it affected your cardio, or your back, or the muscles in your left thigh.
The marriage of healthcare and tech is still in its early days. Fitbit is version 1. Version 2 will see data meeting its interpretation and actually helping people make life changing and often life saving decisions.
So instead of cheering that 1000th photo filter app, how about you focus on cheering that one nanotechnology start-up that will be able to bring about some real social value to the table!
The technological advances that are about to enter our drawing rooms will continue to change the way we live. Technology will affect us in ways that we currently cannot comprehend. Our social capital will either evolve or devolve depending on how we perceive technology as a society.
Start living technology. And do it now.
