The Changing Face of Value

Some thoughts before a panel discussion at the British Academy

“The question persists and indeed grows whether the computer makes it easier or harder for human beings to know who they really are, to identify their real problems, to respond more fully to beauty, to place adequate value on life, and to make their world safer than it is now.” — Norman Cousins, The Poet and the Computer, 1966[1]

Mary Meeker pointed out in 2013’s digital trend report “people used to dance at concerts, now they video, click, share, tweet. The amount of global digital information created and shared — from documents to pictures to tweets — grew 9x in five years (2006-2011).”[2] Watching a live concert through the screen of a smartphone might suggest we value sharing an experience with our digital network above being solely immersed in it. As citizens in a connected society we often place value on contributing to our network in it’s many forms and, when we aren’t where the action’s at, we value the network’s ability to always inform us. Human values “guide our actions, judgements and decisions, and are fundamental to what makes us human” (Being Human, 2008[3]). The more our lives depend on technology, the more embedded it becomes in our decision-making processes and part of tools we use for action. Whilst shopping online it is simple to sort products by price, perhaps encouraging people to artificially place more value on this metric than they may have placed in a physical store where this information is less transparent. The Internet has accelerated the value we place on ‘always on’ connectivity. A recent viral image showed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with ‘wifi’ as the new base of the triangle. Constant connectivity has become of personal value, and this is being driven by technology.

Through our interaction with it, technology promotes and dismisses different human values.

“When we design and implement computer technologies, we focus on making the machine work — reliably, efficiently, and correctly. Rarely do we focus on human values. Perhaps we believe in value-neutral technology. Perhaps we believe that issues of value belong only to social scientist, philosophers, or policy makers. Neither belief is correct. In their work, system designers necessarily impart social and moral values” (Human values and the Design of Computer Technology, 1997).

It would be difficult to keep up with how and who’s values technology system designers are imparting, due to the speed at which new technological systems and functions are designed and implemented in many cultures and communities all over the world. Human values such as freedom of speech and a right to privacy are not an obvious part of the technology design process and some might say are being forfeited by databases and computer systems everyday.

Technology creates new values in a new context. Two growing in prominence are ‘authenticity’ and ‘openness’. In Pine & Gilmore’s 2007 book Authenticity: What consumer’s really want they set out how consumers determine the value of their paid-for experiences. The authenticity of the experience is of ever-increasing importance in digital communities. Branding and advertising campaigns now focus more on real-life actions rather than words, doing rather than saying. The live streaming of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of earth’s atmosphere represents the pinnacle of a brand communicating through authentic action rather than the company’s current tagline, in this case, ‘Red Bull gives you wings’. Genuine experiences and crowd participation can lead quickly to validation in a hyper connected world.

Underpinning authenticity is a larger emerging technology driven value: Openness. Open data, for example, can lead to enhanced democracy of information and better decision-making. Adam Greenfield author of the book ‘Everyware’ stated in an interview earlier this year: “I still believe strongly in openness both as a technical provision and as an ethos.”[4] As the Internet starts to infiltrate into the fabric of our daily lives, openness will become a currency for trust, open information can be verified and checked by many, and closed information cannot.

Openness in technology is also important for how we perceive the currently ‘dumb’ physical world. Google glass and other augmented reality devices show us information overlaid on our environment. Although this technology is currently in its infancy, the choice of information channels provided in an augmented world could fundamentally change human judgement. It is important that information technology, such as Glass, be customisable and calibrated by users to reflect their human values, as it will impact a large number of actions and decisions.

Through new approaches to software, different sets of personal values can be designed into technology experiences, embracing diversity of decision and allowing for enhanced choice making. For example, as a society we value individual freedom, but at some point in our lifetime we have probably bought a piece of clothing made by a slave. Connectivity could enhance our knowledge to the extent that we could verify whether a slave likely made any product or not.

Over the past six-months I have been working with a team on a project we call Provenance. Provenance looks into the way we shop and empowers the user to curate from a wider range of metrics than price and brand in their decision making process. The project is based on Open Product Data — the largest set of open data about consumer products in the world. Open Product Data aims to be a constant source of open, crowd and expert verified information that is freely available. This is overseen and managed by the not-for-profit organization the Open Knowledge Foundation. The crowd and the crowd’s value on contributing to their network and in receiving information from it will drive Open Product Data’s development and accuracy.

I am now in the process of researching the potential of enhanced information, like Open Product Data, to better align how we browse physical products on the Internet and in real life. I believe technology will allow us to act directly on our personal and cultural values through enhanced information and smarter actions.