TILT #37 Tech is math, humans are expensive

The many faces of the digital divide

As the world gets more automated, there’s a lot you can learn about companies by how they scale the human aspects of their products. Google has realized that dealing with “problematic” search results — like the high-ranking ones that say the Holocaust never happened — requires more than just algorithms. Librarians are not surprised.

I encourage people to give Google feedback often. It sucks that they’re crowdsourcing the data quality issues that they created, but if the feedback loop works, we’re all better off for it. I tried it.

Do these feedback loops work? Or is the end result supposed to make us feel better about giving feedback without getting us any closer to solving the actual problems we report?

During National Library week, Ivanka Trump said some things and then I (and many other librarians) said some things. You might have read about it.

Which, okay, not my best work. It is my most popular tweet, much to my chagrin. I had a nice 23 hour run of interesting (mostly supportive) interactions before someone called me a whore. This sort of thing is rare for me, fortunately. I blocked the person and reported the tweet, not expecting anything to happen because Twitter is historically terrible about doing anything to combat harassment and abuse.

And I was wrong. Twitter contacted me to let me know they’d received my complaint, and later that they’d locked the user’s account for violating their policies. Which, is something. Possibly too little too late, but something. Maybe only available to old school and/or verified people, but something. Worth noting, in any case.

I can not say enough good things about the power of blocking people, and tools like Block Together.

Second anecdote concerns Comcast, the cable company that everyone loves to hate. I am not a subscriber, but someone signed up using my email address. I kept getting “verify this email address” emails, a minor annoyance. This sort of thing happens to me not infrequently, usually there’s an unsubscribe or “I got this by mistake” link. Not this time. I emailed, called, and chatted with Comcast. Everyone said the same thing: “It can’t be done.” Then I decided to bug @ComcastCares the Twitter concierge service for aggrieved Comcasters. Within a few hours I got a phone call from a Tier Two tech who straightened it all out in a few minutes.

Which, whatever, sometimes the system works (or maybe just works for “people like me”). But! I also mentioned but did not @ Comcast in a later online discussion, this time about an older student who had come to drop-in time.

I did tell him about the library, but he mostly needed to learn to use his own laptop, with his home internet. @ComcastCares noticed this tweet and back-channelled me asking if they could help.

We spend so much time worrying about poor decisions by self-driving car companies and our appliances spying on us that we don’t stop to think that, for instance, a never-used account is a thing a proactive company could notice and try to do something about. They don’t have to wait to read about it on Twitter. App companies do this all the time.

Unlike apps however, it’s a significantly better deal for Comcast if someone pays for broadband and never uses it. When you pay for broadband, you’re not the product being sold, or are you?

I have a local friend who is Jeopardy-level intelligent but also pays over $30/month for an AOL account he never uses because he dreads the hassle of trying to deal with cancelling. AOL is legendary for making this difficult. Maybe that is why Mike Pence still uses his account?

Speaking of the digitally divided, a large scale look at AT&Ts service offerings in California found that the company prioritizes fiber deployment in wealthy neighborhoods while poorer and middle class neighborhoods have broadband that doesn’t even meet the definition of high speed anymore (as does yours truly, FYI).

Another recent study on Lifeline broadband subsidy projects look at the preferences of low-income consumers. They’d prefer to have more data download capacity rather than higher speeds, if they got to choose. And they would rather have wired in-home connections instead of device-specific aircards. (email me if you need the PDF)

Last digital divide story: I had a bad cold and was away from home. I went to a local walk-in MinuteClinic to see about getting some antibiotics. I found that I could “hold a place in line” via the website which actually let me skip ahead of people who were already there waiting, people who hadn’t used the website. I do not feel very comfortable about the choice I made to use this tool.

A few other things I think you might like to read this week:

• Books after the Death of the Book By Matthew Kirschenbaum — an absolutely fascinating look at the complexities of the object permanence of ebooks and how “books… are not what they used to be.”
• The rise of reading analytics and the emerging calculus of reader privacy in the digital world by Clifford Lynch — the tech that tracks reading, what do we know about it?
• A legal alternative to academic publishing paywalls by Wordshore — I mentioned Unpaywall in my Breakin’ the Law talk and a friend used it as a jumping off point for a MetaFilter post with a lot of good related stuff in it.

While I am talking about MetaFilter posts, I wrote one that is all about rappers freestyling over the words to the children’s book Llama Llama Red Pajama. Enjoy.

Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.