What struck your imagination at CES, the much anticipated trade show for leading edge developments this year?
Our head of digital Sarah Treliving felt that overall whilst there’s lots of products on show that do cool stuff at the show, only a very few of them feel like they’ve been designed for a current or urgent consumer problem.
Aside from many many more ways to use Amazon’s Alexa there seemed many fine gadgets on display to play with. Otherwise tech developments for healthcare or security needs received attention.
Products that caught my eye in the reports included: A clothes folding robot (might be nice). A TV that disappears (not an immediate requirement). A strap that turns your finger into a phone (hmm). The development of 3d printers for body parts (will be immensely important). Robot doctors and connected hearing aids (will be revolutionary where needed). Jeans that connect to your smartphone and vibrate to give you directions might seem trivial, but could actually really be useful for vulnerable people who don’t want to publicise that they don’t know where they’re going (eg young women on their way to a club late at night). Of course there’s still lots of news about smart fridges.
One commentator said this about CES overall: “Silicon Valley innovation seems to be focussed on one problem which is ‘what my mother is no longer doing for me…. There’s a culture of rich twenty-something young men imaging a world that the rest of us might not want to live in”.
Dr Jack Stilgoe, from UCL, went on to critique developers for putting too much of a focus on how to get the laundry sorted or food delivered and not enough on real problems. The truth is that predicting the future is not a precise business and that most of our lives are shaped by old tech still. There needs to be a balance. A balance between hanging on to the old and putting off change. Some people said that whilst CES was exciting they had to sit in an old fashioned queue to try the VR tech and that the vending machines were so old school that they didn’t work. Not that impressive for a conference that holds the promise of solving real problems in the world.
If more women were involved with the business of CES then would this help address the balance? After all the lion’s share of overall consumer purchasing decisions is made by women.
As my book The Glass Wall points out there’s plenty of statistical proof that businesses do better with more women at senior levels.
“There were precious few women at the conference, I’d say less than 5% of attendees and I was stared at non-stop”, said one of the few women attendees at CES 2017.
Sounds like old school Glass Walls are abundant in this conference that is meant to be future facing.
Fake news, back to the bad old days
Friday, January 27th, 2017“The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals the largest-ever drop in trust across the institutions of government, business, media and NGOs. Trust in media (43 percent) fell precipitously and is at all-time lows in 17 countries”
Fake news sells.
It’s a cliché that most people don’t read past the headline of any story. One of the consequences of the current business model online where views drives income is that anything that grabs attention for a few seconds is going to make that publisher money.
So you get stories written, and headlines generated, to drive income. Of course you do. In many cases the drive for views is overriding the necessity for facts to be remotely involved in the story.
Recently Facebook have announced that they are taking measures to counter the spread of fake news. New whistle blowing features are being rolled out where you can flag a story you think might be false. They’ve also announced that they aren’t just leaving it up to readers or to the algorithm. They are going to work with independent fact checkers. This is a big change for an organisation that insists that it is a tech company not a media owner.
Fake news that was widely believed includes the story about the Pope endorsing Trump for president. Or the story about fraudulent ballots being found in a warehouse in Ohio intended to be counted along with real votes for Clinton.
As real life stories, particularly in the realm of politics, have become more bizarre, it has become harder to tell the fake ones apart.
I read recently that many fake news stories can be traced to a small town in Macedonia where teenagers are writing them to generate cash. Hard to fact check… easy, so easy to believe… impossible to disprove.
Does fake news matter?
Fact checking is a relatively recent thing. For most of the previous millennium news did not go through editorial independent checks, there was no New Yorker, Washington Post or BBC to check the facts and look for a second or third source and if you were unlucky enough to be the victim of fake news then it was down to the courts to intervene, and that often meant you didn’t get justice.
In his Histories of Social Media, author and consultant Jonathan Salem Baskin predicted the current state of affairs and fake news. He pointed out that social media was nothing new. For most of history news was spread by word of mouth alone, and the truth was often just what was most believable. Many of his stories are grim.
Take the Salem Witch events in 17th century where the accusations of two children were believed and led to the eventual execution of 20 people.
Or the Blood Libel which contributed to widespread anti-Semitism and pogroms.
When any publisher allows a story to circulate because it drives views and shares and does not check the facts it takes us a step closer to those bad old days.
It is incumbent on all publishers, whether media owners or tech companies, to take responsibility for the spread of fake news. Facebook is to be congratulated for its move towards editorial fact checking. Twitter Co founder Biz Stone is installing a Trust button on new start up Jelly. Those publishers that call themselves premium news sources must now prove that they too can sort the wheat from the chaff, the fake news from the facts, the truthiness from the truth to stop the history of social media becoming the future for us all.
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