Euan Semple's Blog, page 91

The still, quiet, voice.

My main contribution to The Copenhagen Letter that I shared last week was the line that originally said "Make products that you would love people you love to use, and listen to the still quiet voice telling you to stop if you are not".

The challenge for developers and designers like the ones at the event is that they probably work for a company under pressure to repay investors, or satisfy shareholders, who expect them to build manipulative or addictive software because that is what attracts advertising revenue. Saying no is hard.

When doing workshops with people who work in communications of one sort or another most of them know the impact that bland, safe, impersonal "content" has on the networks they are part of and yet that is what their bosses expect them to pump out because it is safer than the unpredictability of reaching out to build real relationships. Doing otherwise is hard.

Whatever job we are in we usually know the right thing to do. That still quiet voice is longing to be heard. No one says it is easy, but we should get better at listening to it.

Thoughts for a Sunday.

My strongest memories of church are of hard, wooden pews and an incredibly itchy short trousered tweed suit. The combination was purgatory.

At University, singing in the chapel choir at St. Andrews, church was a place where you nursed hangovers and lusted over the sopranos sitting opposite.

But as I get older I find myself drawn to sitting in churches. The sense of centuries of people spending time thinking about life and its meaning, especially in small, rural, English village churches, creates an atmosphere of thoughtfulness and seriousness that I relish.

If I could just feel confident that I wouldn't be accosted by someone who believes in a beardy guy in the sky I might visit them more often.

The Copenhagen Letter

Last week I attended a great the event organised by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and Aydoğan Ali Schosswald, in Copenhagen. I met many really smart, really nice people there. Those new connections were enough reward in themselves but we had a greater purpose in coming together.

The focus of the event was the impact that the technology industry has on society and an aspiration to make it take more responsibility for the consequences.

Part of the event was held in the Enigma museum of Post and Communications in Copenhagen who had mounted an exhibit of various manifestos from history. Inspired by those examples The Copenhagen Letter is our attempt to hold ourselves accountable as a group to being more mindful of leaving the world a better place as a result of our work in technology and related professions.

If it resonates with you, and you work in a related field, please feel free to sign it.

#cphletter

On Facebook and dying.

I am currently listening to John O’Donahue reading his wonderful book Beauty. In the current chapter he is talking about the process of dying and his own attendance as a priest at the bedside of people during their last moments. The writing is all the more moving given that the writer died in his sleep last year at the young age of 52.

He talks of how removed we have become from death. How we hide death behind hospital doors and don’t discuss it in polite society. How this makes us if anything more terrified of our own deaths.

So what has all his got to do with Facebook? I have been struck recently by the number of friends who have written sensitively and movingly there about the death of a loved one. As someone whose parents are both in their eighties (though thankfully still in remarkably good health) I am ever more aware that the death of someone I care deeply about is something I will have to face.

I am grateful to those friends who have had the courage to share their experiences there on Facebook, and grateful to live in a time where we have platforms to share such experiences in ways that we might not otherwise.

Meetings—talking shops or changing the world?

I spend much of my working life, when I am not writing, in meetings of one sort or another. Meetings which others might describe as “talking shops”. The implied criticism in that phrase used to bother me— that all that mattered was taking action, that those who weren’t directly involved in some sort of activity were wasting their time.

It’s true. There are meetings that are a waste of time. More often than not they are the kinds of meetings that you forget why they are in the diary but go along anyway because they are a safe place to hide for a while.

But ideas are what change our world and those ideas take shape in meetings. Ideas determine what actions we take and why. Those ideas are generated, refined, and shared in meetings of whatever size from two people up to huge conferences.

The trick is to get better at working out which kind of meeting you’ve been asked to then being ruthless about not attending those that are a waste of time, and enthusiastically throwing your energy into the kind that might change the world.

Good intentions.

I can cope with marketing if the intention is to help me make better informed decisions about the things I want to buy. If the intention is to interrupt what I am doing to shout at me about shit I don’t remotely need my brain is getting better at filtering it out and not even noticing it.

If the intention of journalists is to hold the powerful to account and to explain the world better to me I will pay attention. If it is to churn out a daily list of scandals and things for me to be frightened about I stop reading newspapers or watching tv and radio news.

If your intention here is to have interesting and informed conversations that help us work out together how to make the world a better place then I’m up for it - even if I disagree with you. If your intention is to pick fights, dominate others, and bully my friends I am becoming more willing to use the unfriend button by the day.

I’m becoming more rigorous at working out intentions, both my own and others, because intentions matter. We all need to become more aware of them.

The end of civilisation as we know it?

As tools and services provided by companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon become key parts of the infrastructure of our lives they, and their respective Chief Executives, exert increasing influence on society.

How we see ourselves individually and collectively is shaped by their products. Our ability to do things is in our hands but their control. How we educate ourselves and understand the world is steered by them. How we stay healthy, get from one place to another, and even feed and clothe ourselves is each day more dependent on them.

We used to rely on our governments to ensure the provision of these critical aspects of our lives. Our governments are out of their depth and floundering.

Are we transitioning from the nation state to some other way of maintaining and supporting our societies? How do we feel about this? Is it inevitable? Could we stop it even if we wanted?

Boxes ticked

I worry when I hear “Oh yes, we’ve done social media. We have a very good team”.

It’s the second sentence that is revealing.

It’s not “Our staff are encouraged to talk about what we do and engage the public through their networks”.

It’s not “I love it. I love nothing better than rolling my sleeves up and having a bloody good conversation online with customers who care about what we do.”

It’s not “Our senior management and subject experts write great posts about their challenges and how they grapple with them. It helps them learn.”

It’s definitely not “We love the tension that social media creates between what we currently do and what we should be doing. It helps us see where we need to improve, holds us to account.”

The web is still held at arms length. It’s not how most businesses live and breathe. Boxes have been ticked, but there’s a long way to go.

Real men

Real men don’t get bent out of shape when women expect to be treated with respect and have the same opportunities as they do.

Real men don’t have tantrums when people who don’t happen to have the same skin colour as them expect to be able to live without fear of physical violence, or not to be considered further down the evolutionary scale.

And real men don’t care what other men do in their beds or with whom.

Some of the men who are currently throwing their toys out the pram need to grow a pair.

Mindlessness

Much is being made these days of the benefits of mindfulness, being present, noticing what is happening around you, living in this moment now rather than digging up old ones or fearing the ones yet to come.

But let’s face it, few of us achieve this ideal. For most of us our waking hours are usually mindless. We respond without thinking to what life throws at us based on what our parents taught us or what we see others around us doing. Conditioning kicks in before we get the chance to think for ourselves.

If we think at all we usually think what we feel we should think. Or even worse we do what we think we should do based on role models in film and television, or images drip fed to us by marketing teams since we were children.

We are asleep. We’ve been trained to be asleep. Waking up and asking awkward questions just causes trouble. Life is easier if we don’t question those in authority. But we risk sleepwalking into some pretty dystopian futures. We need to wake up.

Mindfulness is not just about some new age sense of well-being it is also about stepping back from mindlessness. About getting clear about what is happening in our lives right now, and what to do about it. This moment is the only chance we get to do something, everything else is mindless dreaming.