I once saw an illustration of how Englishmen viewed the future. A bewigged character from the eighteenth century imagined seeing his spitting image staring serenely back at him; a nineteenth century fat-cat industrialist saw a perfect reflection of himself, only many times bigger. But the twentieth-century Englishman's perplexed inquiry into what was around the corner found only a giant-sized question mark.
And here in the twenty-first century it has become commonplace that "the only constant is change." We have the old habit of hoping that the future will bring more of the same, albeit "new and improved", yet we keep finding that with change come unintended consequences.
Take Google, for example. It arrived like some sort of Messiah, offering us access to untold riches of information. And like a Pied Piper it led us children off to a land in the Cloud where we could store our entire digital lives and never have to worry again about filing things inside physical objects. Because Google had its own physical objects that we didn't need to bother our little heads about. All we had to do was allow ourselves to become advertising fodder, an "eyeball" for the companies who were paying the Piper.
People like me loved this new form of info-liberation, cutting out the gatekeepers and going direct to what you needed to know. Equally, storing all your personal data online always seemed infinitely safer than keeping it on hard drives which could either get lost or stolen, or as in my own case, accidentally erased with no hope of recovery.
As human beings seemed to get dimmer and less able to think for themselves, this form of self-service was the perfect solution. Faster, cheaper, without all the aggravation, and done from wherever in the world you happened to be. True freedom !
But then the giant question mark popped up again, staring us in the face. What happened when this new datopia didn't quite work out as planned ? What happened when, for example, you clicked the wrong button and accidentally deleted your entire Google Calendar, used as much as a journal as for simple diary entries? Or as friends of mine have found, when you found yourself locked out of your email account or had all of your YouTube videos frozen for no apparent reason ?
If only the world advanced without jettisoning things you took for granted in the past, you would at such times be able to call up customer services, speak to someone and sort it out. But we soon found with companies like Google that a bunch of geeks in California had neither an interest in nor a concern for the human dimension to such computer malfunctions.
As so often, I tried resorting to my status as a journalist to go where I could not as a mere customer, or more accurately a "number". I managed to get someone at Google's UK media relations department to "look into it and get back" to me. Six weeks later, when she had still not got back to me, I had a brief email exchange which demonstrated 1. her complete lack of interest in helping and 2. her and her Google colleagues' complete inability to understand why this kind of data loss might be so upsetting. During this time, I had started a new calendar and consigned my maybe three years of old calendar data to the waste bin of history.
Of course, I was by then far too hooked on Google to change my behavior but this jarring encounter with Google-the-uncaring-corporation left its mark. Some years later I found myself in the Palo Alto swimming pool of a man who claimed to be Google's first ever chief engineer, now comfortably retired at the ripe old age of 30-something. I told him what had happened and he simply said: "I would never trust online storage."
Yet the world has been moving increasingly into the Cloud. There are two things I would like to see, and have been wanting to see for a long time:
1. Geeks and self-service can only get you so far. In order to trust these people with our most personal and vital data, indeed our very memories, we need a new model in which those who wish to pay for some kind of "old-fashioned" customer service can do so. By this I mean access in times of emergency to an individual who can think outside the tick-box and give the sense that the company with which you trust so much of your life actually has a beating heart and does give a damn. Of course, this will almost certainly cost money. As a customer we can all make the judgement of whether we want and can afford to pay. I would have been happy to pay something just to use the basic Google service, and indeed do pay for things like extra online storage for photos.
This model, free self-service alongside a paid-for service, can apply to a myriad of other modern companies too, not just the ones founded by geeks.
2. Some years ago I floated the idea of an article asking what happens to our online data when we die ? No-one seemed very interested. I tried to get a comment or two from the likes of Google but they had nothing much to say: apparently it was a non-issue. But our online archives are becoming evermore vital to who we are and to how our family and friends will remember us. For some people, this data may have even more value to society and the world at large. In the old days, a deceased person's "papers" were often saved at the last minute, despite their wishes to have them burned (Kafka, Emily Dickinson etc.) Today, there is no need for any bonfire, just the split-second click of a button and an entire life can be erased. Maybe even the life of a geek with a brilliant, world-changing idea.
Then we really would be faced with a giant question mark.
Update: Just found this article on Google Calendar's other unresolved problems.
Update 2: Just read this recent article on the subject of digital legacies.
Update 3: September 21, 2011, 5am: Sam, I am desperately sorry: I have just accidentally deleted about 100 Youtube videos of you. Once again, your crying woke me up and I came here to the computer obviously not compos mentis enough to function responsibly. In an attempt to change all of your uploaded videos to "Unlisted" from "Public" (the iPhone's upload default was "Public" and until now there was no way to change them all in one go), I went through the 500-plus videos on the My Videos section of Youtube and clicked the multiple-highlight "change status" button. Unbelievably and unbearably, on one batch of videos I clicked "delete" instead of "Unlisted" and, despite the brief "Are you sure" warning, I went ahead anyway. Since I don't have a back-up of these videos I have instantantly erased a chunk of your documented life. There are still non-video photos - many - of the erased weeks but I am sitting here in shock, mouth dry. It is unbearable to know that I have done something so fatal and so stupid in the blink of an eye. Google, the owner of YouTube, has nothing more to say on the matter of such user errors, other than to inform you that such deletion is irreversible.
Update 4: Just received this response from Google UK's head of communications: "Hi Robert, Thanks for your email, and very sorry for the slow reply, I've been away and am catching up on messages. I'm afraid that as far as I'm aware, there's no way of getting the videos reinstated once you've deleted them. I totally understand how upsetting this situation is, and apologies for not being able to help you out." I appreciate the reply; I appreciate the empathy and the candour; but I don't appreciate Google's continued corporate indifference to this most human, rather than geeky, of areas. It seems to be a massive cultural blind spot, for all their brilliance.
Update 5: Facebook's policy on deceased people's profiles.
Update 6: digital hauntings.
Update 7: Well, finally Google is catching up with me.
And here in the twenty-first century it has become commonplace that "the only constant is change." We have the old habit of hoping that the future will bring more of the same, albeit "new and improved", yet we keep finding that with change come unintended consequences.
Take Google, for example. It arrived like some sort of Messiah, offering us access to untold riches of information. And like a Pied Piper it led us children off to a land in the Cloud where we could store our entire digital lives and never have to worry again about filing things inside physical objects. Because Google had its own physical objects that we didn't need to bother our little heads about. All we had to do was allow ourselves to become advertising fodder, an "eyeball" for the companies who were paying the Piper.
People like me loved this new form of info-liberation, cutting out the gatekeepers and going direct to what you needed to know. Equally, storing all your personal data online always seemed infinitely safer than keeping it on hard drives which could either get lost or stolen, or as in my own case, accidentally erased with no hope of recovery.
As human beings seemed to get dimmer and less able to think for themselves, this form of self-service was the perfect solution. Faster, cheaper, without all the aggravation, and done from wherever in the world you happened to be. True freedom !
But then the giant question mark popped up again, staring us in the face. What happened when this new datopia didn't quite work out as planned ? What happened when, for example, you clicked the wrong button and accidentally deleted your entire Google Calendar, used as much as a journal as for simple diary entries? Or as friends of mine have found, when you found yourself locked out of your email account or had all of your YouTube videos frozen for no apparent reason ?
If only the world advanced without jettisoning things you took for granted in the past, you would at such times be able to call up customer services, speak to someone and sort it out. But we soon found with companies like Google that a bunch of geeks in California had neither an interest in nor a concern for the human dimension to such computer malfunctions.
As so often, I tried resorting to my status as a journalist to go where I could not as a mere customer, or more accurately a "number". I managed to get someone at Google's UK media relations department to "look into it and get back" to me. Six weeks later, when she had still not got back to me, I had a brief email exchange which demonstrated 1. her complete lack of interest in helping and 2. her and her Google colleagues' complete inability to understand why this kind of data loss might be so upsetting. During this time, I had started a new calendar and consigned my maybe three years of old calendar data to the waste bin of history.
Of course, I was by then far too hooked on Google to change my behavior but this jarring encounter with Google-the-uncaring-corporation left its mark. Some years later I found myself in the Palo Alto swimming pool of a man who claimed to be Google's first ever chief engineer, now comfortably retired at the ripe old age of 30-something. I told him what had happened and he simply said: "I would never trust online storage."
Yet the world has been moving increasingly into the Cloud. There are two things I would like to see, and have been wanting to see for a long time:
1. Geeks and self-service can only get you so far. In order to trust these people with our most personal and vital data, indeed our very memories, we need a new model in which those who wish to pay for some kind of "old-fashioned" customer service can do so. By this I mean access in times of emergency to an individual who can think outside the tick-box and give the sense that the company with which you trust so much of your life actually has a beating heart and does give a damn. Of course, this will almost certainly cost money. As a customer we can all make the judgement of whether we want and can afford to pay. I would have been happy to pay something just to use the basic Google service, and indeed do pay for things like extra online storage for photos.
This model, free self-service alongside a paid-for service, can apply to a myriad of other modern companies too, not just the ones founded by geeks.
2. Some years ago I floated the idea of an article asking what happens to our online data when we die ? No-one seemed very interested. I tried to get a comment or two from the likes of Google but they had nothing much to say: apparently it was a non-issue. But our online archives are becoming evermore vital to who we are and to how our family and friends will remember us. For some people, this data may have even more value to society and the world at large. In the old days, a deceased person's "papers" were often saved at the last minute, despite their wishes to have them burned (Kafka, Emily Dickinson etc.) Today, there is no need for any bonfire, just the split-second click of a button and an entire life can be erased. Maybe even the life of a geek with a brilliant, world-changing idea.
Then we really would be faced with a giant question mark.
Update: Just found this article on Google Calendar's other unresolved problems.
Update 2: Just read this recent article on the subject of digital legacies.
Update 3: September 21, 2011, 5am: Sam, I am desperately sorry: I have just accidentally deleted about 100 Youtube videos of you. Once again, your crying woke me up and I came here to the computer obviously not compos mentis enough to function responsibly. In an attempt to change all of your uploaded videos to "Unlisted" from "Public" (the iPhone's upload default was "Public" and until now there was no way to change them all in one go), I went through the 500-plus videos on the My Videos section of Youtube and clicked the multiple-highlight "change status" button. Unbelievably and unbearably, on one batch of videos I clicked "delete" instead of "Unlisted" and, despite the brief "Are you sure" warning, I went ahead anyway. Since I don't have a back-up of these videos I have instantantly erased a chunk of your documented life. There are still non-video photos - many - of the erased weeks but I am sitting here in shock, mouth dry. It is unbearable to know that I have done something so fatal and so stupid in the blink of an eye. Google, the owner of YouTube, has nothing more to say on the matter of such user errors, other than to inform you that such deletion is irreversible.
Update 4: Just received this response from Google UK's head of communications: "Hi Robert, Thanks for your email, and very sorry for the slow reply, I've been away and am catching up on messages. I'm afraid that as far as I'm aware, there's no way of getting the videos reinstated once you've deleted them. I totally understand how upsetting this situation is, and apologies for not being able to help you out." I appreciate the reply; I appreciate the empathy and the candour; but I don't appreciate Google's continued corporate indifference to this most human, rather than geeky, of areas. It seems to be a massive cultural blind spot, for all their brilliance.
Update 5: Facebook's policy on deceased people's profiles.
Update 6: digital hauntings.
Update 7: Well, finally Google is catching up with me.
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