Every so often we’re reminded of how quickly digital technology has embedded itself in our lives.
Nora Young’s reminder fell out of the Sicilian sky last year, as the vacationing host of CBC Radio’s Spark enjoyed a rural drive on the Mediterranean island.
“I’m looking at the map and navigating with Google, which is using cellular internet, and I’m going, ‘This thing is so slow!’” Young said. “I mean, how ridiculous is that? I’m in the middle of nowhere in rural Sicily, and I’m upset because it’s slow; that I am not getting satellites to tell me exactly where my vehicle is in real time.”
It was a small, fleeting and personal illustration of what Young explores in public each week on Spark; namely, the way technology and culture interact and influence one another.
On April 10, Young will bring her insights to Communitech’s annual Tech Leadership Conference as one of three keynote speakers, joining news-aggregating pioneer Arianna Huffington and author Neil Pasricha, whose The Book of Awesome is an international bestseller.
Young’s appearance in Waterloo Region will coincide with the release of her new book, The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us.
I caught up with Young at the CBC’s national headquarters in Toronto recently.
Q – Let’s start with your bullet-point bio.
A – I grew up in Toronto in the suburbs, in Don Mills, and for a long time I knew that I was interested in journalism. I also knew for quite a long time that I was interested in technology as it applies to culture.
This was a long time ago, so before there was this sense in which technology was so cultural, in the way we naturally take for granted that it is.
So, I studied technology mostly from a political and philosophical point of view, and after I finished school, started stringing for CBC for a show called Brand X, which I loved dearly, but has long, long since gone off the air.
From there, the same people who produced that show started Definitely Not the Opera the following year, and I auditioned to be the host of that, and got the job with very little experience. I did a lot of learning on the job, sometimes painfully.
I did that for eight years; then I had decided I’d had enough, so I left CBC formally, though I continued to do a lot of work for CBC.
And then, around early 2007, I had the idea for Spark, and I approached [executives] Jennifer McGuire and Chris Boyce at CBC. They were into it, so we made a pilot and proceeded from there.
Q – You have a new book coming out on April 10, the same day you’ll be appearing at Communitech’s Tech Leadership Conference. What prompted you to write this particular book?
A – One of the things we do on Spark, without blowing my own horn too much, that I think I have a knack for is seeing trends that are nascent, that seem like they are connected to other nascent trends, and pulling them together.
I started to notice a while ago that there was this trend towards self-tracking, whether it was people wearing pedometers, or life caching, or checking in on location-based services; all these different kinds of ways in which we’re providing this documentation of our own lives, whether it’s because we want to accomplish a goal, or get fit, or whether it’s just a desire to keep track of what we’re doing and how we’re spending our time.
I could see that happening in a lot of different places, and I thought, ‘There’s something interesting going on there,’ and some interesting combination of how the technology is facilitating that in a way that is a lot easier than in the old days of keeping a paper-and-pen diary.
But also there’s something going on culturally, about why we want to do that.
So I pitched the book and started working on it, and then I started to see that maybe there’s an interesting parallel going on here. At the personal level, we’re spitting out all this data, but then at the cultural level, we’re starting to do the same kinds of things, whether that’s by aggregating all that data that people are putting out there, or whether that’s the way we’re starting to see sensors dispersed through the environment that are collecting data about how things are being used.
So, at the same time that we’re getting this data map – this personal, digital doppelganger of our everyday lives; how we’re spending our time; what we think about things – we’re starting to get a picture at a social level of how the city, the community, is being used.
And so I started to track where some of the really interesting research is being done in this area, especially at MIT, but also to think about what are some of the downsides about this; what does the data tell us versus what we think it tells us; how easy is it to misread that information, and so forth.
So that’s really why I wanted to write the book. It just seemed to me it brought together a lot of interesting things that are going on in the culture.
I have to say that I probably could have written three books about it instead of one; I mean, it’s a very big overview, but my hope is really that it’s part of an ongoing series of conversations that are going on around that area, and around how we use all this information, and how we use it for good while protecting people’s privacy and things like that.
Q – You’ve been hanging around this intersection of tech and culture for a long time now. What is it about that intersection that has grabbed and held your interest in such a big way?
A – I think partly it’s that I feel like there’s a niche there for that; I mean, there’s a lot of good reporting on security issues; there’s a lot of good reporting on the business side of tech; there’s a lot of good product reviews. But it seemed to me that there was a whole area around how the technology is shaping the culture, and vice-versa, that wasn’t really being covered.
And I think, in a way, that it’s not been covered because of an artifact of journalism. I mean, you know this as a journalist, that we have these kinds of areas – is it a business story? Is it a lifestyle story? Is it a front-page news story?
But there’s a whole lot of life stuff that doesn’t fit into those categories, and that, to me, was really interesting.
I also think that, during periods of extraordinary dynamism and innovation, as we are in now, this is a unique opportunity to really shape the tools, as they shape us.
People often will say, ‘Oh, I don’t use technology’ or ‘I don’t like technology.’ What they mean by that is, ‘I don’t use or like the latest technology that I’m not comfortable with’, but you know, we all use chairs, we all use pens. Technology is all around us, and the thing is, it just becomes invisible to us after we are so familiar with it.
So, this time when we’re all thinking about the social norms governing how we use all these new technologies is the time when we can have an influence, and an open discussion.
The internet has made the ability to have that discussion across boundaries easier than ever. So, you can now have tinkerers talking to researchers, and startups talking to academics, and regular people talking to everybody in a way that I think is very exciting.
Q – Would you say your general view of that intersection of technology and culture is positive? Skeptical? Neither? Both?
A – Neither and both.
One of the problems with technology journalism, and the current culture around technology in general, is that it tends to really break down into technophiles and technophobes. I think there’s a tendency to say that if you’re raising questions about how technology is used, you’re somehow afraid of the technology, or you’re a Luddite or whatever.
But I think that the reality is a lot more nuanced than that.
What I find exciting right now is that there’s so much going on, and it’s going on at such a dispersed and non-hierarchical level, that there’s a lot more potential for really exciting, interesting things to come out.
It’s not just being driven by the IBMs or the Microsofts or whoever – not to demonize them – but it’s not necessarily being driven by these giant corporations or giant research institutions. It’s being dispersed broadly.
Q – And driven by the people using the technology, and maybe in ways that the innovator didn’t anticipate?
A – Yes, which I think has always happened; it’s just that now we have a little bit more of a feedback loop in terms of how users’ use is affecting how things develop.
So I would say there’s more reason to be optimistic about things now than there has been, but we also are facing some very hard challenges, and I’m definitely not a gadget-loving, starry-eyed technophile.
Q – Keeping up with what’s going on in the general world, let alone the tech world, seems to be more and more difficult just given the sheer volume of information and the non-stop news cycle we’re living in. What’s your secret to staying on top of what’s happening in such a diffuse and dynamic field?
A – I think the first thing is, you can never be on top of everything.
It’s my full-time job, and I’m not on top of everything.
It’s very challenging.
You’re always at the moment where you’re going to be the person who hasn’t seen the ‘David after the dentist’ viral video or whatever. You just can’t be on top of everything.
What I try to do is go through things with a really open mind and just have things set on that idea of making connections across things, and seeing how little things are related to other things.
That’s my tool for trying to make sense of what I’m seeing around me, so that it’s not all these totally random, disconnected things.
I have actually been really responding by trying to curate my sources of information more carefully for the same reason; it’s just overwhelming otherwise.
For instance, one of my Twitter lists is the Spark guest list. So, if there are people who are interesting and innovative that caused us to have them on the show in the first place, they’re probably tweeting about really interesting things. That’s a feed I always check and there’s always interesting things going on there.
Q – Your journalism often takes a global perspective. How would you view Canada’s place in the broader tech world right now?
A – One of the things we took as a given going into making Spark was that our Spark world was going to be very flat.
So, that might mean that for one story we’re talking to somebody in Vancouver, and the next story we’re talking to somebody in Copenhagen.
The world of innovation just is very flat right now.
That said, one of the goals that I have for Spark, and I think one that my colleagues share, is to do a better job of covering the Canadian tech scene.
Because we’re trying to work in very big trends, sometimes we don’t always see what’s going on right in our own backyard.
But in the same way that we were talking about before, I do think that the world is much flatter now, and you don’t necessarily have to be in Silicon Valley to be doing that.
We did a piece recently on Spark about creating the next Silicon Valley and whether that’s even possible to do. One of my guests was making the point that the real action happens when you’re able to make connections with other centres.
So, it’s partly about having a place, a real location where people can get together and where there’s some kind of energy that comes out of people bumping shoulders.
But it’s also about recognizing that you can make connections across geography, with people in other kinds of centres.
Q – What do you think the current explosion in startup activity says about the state of the world today?
A – Big question.
I think, on the positive side, it shows how much space there is for innovation and all of those kinds of things we’ve been talking about; about the barriers being lowered.
On the negative side – and this is what I think is going to be the thing in the future – is that it’s fine to say we have a million different location-based services or whatever, but I think the real question is, how do you create things that are actually meaningful to people?
If we’re at the stage now where it can be your full-time job to try and keep up with technology, and you’re having trouble keeping up with it, this is just the beginning of where we’re going.
And I think that’s the question for anybody who’s in a startup. Unless you can really answer the question of not only is there a use case for this, but is it actually going to be meaningful for people – I think that’s where the real energy is going to be in the future, around creating meaning, and deep meaning, and loyalty for people, just because there’s such a crazy proliferation of services.
Q – How much of a techie are you in your life away from work? Are you hopelessly addicted to gadgets? Do you ever manage to completely shut off?
A – I really want to get away from the relentless addiction to the upgrade; I think it’s really a problem. And I think that, as we live through the app revolution, there’s really no reason to keep throwing out our hardware.
So, I’m not really addicted to the latest gadgets. I’m sort of addicted to the latest applications and the latest online services.
It’s a bit of an occupational hazard, I suppose, because I have to check out everything, but I would say my single life’s challenge is in disconnecting and getting beyond the distractions of the digital. I think that’s a huge challenge for me.
That was another reason why I wanted to write the book, because I think it’s a problem that a lot of people have.
I have had periods where I have successfully unplugged, but they come fewer now. It used to be if you would go on vacation and go to Europe or wherever, you would just do without; you’d be figuring out how to use a weird payphone and the technology was kind of a pain in the neck to figure out, so there wasn’t an overwhelming incentive.
But now it’s so simple.
I had the experience last year of being in rural Sicily, and I was really in the middle of nowhere. And we’re driving around and there’s nothing but olive trees and whatever, and it’s very hilly terrain, and I’m looking at the map and navigating with Google, which is using cellular internet, and I’m going, ‘This thing is so slow!’
I mean, how ridiculous is that? I’m in the middle of nowhere in rural Sicily, and I’m upset because it’s slow, that I am not getting satellites to tell me exactly where my vehicle is in real time.
You can get so used to that that you forget, but I do think it’s really important to do that, and protect times when you’re not connected to things.
Q – I was away recently and I took this smartphone with me, not because anyone told me to, but because I had a nagging feeling that if I totally disconnected, there would be something waiting for me when I got back that I wished I had known about and dealt with while I was away.
A – I think that’s a lot of what it is.
Anil Dash, who is a very prominent blogger and way more important than I am, wrote a similar thing about going to India and being really off the grid for three weeks or whatever, and coming back and realizing that he had missed nothing, really, of consequence.
It’s not what you’re actually missing; it’s that mild anxiety of, ‘What if I’m not there to put out a fire?’ And there is a certain reality to that.
I mean, if something blows up, people expect to get a response on Twitter; you can’t just say, ‘Well, I was away for three weeks.’
Or maybe you can, but we don’t.
Q – How much stronger do you think that dependency can get before it reaches a breaking point?
A – I think mostly that we’re going through a transitional phase, and that, especially for people like me who did not grow up in digital culture, but yet are currently living in it, it’s a huge change and a big amount to adapt to.
So I do think part of it is just that we’re at the stage where we’re using the technologies but we haven’t yet really figured out how to change the systems underneath the technology.
The education system is still pretty much the same as when I went to school, but our relationship to information is completely different than when I went to school.
So there are all these social institutions, like education and like the workplace, that really in large measure have grown up in response to the ecosystem of information, but that ecosystem has totally changed.
I think we’re still trying to use old technologies of society to deal with what are new technologies of information.
So, I think part of it is a transition, but having said that, I do think that we’re a little bit giddy right now, and I do think that, down the road, that idea of creating meaningful relationships, meaningful technology, genuinely helpful technology that helps people manage information, I think that’s going to be huge.
I don’t think you’re going to see people in 10 years with the same crazy number of apps that people have on their phones that they downloaded in one second and never looked at again.
I think people are going to be a lot more curatorial about how they handle stuff.
I see it all the time, just the extent to which you get e-mails from people that make no sense, and you’re pretty sure it’s because they were doing something else halfway through writing the e-mail.
Like, how long can that continue?
Q – Anything else you’d like to say?
A – For me, any time I get to meet people is an opportunity for me to learn at least as much, hopefully, as the people I’m speaking to do. So, I really hope people will come up to me and talk to me and tell me what they’re doing and what their concerns are, and where they see things going.
I so rarely get asked, so it’s nice to actually see real humans and find out what they’re thinking about.