Realizing Technologies Potential to Unite

Over the last decade, we have seen technology go from a promised utopia of connectivity and increased democratization (so many hopeful people from the Arab Spring) to being vilified as a tool to control (PRISM) and leading to the fraying of democracy (Cambridge Analytica up through the January 6th Capital Hill riot).

However, as someone who taught a course on anti-social technologies in 2010 (before it was cool to mistrust Facebook) I want to caution us from the extreme end of mistrust of technology.

To be clear, bad actors and monopolies are a definite threat to our society. Biases, intentionally, or not, built into our systems also pose a threat we must guard against. However, all these flaws are ultimately human flaws and not inherit in technology itself.

There is an opportunity to imagine a future technology ecosystem that serves humankind instead of making us slaves to the technology. Technology that connects us to diverse perspectives instead of amplifying echo chambers.

It all starts with changing our approach to how we design and develop these systems. Even when building cloud and other networked applications, we use a mental model of a single individual completing a task / engaging. Instead, we need to rethink these systems as experiences people (emphasis on the plural) that use technology to empower our interpersonal relationships instead of optimizing for individual performance efficiencies.

To make this more practical, think of the last time you purchased food from a restaurant. In our encouraged isolation during the pandemic this might have been your decision alone as you were eating lone. We’ll touch on how even in that solo eater case your order may not have been as independent of an action as you may think in a future article. In many other cases though, your own preferences were balanced with those of family members or a small group of friends. Even if you know each other well, this was likely a lengthy discussion as you negotiate against one another’s preferences and either one person trades their desires for that of another person’s (perhaps hoping that the social capital gained can be traded in at a future juncture) or reaching a point of equally (dis)pleasing food (pizza).

This transaction likely still involved technology—one or multiple people within the group were on phones or other devices exploring options. The question I’ll end this article with is how might we take these natural human intersection points that are already using technology and improve those experiences through the technology? This is the meat of what this set of articles will explore.

Read part 2 to hear about one way to apply these concepts.

Interested in joining the conversation? Reach out to me on LinkedIn.