Culture Clash #294 - The challenge of designing for the psychological nuance of humans
Why algorithms don't know when our life circumstance changes
Welcome back to Culture Clash. This week’s most impactful and relevant piece I read was I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget by Lauren Goode in Wired. The piece delves deep into how the ever-changing life circumstance of human beings can collide with the digital services and algorithms we use every day.
Lauren’s article looks at this topic through the lens of her own personal story. As a tech reporter, Lauren has been heavily invested in the digital ecosystem for the past 10 years. During this time she also had one long-term relationship. Eventually, after 8 years together, Lauren decided to get married to her boyfriend and plan a wedding. This is when things starting to go awry. After the wedding was almost fully planned, the relationship came to an end and the wedding was called off. A sad, and somewhat unforeseen set of circumstances.
This was the start of Lauren’s digital collision.
Lauren had no easy way to tell her photos app that her relationship just ended. She also didn’t have an easy way to tell many of the services she used to organize her wedding, such as Pinterest, that her wedding was no longer happening.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when apps started co-opting memories, madly deploying them to boost engagement and make a buck off nostalgia.
Lauren kept being reminded about her upcoming wedding and her 8-year relationship by her photos app. She continued to see advertising across the Internet for anything and everything wedding-related.
Our smartphones pulse with memories now. In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.
The idea of resurfacing photo memories came from the very nature and dynamic around digital photos. As smartphones with cameras became pervasive and digital storage became relatively cheap, we began to document everything through pictures. But most of us rarely go back to look at our photos. It makes sense for a modern photo app to employ an algorithm to resurface old happy memories.
Yael Marzan, the product team lead for Google Photos, said the search giant was inspired to launch Memories because they realized that the majority of the pictures being stored in Google Photos were never looked at again
To hear technologists describe it, digital memories are all about surfacing those archival smiles. But they’re also designed to increase engagement, the holy grail for ad-based business models.
But there can be real emotional and psychological consequences to resurfacing memories digitally.
This monetization of emotional memory isn’t just off-putting in theory; it can also inhibit personal growth, as I was slowly learning. “Forgetting used to be the default, and that also meant you could edit your memories,” says Kate Eichhorn, who researches culture and media at the New School in New York City and wrote the book The End of Forgetting. “Editing memories” in this context refers to a psychological process, not a Photoshop tool. The human brain is constantly editing memories to incorporate new information and, in some cases, to cope with trauma.
What I love about Lauren’s piece is that it’s ultimately about product and experience design. These are challenges we need to be aware of and design for. It’s not enough to have smart machine learning identify the best and happiest memories. We need to create better systems that allow humans to “collaborate” with technology. There are many potential ethical and privacy challenges I won’t attempt to address them here. Let’s just say that it all starts with awareness. As product designers, let’s be aware of these type of challenges with our product experiences.
I realized it was foolish of me to think the internet would ever pause just because I had. The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.
No matter how intelligently we think we’re designing our digital services, human beings are psychologically complex, and emotional creatures. Reducing the naunace of human life to simple algorithm might always be difficult.
5 Links
✍🏻The Healing Power of Javascript
Craig Mod on the therapeutic power of coding.
The purpose of the search function was somewhat irrelevant. I simply needed to code. Code soothes because it can provide control in moments when the world seems to spiral. Reductively, programming consists of little puzzles to be solved. Not just inert jigsaws on living room tables, but puzzles that breathe with an uncanny life force. Puzzles that make things happen, that get things done, that automate tedium or allow for the publishing of words across the world.
✍🏻 The Pleasures of Conversing with Voice Texts
Love this story in the New Yorker. Another love letter to a different modality of personal communication. I continue to challenge the various people I communicate with every day both for work and in my personal life. Voice texts are incredibly intimate and make you feel like the person is right there next to you. Send one to a friend or relative.
✍🏻 A booming industry based entirely on missed calls
An excellent story from The Rest of the World about the lo-fi technology of missed calls. It’s good to reflect on a time when mobile technology was quite expensive and people found creative ways of hacking it.
Leaving missed calls in this way — effectively using a mobile phone as a kind of latter-day pager — was a consumer hack that, in the 2000s, before India’s cheap smartphone and data revolution, grew more popular than texting.
✍🏻 The Perfect To-Do System Is Not Just Around the Corner
As someone who has tried a lot of different productivity systems and tools, I appreciate this perspective from the prolific Brett Simmons. Clearly there is no perfect system, but his main insight is that every system requires much upkeep to make it useful. That’s the nature of todos.
✍🏻 Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus
Incredible story of the woman that championed mRNA technology for years without much recognition and acclaim. She’s one of the main reason we are all able to be vaccinated for Covid with incredibly effective mRNA vaccines.