Freivalds: In Twitter we trust (Hey! What happened to God?)

  

Published 9/1/2018

The Roanoke Times, Roanoke, VA

By John Freivalds

 

My first experience with the power of technology came almost 50 years ago. There was no internet, fax, call waiting, watts lines, caller ID just the phone. My boss in the grain business wanted to know how much of this specialty flour a local competitor was producing. And he wanted the info in two days so he could present it to the marketing council. What to do?

Armed with whatever else I could pick up about the company at the library (remember no Google around then) I called the company at lunch time and got through to the plant manager asked "I am from marketing research and need to know the last three years production runs?" He answered "why don't you call so and so in Chicago? (The company's headquarters)." I said "I did, everyone's out to lunch." Then he said "OK" and gave me the numbers.

 

I was proud of myself, I didn't lie as I told him I was from market research ( he didn't' ask whose) and I gave him my name. I proudly went into my boss's office and gave him the numbers."How did you get these?"

The telephone had this magical allure then, like Twitter has now and you could get any info anything by just by calling someone. Just imagine if I had gone to the factory gate and told the guard I wanted to speak to the plant manager so I could get all you production data. No way, Jose.

But the telephone gave you access. Today its social media. According to a new book by Franklin Foer "The Existential Threat of Big Media" social media out of the hippie-inspired Whole Earth Catalog published in 1972. This was the new Bible of a whole generation in Silicon Valley and to be trusted. This trust has been passed on to Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Google and Facebook. We thought that these companies existed only to enable the free flow of information and in the words of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg "democratize the world."

When I walk around the rivers and mountain (even on the Appalachian Trail) I am always surprised to see more people addicted to what phones are telling them than looking out at the beauty around them. And this cellular gawking is even done at the expense of personal safety and distracted driving and walking. Henry David Thoreau writing in Walden Pond wrote 'Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention to serious things...After all the man whose horse trots a mile a minute does not carry the most important message."

Scammers have figured out to use social media to sell us stuff, the Russians have figured out how to influence elections. And, yes, it gave us Donald Trump as President. His politics aside, he figured out social media. In the words of Franklin Foer, "media needs to give the pubic what it wants a circus that exploits subconscious tendencies and biases. Even if the media disdained Trump's outrages they build him up as character and a plausible candidate."

So while many would disdain monopolies in steel , food, automobiles, petroleum that has no carry to high-tech. Google is now the biggest spender on lobbying in Washington, DC. The European Union is more sensitive to what high-tech is doing to our privacy but not so in the US where any government regulation these days is seen as bad. Foer warns that the Big One, a huge hack is cooing that will bring the whole cyber system down much like the financial crisis of 2008.

There is a big irony here for food shoppers care about what goes into their mouths, need to be persuaded to apply the same care that goes in their brain.