Do You Suffer from APPrehension?

These days I often awake with a sense of APPrehension. I’m nervous about the frustrating hours needed to navigate all those apps and other digital tools now essential to manage my life, do my work, bank or shop. To do almost anything. QR codes, uploads, downloads, digital signatures, scanning, Whatsapp notifications and everything else?needed to function as a Digital Citizen.

Because when I say ‘navigate’ I really mean ‘struggle.’ This is no Luddite rant – I’m a fan of technology, which can and has helped us save lives, educate the world and transformed our ability to connect families and markets around the world. I’m often an early adopter of new virtual tools and sources of information, although I have to admit that while I embrace the new, I’m also a quick rejector, especially when the new APP or software is too fiddly or time consuming to get the benefits. Not surprisingly my favourite APPs are the torch and compass on my phone, allowing me to do all kind of analogue things but with a digital friend – I enjoy the irony.

The promised blessings of ease and efficiency through online working are a chimera for the consumer: spending all those hours filling ?- and refilling - forms online means that often we are paying our service provider for the right to become their digital clerk. Or even their slave. It’s a brilliant business model...

The Infallible Business Model (IBM)

Outsourcing customer service and clerical work to the customer has been great for many large corporations, utilities and retailers. I resent that our homes have become Dilbert cubicles, as if we were working in an actual office space in the bowels of their enterprise. We mirror their setup at our own desk, with computers, scanners, printers, cameras and filing systems.

Naturally the providers assert that this is all for our benefit, and nothing whatsoever to do with their own cost-cutting drive. That’s why I call it the IBM, or Infallible Business Model. Let the customer behave more like an algorithm than a human, then he or she will remove the need for so many of those expensive people you used to hire.

Until now I’ve spent my life avoiding ‘mandatory fields,’ in my career and personal life. As more of an innovator than a detail person, there’s a part of me that thinks these boxes are a way of imprisoning me in the heart of the beast. AKA the meta-algorithm I’m being asked to join.

Look - I'm drowning in a sea of wrong usernames and forgotten passwords. That phrase, ‘have you forgotten your password?’ plays like an earworm in my head. Its tone becomes more admonishing the more often I come across it. Is there such a condition as ‘Digital Shame?’ I think I’ve got it.

Malevolent AI

A technically adept friend, no longer young, still attributes malevolent motives to the algorithm. His observation that “It’s got it in for you - and it’s evil!” is the irrational view of many of a certain age, who misguidedly expect the technology to work with the sturdy reliability of, say a landline. (To use an analogy that makes no sense to the Millennials and Gen Z.)

My father was a mathematician, and I remem ber him taking time off work to coach me in my least favourite subject. With kindly intent, he would say the words, “It’s very simple…”

Never use this phrase! Although well meant, it triggers a whole subtext of emotions. Yes, it would be simple - if I wasn’t so…simple!

Technologically skilled people approach your problem – uploading a QR code to an airline’s website, or the inevitable ‘attachment disorder’ you are experiencing - with?comments about how it’s all so easy and obvious.

Thus are you disabled in making the transition from digital immigrant to techno-native.

?

The Digital Divide

Of course the algorithm doesn’t hate you, but it’s not as easy to deal with as advertised. Travelling to Spain recently, the online form filling, uploading and double-checking, took as long as the whole end-to-end travel time. Can this be efficient? I put in hours of human emotional labour, with the sole aim of impressing the airline’s ‘bots’ that I was fit to travel.

I kept thinking, ‘suppose I was an older person-I wouldn’t be able to manage this, and I’d be forced to stay at home.’

Then I realised I was that older person…

Again, I’m not (just) complaining. I’m lucky enough to still be working professionally in virtual ways, speaking and coaching people around the world online. I’m also curious - I had TikTok, Instagram and the other social media outlets since their inception, and lecture about the psychology of embracing digital transformation.

What I am impatient about is the unnecessary complexity and time-wasting repetition of data that - despite supposed data protection – my bank or credit card firm already has, probably on some digital server in the metaverse.

Whoops – I didn’t mean to introduce that concept so late in my rant. Wearing my professional hat as an innovation-watcher, the metaverse is going to happen. Sooner and with more wide-reaching influence than we now think. (That’s the nature of digital tsunamis.)

But for those of us who fear online – especially the box ticking ?- has already taken up too much of our mental broadband during lockdown, I suspect there will be a reaction. A wave of appreciation for human on human interactions, and all things beyond the screen.

On Being a Screenager

Over a decade ago I came across the term, ‘screenagers.’ It’s said that the generation gap today exists between those of us who only, and sometimes reluctantly, manage one screen at a time, and those (usually younger) who can deal with several simultaneously.

We’re screen and App happy. 5 years ago comedian Bill Bailey said that he’d gone to visit his local hospital – only to find it had been replaced by an App. Humour is often prescient, and reaches the parts more rational analysis doesn’t penetrate.

So if anyone starts a conversation brightly with words like, “Have you seen this great new App? It puts you to bed, tucks you up?and sings you a lullaby,” just ask if it’s easy and intuitive to use. Otherwise it’s bound to be a source of APPrehension…

Nigel Barlow

Cyber space and Gloucestershire

[email protected]

April 2022

?

?

?

?