Category: culture-and-politics

When Tinder met Vanity, we all got popcorn and watched

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe: Berlin 2013 (Day 2)
…at the helm of the company that’s changing society in ways they can’t stop, or even fathom because they’re right in the middle of it. Scary.

Tinder (which I have written about and am now somewhat convinced will be seen as a bad bad joke in many years time) was recently written about in Vanity Fair and… Oh dear, tinder took to twitter to complain!

The best deconstruction of the whole thing comes from David Evans over at onlinedating insider.

I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the VF article. Story after story about relationship-challenged New Yorkers. Men in New York treat women terribly and brag about it in Vanity Fair. Wow, you don’t say?

The VF article is a retread of a topic that’s been beaten to death by the media and dating bloggers for almost two years, but VF decided to hang out with a bunch of New Yorkers who rack up Tinder sex-mates like there’s no tomorrow and talk to them like they are adults or something. The writer clearly emerged from a cave last week and the first thing they did was go on a Tinder date and now she’s scarred for life.

Tinder is simply a throw back to old skool dating (when it was al about looks and not the personality), but it doesn’t stop a whole host of articles, posts and shows being written about it… even in mid 2015! Tinder has become the symbol of our misogynist culture much like how the game was a few years ago?

“It’s an eye-opener and validation of a woman’s worst fear. The guys are swiping right to hook up and it’s all just a game.” Give me a break. The women who enable men to behave this way are just as complicit in the degradation of modern courtship as Tinder is. And Tinder is at the bottom of the pile, along with Ashley Madison.

Add gamification and repeat

The gamification of online/social dating can be scary stuff which I’ll cover in my TedX Talk early next year… Don’t miss it, its going to be pretty wild…! Ironiclly it will be on Valentine day, so expect a blood path of broken hearts and trashed dreams

Its so clear there is a problem, as many people including Sherry Turkle and even comedian Aziz Ansari’s modern romance, identifies. They wonder about current social impact of not just its users but on the mating process as a whole!

David really gets into to the metric problem of the throw away action of a swipe.

What is the equivalent of a right-swipe on a dating service? Replied to emails? If I email you and you email me back, that’s a match. Sam Yagan at Match told me that years ago. Back when he was the Co-founder of OkCupid, and they always said Match wasn’t worth the money and nobody should have to pay for a dating site…

…Tinder’s definition of a match as two people physically moving their fingers about a quarter of an inch to the right compared with writing and responding to emails. Comparing swipes to responded-to emails is ridiculous; they’re not even comparable. But we’re talking about Tinder here, so anything goes.

How about this. Whenever two people like or favorite each other’s photos on a dating service, they are a match. Is that comparable to Tinder mutual swipes? I don’t know and I really don’t care anymore. And neither does anyone else, because all I read about in the media are stories about people on Tinder hooking up three times a week and 25 million matches a day.

He’s right, no body is really thinking about what the metrics mean when  writing about Tinder. It might as well be 25 millions acorns! There is so much more David writes in the post but I love the ending line, and I’m really starting to agree (even though I know a few friends who have successfully had serious relationships via tinder)…

Tinder is the worst thing to ever happen to the online dating industry. End of story.

Psychology of dating in the technosexual era

https://twitter.com/cubicgarden/status/624880650164830208

The psychology of dating in the technosexual era is a nice title and something I’ve been collecting stories about in my diigo group dating troubles. (diigo wants more money for it to be public, but you can look at this tag for most of it)

So my first reaction was… uhhh duhhh? Who doesn’t know this?

But then I have spoke and wrote about this to death.

Tinder is hardly original, yet it has taken the mobile dating market by storm: despite launching only last year, an estimated 450 million profiles are rated every day and membership is growing by 15% each week. More importantly, and in stark contrast with the overwhelmingly negative media reception, Tinder has managed to overcome the two big hurdles to online dating. First, Tinder is cool, at least to its users.

Indeed, whereas it is still somewhat embarrassing to confess to using EHarmony or Match.com, Tinderers are proud to demo the app at a dinner party, perhaps because the alternative – logging off and talking to others guests – is less appealing.

As I also said… It switched from physical first & personality second to personality first & physical second during the first phase of the  internet’s affect on mating. But then came the fightback, starting with social dating. Now all the big sites all have a social dating app of some kind.

 

I found the Guardian piece interesting because of one two things…

  1. Yes its absolutely right and its fair to say its still scratching at the surface.
  2. Its written by !

You may wonder who on earth is he?
Let me refresh your memory…

This reminds me of a TV show we created a couple of years ago; we profiled over 3,000 singletons using state-of-the-art psychological tests and created 500 couples based on psychological compatibility… but ignored looks and race. When the couples finally met – even though they trusted the science of the matching process – they were 90% focused on looks and only decided to date a second time if they were deemed equally attractive or worthy of each other’s looks.

Yes remember the terrible dating show I took part on (not that one!) 2 years ago? Yep that one… saying the name still conjures up a certain amount of hate and distress. The year of making love!

Clearly, psychologists have a lot of work to do before they can convince daters that their algorithms are more effective.

I found this sadly ironic, especially with everything discovered over the last 5 years. I am hoping to present a spectrum of this and other issues as a conference talk in the very near future.

Growing worries about our tech driven culture from Aziz

Friendly Conversation

You can add Aziz Ansari to the growing list of people reconsidering the effects of our technology on our culture. He joins Sherry Turkle and Andrew Keen with his latest book…

Modern Romance, an interesting book full of interesting research about how people meet, and mate, in the modern world.

First heard about on the Freakonomics podcast…

I’ll be checking it out soon… as it looks like a good one.

…The rest of the book deals with online dating, dumping, sexting, cheating and snooping on your partner, all of which have been made easier by the rise of the smartphone and the private world we create behind its screen. This is territory already explored by theorists such as Danah Boyd and Sherry Turkle and OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder, but Ansari helpfully masticates their findings down for a general audience. He is neither a tech evangelist nor a luddite: the gadgets might be constantly updating, but human nature is slower to change.

Forget the pecking order, collaborate

Simon Lumb while talking about leadership in the northern quarter today mentioned.Margaret Heffernan: Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work

Organizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,” where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It’s a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out: “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.”

Even before I watch the video I’m in agreement. This reminds me of my favourite cluetrain rule.. #7

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy and the result of which heterarchy

I’m sure one day I’ll bring all my favourite management and leadership clues together into some kind of manifesto or at least a blog.

10 years since the London 7/7 bombings

Evening Standard 7/7/05

Its hard to imagine all the things which have happened since the day I rode my scooter into the BBC Worldservice at Bush House. I remember driving along with Sarah on the back and being overtaken by about 10 police cars and in one hell of a rush. I was near Waterloo and I thought something isn’t right.

By the time I got into work, everybody was standing around watching the tvs. Nobody quite knew what was actually going on, but I remember not being able to leave for our own safety by about 1030.

As like now, I was a keen blogger and I blogged things I heard and read at the time.

Most of the links go nowhere but its really interesting to read out my thoughts following the everything which happened that day.

Well all I personally can say is, tomorrow I will be returning to work and will happily ride the train, tube or a bus. This terrible event points to the fact we helped America in the unjust war were still involved in, although a majority of people here were against it. I do worry that there maybe more attacks like this, but I wont let the fear take over my life in this wonderful multicultural city. The people who planed and executed the bombs are nut jobs and can claim to be of what ever religious background they want. But the fact remains that people who were killed and injured were of all faiths, religions, colour and background. Tomorrow we shall see both sides using the London blasts for there own means but also tomorrow we shall also see a city going back to work with its head up high. Yes I do sometimes love London.

Indeed! It was a scary time to be in London but really focused my views on the war and the government. 10 years later, I feel not much has changed in government I feel, actually its worst. My follow on blog also sounds angry and upset at the same time. Not sure if a year later I felt less upset or just more accepting of what happen? At least the video still exists on archive.org.

So sad to know peoples lives were lost and many many more people are still affected by the result of the ideology of a few nut jobs.

The right to delete in online dating

Delete billboard by Ji Lee

You know how I’m very interested in the ethical dimension of  services and data. Data portability is something I have a long history with and alongside that, there is related idea of having access to delete.

Of course this can be very controversial like the much talked about, right to be forgotten.

Its intriguing to look at the online dating world where data is thrown about with little regard for the users.

Turns out, there are many people who think deleting a dating app from your phone is the same as deleting your profile – but it isn’t.

Dating apps and online dating sites make it kind of tricky to get rid of you altogether – after all, they attract people (and investors) based on user numbers, so they are not motivated to make it obvious how to delete your account.

Okcupid plays by the rules while eHarmony requires a web action and then a email to confirm. Hinge a mobile dating app, requires you to use a desktop browser before you can delete it the account on your mobile via uninstalling the app.

With Tinder, I disconnected my Facebook account from Tinder meaning the account will be rejected by Facebook if it was started again. Its not elegant but saves me having to install Tinder again. I kind of refuse to install it again.

Makes you wonder how many loops some of the other dating sites and apps will make you jump through…?

OpenTech 2015 leaves a lot to think about

OpenTech is a one day conference which I last attended back in 2006 I think. Now in its 10th year, its still a place for the tech focused  culture to be heavily debated.

OpenTech has 3 tracks of talks from people who put themselves forward beforehand. I had thought about doing so but missed the deadline for expression of interest. I learned that I should have done so anyway, as quite a few people dropped out.

Regardless of the drop outs, the conference talk quality was high. Here’s the ones which really spoke volumes to me.

Opentech 2015

The Open Rights Group 10 years on…

I was always looking forward to this one, especially because it was 10 years since a bunch of smart people got together to discuss the idea of why there was no EFF for the UK. In that room somebody pledged to pay 5 pounds a month to something like the EFF. Others followed suit and with  Suw Charman Anderson (whom I’ve not seen in ages) taking up the reins of what ever it was going to be. The Open rights group was born and fostered into the world.

It was great to step back through the history of the Open Rights Group and think about the next 10 years (my question). I had hoped Becky, Danny and Cory might have been there too but alas it was great to see everybody else.

Opentech 2015

Privacy: I do not think that word means what you think it means – Kat Matfield

This was enlightening talk in a string of talks about privacy. It was refreshing to have the view of everyday people on privacy. Especially the idea of peak page padlock aka security theatre, which she explained was a kind of dark pattern. She didn’t get a easy ride with the questioning afterwards about the sample size and how scientific the tests were but it didn’t matter, it was fascinating regardless.

Opentech 2015
The state of the network address – Bill Thompson

What can I say about Bills talk? Well it was great. So much was covered but I loved the idea of…

IP, therefore I connect

Human values in the technology was heavily discussed along with doing the right thing and building systems/frameworks to encourage the best of these values.

Bill outlined a couple scenarios which he uses to illustrate human values. Hearing them made it very clear whats at stake.
Use of personal data for children and young adults who are still finding there way, experimenting with their identity and learning what makes them tick. These years are hugely transformative and can be easily warped by requiring students to submit work through facebook or the rest of a religious family seeing recommendations for atheist documentary’s. Each thing is well meaning but damaging as a consequence.

I don’t know what my parents would have made of me taking out books from the library about drugs. I was curious and as a result learned so much about them that I pretty much embarrassed teachers and friends with my knowledge of drugs. I also never took them as a result of my knowledge. If this was 20yrs later and my parents were getting recommendations based on my book renting it would be a very different conversation!

Ethics and human values need to exist in the systems & algorithms we create. Its beyond a nice thing to do, its essential. Bill highlighted the conflict in the way most startups are funded. He pointed out public organisations like the BBC to develop new models for the public good.

Everything ran nicely into Gavin Starks talk which followed about the state of data and data as infrastructure.

Let’s redecentralize — Irina Bolychevski

I didn’t really recognise redecentralise till Irina started listing the sites which they had listed on there Github repo. At that moment I started thinking this sounds similar to something I blogged about a while ago... and I wasn’t wrong.

Opentech 2015
A mobile web of apps and documents – Adewale Oshineye

I think Adewale is great (no kick for the amount of times I have quoted him even). He thinks long and hard about subjects and I quite enjoy the challenging discussions we end up having when we have time. It was in the last session about decentralisation, that I even quoted him in my question to Irina.

People’s enthusiasm for federated decentralised $WHATEVER seems inversely proportional to the practicality of their plan for achieving it

It was great to hear Adewale on stage. I wasn’t quite sure where he was going at the very start of the talk, when he started asking what the web was but before long it all came clear when he revealed the slightly surprising fact that the biggest mobile user agent is Facebook. Aka people viewing the web through the Facebook app more than any other mobile device or app.

He then talked about Javascript only sites (ones which don’t even deliver a page unless you have JS enabled), apps containing URX’s, The Chrome and Safari tab feature. Pintrest got a bit of kicking for their aggressive stance to use their app over accessing by a browser or any other way.

But its the question Adewale left us which was the kicker….

Is this still the web?

A bit of a debate kicked off but unfortunately there wasn’t much time left to really get into it. However the question still remains and got me thinking, about what I hold dear about the web. Maybe I’m romanticising the history of the web? But I don’t think so… I honestly think theres something important about the open web through open platforms.

Thinking about it now, listening to Brian Chirls earlier in the week talk about WebVR starter kit and the things he did to make sure VR isn’t just for the rich elites but also for the children who might be able to afford a cheap android phone for VR viewing. But its not about consuming! They should be able to create their own VR, like when we used view source to understand how the web worked. Even on a super locked down library PC.

I know there is something essential about using accessing the web from a browser. It might be the shift from consumer to author but I haven’t quite condensed it down to a paragraph yet, I’m sure to tell Adewale when I next see him next.

Opentech 2015
dotEveryone by Paula Le Dieu

I was lucky that the order on the website stayed the same, as I left track 3 with Adewale on the top floor to catch Paula Le Dieu sitting on the stage. As I walked down to the front, she was talking about how things like the Open Rights Group and BBC Backstage were launched 10 years ago and most stood the test of time. I know Paula wasn’t singling me or anybody out (she later pointed out the BBC creative archive project was ended a few years previous to the end of BBC Backstage) I just happened to walk in right on cue. I wanted to clear things up anyway in my question. Some people later asked me what was BBC Backstage, which goes to show.

DotEveryone was a interguing talk and although not a lot was given away. Paula did mention 3 points of focus.

  1. Internet connectivity – Net neutrality?
  2. Diversity in Tech – There was a talk about being female on the internet earlier
  3. New Business models – Very fitting with Bills State of the internet address)

I’ll certainly be looking more into doteveryone.

It was a good conference and it was great having the ODI sponsoring and supporting it. Keep wondering if we could something similar in Manchester, especially with lots of people interested in the effect of tech culture.

Stop the slut shaming crap…

The Morning After.

A friend of mine read the post I was sent from Tony. They commented on the post and I will power phrase it as this…

The casual hook-up crap in that post is really awful… Hookups aren’t people you feel nothing for. they can be intense, lovely experiences that make you feel alive and fulfilled. You can learn a lot about what you want, what you like and who you are through them. that post was just nasty “slut shaming” crap.

And they are right… lets read the key parts in full

We sleep around — a lot.

Some less than others, but most individuals have multiple partners every year. Don’t get me wrong, I like sex just as much as the next guy, but sleeping around ends up leaving us feeling empty.

It starts out feeling exciting and gratifying, but ends up making us feel even more alone. Worse yet, it makes finding someone to love infinitely more difficult. You’re wasting your time with people who mean nothing to you and, to top it all off, you are likely to turn sex into a sport.

When that becomes the case, good luck trying to make love. Good luck enjoying sex when sex is no longer a special or unique experience, but just another trivial evening.

Bollox, yes there are some people whom see it as a sport or game with achievements but having casual sex does not mean you are wasting your time, not capable of making love or even having a long term relationship.

This reminds me of the talk about non-monogamy in Manchester when somebody suggested that people in a poly relationship might as well forget about falling in love because there love couldn’t be as deep. Once again Bollox!

We need to get over this crap, this is the type of thing which breeds ignorance and terrible sex educational black spots. This is why I have a new found respect for the Japanese and their age laws around sex. At least they are dealing with it, instead of the head in the sand approach or simply con-damming it.

Am I losing the ability to be in love? Nope

Love...

Tony sent me a link to 10 Reasons Why This Generation Is Losing The Ability To Be In Love. I quoted a few bits from it in my thoughts about narcissism and selfies. But theres much more to be quoted…

My greatest worry is our generation will be looked at as the generation that gave up on love. We date for the sake of dating. The generation that forgot how to love — which is ridiculous. Most people have never had a good understanding of love, just a poor interpretation of it.

I’m not sure why Tony sent this to me but I have thoughts why… you see why as I go through some of the points I think are levelled at me?

We sleep around — a lot.

Although I have dated quite a bit, I don’t sleep around a lot. This is a common misconception when I talk about dating. If I mention serial dater, the first thing which comes to mind is sex.  I won’t even go there about what is sex…

We’re becoming even more egocentric.

Not so…  Although I agree culture is leaning that way, sadly. But its nothing to shrug about, the future is not written.

We date for the sake of dating.

Many people have asked me over and over again, if I date for the sake of dating? Everytime I say something about enjoying dating, mainly because I might be sapiosexual (more about this in the future as I do agree its a little silly but this a bit strong, thanks Tom).

But I do also say, I date because I would like to meet somebody special. Heck in the context of this post, I would like to fall in love again. Feels weird saying that but its true but I’m not scared of doing so. I will look forward to it.

We aren’t fans of making compromises.

I do agree, I don’t like to compromise much but I do understand I do need to compromise. For the person who sweeps me off my seat, I’ll compromise and some.

We believe in fairytale endings.

Nope, I don’t buy it at all. I would say I have come to the realisation that love take a very different path for everybody. This includes non-monogamy too. Wheres the fairytale endings for that? Exactly, don’t believe the hype… silly rabbit!

We’ve been fooled into believing perfection is attainable.

Rubbish, perfection is an illusion. Just like the fairytale endings, being open to more creditable influences and meeting more people, its clear as day whats actually attainable and what is sustainable.

We’re goal driven, but often forget to include our partners in the mix.

I don’t know about this one, I feel this generation is much more collaborative than previous ones. The slow but sure balancing of the sexes also insures both or more partners goals and aspirations are more important than ever before.

Most of us are really bad at loving.

As Haddaway said, What is love?  Although I joke, its a serious question. Love is different for everybody. We have evolved and so has the sense of what love is…  I don’t disagree that the paradox of choice and other factors have made finding love much more complex but millions fall in love everyday. Be it physically or virtually. With one person or multiple people.

On top of that, there are so many different ways to tell our loved one(s) that we love them. From a text message with emoji at the right moment to turning on a light in the connected objects domain.

I think the writer is unfair in the statement that we are really bad at loving.

For me, its not a resistance to fall in love but to get it somewhat right. I listen to my gut reaction a lot more than I use to. Does this mean I don’t have the ability to fall in love? No, it means I will only fall in love when the conditions are right and not for some artificially manufactured reason.

How did Tokyo change me?

Mount Fuji!

Si Lumb said to me, something like…

Yeah I read the many blog posts you wrote and saw some of the images but what I really want to know is, how did it change you?

This is a tricky question… Every experience slightly changes you but this one was extra special.

I already said my experience of the Onsen was fascinating and enjoyable enough that I’m going to visit a local spa every few months now. It won’t be the same but lying in the water thinking about things was quite refreshing.

The experience of seeing the forward thinking culture of Japan struggling with over narcissistic approaches did have a profound effect that technology in the wrong hands can be toxic. This has renewed my politic thoughts about our rights online. Maybe time to donate more the Open Rights Group and spend more time helping out? Something to think about…

I hadn’t really considered getting a new scooter after my Silverwing dies but seeing the range of maxi-scooters in Tokyo. I’m actually reconsidering it. My thought is learn to drive, so I can rent cars for certain trips and times like going to Ikea. But get another scooter for general commuting and exploring.

I always said Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore and Seoul were on my list of places to visit. I enjoyed Japan and said I’ll go back in a few years time. I feel like I managed myself ok. With this under my belt, I’m much more willing to consider elsewhere in the near future. I guess it changed my thoughts on travelling alone into the unknown.

Lastly the stories I can tell about Tokyo and Japan are crazy. I’m putting together a presentation for a few people, but the interactions with people and things were fascinating.

I’m very thankful that I got the opportunity to go under my own steam, it was incredible… and now I can tick it off my new years resolutions! Not in a flippant, I did Japan way, but in a I feel enriched and want to visit again and other places. Other people will never get the chance.