Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Russia as North Korea

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Can real news reporting be shut down in Russia as completely as it has been in North Korea?

Many of us studying modern communications patterns have confidently affirmed what seems like the obvious point that digital media have made political boundaries much more permeable. In a word, national borders mean far less than they used to. The follow up is that most frontiers are now pierced by social media, internet access, and personal media in the form of phones and digital files. The files in phones and other devices are an interesting case. Some are so small you can lose track of their tiny memory chips within them.  A person can travel with an encrypted SD card or thumb drive that will probably not be detected by border security.

It was easier for totalitarian regimes at the height of the cold war to jam short wave broadcasts or confiscate the magazines and newspapers of travelers. Yet, even with these older media forms bled their content into Soviet-controlled East Berlin. Residents there couldn’t help but notice the relative freedom and prosperity of their neighbors on the other side of the wall.

True, the additional example of North Korea is a special case. It sits under a total blackout as dense as the concrete and steel sarcophagus that contains the radioactivity of Chernobyl’s power plant. But the North has had a lot of time to lock down its tightly closed society.  And yet K-pop and some news from the south still gets in. For its efforts at isolation, North Korea has paid the high price of a mostly impoverished population.

Russia is different. After the disintegration of the Soviet state, Russians got a taste of western affluence and a semblance of diversity in some of its news media. For a time, Vladimir Putin seemed to be following the path of Mikhail Gorbachev in warming to European neighbors to the West.

But in recent years Putin’s persistent belief of post-Soviet humiliation has changed everything. Using the thinnest of pretexts to invade Ukraine, his current march backwards into the deep-freeze of the Cold War is a play to a persistently quiescent Russia for an expanded national identity that is decades out of date. The fairy tale of a “special military operation” requires that residents never call it the bloody “war” that it is; instead, the rest of the world has to witness what they cannot be shown.  And so a new Iron Curtain has descended, testing the permeability thesis many of us so confidently made.

In the new media clampdown reminiscent of China’s “Great Firewall,” millions this week have been blocked from online access to Facebook, Instagram and other platforms. Instagram alone had 60 million users in Russia. But with threats of years in prison for even carrying an antiwar sign, most Russians may well succumb to what has become another turn in the cycle of exchanging personal freedom for the dubious comforts of living under a strong leader.

Current threats of punishment and jail time for simply describing what is going on in Ukraine have also required the partial closures of the not-easily-intimidated foreign press. Among others, CNN and The New York Times concluded that their reporters would be jailed if they remained.

It’s hard to get a clear picture of how tight the embargo of information from western news sources is. It seems to change by the day, but it is clear that many Russians have far less exposure to honest reporting about the atrocities carried out in their name. And at least for now, too many are cowed into believing the phony news promoted by government “news” sources.

I’m still convinced that, in the longer run, this wall of censorship will be pierced via internet VPNs, routine phone use, and through media that travels, as it used to in Soviet times, from person to person. Remember eastern bloc samizdat in the 1980s?  This kind of self-published news was passed around to voracious Russian readers. Samizdat was one reason the old Soviet bloc feared copy machines in businesses. Users were required to notify an official “hammer man” when it had reached the end of its life.  He would be sure it would not become a printing press.

In the meantime, travel in and out of Russia may take communications back to an earlier definition: the transportation of information from place to place. That will happen at least until the devolving situation makes even more citizens realize that they have again become prisoners in their own borders.

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Giants That Struggle With The Idea of Personhood

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , ,

The hard truth is that many rich mega-giants have lost the will to engage directly with their customers.

There was a time when major organizations had enough employees to deal with customer problems. Name the organization—a media outlet, a service provider for a utility, a business dependent on selling products and services—and there was usually a person ready to receive a question or complaint. “Customer service” meant a company tried to be available to those with whom they had a relationship. That is still true in business-to-business communications. For example, Ford certainly expects that a supplier will take their calls. But the public and social media side of the ledger usually offers no such chances. In a quiet revolution, A.I. robots have taken over customer relations while the rest of an organization sits behind walls of anonymity. Thousands of employees in the offices of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and scores of other companies are mostly insulated from the people that use their services. Commercial in even modest-sized organizations  are now careful to not list contact information.

There are outstanding exceptions in almost every area.  Amazon still offers phone help. At least a few years ago the electronics giant Onkyo was happy to put me through to an engineer to solve a technical issue. And local businesses show a lot of patience to still deal with customers.  But the “virtual assistants” up and running in most larger enterprises pull the con of giving a person’s name to microchips and algorithms that offer simulations of the human voice or texting, all with the increasingly lifelike lexicons of real human rhetoric. The great leap in speech-mediated A.I. can be awesome, but it has given us a kind of zombie intelligence that can only “think” in binaries and fake comprehension.

All of this takes personhood out of the equation, with real and often sad consequences. Imagine, for example, the fate of a new widow facing a labyrinth of health, state, county and employer bureaucracies to be contacted after the death of her partner. A few will be appropriately responsive.  But others will throw up a filibuster of recorded phone directories and “try again later” messages. Lately even Social Security can’t be bothered to pick up the phone.  And COVID is a poor excuse. If a person can still do interoffice communication with their colleagues, they can still represent an organization to customers or clients.

The hard truth is that many rich mega-giants have lost the will to talk directly with their customers. None of us would think it would be a good use of our time to try to call Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Granted, they have a lot of customers.  But most haven’t developed a graded gatekeeping system that would allow private and serious users to reach them.

I a challenge with Google  that is a good case in point. I have two Google e-mail accounts: hardly unique. But in this massive organization’s self-contained world–even using my real name, passwords and my patterns of internet usage–I am still “Person 1” and “Person 2.” And they are pretty sure that one of us is up to no good.  I benefit from using Google Analytics data for this blog. It does what Google does best: track, count and sort. But person 2—who, I swear, looks exactly like me in a mirror—apparently has no business even asking to see the data. Sadly, they think they are being useful to warn Person 1 that Person 2 is trying to break into my account. Ditto for Microsoft, with confounding and insistent new logins to expose what they see as different accounts hacked by robots. In the name of security, the idea of personhood has more or less been lost on them. They think a real person can read laughably smudged CAPTCHA tests. Meanwhile, these companies have moved on to creating networks they are selling as “teams,” apparently not noticing they have yet to master the basics of authentic one-on-one communication.

My more computer savvy friends will tell me there are workarounds for these inconveniences, especially if I am willing to take them on as my second job. But they are missing the point. In many cases there is only a useless “virtual (non)person” to “chat” with. Even a two-year old can detect the fraud of a fake human being passed off as the real thing: the original basis of the previously discussed Turing Test.

To be sure, organizations feel like they are under siege from product users who call insistently because they can barely understand the services they purchased. But these companies have abetted the constant connectivity they now want to run away from.  For sure, Americans have all but surgically implanted their phones in their right hands. Not-so-smart phones have become substitutes and surrogates for many of us. But its all part of their world these giants created, and they need to find better ways to deal with their users as humans.

No wonder electronic games are so popular with more Americans. They can make interacting fun—even if it is just with a machine. At the same time, many of us our losing our capacities to deal directly with others in the kinds of collaborative problem-solving that existed just a few generations ago.