Tag Archives: New York Times

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Is “Feedback” Genuine Listening?

We should not assume that a group asking for “feedback” is really listening. Listening is a cultivated and individual skill.  Feedback is typically less refined and subject to organizational filters.   

Recently I noticed that the New York Times seems to have stopped publishing letters in its Sunday Magazine and Book Review. Not an earthshaking change maybe. But it began to strike me that this deletion of reader’s opinions was odd when juxtaposed with the paper’s fall-over-backwards requests for feedback after doing something as simple as reporting a missing paper. The single checkmark notification is a nano-second act, yet it provoked a request to know how satisfying or difficult  the experience was. It seemed that their priorities were upside down. Why dismiss reader’s comments while keeping a useless exercise about a simple matter? I suspect this is a kind of irrationality that grows out of an automated system which doesn’t know what matters.  We are on the midst of similar requests for feedback from CX (Customer Service) teams responsible for designing the “customer journey” in retail. They can satisfy themselves by signaling concern for customers without setting up the tools needed to fully follow through. Listening is a demanding intellectual exercise; responding to an set of a-priori questions is not.

It’s worth remembering that the term “feedback” arose as a name for noise or interference produced by an electrical circuit back onto itself. The deafening growl of a public address system is an example. We get a double dose of aural unpleasantness if Uncle Fred gets his karaoke microphone too close to the speakers.

To be sure, I’m an outlier for still expecting a newspaper to be in the driveway each morning. But this simple example suggests a growing trend in how we are asked to interact with agencies, businesses and organizations. Our communications with these entities seems less about the specifics of a response, and more about creating a running tally of stock complements, complaints, or experiences that can be processed into data-driven marketing. “How did we do?” asks the online store. “Did we answer your question?” a tech website wants to know. The answers will only need a simulacrum of listening, without anyone knowing enough to learn much from the answer.

With some exceptions the idea of “customer care” now amounts to the creation of a digital interface between an increasingly impatient live body on one end, and a digital “bot” with a set of closed-option questions on the other. Companies like Bizrate specialize in setting up such systems for clients. But rarely do organizations allow a customer with a specific question to frame their issue in their own way. Speaking broadly, as a culture we are under the paradoxical impression that we need to appear consumer-driven, but we don’t need to hear that much. Surely customer comments can do some good. But we are already so overtaxed with incoming messages that these pre-formed exchanges seem like they hardly matter.

More often than not, the organizations repertoire of a group’s “answers” cannot easily match the particular variables embedded in a question. Hence, no one is really “chatting.” We have all ended up at the top of a phone tree when none of the options seem good. To change metaphors, more than I can count I’ve ended an exchange with a chatbot feeling like I got pushed onto the wrong train. Try dealing with your cable supplier, and you will likely conclude the experience feeling like you ended up going to Duluth rather Dallas.

What is both ingenious and perverse in these end-of-transaction questions is seemingly how much an organization pretends that it is listening. The problem, of course, is that prompts generated by algorithms cost practically nothing to produce. And they may actually yield some data that can satisfy the performance expectations of management. It seems like the marketing department is growing, but the service department has been hollowed out. Odds are that an organization really doesn’t want to hear you on your terms.

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A Cloud Over Tech

If we all “hang out” virtually, we make ourselves smaller.

A few days ago I watched a car drifting on its own across a sloped parking lot, motor off.  There was an occupant, but he was lost to everything except the text he was writing. He was clearly headed for trouble on the other side when he finally realized that the laws of physics had put him in the path of others. I fear this is us, drifting–even while the world waits–and too preoccupied with a screen to notice.

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As a case in point Brian Chen’s recent technology piece in the New York Times (December 29, 2022) eagerly described of coming advances in digital media:  better iPhones, new virtual reality equipment, software that allows people to “share selfies at the same time,” and social media options that provide new “fun places to hang out.”

So glib and so short-sighted.  When did a few inches of glass with microchips become a “place?” Language like this makes one wonder if, as students, these technology journalists encountered the rich expanses of social intelligence that come to life in real time. Too few technology mavens seem to give any weight to the ranges of human experience predicated on hard-won human achievements of cognition and competence.  Consumer-based digital media are mostly about speed rather than light. If we all “hang out” virtually, we make ourselves smaller, using the clever equivalent of a mirror to not notice our diminished relevance.

Most social media sites only give us only the illusion of connection. This is perhaps one reason movies, sports and modern narratives are so attractive: we can at least witness people in actual “places” doing more with their lives than exercising their thumbs. Spending time with young children also a helps. In their early years children reflect our core nature by seeking direct and undivided attention; no virtual parenting, please. In expecting more than nominal indifference they may be more like their grandparents than parents.

A.I. pollutes the idea of authorship

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Among more changes awaited next year, Chen described a “new chatty assistant” from an A. I. firm. The software is called Chat-GPT, which can allow a nearly sentient chatbot to act as a person’s “research assistant,” or maybe generate business proposals, or even write research papers. He’s enthusiastic about how these kinds of programs will “streamline people’s work flows.”  But I suspect these require us to put our minds in idle: no longer burdened with functioning as an agency of thought.  Apparently the kinks to be worked out would be no more than technical, freeing a person from using complex problem-solving skills. Indeed, the “work” of a computer generated report cannot be said to come from the person at all. As with so many message assistants, A.I. pollutes the idea of authorship. Who is in charge of the resulting verbal action?  Hello Hal.

Consider how much worse it is for teachers of logic, writing, grammar, vocabulary, research and rhetoric, let alone their students. All ought to be engaged in shaping minds that are disciplined, smart about sources, and able to apply their life experiences to new circumstances. It is no wonder that the increasing presence of intellectual fakery makes some college degrees nearly meaningless. Paying for an A.I.-generated college paper is bad enough; generating plans for action from a self-writing Word program is a nightmare for all of us who expect our interlocutors to be competent, conscious and moral free agents.

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