Category: Web

Describe the internet without refering to technology using a maximum of 10 words…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Information Technology, Internet, Life, Online Services, Web

What do you do after a long ramble through park land with large herds of free-roaming deer when the weather is rainy, chilly, and blustery? Dry off and warm up in a café with a hot drink and something to eat. That’s exactly what the Badger and his wife did at the end of a bracing wander around Petworth Park. The café, in Petworth House  which sits magnificently at one end of the park, was busy but we found a table next to a small group of millennial couples who had hiked cross-country from Midhurst seven miles away. They were refuelling with tea, sandwiches, and hot soup in readiness for the trek back. Their lively conversation wasn’t about their hike or their return journey, but about the internet and AI! Some of the group, the Badger sensed, clearly had a background in IT. As they finished and rose to leave, one commented cheerily to another that ‘There should be a simple way of describing the internet that doesn’t use jargon or refer to technology’. After the group left, the Badger’s wife challenged him to do just that using a maximum of ten words!

Thoughts bubbled in the Badger’s brain for the rest of the day, and later that evening he told his wife that he’d converged on a description for the internet that met the challenge. She merely shrugged her shoulders disinterestedly and continued surfing the internet on her smartphone. Undeterred, the Badger announced that the internet is ‘All human interactions, from good to evil, sped up’. She simply nodded and told the Badger to use it for his blog, and that’s exactly what he’s done!

There are probably many valid and better alternatives, but the Badger thinks these words powerfully describe the internet, that nebulous entity which not only invisibly connects people, places, information, stories, beliefs, knowledge, and ideas globally, but also entertains us, sparks our curiosity, and mirrors our aspirations, flaws, and contradictions. The words also encapsulate the fact that all the good and bad attributes of humanity waltz together on the internet at a speed humankind has never encountered before. The fight between good and evil for domination is thus unrelenting, perpetual, and affected only by human ingenuity. Sometimes good dominates and other times evil does, which is why we should be wary, cautious, and conscious of safety, security, and privacy when engaging in the virtual world where the yin-yang of modern life is played out.

The Badger’s wife has now suggested a new challenge – to describe AI in ‘a simple way that doesn’t use jargon or refer to technology’ using a maximum of ten words. The Badger’s first thought was to describe AI using the same words for the internet. His second thought? To avoid challenges spawned when your spouse overhears something in the conversation of strangers!

‘You are the weakest link’…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Information Technology, Life, Online Services, Web

An email from British Telecom (BT) arrived in the Badger’s inbox last week. It communicated the ‘inflation plus 3.9%’ price rise of the Badger’s broadband in line with a  clause in his package contract. This was expected, but it was hard to take seriously BT’s accompanying narrative for the increase when the Badger can renew today with their promise of a free upgrade to fibre to the premises (FTTP) – if it becomes available during the new contract term – for 30% less than he’s currently paying!  BT, by the way,  appear unable to provide any date for when FTTP might be available in the area, and so the Badger considers their free upgrade promise as simply a marketing ploy of little tangible value.

As you might expect, the Badger’s started exploring the options for when his current broadband is out of contract in the summer. Last weekend, a mobile comms provider’s TV advert triggered the Badger to visit their website to look at their broadband offerings. The Badger didn’t dwell there long, but obviously long enough for their systems to kick into overdrive because over the following three days, there were a series of unsolicited calls from the same telephone number to the Badger’s landline. The Badger, as part of a long-embedded security and privacy discipline, never picks up landline calls from numbers that aren’t in his address book. A quick check of the caller’s number on who called me  revealed a ‘negative’ rating and that callers were, or purported to be, from the mobile comms provider whose website the Badger had visited. The number was blocked and after a couple of days the calls stopped.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about this because it’s a dynamic that many people will have experienced. However, it reminded the Badger to be conscious of the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of marketing, to carefully consider inflation-linked price clauses when shopping for broadband, and not to be complacent because everything you do online provides data that others, reputable or otherwise, will use for their own purposes. It’s easy to become complacent, and there are always consequences from your internet searches and website visits!

The Badger’s wife always blames today’s technology when nuisances like that described above occur. The Badger, however, always tactfully disagrees and highlights that its human behaviour and human complacency in interacting with technology, rather than the technology itself, that is a root cause. He always points out that it’s rarely the technology per se that leaks information to feed the perpetual media frenzies that are a feature of modern life, its people! On this occasion, however, the Badger made a tactical error by reminding his wife that she should be careful when online because ‘you are the weakest link’.  As true and generally pertinent as the phrase might be, it didn’t go down well…

The Web at 30, and getting cancelled…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Learning, Life, Online Services, Opinion, social media, Web

There’s an interesting article entitled ‘Going global: the world the Web has wrought’ in this month’s edition of Physicsworld, the member magazine of the Institute of Physics. It covers how the Web has taken over the world in the last 30 years and the role of physicists and programmers in enabling this to happen. The article points out that the benefits of the Web have not come without tremendous economic and social dislocations, and its last sentence – ‘The world has indeed been transformed by the Web, but not entirely for the better’ – captures a truth that resonates with those whose careers spanned the Web’s progression.

The Badger made this ‘not entirely for the better’ point to a neighbour’s daughter, home from university for the weekend, and got a lecture in response! The Badger is a fuddy-duddy, apparently, whose opinions are irrelevant because his generation are responsible for everything that’s wrong and the Web has brought people nothing but good. Hmm! Resisting the urge to argue, the Badger just smiled and calmly suggested the young lady’s view might change on gaining more life experience after university. With a stare that could kill, she stormed off!

At the local supermarket later, the Badger bumped into her mother who apologetically mentioned that her daughter had ‘cancelled’ the Badger. She then said, ‘Join the club; last week she told me that I was cancelled too’. We laughed. The youngster’s mum theatrically rolled her eyes and then wryly bemoaned the amount of time her daughter spent surfing the Web. Being told you’re cancelled was a new experience, but not a bothersome one because it’s an absurdity that just illustrates the ‘not entirely for the better’ point about the transformational impact of the Web.

Many in our younger generations today seem intent on banning, reinterpreting, or cancelling anyone or anything from earlier times because it might offend. Enabling the growth of a sentiment which redefines the truth and facts of earlier eras stands out as one of the Web’s ‘not entirely for the better’ transformational impacts. Microsoft’s new ‘inclusivity checker’ in Word, see here and here,  is a simple example of the sentiment’s pervasiveness. In the Badger’s view, the words actually written by authors, songsters, and spoken by famous people in earlier times are the facts of their era and suggesting ‘inclusivity’ modifications for them just promotes the breeding of a denial and dishonesty in society that future generations will regret.

From the Badger’s experience above, it seems that all you must do to be cancelled is point out that the Web is ‘not entirely for the better’, be of an older generation, and stand up for the preservation of the language and facts of history, no matter how uncomfortable they may be in a modern setting. If that’s the case, the Web is facilitating the slide to a cultural oblivion that future generations don’t deserve.