bjbjq Rikke: In this interview, we are going to meet Tom Erickson. Tom is an interaction
designer and researcher at the social computing group at IBM Watson Lab, in New York. Tom
has been working for IBM since 97 and before that, he spent nine years at Apple. He is
actually the ideal person to talk to about social computing. What are the most important
issues according to ethics do you think? Tom: Again, it is an issue of levels. I don t know
if I can do all of the levels here, but one thing we need to think about is the extent
to which the systems we designed allow people to perform the full range of interaction.
One example I am fond of is, think about reputation systems. Maybe I rent a small hotel. Let's
suppose I screw up, I do something bad. Somebody complains or reveals what I did on the system.
Let's say I am sorry. I try to make amends. Will the reputation system allow that? Suppose
the person I have wronged and I work it out. Maybe there is some innocent explanation for
what I behaved badly and they forgive me. Can that forgiveness be embodied in the system
you have designed? We can think of ways it could, but does it support that? I think clearly
it should. We need to think about the full range of human interactions and make sure
that we don t just support a narrow range and disrupt the larger processes of forgiveness.
On the other hand, reputation is important to. We also don t want to design systems as
a rule where people have no history. We need to think about it at that level. At a higher
level, you can keep going up. Clearly there is the issue of digital divide. We are creating
all of these lovely systems that help people get ahead commercially, allow them to have
good communication with others, have fun, have enjoyment but those are not accessible
to a certain segment of the world or community. We need to keep that in mind. It is not clear
to me what to do about that. On the one hand, I don t think we want to say, well we won
t design anything until suddenly everybody can have access. That is not feasible. On
another hand, just thinking that everything we do is going to lift everybody s boat equally,
that is not the case either. It is important to think about if we are building a system
that is going to do something, how does that affect others, even in just leaving them behind,
or disadvantaging them more? If you have a small antique store and you don t know how
to get on the web, you probably have lost a lot of business in the last decade. More
generally, any kind of media. This is a point that goes back to Walter Ong, any kind of
new medium, advantages some people and disadvantages others. I personally have a terrible memory.
If I lived a thousand years ago when discourse and activities required a good memory and
oral abilities, I would be a lot worse off than today, when you need to be a good writer.
In an age of writing, I can prosper. In an age requiring speaking and good memory, I
would be much worse off. I guess one of the things I like to say about interaction design
the potential of online systems, is initially when they came along they were very text based.
They favored people exactly like me. For the longer purpose, now we have VOIP, so we can
do speech online. We are getting better at turning voice into text and text into voice.
My hope is that will make online systems more accessible to different communities. Another
nice thing about text is if you are not a native speaker of a language, you can type
text in not real time, so you can work out what you would like to say to somebody who
doesn t speak your language. If it is oral, you are out of luck, or you need somebody
very patient. We need to keep these things in mind and work and try and understand in
whatever we are designing, how to address those. We are never going to be able to treat
everything with absolute quality. We can try to keep the diversity of the world in mind
and make sure we are bringing other people with different abilities, who speak different
languages, who have different skills and making things as accessible to them as possible.
For me, that is a big ethical issue. Rikke: Is this why you are working on a device for
the development of countries? Tom: Part of the motivation of that is we believe it is
a good thing. I am fundamentally an optimist, in that I believe that systems, which increase
the possibility of human communication, are good. On the whole. Certainly we can find
lots of examples of hate speech online and negative interaction, but overall if you give
me a choice between creating and interactive source for people and getting more people
to communicate more, I would say that in general that is going to result in a net improvement
of the world. Others might disagree. That is my driving thing. I guess that is the big
assumption behind my work. If you somehow convince me that is wrong, that would be very
disheartening to say the least. Rikke: You would stop working maybe. Tom: I would find
something else to do, I guess. Rikke: Yes. I have one last question. Let's for a minute
compare online and offline businesses, with regards to leveraging social behavior. When
you look at offline businesses, they put a huge amount of resources into leveraging social
behavior. That have many strategies to get people to tell their friends about the products,
they get celebrities to endorse their products and they make limited editions. When you look
at online businesses, do you think they spend the same amount of resources on leveraging
social behavior? Tom: That is a good question. I think the answer is probably that I don
t know. I do think that you are seeing businesses paying more attention to the online component
of that. Even just in the last year, you can see more and more consultants out there, who
will come along and advise a business on how to get buzz on Facebook or Twitter. I don
t know how to balance the amount of resources people are spending on it, but I think it
is very rapidly becoming a common belief that if you are a business and you don t have the
Facebook page or are not on Twitter, that you are missing out on something. A while
ago, I read about a company that was essentially selling Facebook friends. You are a company,
you go to them and this is not quite as fake as it seems. What you do is, say I have a
little company that sells pottery. I am willing to pay for, they had prices. I forget what
they were but like $200 for 500 Facebook friends, or $200 for 1000 Facebook friends. You would
pay the money, and they would go out and look for mailing lists, Facebook groups and they
would send out invites. Come and be a friend of Tom s company. Tom s company does this,
which you seem to be interested in and people would sign up. You have sort of subcontracted
your friending. The fact that there is apparently a viable business in that, signals to me that
business are catching on fast. Rikke: In your opinion, how big is the potential in the online
world of leveraging or exploiting social behavior? Is it easier to leverage in the online world?
Tom: That is a good question. I think there is certainly a huge potential there. For an
online business, if your customer base is worldwide, you can reach a million people
as easily as a thousand. If you are trying to make physical world contact with them,
you have got maybe a linear price rate or the price goes up as you try and reach more
and more people. I think there is a huge potential there. On the other hand, as I don t whether
to call it as a society, a culture or a meta interaction system, as businesses discover
various methods like spamming and fake friends, the world doesn t like that. It develops counter
measures. I think the worst thing that can happen is spam checkers stay on if we are
all flooded with spam, and then we will stop using email and move to some other channel.
Hopefully things will be in balance. We will strike some kind of homeostasis between the
needs of businesses to promote themselves or their products and the tolerance of individuals.
One could even spin a story to say, it is everyone s advantage that businesses target
only the people who are really interested. The people would like that and the businesses
would like that. Everyone will live happily ever after. I don t personally believe in
that, but there may be some kind of balance there. If you are able to spam the entire
world, three billion people who hate you, then that might cause a lot more difficulty
and expense for you than having gotten a million extra customers. Some kind of balance always
emerges. Where it is going to emerge, it is hard to say. Rikke: Thank you so much for
passing on some of your advice and so much of your knowledge and perspective. Tom: It
is a pleasure. I have really enjoyed the conversation. Rikke: If you want to know more about social
computing, you should read the chapter Tom has written at HYPERLINK "http://www.interaction-design.org"
www.interaction-design.org . Thank you so much for watching. Social Computing Ethics
in Social Computing HYPERLINK "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd0HjFLJp90" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd0HjFLJp90
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