>> Please welcome Veronica Belmont!
(applause) >> Oh, hello!
All right.
That's much better.
I was going to say, there's a lot of you here.
You weren't supposed to still be here at 3:00 on Sunday.
So we're just going to work with that.
But yeah, I'm Veronica.
That's giant me.
I'm a TV host, a podcaster, aspiring writer of erotic genre fiction, startup advisor,
yes, thank you, Kiala, my co-host, is in here somewhere too.
I'm a board member for startups, among many other things, and I've basically been making
online audio/video content for the web for the past decade.
To the point where I was called a doyenne of technology podcasting, and someone younger
than me, this very weekend, called me an internet old. [laughter] This very weekend.
And for me... [laughter] Now, I know that she's a dowager and not a doyenne, but it
seemed very relevant.
Yeah, I relate to her in so many ways.
So as Andy mentioned, right now I'm hosting a show called Dear Veronica for Engadget,
where I cover all sorts of tech questions, social media etiquette, people dealing with
racist family members on Facebook, you know, the usual, and one of the things that we commonly
get questions about, time and time again, is how to engage with other people online.
You know, we have anxiety about how we're being perceived and how they can be better
communicating with their peers via social media.
My best guess as to why people have all these questions is because there's suddenly so much
more at stake.
Everything we do online, our relationships, our friendships, our love life -- it's all
tied into this persona that we spend years and years creating, and curating, for ourselves
and for others to view.
Which is why, when things go wrong, which they often do, or they're perceived in a manner
that we didn't initially anticipate, it can be disastrous.
Not just in the short term, either.
It can be over the course of our entire offline and online lives.
One flub, one tweet, one photo posted privately that becomes public can cause a lasting blemish
on our personal history.
Have you guys all heard about Lindsay Stone?
Familiar with the story?
She was at Arlington National Cemetery, and she had a friend with her, and they had a
little Facebook joke going back and forth where they would do the opposite of what the
sign told them to do.
This was just something they shared privately with each other, though Facebook is a public
forum, and she got destroyed online.
She's a nice person.
She worked with disabled kids, she by all accounts was a decent human being that at
one point had a bad judgment call that has completely ruined her life.
That sucks.
And, you know, screwing up publicly isn't just for famous people anymore or quasi-internet
famous people anymore.
Anybody can have their mistakes show up for the world for all eternity.
This is our world now.
The best case, it shows up on your Google results, the worst case, it makes the news
and completely blows up.
In fact, as I was working on this presentation, one of my Twitter followers sent me this piece
of news.
So what we're seeing here is that this guy was applying for a job and accidentally sent
a nude selfie to the HR manager.
[laughter] The HR manager!
I mean, it's bad enough to...
No.
It's bad enough.
But the problem here is that he...
That was not the intended recipient.
This isn't a case of him being...
Well, he could have been being creepy to someone else, I guess, but he wasn't trying to be
creepy towards her.
Maybe it was a loved one.
And naturally he didn't get the job.
I guess it wasn't good enough, I don't know.
But her quote about it was, “I guess it's the new wave of technology, and sometimes
too much technology is not good for us.
We're seeing it more with younger people.
An appropriate text is sent and it's shared and goes viral.”
Fortunately, though, for this guy, his name did not make the article.
[laughter] So you know...
The negative effects of these situations really blow up, without the benefit of context.
When they're viewed in a vacuum, right?
That was a pretty good reaction.
Thank you.
There's no background, there's no details.
You just see what there is on the internet, and typically the more viral something becomes,
the more stripped of context it is.
Which is why it's very frustrating for me that for a pretty small segment of the internet
population, they only know me for one animated GIF.
That's me!
I'm just going to leave it up there for a while.
It's kind of mesmerizing, isn't it?
[laughter] You know, sometimes I just watch it on repeat and go into a trance-like state.
Anyway.
So because you are actually humans I can speak to in person, I get to give you the benefit
of context, which is really nice.
Now, this was a show I used to host.
And the GIF is taken from a blooper reel of an episode that we did.
We typically would shoot for an hour, some funny stuff would come from the back and forth
between me and my two co-hosts on Tekzilla, and then the editors or the producers would
put together a blooper reel at the end of the show and it was usually a big hit.
It was a help and how-to show, we covered technology, social media stuff.
Not too dissimilar from what I'm doing now.
I was there for about five years.
And so this is the shirt.
I still love this image.
It's like...
Geeky Cthulhu.
I remember the day we were about to record, my producer saw the shirt, he thought it was
really funny, so I thought it would be a super fun idea to make the Cthulhu swim!
You know, in, like, his natural habitat.
I guess space is really his natural...
Whatever.
Whatever your opinions on Cthulhu are.
So in the video, I say that the motion was so lifelike.
So in that last GIF we saw, that's what I'm saying.
So it went into the blooper reel, we had a blast with it, cracking up, having a good
time.
I'm literally explaining the joke in the blooper.
I'm saying the words that I just said you to.
My intent is clear, my participation in the joke is absolutely clear, everybody is having
a good time.
But, as they say online, you won't believe what happens next.
[laughter] Or maybe you will.
So that blooper reel was then cut into a separate video, uploaded to a user's channel, on their
private account.
We couldn't really touch it all that much.
It's not the worst thing in the world.
It's no longer clear, though, this is a blooper at all.
It could have come from any part of the show, from any show that I worked on.
You can only barely see it's part of the Tekzilla set.
But this guy, master of SEO...
Look at that shit.
That is more views on a video than I think I've ever had in my entire career doing web
video.
Which is not saying that much, but whatever.
And then we get even further removed as the video that contained all the context is stripped
down to an animated GIF.
We no longer have the audio, no longer have any sound, no longer have the benefit of even
the description of the uploaded video on the YouTube page.
We just get that little guy over there.
Looping forever.
The jiggle remains.
So, big deal, right?
There are far worse things that could have happened to me.
It's not the end of the world.
This is what happens when you have a presence online.
I get that.
I don't have to like it.
I don't have to love it.
But it happened a long time ago, right?
Except not.
Because time means nothing on the internet.
This whole thing is my internet cockroach.
It won't die.
It is so big!
I hope I'm not freaking...
Anyway, you're fine.
It's not real.
So it can't die, it can't be deleted, can't be reasoned with, it's just this thing that
exists on the internet forever.
So every time I launch a new show, launch a new product, do an interview, talk to someone
online, god forbid, show up on Reddit for some awful reason.
There she is, the GIF of me, seven years ago, proudly shaking my wares in all her Cthulhu-laden
glory for all time.
So this is a tweet I got earlier this month.
I guess someone is making money off this at least.
So he says...
I saw this on a very adult site today.
I thought you might want to know.
Winky face.
Did I?
Did I want to know?
Did I need to know?
Can I do anything about that?
No, I can't do anything about that.
But yeah, like I said, I’m an ad now.
Good for them.
So this is my personal favorite.
I did a talk with Product Hunt, which is a fantastic site, if you're not familiar with
it, and we talked about web culture and projects and startup culture, all that great stuff,
but the first response to Product Hunt tweeting about the interview was that guy.
Sorry, dude.
You don't get to be anonymous in this case, bro.
He just goes...
So lifelike.
This is what I said in the animated GIF.
So I did a little back and forth with him.
That's not always the best idea.
But this part...
“You reap what you sow.”
You reap what you sow?
That kind of thing has just stuck with me.
Somehow I asked for this?
Or somehow, I'm not deserving of any of my other accolades or professional achievements,
because I did this one thing, taken out of context, etc, etc?
And the saddest thing for me... [laughter] Thank you, XKCD.
Thank you.
The saddest thing for me is how often and to what lengths I try to go to explain myself
to these assholes.
Like...
Sorry.
I know we're not supposed to swear too much.
But I want so badly to give context to the animated GIF that I end up engaging with these
people who are just putting me in my place, which is super fun and productive!
Hey, guys.
That's you from last year.
I think it's probably safe to say that every single one of us out here, every single one
of you in the audience, has probably had to deal with something like this in your lives.
Maybe it's not quite so visual.
But there's probably something out there that you're not super-duper proud of.
Andy, I used your picture from last year.
So consider this your attribution to your Creative Commons license.
Not that guy, though.
He's fine.
He's got a clear conscience.
And what's absolutely fascinating to me now is how hard lawmakers are trying to find ways
to stop or prevent the internet from doing what it does best—remember.
So here are some examples of some pretty piss-poor implementations of this effect to rewrite
or throw a rug over internet history.
Maybe they were done in the best intentions at heart, but they won't work and they probably
shouldn't work.
You know, I get it.
I get it, though.
We've built this incredibly evolving and growing organism at such an amazing rate.
Such a rapid pace that we haven't really figured out a way to emotionally process this new
invincible and perfect memory that exists on the internet.
That we all have access to.
I mean, we used to be so stoked to share cat pictures with people on the other side of
the planet.
There it goes!
That we forgot to think about what happens when it's not cat pictures.
But the nudes you sent to your boyfriend that ended up on a revenge porn site.
Poor bastard.
You're so cute.
[laughter] So the laws suck.
Teenagers and most adults that we know are still unwittingly doing things on the internet
that could someday ruin their lives, or at least greatly embarrass them.
Embarrass the hell out of them.
And all the mistakes we've ever made online are part of the public internet record.
Note, I was having dinner on Friday night, and I was talking about this presentation.
Hi, Dawn.
Is Dawn in the audience?
There she is, right there.
And we were having a talk about this presentation.
And she said...
You know, as time goes on, being embarrassed about this kind of stuff won't really be necessary
anymore, because everyone will have that one thing.
Or those two things or those ten things.
And then it won't really matter as much anymore, will it?
But we're not quite there yet, unfortunately.
So what do we do about that?
For me, it all comes back to one thing.
Empathy.
It sounds so easy, but it's really, really not.
I guess that as I said, every single person here, myself included, we've all jumped on
some internet bandwagon without really digging into the context of what we were actually
contributing to.
Maybe even we realized later that it was a shitty move, but we moved on.
This was a great quote I found in Psychology Today when I was working on this presentation.
I'm going to try to read it, though it's very large.
You can read that first part, but what I really wanted you to focus on, because I really can’t
pronounce supramarginal gyrus?
Do we have a doctor in the audience?
“When this brain region doesn't function properly, or when we have to make particularly
quick decisions, the researchers found one's ability for empathy is dramatically reduced.
This area of the brain helps us to distinguish our own emotional state from that of other
people and is responsible for empathy and compassion.”
So our need to react, to be part of the conversation around us, to be relevant, to be first, might
be diminishing our ability to have empathy and compassion.
And in researching this presentation, I kept reading the same phrase over and over again,
which is...
Empathy is a muscle.
We have to keep using it in order to keep it strong.
But the more you flex it, the easier it actually gets.
So I'm not a doctor, clearly.
But I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about empathy and compassion and mindfulness
and how they impact us, especially online.
However, I want to be clear.
That's not what I'm seeking for myself, in regards to the GIF.
There's only one way for me to not feel completely crazy.
To not kind of lose my crap over this, every time it pops up, and that's to be empathetic.
So I understand now that the context has been lost.
The people messaging me, they don't stop to think about it, they don't know how the image
was born.
They're not really stopping to care either.
They don't frankly give an F. I'm not excusing the dickish behavior or forgiving it.
Believe me, empathy and sympathy are two totally separate things.
But maybe...
Maybe we can get to them early.
You know, schools across the world, in Ireland, here in the United States, are all working
on programs to specifically teach empathy in classrooms, and educators are realizing
that this not only helps people relate better to each other, but it also improves test scores.
Go figure.
So I also find it interesting that we're nicer to our computers and phones than we are to
other people on the internet.
We give our AI names.
We have Siri, we've got Cortana, Alexa, Jeeves, and...
Yes.
I didn't want to leave Jeeves out.
We're pretty mean to Jeeves, right?
[laughter] We tease him sometimes.
But typically, we talk to them using, like, kind and natural language.
And we feel good about that.
We feel like we have a relationship with them.
So is the issue that we're writing in text to people online?
The comments?
The tweets?
Is that making us so distant?
Or does hearing another human or, in this case, non-human voice change something inside
of us?
Does it trigger some sense of empathy?
Maybe software can make us nicer.
I don't know.
Do we need to be prompted before we post something that we'll regret?
Or is that taking away the spontaneity of the internet that makes it so wonderful?
You know, as I said, lawmakers are really trying to keep up the pace with this, but
maybe the geeks can help figure something out.
Now, I'm not a programmer, but I'm totally willing to talk your ear off about ideas at
a later date, at this event, and for a very reasonable advisor share amount.
[laughter] Just kidding.
I'm not kidding.
Let me be real for you, for a minute, too.
Real talk time.
So after Zoe Quinn gave her talk yesterday, I had a huge freakout and almost scrapped
this entire talk.
Because the last few thoughts she had so strongly mirrored my own.
If you saw me ugly crying in the bathroom yesterday, that was why.
I'm cool now.
Or one of the times.
[laughter] We had essentially come to the same conclusion, though obviously through
a very different set of circumstances.
So instead of changing my last few slides, I'm going to leave them, because I feel so
strongly that we can have a positive change on the atmosphere of the internet, even if
we don't necessarily see ourselves as part of the problem.
We're all going to make mistakes.
[laughter] We’re all going to make mistakes at some point in our lives.
And these things are going to last, for better or for worse, and become a permanent part
of the DNA of our history of the internet culture.
We can't change that, right?
But we can opt out of being part of the internet mob machine, and that's something that Zoe
talked about a lot.
Hell, we can take it a step further and speak up when something doesn't sit right.
We can learn more, keep an open mind, actively work towards being more mindful when the punishment
actually befits the so-called crime.
And frankly, who are we really even to say?
And people like the ones in this room can create the tools to help us get there.
In this era, where everything is permanent, in this era where everything is permanent,
it's more important than ever to give people the benefit of the doubt, and at the end of
the day, a more mindful internet will be a better place for all of us.
Thank you.
[applause]