Your computer/tablet/phone are listening . . . and learning . . . and not always in the way you might expect it to benefit you.

Bruce Schneier wrote that “Surveillance is the business model of the internet.”

Search engines, social media sites and smart programs, including bots like Alexa, Google Assistant, Echo and Siri, are just another way for companies to keep track of what you’re doing, saying, searching or purchasing.

“By 2021, there will be almost as many personal assistant bots on the planet as people.”  

If you don’t already have one, those online bots are early manifestations of AI that have already reached a fairly surprising level of sophistication. Your voice is recognized. You can ask question, and direct them to do things like play a song or remind you in ten minutes to call someone.

As yet limited conversations are taking place with these bots that are starting to address emotional as well as intellectual issues. A poet friend with an advanced degree in electrical engineering is already programing/experimenting with bot poetry.

Home appliances now have a social life.

Fridges, stoves, dishwashers, lighting, TVs, phones, computers, furnace, AC, and security systems co-manage/coordinate many of your home entertainment, shelter, protection and environmental systems.

But the information flow is not one way.

It’s called surveillance capitalism.

As Shoshana Zuboff writes: “It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal [of business] now is to automate us.”

It’s a power to shape behavior, available choices and decision-making.

Now, think of all the ways you bring search, word docs and other electronic media into your writing. Your activity is tracked, and your searches shaped to suit that tracking.

Years ago, Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that the “contents of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” 

Make no mistake, through data collection, analysis and electronic media the business of business is just that. Big Data is continuously shaping what it provides to you in the service of that business. That can and probably probably already is reaching into what you write.

The trade-off is for personalized content (in a narrowing media bubble of information) in return for data on your interests and activities that can also be sold to retailers and manufacturers. But that data also shows up in the kind of information you ask from Google.

Roger McNamee recently wrote in Wired: “the business model is about tracking human beings, claiming eminent domain on their personal data, using it for behavioral prediction, and then using the tools of machine learning and AI to steer people toward outcomes that make those predictions more valuable.”

The original plan simply was to organize knowledge. Now it is about behavior modification through manipulating, exploiting, influencing, guiding and control.

Searching online, you are in turn searched: our interior, private lives opened into a public gathering of data (The Guardian)

Technology alters writing/reading by causing the brain to think in different ways, often resulting in a narrowing and flattening of critical reasoning and creativity, in addition to a shortening of attention spans both in the writing process as well as in reading.

What is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to an ever-widening array of digital media?

Search engines, social media sites and smart programs are programed to adjust and prioritize information to your personal preferences, choices, needs, biases, and interests. Accordingly, they flow that information, suitably shaded and ordered, back to you.

The more you use these programs, the more they shape for you a personalized and increasingly narrow and particularized flow of information. The programs are simply feeding what they see as your interests.

Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and other social media, with their predisposition toward paraphrase, aphoristic comment and emotional/confessional expression over a language of more substantive ideas, form and content, have the power to “trend” an author and to drive a layer of attention a mile wide and inch deep.

The result can sometimes become Fan Poetry or Fan Fiction . . . writing that seems more a product of the medium than the mind, a purposeful suspension of critical thinking.

Often in such circumstances writing that is banal and less challenging from a creative point of view rises to a level of attention (sometimes in print or eBook sales as well) far out of proportion to its critical worth. The direct, plain qualities of such writing easily suit and conform to the new media, appealing primarily to nontraditional readers.

Tailor-made for the electric media of the new century, a broader populace poetry of “instapoets” is emerging – writing that is what I think Russell Smith refers to as “the blunt and emotional jeremiad” – not unlike the emotionally prosaic “sweet kitsch” poetry of Rod McKuen from the 1960s.

Tony Hoagland is harsher: “ . . . narrative poetry . . . has been tainted by its over-use in thousands of confessional poems . . . the inadvertent sentimentality and narcissism of many such poems have imparted the odor of indulgence . . . .”

That noted, as a poet-friend says, “luckily for us, poetry is all about (at least in part) shifting, smearing, and plainly pushing meanings [and syntax] in all kinds of directions.”

Shaping and expanding in this new technological age, poetry needs to find ways of maintaining creative weighting and proportion between a writer/reader’s personal connection to its essential emotional core and to the intellectually objective experience of its creative execution.

Tune in for my next poetry post on Tuesday, April 9 when “Some Assembly Will Be Required”

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.

In fifty years, poetry will no longer resemble what we read today.  

Let’s riff a bit on some serious, playful, and radical thinking about how poetry, language and reading are changing, as well as some of the causes driving those changes. 

The World Wide Web first emerged thirty years ago. Today, half the world is online.

That’s closing in on 4 billion people. Think about what that number means . . . 

The world literacy rate in the early 1800s was 12 %. Today it is 86%, the vast majority of that coming since the 1960s. Today there is still a large difference in literacy rates across generations, mainly favouring the young . . . those born into or coming of age during the emergence of the computer, online media and the web.

A lot more people reading, coupled with the growth of and access to online media, has altered not only what is read but also the quantity and variety of available product.

Throughout the last 30 years a generation of poets and readers has been gradually immersing itself in our online world, adding both more creatively varied as well as more prosaic forms of poetry.

Today, a widening range of electronic media is daily creating and supporting ingenious information systems, innovative forms of knowledge, the creation of new words, different uses of language and reorganized patterns (OK, bubbles) of culture, all of which flow overtly and covertly into what we write. 

Google’s digital universe is ground zero for a new kind of writing – weaving technology into the service of the brain’s continuously adapting creative processes – in which focused computer-mediated modification and extraction of data, commodification, and control/guidance of an author’s decision-making methodology are all affected.

As the principal medium of conscious human thought and emotion, the language with which we express ourselves – how it is both written and read in processing through and merging with that media – is leading to a more fluid research and writing process, different kinds of reading experience, as well as confronting us with whole new kinds of diction, syntax, metaphors and styles of writing. 

We need to recognize the notion that “place” (even as in writer in residence) in an online medium now clearly means not a particular place for the author but rather something located in and emerging out of a map composed in the size of the world (which also happens to be the title of a new manuscript I’m working on).

The innate ambiguity of language requires context before its precision can be realized. With electronic media, the new context for both writer and reader is wherever you are as well as everywhere the writing comes from, goes to, and is consumed.

Words in the web are often hyperlinked to another location/perspective – at their simplest appearing as definitions, synonyms, antonyms, spelling, grammar, to name just a few – and in their more complex form as links to pictures, articles, books, other writers, etc.

Those links can be familiar or surprising and novel, opening up infinite combinations and capabilities for exploration. 

Next up within the coming decade will be how artificial intelligence (AI) – already with us in several forms – will bring/enforce new levels of technological decision-making, control, contribution and modification with respect to choices as to what and how language is used.  

The emergent flexibility of such media consistently reshapes and “free-orders” the mind, how we experience the world and our thoughts and ideas about that world . . . ultimately also reshaping the diction and syntax we use.

Walter Ong tells us, “Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word.”

Science is telling us the brain’s neural activity is continuously evolving as circumstances and context change. Online media is the biggest contextual change yet!

Writers like Marshall McLuhan or more recently Nicholas Carr and Yuval Noah Harari write that the brain, because of its plasticity, is also subtly adjusting its neuronal connections – guiding, altering how we think – for better and worse – in response to the various forms of electronic media it encounters.

Change can be lamented or embraced, and technology is fine so long as it is deployed wisely.

 So . . . What are some of the intrusions/effects of technology on poetry? (Note: These will be numbered throughout April)

(1) The gradual narrowing, and assigning portions of our creativity and decision-making to technology and its algorithms.

The computer – and the programming codes/processes underpinning its workings – becomes the author’s co-author, and the poem’s first reader and editor . . . not always wanted but forever, it seems, more than willing to exert its will and influence.

Imbedded algorithms help guide/direct the writer to move seamlessly between documents, check/propose spelling and the composition of clauses/phrases, suggest alternate words, synonyms/antonyms, search information, and connect to other documents by way of hypertext links.

Algorithms have been employed for some time. Around 300 BC, Euclid created one for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers, and in 60-120 AD Sieve of Eratosthenes used one for finding prime numbers.

In today’s lexicon, an algorithm is a precision-driven process guiding a computer to define and resolve a problem through a methodically ordered cycle of clear directions.

It measures and ‘discerns’ the world through the systematizing and shaping of its coded directions.

On the web, whether searching or in social media, knowledge more and more becomes information altered and shaped through the unique presence, influence and authority of algorithms. 

For more ways technology affects/intrudes upon how we write/read poetry, look for my next post.

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.