The Social Impact of Technology

David:

Welcome to Disarming Data. We're looking at data and privacy from the perspective of two generations.

Paige:

I'm Paige Biderman, I'm a millennial who grew up in the tech generation.

David:

I'm David Biderman. I'm the boomer. I don't know anything about tech. I usually lose my cell phone rather than use my cell phone. I'm a tech novice. In this podcast, we'll be having conversations with cyber hackers, privacy experts, and guardians of security who can explain some of this to me.

Paige:

And Dad, you forgot about whistle blowers and other people who are interesting and influential to us.

David:

And Paige, you forgot to say thank you for listening to the show.

Paige:

Thanks for listening.

David:

Welcome to Disarming Data. This is a podcast where we explore technology, communications, people of great interest. And our twist, nuance is that we do so from multi-generational. I'm the old boomer and Paige, who is going to introduce herself in a minute, is the millennial. And as you may know, as you all know, we have different perspectives on communications and things otherwise related. But today we are really very, very honored to have Elizabeth Keating. Elizabeth is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm very pleased to say, Elizabeth, that you attended both college and you did your PhD at Berkeley, our favorite school.

Elizabeth:

I did my undergraduate at Berkeley and my PhD at UCLA.

David:

Okay. So you're in California.

Elizabeth:

Two of my favorite schools.

David:

Okay. Yeah, that's great. And then your list of books and your list of accomplishments is probably too great for us to go through. But among other things, you had a full ride scholarship. You started studying in I see New Guinea and East Philippines. You've spoken at the Freiburg Institute, the Max Planck Institute, given over 75 talks, I think authored three or four books. And you specialize in communications and linguistics. I'm not trying to tell you who you are, you could tell the group better, but I just wanted to introduce you and say thank you for joining us.

Elizabeth:

It's my pleasure certainly to be here.

Paige:

We always really like to begin by asking our guests kind of where they grew up and how they got into the field they work in now, and what kind of made you interested in studying anthropology to begin with.

Elizabeth:

I actually was born in New York City, and then spent some time as a small girl in Connecticut. And then my father, who was an engineer, took jobs in different places in the US and also in the West Indies, and so we moved around a lot when I was a child. And maybe that created the interest in different places, and anthropology, I don't know, but it's never been difficult for me to go someplace and be fascinated by how people are living their lives there. And of course, in the United States there are a lot of different communities. My whole family ended up in California, like many people. And I went to undergraduate and graduate school there, as I mentioned.

And after graduate school, I went to the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands for a post-doc, where we studied many different aspects of language. But we studied how different languages express spatial relationships, and whether that influenced the way people thought about spatial relationships. So was there an influence of language on cognition? This is a topic that's fascinated people for centuries because it's so difficult to understand what's going on in the brain without really looking at language. And then I came to the University of Texas as an assistant professor, just the lowest rank on the scale. And I was very, very lucky when I first came that we had a deaf graduate student in linguistic anthropology. And I started working with Gene, and we did some projects looking at American Sign Language. And we started to look at a new technology which was emerging for deaf people to be able to use sign language long distance, in other words, because of the properties of computers that were being designed and developed, it became possible to do what we're doing today without thinking too much about it.

But back then, it was pretty revolutionary. And the deaf community is very, very technologically leading edge, if you will. They've always adopted technologies very quickly. And we were looking at an application that Sprint was designing in order to help with interpreters interpreting conversations for deaf people. And Gene said to me, "You know, Elizabeth, there's something even more interesting going on in the deaf community because deaf people have discovered webcams." This was in 1999. They were just coming onto the consumer market. He said, "And of course, they're having to adapt sign language because sign language is something that emerges in three-dimensional space." We want to talk about space that way. But it has to be rendered in two-dimensional space on the screen.

And we got some research funds, and we started to study these deaf families and what they were doing with these webcams, and that's how I got interested in the social impacts of technology. It was great fun. Austin has a sizeable deaf community because the deaf residential school was situated in Austin for a good part of Texas. And it was a wonderful experience both culturally for me and also language-wise because to learn a visual language, it was fascinating.

David:

So you learned sign language, obviously.

Elizabeth:

Yes. I'm afraid I only got up to about an intermediate level. But because Gene has deaf parents, he grew up in a sign language environment. And he was my co-partner in all of the research, he's now a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington DC, and continuing on with doing this kind of work himself. And after that, I got involved in a project looking at engineers who were collaborating virtually from four different continents designing advanced energy plants and how they were having to use virtual tools in order to do the teamwork that in prior times they were doing by sharing the same office space. So they had tremendous challenges, not just the challenges of assuming too much, but the cultural challenges as well in terms of: How do you do teamwork? And how do you even do a greeting? And how do you communicate things like respect and attention and so forth? So I was also during that time, the director of science, technology, and society program at the university, and also doing other projects having to do with technology. And I've always been fascinating by how adaptable people are, and also the fascinating tool of language that we have.

David:

Well, I guess we have to talk about ChatGPT at some point. Can't forget about that. I'm sure you've taken a look at that. But I wanted to start because the reason we asked you on was because I'm sitting here in the LA office of the law firm where I work, and you could shoot a bullet down the hallway and you wouldn't find a soul. I mean, nobody is coming in at all. Everybody's doing everything by Zoom, and face to face meetings are very rare. I don't think it's right. I think we're missing a lot. But I'm from a different generation. Paige, you may want to give your perspective on these kinds of things.

Paige:

I mean, so I'm in school. Right? A lot of our classes, even though we have in person classes, a lot of professors chose to still teach lectures on Zoom. It's not a ton of communicating back and forth. But I do find that it's much more difficult to stay focused than when in a classroom or lecture hall. I have to really concentrate in order to kind of stay on the professor on the screen. I don't know if it's just being around human beings. I don't know that much about it. But it does feel kind of weird is the only way to describe it best. So I guess my question would be: Why do virtual meetings feel so weird?

Elizabeth:

Yes, it's an excellent question, and it's something that we're all experiencing for sure. We talked for two years on Zoom during the pandemic, and it was much less than a satisfying experience for particularly the students. And one of the reasons it's so difficult is, well, first of all, we never think about how we interact with people, how we conduct a conversation. We've learned how to conduct conversations at a very, very early age. Most three year olds are pretty expert at it, and they're expert at language as well. And so we never really have to think about anything that we do in terms of carrying on a conversation, or establishing an interaction, or maintaining it, or even closing it down. We know how to do all of those things. But what the virtual spaces have pointed out to us is we don't know what we don't know.

In other words, all of those habits are disrupted, and suddenly we don't have at our disposal the same signals that we've been relying on without even realizing we're relying on them. So a good example is, the turn-taking is very, very awkward in these virtual spaces. And one of the reasons for that is that we don't notice it's below our conscious reckoning, how it is that we're tuning into if someone takes an in breath, we realize, oh, they're getting ready. They want a turn. They're signaling to us that, okay, wrap it up, I want to take a turn at talk. Or they start nodding their head a lot and becoming more involved, and you understand that as a signal that they want to become even more involved by taking a speaking turn. And we also listen to the different ways that people pattern their intonation to show us that they're coming to a possible transition point where it wouldn't be rude if we took a turn ourselves.

And we are so good at doing this that the typical gap in American conversations, and this is similar in other languages, is 200 milliseconds. That's shorter than the time it takes to retrieve a word.

David:

wow.

Elizabeth:

And so what it means is that we're already pre-planning what we're going to say as someone's wrapping up their conversation, and we're just ready to ... And we can predict pretty much how they're going to end, what they're saying at those times when we're ready to jump in, or we want them to acknowledge us as having a turn. And these are all such very subtle cues that when you're facing a bunch of people on the screen, you can't really focus your attention on everybody at once in the same way that you can in a face to face interaction. So sight is so important in face to face interactions. We can monitor in our peripheral vision what's happening with other people and how their body behaviors are signaling attention, or attitude, or stance, or engagement. And all of these things are lost on the screen because there's too much in the background.

If we look at anybody's background, there's so much difference between each of the backgrounds. We're not sharing the same background. And our attention gets diverted to that. But mainly, it's the lack of embodied cues, which have traditional been ignored. I mean, we call them nonverbal. That signals a lot, doesn't it?

David:

Yeah.

Elizabeth:

We're calling them by what they're not, so we don't really have a robust body of research on how to really understand these different features of interaction.

David:

Yeah, because we had someone who basically specialized in facial recognition, not from a technical standpoint, but from a psychological standpoint. And she was saying how important it was and how much you could learn just by looking at people's faces when they were talking. But one thing, I've got to ask you this, one thing she said was ... There's a book called Lie Spotting, it shows you how you can spot a liar, et cetera. She said, "It's a total myth. You cannot look at someone's face and figure out whether they're telling the truth."

Elizabeth:

That's right. People would love it if we did have some kind of standardized signals like we do in language, but it's not the case. They're very idiosyncratic and they're difficult to really parse. And the gaze is a very interesting aspect because one of the things that's disrupting about virtual conversations too is you don't really know what people are looking at.

David:

Right.

Elizabeth:

And so that's a bit disorienting as well.

Paige:

Yeah. The expert we had on, on nonverbal communication, she also talked a lot, and I was just wondering if you could touch on this, how important lower body cues actually might be, which I've never even thought about. I've never though about how someone's stance, until she mentioned it, and I was like, "That is really interesting." And she talked about how influencing people, lower body cues were really important. Do you think that also plays a fact? You can't even tell if someone's wearing pants. You know what I mean?

Elizabeth:

That's right. That's right. We are using all of these semiotic modes, if you will. We're making sense of them. People are sense making creatures, and they will use all the materials at their disposal to try to create sense out of the signals that they're receiving. And as far as the lower body, yes, people can signal for example that they're getting ready to leave an interaction. That's a very delicate move to make because people are, despite what you read in the media about us being in constant conflict with each other, when you look at conversations, when conversation analysts look at conversations, they find out that we're actually quite sensitive to each other and careful not to give someone the impression that we're rejecting them.

And so when we're getting ready to leave an interaction, there's usually a pretty complex back and forth. There's not just one bye, but you start to change your body, often your lower body, your feet a little bit, so they're signaled that you're getting ready to move out of the interaction. And so everybody can coordinate that moment, and everyone is then collaborating on when the interaction comes to a close. And the next time you're on the phone, see if this isn't the case for you, where you'll say to someone, "Well, I've taken up a lot of your time already," or, "Gee, I'm sorry but I have another meeting to go to," but that won't be the end of it. There'll still be some wrapping up so that each person is confident that the other person has ... Their social face has been taken care of and nobody is feeling as if their time isn't worth the other person's time.

Paige:

And is this over across all cultures? Or is this very much kind of the American standard way of interacting with each other?

Elizabeth:

It's pretty standard across cultures that there is a polite way to begin an interaction and in a polite way to end an interaction, and that people will take care that they are attending to those local meaning sets. In some places of course, hierarchy is very important. So the place where I originally did my anthropology field work on a small island in the Pacific, they believe that hierarchy is the aesthetic way of the world, that's the beautiful way of the world, is if we have a system of hierarchy that everyone is familiar with and each person has their place. And in those systems of course, the higher status person has a bit more leeway in their behavior. But you'll also find that they might be the most respectful people because they aren't taking their authority or their status too far, they're not really insisting too much on this social difference, this arbitrary social difference.

David:

About the politeness, just an example would be for me, that's very true because we do this podcast a lot. I do it with someone else. And there was one where I had to leave. We have this chat feature on the software here, so I was chatting with these people saying, "I've got to go. I've got to go at exactly this time." And I sent all these chats out. Of course, they didn't read them at all. And at that time, I just disappeared. And then I felt so guilty just for dropping off without saying anything. And they were all looking around saying, "What happened to David?" So that resonates with me in a big way.

But the other thing I just wanted to mention, and I want to get you to talk about the implications of all this, you're absolutely right because my day consists of, for better or for worse, a lot of these Zoom meetings. And I do it and I know I can even tell when people do it because you have two screens, so you can have your emails up and you can have your Zoom up. And you can see people are reading their emails during a conversation, or they're reading a document. They're doing something else. They're really not focused. And I admit to doing it. But I wanted to get your sense. What are the implications of that for going forward? I mean, should we come back, everybody come back to the office? What should we do?

Elizabeth:

It's very, very difficult to predict how people's behavior is going to evolve. But I agree with you that there have been some already evident ramifications of all of the Zoom meetings that people are having. And I think you alluded to one of them which is that people easily get distracted and feel that they can do more than one thing at a time. So there might be a lull in the conversation or part of the meeting that doesn't impact you. And so you go on and start doing some else for a little while, probably if it's anything like my response, I think, "Oh, well, here's a good opportunity to catch up on something that I really need to do by the end of the day." I feel somewhat clever in being efficient about my time.

But at the same time, I think it degrades the interaction for everybody when we know that other people have their attentions elsewhere. And so this idea of joint attention is really one of the most enjoyable things about being human is having an environment and having a situation where you have joint attention and you're working together, or you are collaborating on something. And as people's attention gets siphoned off, we lose those moments of connection. And I think that's part of what is contributing to people's isolation and sense of isolation from Zoom. It is that they, for better or for worse, everybody is participating in this bifurcated attention and we're missing those glorious moments of really connecting with people and having that exhilaration of collaboration and cooperation.

Paige:

Could you just explain just what exactly joint attention is? Is it something you just learn when you're a little kid from watching your parents? Or how does someone kind of get the joint attention skills as a human being?

Elizabeth:

Joint attention is the fundamental architecture for interaction. We can't really interact with people until we have joint attention. And it's another one of those aspects of conversation that we take completely for granted. I think yes, you're right, children do have to learn how to engage in joint attention. And I think this is one of the challenges that parents have is getting the attention of wiggly little children who have trouble focusing on one human face at a time. But this is something that's socialized very explicitly in some cultures, for example, the Pacific societies will socialize their children in a pattern where they face the children outward at a very young age, instead of facing inward towards the mother or the caregiver. They focus the children outward and they instruct the children on what to notice in the environment, so to notice other people, to notice themselves in relation to other people in the environment.

In the US, we tend to have in many of the ethnic groups in the US, we tend to have this dyadic communication model, where the mother and the baby, or the caregiver and the baby, or the older sibling and the baby are face to face and they're making faces, or babbling, or otherwise entertaining and engaging the infant or the young child in order to keep that joint attention. So joint attention can mean different things in different cultures, but it's something that parents and other caregivers do socialize. And in American Sign Language, this is the sign for pay attention, so it's very ... Of course in sign language, it would be very gaze oriented because you can't conduct your sign language interaction if you don't have everyone's gaze. I think the eyes are really critical in this achievement of joint attention.

David:

Oh, that's cool. I've got to say for the podcast listeners that the signal for joint attention would be holding both your hands flat up against the side of, in front of your face, almost like a megaphone, but a wider megaphone. I think I described that right.

Elizabeth:

Thank you, David. I forgot that was addressing just the audio channel here. I guess I was in my sign language mode.

David:

Your Zoom mode. [inaudible 00:24:39].

Elizabeth:

My Zoom mode.

Paige:

Have you found that there are new skills or kind of new cues people are picking up on? Because I feel like online meetings and just online space is becoming so much more popular exponentially.

Elizabeth:

Yes, I think people are learning how to conduct these online interactions, that we're all getting used to them. I remember when cell phones were first introduced very widely, say 2004 or 2005, most people were getting them. People had a lot of trouble, you might not remember, but they had a lot of trouble integrating cell phones into their interactions. And people were outraged that someone might answer their phone in the middle of a conversation or even pay attention to their phone. And now, people don't think twice about it. They just stop the conversation, wait for the person to even respond or take the call, and nobody is offended by that. But not that many years ago, people would consider that to be some of the most outrageous behavior they had ever witnessed. And so I think that there is a way that we do adapt to these what people might think of as insults to our ability to really conduct ourselves in the manner that we've been taught is the correct manner for a moral person.

But we tend to be very adaptable. And I think one of the things that people are becoming more adaptable at is first of all, the turn taking. People are becoming less inhibited about jumping in or talking at the same time as someone. People realize that it's not intentional, that it's part of the problems with the state of the technology. And people are also realizing that people have different ways of being attentive in the meeting. Some people won't show their faces. Some people will show their faces, but only for part of the time when they're talking. And people seem to be very tolerant of the different ways that people are being comfortable in that space. And there doesn't seem to be one rigid form of behavior that's being applied to everyone.

Paige:

Do you think businesses need to start kind of training their employees a lot more on how to communicate in the online space? Especially because I guess what I would think about is just a lot of people that are in sales have kind of moved to more Zoom even, but I feel like that's such a skill that kind of requires so much communication. I don't know if there's responsibility sort of on higher ups in companies to start training people.

Elizabeth:

Probably certain individuals could use some coaching because I think for some people, it's a lot easier than other people to feel comfortable in the environment. Some people have suggested that being able to see ourselves on camera is one of the ways that we are a bit, where our comfort zones are a bit threatened in terms of this type of interaction. We might be inhibited in some ways. What you certainly don't want to do is inhibit anybody from making a contribution. In face to face meetings, there are ways that we have to include people and make a space for someone to participate and make a contribution. But that's a little bit more difficult to monitor in some of these other settings where there might be quite a few different people on the call, and some visible and some not. So I think the inclusivity part could be something that people could be made more aware of. And then I would say that on an individual level, make it possible for some people to practice or to have a chance to become more comfortable so that it's a more equitable environment.

David:

So JP Morgan, I read in the New York Times, they recently ordered all their managing directors to be back in the office every day, five days a week. At this law firm, I think staff are supposed to be in two days a week, but it's honored more in the breach than otherwise. But what would you do if you wanted to facilitate the best communications? Put commuting and office expense, everything aside. To facilitate the best communications, what would you do if you were king of a JP Morgan or my law firm or something?

Elizabeth:

I think that I would definitely want to have face to face some of the time. One of the things that you really miss when you don't have a face to face setting is you miss the opportunities for peripheral participation. So we tend to think of participation and interaction as having to do with the speaker. But there are so many times when we are all peripheral participants, and yet learning a tremendous amount. When you first join a company or a group, of course you need time to observe how people behave with each other and to get filled in on some of the history of the interactions and the different decisions that have been made. And even just those hanging out moments in the coffee room and in the break room are tremendously valuable for not only passing knowledge and mentoring, but understanding who in the firm knows what, and where that knowledge is located.

When we started to work with the engineers in the four different countries, so we were working with Romanian engineers, Indian engineers, Brazilian engineers, and American engineers, and the Romanian engineers said that they really miss the hallway conversations. So the conversations you have in passing, where you'd be caught up by somebody, or somebody would say, "By the way," and it would save you a lot of work and improve the communication. They said once if they went to the US, they could catch up on all of that. But once they went back to Romania, their information, their map of who knows what and where they're located would become out of date very fast. So I think the peripheral participation with the mentorship, particularly is very, very hard to replicate in a Zoom environment.

My students have told me that what they found when they were on Zoom was they didn't have those sort of side conversations they would have in class or before or after class. They didn't really get to know some of the other students in the class because these moments where it could be just two people by themselves, or two or three, and again, that would involve other students maybe overhearing some opportunity that they didn't really know about. So a lot of those informal learning opportunities would sadly be unavailable. And that's why I would want people to be in the office.

At the same time, I recognize that people's family time is important. And for some people to have the chance to take their kids to school and pick them up in the afternoon and things like that can also be very valuable. So hopefully, there is some way to include all of these ways of doing work.

Paige:

Young kids today are now growing up sort of in this environment. I mean, when I was a kid, obviously by the time I got a cell phone, everyone had a cell phone. But I do remember my dad having the briefcase cell phone, [inaudible 00:32:41] huge, rare one. Do you find that, or could it be possible that they will kind of, even the new generation growing up will have completely different ways of communicating because of how much of an influence technology has become on both their learning and just their general interactions with kids now? Everyone's texting before calling, that sort of thing.

Elizabeth:

Yes, definitely. I think a lot of them want to be influencers. The appeal for them of this environment is tremendous. I can't say there's a great appeal for me. But for them, yes, I think that they see the potential of it and they're ready to engage with it. And I think they're very creative in how they engage with it, so it's fascinating to watch. At the same time, I think that they are very, very distracted by social media. And I think that's giving them some challenges in terms of mental health and confidence and ability to feel secure that people of my generation didn't have.

Paige:

Right. Yeah, it feels like there's no break now from any humans once you're on all the different social media sites. It feels like you're constantly ... Especially, I can imagine when you're younger, you feel judged all the time anyway, and nervous, and you're going through puberty and all these changes. And even today, I still feel like a lot of times I don't want to have to go on this media and see all this stuff, and then have to react to it or put something on my Instagram. It just kind of gets exhausting, and I'm 27, so I mean, I could imagine being a young kid having those social media sites could be really difficult, actually.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. It's wonderful having your perspective on that. Yes, that's very, very interesting.

Paige:

Kind of talking about that, I mean, AI is definitely ... I don't know. Have you read a lot about AI?

Elizabeth:

Well, the academics are talking a lot about it because many people, for many teachers, the essay is the embodiment of a student's learning and knowledge and skill capacity. And I think they're realizing that they're not going to be able to use the essay anymore to judge those levels of accomplishment because it's going to be difficult for them to know if the essay was the student's work, or it was enabled partly at least by AI. I'm not a teacher who has students do essays anyway, I always have them do projects where they have to interview members of people who grew up in a different culture and then moved to the US, or they have to go out into the community and do little mini ethnographies, or they have to interview their grandparents to find out who culture has changed in the last couple of generations, and thins like that. And I always ask them to give me a finished product that's in a more report format because I think that's more like what they're going to end up doing when they're out of school.

So in my case, it doesn't really affect my ways of teaching and assessing learning that much. But I think it's going to be interesting to see how we measure certain skills going forward. And again, it could be stratifying. In other words, those people who have access to the tool may be able to have an advantage over people who don't. And I am a little bit concerned about that. But there's no stopping the people's adoption of these different tools.

David:

Wow, that's real interesting because one of our guests just a couple of shows before you, he was Harvard Law, he was at a big law firm, and he dropped out to help underprivileged students or students it was a first generation for college in high school get through high school. Yeah, he said they were under such disadvantages already. But now if they don't have ... And people are using that access to the technology, it'd be even harder, you'd think. Paige was telling me. Paige, you may want to talk about this, that the whole way of learning should be different now because you shouldn't be judged on your memory. You shouldn't be judged on your computational ability. You shouldn't be judged because everything can be done by somebody else.

Paige:

So I'm going into psychology, so I had taken an education psychology class. And our professor was very adamant that the way the school systems are set up now will not work with the technology advances. And they haven't been really, even with the internet alone. I mean, AI is something completely different. But the way students are being judged and graded in school won't transfer into real life applications, so teachers really need to start to come together to find ... Like what you were talking about, oh, you have these projects that would probably be useful in a career field, whereas certain testing and essays, they would never be useful. And also, so much of the information is a Google away, so that's kind of ... It was interesting to learn that.

And then once I saw ChatGPT and other AI technology, I was like, "Oh, now it's even more true," because not to put you on blast, but my dad would be like, "Oh, tell it to write an email." I think I jokingly put, "How do I break up with my boyfriend?" Like a report of exactly what to say. So it's just interesting, but I know it's kind of the way the world will continue to head. Have you found that technology just plays a very different role in across different cultures?

Elizabeth:

Yes. And it's remarkable the fast adoption of technology, and part of it is the result of mobile phone technology. It's just such a mobile platform. All it requires is a cell tower, which doesn't require a lot of infrastructure in many parts of the world. And it's available to many, many people. Many people who don't even have electricity or running water will have a mobile phone. And so that makes the dissemination of different software products much easier. It would've been unimaginable 50 years ago to have that kind of penetration of different products and different new ways of doing things. But I think both the visual aspect of it, which again was such a scandal when you could take pictures with your phone upload them so easily, and people didn't realize that their images were able to be replicated like that. But now that we are more aware of it, then of course there's so much information that can be transferred with images.

So I think that, yes, there is a widespread adoption of technologies. The thing is that each technology's going to land within a cultural context. So whether the culture approves of equal opportunity for men and women, or equal opportunity for different segments of society, that will impact the end result of the adoption of the technology in these different places in ways that you would just have to look to the local culture to be able to understand, and local experts to help us translate that into some understanding that would take into account the local context.

Paige:

Have you found that certain cultures are kind of less accepting of social media and just the tech advances in general, as a culture, as a whole? I could see, and I don't know how true this is, but more of a culture that's much more, I think the world would be collectivist, sort of, focused on the groups and the families. Because America is such an individualist.

Elizabeth:

That's right. That's right. But there still are elements of censorship in US society too, and I think that's probably that kind of censorship, whether it's age based, these are materials we don't want small children to have, or we don't want certain people to have. Yes, there are certainly cultures that are concerned for, as you say, for reasons that are consistent with their cultural values. They are concerned to manage and monitor people's use of these technologies. And I think in every community, there's a trade-off of course in social life. What kinds of actions are we going to tolerate? And what kind of actions are going to be determined to be not in the interest of the group, even if that means that it's restricting the freedom of the individual? I think that's one of the most difficult kinds of conundrums of our time, isn't it? To be able to foster individual happiness and also live together in harmony as well, I think that's been the challenge of every society.

David:

Backing up a bit, we had another guest, I just want to tell you. So we like anthropologists, so we had another guest. Her name is Joanne Tett, she's on the board of editors of the Financial Times. But she had her PhD in anthropology from Cambridge, and then she did what you did. She worked out in Africa in fields and things like that. But then she came back and started working for ... So I don't know how she did it, but in the Financial Times, in that world. And what she studied was pre 2008, she was hanging around a bunch of these kids at Merrill-Lynch that were trading these toxic bonds. And she was very prescient in predicting what was going to happen, which it did, the cratering. And then she wrote a book. I'm sorry to go on for this.

But I'm going somewhere, I promise you. The point that she made, and she wrote a book about this later, is that her anthropological skills gave her a perspective on things that allowed her to understand things different, and maybe even better than just doing surveys, or clinical trials, or something like that. So I just wanted to get your thoughts on that, particularly how you did manage to study the things that you have studied from an anthropological standpoint.

Elizabeth:

Yes, I think the anthropological standpoint gives you great insights that you can't get in other ways. And I'll give you an example that's a little bit off the technology topic, but a project that I recently completed, I'm still engaged in it because it's so fascinating, but I wrote a book that came out in November about interviewing your grandparents and members of your family from an anthropological point of view. So I developed a set of questions that are based on asking about your grandparents' way of life. And these questions are based on what an anthropologist would want to know. What were the houses like that you lived in back then? What was an everyday like? What were your social interactions like? What sort of identities did you have at that age? What was the kinship structures like? Who hung out with whom? And who did you eat festive meals with? And what were you afraid of? And what were your beliefs? And things like that.

So it's an illustration of how approach, which totally disregards your role relationship, you're not the grandchild anymore, you're the anthropologist. And what you can find out is stunning in its detail. People will talk about the technologies of the time. And they'll talk about going to school on a horse, and they'll talk about World War II, growing up in World War II. And even just the question about the houses, just details about the houses tells you so much about life back then. And you said as an illustration of what an anthropologist can learn is the details, the tangible details, the details that can give you some insight into how the other person thinks.

So I tell people in interviewing prior generations, don't ... Try to step out of yourself and look at the world from their perspective. And I think this was what was so successful about the person that you were just citing, who took the anthropological approach. She was able to by taking that approach, to look at the world from the viewpoint of those people whose activity she was interested in. And that's what enabled her to have some insight into what might happen next, was getting into their frame of mind.

David:

That's so interesting. And speaking which, one thing you noted in terms of just communications and thinking about others is that when you talk about how important communication is, people, you said people always think about: Well, how am I doing? Enough about you, let's talk about me. What do you think about me? Maybe you want to expand on that a little bit.

Elizabeth:

Yes, I'm glad you brought that up. So people start thinking about the speaker, but it's actually the hearer that's the most important participant in any conversation because that's the person who is really determining whether your contribution was understood in the way that you hoped it would be, or that you can build further on that interaction by understanding exactly how they did take it, and what impact what you said had on the other person. And so we really need to focus on the hearer and not on the speaker. And this is particularly important in cross cultural settings because you want to try to make sure that you understand the speaker, or the hearer's perspective because it can be completely different from your own perspective. And this is what got the engineers that I studied in trouble, was they made a lot of assumptions based on how they might interpret what they said without seeing that it might have a very different interpretation from the point of view of the hearer and with the hearer's cultural background.

David:

This may be different. You're talking about they always tell us, part of our job as a lawyer, probably about 95% of our job as a lawyer is bringing in clients. And one of the things they tell you is you have to follow the 80/20 rule when you're having meetings with someone, meaning you let the other person talk 80% of the time, and you should only talk 20. I don't know if that resonates with you, what your thoughts are on that.

Elizabeth:

Yes, yes, that's a very good way for you to learn more about their perspective, and also to give people an opportunity to invite you into the world that they inhabit. There's a lot that we do share, but a lot that we don't share with other people. And it's always fascinating to be exposed to those things that we don't share.

Paige:

And then to just go quickly back to the book you wrote, is the point of learning about kind of past generations to be able to eventually step back inside yourself and see how it has affected you, the history of your family? Or is it to just kind of overall learn about more cultures? It's just because I've been reading and researching a lot about trauma. I just read a research paper yesterday actually about how children of Holocaust survivors, how they kind of took on this weight of this trauma, even though they weren't there when their parents were put in concentration camps or whatever they went through during the Holocaust.

Elizabeth:

That's right. That's right. That's really an important part of learning about your heritage, is not necessarily taking on the trauma. I think they are finding that there are even some genetic aspects of trauma in the previous generations. One aspect of psychology that I have read about is that it has a very positive impact on people's identity to understand themselves in a chain of, in a legacy, in a heritage, and where they fit in their family has very positive impacts on their self-confidence and feelings of self-worth. And also, when they hear about the challenges that former generations had, it often gives them security that they too will be able to prevail and grow stronger no matter what challenges they have to endure, even though they're going to be quite different challenges of former times. But the identity, seems to shape people's identity in very positive ways. And unfortunately, being in the US, we're often not really very aware of our family heritage because the links got cut at some point and there weren't the technological means to stay connected back then.

David:

Your empathy for everyone and everything comes out. I'll be candid with you, I was hoping you were just going to come out and be bombastic and say, "People should stop Zoom meetings and come to the office." [inaudible 00:52:11]

Elizabeth:

I think it's just we're living in such a diverse world and a diverse environment that I can certainly understand how tough it must be to manage a group of people these days, and it just gets more challenging all the time. But people are so inventive and innovative, I think we have to stop and appreciate them. And I think this podcast is so wonderful because it helps people to think through some of these issues and to sit back in awe at what is happening around us.

Paige:

Thank you. Have you found that it's harder for older people to adapt to this sort of Zoom culture. My dad, he's, no offense, but he's older, I think part of the reason he's so against it is because…

Elizabeth:

There definitely are generational issues, and I think part of it is that what happens is your whole skillset gets wiped out. All these skills that you worked so hard to become somewhat sophisticated about, suddenly they no longer apply, and you're starting again from the level of the novice. And I think that is really difficult, not just in terms of finding the energy once again to learn another new language of how to do the same thing you thought you already knew how to do. But also, just I think it's somewhat deflating emotionally to find that you really can't rely on the skills from the past, at least not all of them. And so I think we have to help each other to be kind of optimistic about the rate, the pace of change. I hope it's keeping us cognitively more healthy as we just get challenged continually.

David:

I'm trying to get by.

Paige:

Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Elizabeth:

Oh, it was a real pleasure. I just love your perspectives and hearing about what you're experiencing too.

David:

All right. Thank you.

Paige:

Thank you for listening to Disarming Data, and thank you to Eric Montgomery for producing this podcast. To support the podcast, please rate, review, and follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. If you'd like to learn more about the current state of data security, head on over to our website, disarmingdata.com.