Sunday 17-09-2017 11:59

It feels almost Victorian, like in an epistolary novel by Mary Shelley or Anne Brontë, to start corresponding with a complete stranger on a subject that’s apparently close to both our hearts. I‘m eager to learn what themes you will provide and I look forward to discussing them with you. Of course, at the same time there’s a strange twist to it. We write to each other but we also know that our correspondence will be made public, and therefore one tends to — or rather, I tend to — put a better foot forward. I mean, this is not without obligation

But anyhow, we are meant to begin this correspondence with a short introduction. I don’t have to mention my name as you already know it, just like my position —head of digital at VPRO. Rather than just stating the facts I think it’s more interesting to tell you how I see myself, what I identify with most. I mean, of course I am a son, a father, a brother, a husband, a friend, a workmate — these are the parts we can all more or less see ourselves in. But what makes me different? What defines my identity most of all?

The first word that springs to mind is journalist. Although nowadays I am much more a manager, a strategist and a policy maker, my background as a journalist still shines through in everything I do. It determines what questions I ask, how I view the world and which solutions I come up with for problems I encounter. Fifteen years of editorial work — as a freelancer first and later writing for de Volkskrant (business desk and correspondent in Brussels) - does shape you for life.

At the time — we’re talking the late nineties — I was stationed in Brussels and reported on the EU, NATO and Belgium, but in my own time I got involved in the online world. The strategic implications of this technological progress were far from distinct then, but it was already evident that the internet would profoundly change our trade and society in general. In 2003 I made it my profession as well, first as head of online at de Volkskrant, from 2010 as a freelance writer. advisor and teacher and since 2014 in my present job.

How do I observe technological progress now? Not just from the strategic mission that comes with my job, but explicitly also from the impact this progress has on our culture, our coexistence, our economy, our politics, our government. I feel it is very much a key task for public broadcasters to sketch the consequences, to explain developments and to ask questions. It is from that perspective that I look at our project "We Know How You Feel". What exactly does it mean when our thoughts and feelings will be out in the open? How does that change us? As an individual, in our relationships and in our social interactions?

I hope and expect this project will bring us interesting new insights.

Warm regards,

GJ Bogaerts
Head of digital VPRO

Saturday 30-09-2017 21:04

I did not only start out as a techno-optimist, I still am one. I just never believed that technological progress in itself was a prerequisite for human happiness, collective or individual. It is a necessary condition though. Without technological advancement we would still be subject to the whims of nature.

But indeed, ultimately it’s how we apply technology that determines its quality, positive or negative. So I agree that technology in itself is neutral. It’s the scientists, the artists, the designers and the storytellers who can ultimately give it direction and meaning. In my view they set a standard, a standard we in turn need to determine how far we can stray from it.

We can assume a critical stance towards Google and Facebook and other data drivers because there is an entirely different group of people thinking about alternative approaches. They constitute the subculture of technological progress and they never cease to ask critical questions about applications, whether these are driven by profit or by a lust for power and control (the NSA’s of this world).

Anyhow, as far as I’m concerned public broadcasters for as long as possible will be a safe environment, where this critical questioning and free thinking is possible, where alternatives can be thought out and where experimenting with new technologies is allowed. At the VPRO we even consider that to be a core task.

We apply it as often as possible in our own productions but naturally we also apply a set of rules: we must reach a minimum amount of viewers, listeners or visitors. And there is a limit to what productions can cost. We set up the Medialab in Eindhoven to be a truly free environment, where we try to liberate ourselves as much as possible from all these rules we have to work by.

The Medialab is always on the lookout for relevant developments it can pick up and research, fed as much as possible by the available knowledge inside the VPRO and a wider network of artists, scientists, designers, authors and journalists.

Innovation in public broadcasting is always focused on media, both their production and consumption. That’s another reason why it is a core task: we see our audience moving away from so-called linear viewing and embracing new platforms. So we have to get to know these platforms as well. We must be able to handle them and to judge if such a platform or new technology could be of any benefit to us. By doing so we get to know these technologies and we find out what their positive - and possible negative - applications are.

We expect the influence of wearable technology on our media consumption to grow as it becomes more popular. We’ve already seen that very convincingly with the portables we now all carry: our smartphones, our tablets and our e-readers. But wearable technology is developing rapidly: from smart watches to sweatbands and underwear that can monitor our heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature. Even our sex life is not safe. Remote satisfaction no longer requires a tour de force…

Wearables can be used to produce media and to consume media. We will be able to create wonderful things using them, but we must also look at the flip side. My biggest worry concerns the data wearable technology can collect and exchange. And that is what this program predominantly focuses on.

Which personal data are we giving away without knowing it? How can we make our public conscious of that fact? What do my glance, my posture and the way I walk tell the shop where I get my daily groceries? We know that some clothes stores already experiment with personal display-advertising after a lightning fast analysis of my personal traits.

"We Know How You Feel" aims at giving the audience insight in these developments and processes. Last year we did a similar project, called "We Are Data". The accompanying website clicklickclik.click received almost a million clicks. It is evident that the subject lives. It’s urgent and it calls out for critical questioning.

I see many similarities between the goals I mentioned above and your observations about Gr1p. My counter question to you is: what do you see as the most effective way to reach these goals? Is it enough to make the public conscious? And what is the best way to achieve this awareness?

Warm regards,

GJ Bogaerts
head of digital VPRO

Sunday 7-10-2017 18:11

Let me start by answering your question on the values that underlie our Medialab project. By far the most important value to me is insight. You could make a sequence, starting with data. Data leads to facts, when you have facts you are informed and information in turn can lead to understanding or insight. None of these steps is self evident: it takes an effort to get from data to facts, from facts to information and from information to insight.

With our project "We Know How You Feel" we aim to question the ease with which some people in the world of media seem to take the use of algorithms and data for granted. For if we don’t use them in the right way we do indeed run the risks you described earlier: filter bubbles, the eradication of surprise and serendipity, choosing the common denominator instead of finding interesting niches that can truly teach people something new.

Only when we (as a society) have a real understanding of how data and algorithms influence our lives - and will influence them even more as smart appliances take over more of our environment - we can think of alternatives. I’m fortunate enough to work for a broadcaster that has a genuine interest in these alternatives and reports on them on a regular base, most prominently in Tegenlicht/Backlight.

Imagination is the foundation of every technological innovation and every invention. The American author Neal Stephenson has teamed up with the University of Arizona for an interesting collaboration, Project Hieroglyph. It connects science fiction writers to scientists and builds on a thought by Carl Sagan.

He once said that the road to the most groundbreaking science was paved by science fiction. It’s the power of imagination leading the way for science. If we hadn’t been able to imagine that one day people would no longer die of of smallpox or pneumonia, the smallpox vaccine and antibiotics would never have been invented.

Shortly after World War II Arthur C. Clarke had the idea that global communication could be made a lot easier if we’d be able to launch satellites that would stay in a fixed place above the earth. Twenty years later, in the mid-60’s, the first geostationary satellite was launched and nowadays we can no longer live without them.

On the neutrality of technology: I agree with you that we as people create technology and that we do so from our own needs and biases. In that sense technology is not neutral indeed. I think the nuance can be found in Kevin Kelly’s observations in ‘What technology wants’. Kelly states that technology has its own evolution and creates its own progress, independent from mankind. In that view technology is not influenced by human prejudice.

Let’s make this vision concrete. Google was recently blasted because an image search for ‘black people’ also came up with photos of gorillas. Shortly afterwards Google’s Adwords turned out to show more ads for well paid jobs to men than to women.

These are examples of technology being applied in a non-neutral way. But underneath these examples lies an instrument panel of static mathematics, with lots of attention for regression analysis and standard deviations in the programming languages Google applies. Scientists had been using this panel for much longer and it was only a matter of time before software developers would discover it as a tool to analyse the enormous amount of available data. That analysis in turn enables new applications. Siri and Alexa grow ever smarter, but at the same time they remain products of human imagination and consequently of human bias.

In my view the real peril of this development is not contained in the observation itself. Human progress is only possible because we have ideals that spring from our own vision of the world. The peril is in the fact that the means to achieve this progress are in the hands of ever fewer people. Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are building our new world. It frightens me that these are companies that evade any form of democratic control, and are judged by their shareholders on just one thing: net profit per share.

To be honest, I’m not very optimistic that a ‘collective conviction’ can arise - as you wrote - to raise the pressure for change. These companies operate on a world-wide scale and there is not a trace of world-wide political consensus on how to handle them. The EU goes its own way and introduces a ‘right to be forgotten’. Within the EU Germany is the only country that holds platforms liable for allowing hate speech. US policy meanwhile is aimed at safeguarding the position of these companies and therefore introduces laws to protect these enterprises. And then we haven’t even started talking about the breaches of internet freedom by for example Russia and China.

But, entirely in line with my techno-optimistic vision, I also believe that technology will provide a solution for all of this in the end - blockchain FTW!

GJ Bogaerts
head of digital VPRO

Monday 16-10-2017 15:42

Techno-optimism does not relieve us of our duty to act and to critically question!

So even though I consider technology to be both cause of and solution to many of our problems, I still think that parties like Gr1p and VPRO must promote our ongoing critical questioning of that technology.

Regards,
GJ Bogaerts