Just Browsing

BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Welcome to Matt's Blain. My name is Rich Bredry. Now, what's in a word?

Today we're asking how a 19th century form of a leisure entertainment became the cover for data mining and keeping tabs on our every online move. Do you mean browsing? Yeah, well, look, I know words are boring, but that's what I want to talk about, browsing. I want to talk about where the term came from and what the term has come to me and how that kind of historical meaning of the word kind of blinds us to the things that it's come to represent.

So let me set the scene with a question. OK. When was the last time you wandered around somewhere aimlessly? It could have been window shopping in a mall.

It could have been just walking around the streets. I don't know, losing yourself in an art gallery. And it's not an accusation, by the way. It's just about behaviours.

When was the last time that you wandered aimlessly and without worrying about the time, about worrying about a clock? Joe, I genuinely can't remember. I think it may have almost been in Bali a couple of years ago. But I think even then, I was concerned about whether I was going to get back in time for my dinner.

No, but that's the thing. I know you're laughing because it sounds trivial. Ridiculous. Yeah, but I'm kind of the same.

As regular listeners will know, I've spent a bit more time back in the UK in my hometown this year. And partly thanks to the much colder climate, I did a lot more walking around than I do here. So I would just go out and wander. But even then, that wandering tended to be quite targeted.

I'd be walking to a destination, for example. So I'd be going to the supermarket on foot rather than driving there. Or I'd say, I'd take a certain time slot for a walk. I think there was maybe one day during the trip where I went to Cambridge.

I had no agenda. And because it's a city I know quite well, I wandered off into bits. I didn't know into the kind of wilder bits. And when I say wilder bits, I'm not talking about the mean streets of Cambridge.

I'm not saying that there is such a thing. No, I don't think Cambridge has its back streets. But it literally has wilder bits. It's got protected wildlands that's in the centre of the city.

The area is called the Bax. And it's not a park. It's just streams and rivers and common grazing land. So you can just wander around.

And there are horses and all kinds of stuff just wandering around grazing. You can still see and hear the cars because roads criss cross it. But at the same time, you forget that you're just a five or 10 minute walk from all of those universities and the shopping centre. And that was probably the last time that I just wandered aimlessly browsed.

I mean, don't get me wrong. It's nice that you're sharing your love of nature. And it's nice to see that other side of you. And there's perhaps some human in you after all.

But unless those are like robot ponies, I'm kind of struggling to see where you're going with this. I would have quite liked it if they've been robot ponies. I mean, that would really have tickled me. But no, as I said, this is its behaviour role.

In my own life, much as you said, everything I do has, if not a purpose, at least a clock running against it. And I know that's always been a work I've had running life to a timer. But it's something that I know a lot of people do. We schedule everything.

And don't worry, this isn't going to turn into one of those in-box zero type stories. But just to again, setting the scene, I had a, I was at my local mall last Sunday evening. It was mobbed. And people just seem to be aimlessly browsing, you know, families, groups of friends.

They were doing normal things, looking in shop windows. They were just, you know, buying snacks. You want to call them sheep all? I mean, I'm still struggling with this.

No, it's again, not sheep all thing. You know, everyone was just doing normal stuff. They looked relaxed. Nobody was rushing.

Except for me, because I had lots of frozen stuff that was rapidly melting. I'd left my cooler bag in the car. But, you know, it's just my perception of things that everyone else was relaxed. I don't know what was going on in their heads, what in a timetable or clocks that they were all working to.

But as far as I could see, they were browsing. So, you know, we keep circling back to this word. And that's because I read a really cool piece on Wired that got me thinking about the idea of what browsing is and how it's actually changed. Now, if you want to read the article, it's called, Your Internet Browser Does Not Belong to You.

It's written by a writer called Susanna Scheller. It's maybe a seven minute read. But it covers a lot of the things that we talk about a lot on the show, things, you know, subjects like choice, control, and how often these can be something of an illusion. We're back to sheeple.

Well, not really. It's more about the co-option rather than the evolution of the term and how we're happy to have two kind of simultaneous codes of behaviour that apply to the same word. So, again, what do you think about when I say the word browse? What does the word mean to you?

I think I mean that I would say a lucky kind of middle ground between what browse actually means and what browse has come to me. You know, I'm from that era where browsing actually meant going into a shop and then we had the invention of the internet. And of course, browsing became something that we do online. And exactly.

And that's I think what it's synonymous with for most people now. You know, it's that app that we had to, when we're not using an app tied to a specific browser. Sorry, a specific service. And that is a browser.

And using a browser is second nature. A lot of us work in a browser. There's kind of this generational divide between people who access email and spreadsheets and presentations through their browsers, rather than through a desktop. Obviously, they're wrong.

It's faster to use a desktop version. It just is, but that's not a point. It's really about what words mean, because they influence the way we think about what they describe. You know, look at the reasons that the security company Blackwater changed its name.

How we use words shapes the way we think about the things they represent. And that's the point that Susanna Shower is making in the word piece. So just say again, what did you say browsing meant to you? Well, I guess now it means surfing the internet, you know, or looking through various web pages or yeah.

Yeah. So when we go back into more of the history of what browsing is. So the term actually appeared back in the 19th century. It was largely applied to the emerging middle class of the time.

We were for the first time starting to see things like shopping at arcades and department stores in the US and across Europe. And it was the first mass example of shopping without buying. You could actually just go into a place and either look through the windows of a shop or go in and do that thing of browsing. So this is an unfortunate nod to sheeple, but it is unintentional.

In a way, you can describe shoppers as grazers. They're people who have specific items to buy. They go to the place and they eat the grass. So they're grazing.

Whereas people who are browsing, maybe they're going to graze, but there's no direct intention. So browsing emerges as this leisure activity. And it's a privilege that we now take for granted, you know, this right to shop without buying. And those shopping arcades, you know, you can kind of think of them as Victorian shopping malls.

It was the first time that we saw this blend of public and private space. And as Susanna Shower comments, you know, it combined curiosity, aspiration, consumption with this new idea of leisure. Wasn't there something like an emancipation angle to it as well? Yeah, because shopping was seen as a form of entertainment.

And that made it a socially acceptable reason for women to be out in public, other than being escorted by their main folk or, you know, going into the grocery store. Again, you know, think Victorian mall rats in tea rooms. And that behavior has evolved over time as disposable incomes have increased in every class. So now when you walk into a shop, the assistant will ask you if you want any help.

And if you say that you're browsing or just looking, they're not going to boot you out of the store, because in most instances they're happy for you to look, because you might see something that interests you, even if you're only bookmarking it to come back later. Now, there are, of course, exceptions. We've all got at least one friend who goes into the supermarket just to take the free samples from the promotion people. They don't ever buy anything.

They just drink tiny cups of milk and eat lukewarm sausages. I don't know if some kind of jam. It's usually the same friend in Verti-Commerce who helps themselves to the leftovers from your plate when you're out for dinner. Okay, but how does that link to the modern example?

A web browser. And Richard's laugh tells me that he also has at least one of those friends. Experience, yes. So how does it link to the modern example, the web browser?

So the word browsing suggests these historical ideas of leisure and choice. But is that really the experience we have when we go online? So I'm not going to go too deeply into the history of the web browser, so the wired article does that really well. Although for some reason, I can't seem to pin down the first time one of these tools was actually called a web browser.

So I don't know how we got to that point of determining that this was a web browser. Certainly we know that Tim Berners-Lee coined the phrase worldwide web, I think in the early 90s. And browsers emerged as this simple way to navigate this early internet. Some of the early browsers or earliest browsers were things like Mosaic, which was one of the first examples that used a GUI graphic user interface to translate the code into something that was easy to look at and access.

Actually one of the developers of Mosaic was Mark Andreessen. Of course, who went on to develop Netscape Navigator and of course, Netscape Navigator fought one of the early tech wars against Microsoft's internet explorer. I think they actually lost that battle. And when we look at today's browser landscape, Google and the Chrome browser obviously are the current kind of browser champions.

And Microsoft is a contender again? Well, yeah, thanks to its integration of GPT into the Bing search engine. Bing, yeah, I know I can't help it either. I do that every single time.

It's, I don't know how it must drive people out. But it's strange out of nowhere, Microsoft's Edge browser is suddenly in contention as a major player. So we could be on the cusp of the third browser war. And again, another reason why words matter in something else that the Wirepiece points out.

One of the key developments in these web wars was the tab in the browser. So we were being able to see one site at a time to having multiple separate sites in separate windows. I mean, we all remember our desktops being littered with hundreds of different web windows. And then suddenly, we just have one window with multiple sites on tabs in One Browser.

Are you one of those people who litters your machine with tabs that have been open for weeks? Absolutely not, Matthew. It drives me bananas. And I'll tell you this now.

Right in front of me, I have two large screens and I have separate windows in each screen, even though I could have multiple tabs open. I can't do it. And I think this comes from when we were younger and tabs used an awful lot of memory, a lot of RAM. You know, it's been ingrained in me to close down the tabs that you aren't using.

No, I know, I recently read something. And the generalist said, I think that with their mobile Safari, they had about 500 open tabs. And some of them had been open for years. And yeah, and you know, I'm the inbox maximalist.

And that's just drove me spare. Untidy inbox, tidy browser, that's me. I'm the same of you. As soon as it proliferates, I'm instantly close all tabs to the right and I just kill everything.

And if I need anything again, I just go to my search history. But when we look at browsers, they do so much more than let us access the internet. They store passwords, they store our payment details. As I just mentioned, our search history cookies let us jump into websites and continue where we left off days or even weeks later.

But the crucial point about these tabbed browsers is that the word means something. They do exactly that. They keep tabs on us. Yes, you can empty your search history.

But some cookies as we know jump from site to site. Less so I think now after new data regulations. But all that information is going backwards and forwards to all kinds of places. Algorithms and AI are used to personalize those experiences on sites that we visit often, especially the sites that want to sell a stuff, which is pretty much everything.

Because even when we're consuming information, they're still trying to sell a stuff. YouTube is selling on the ads it shows. So it's not just on comma sites, you know, like Amazon and other retailers. And this is where it differs from 19th century browsing.

Yes, obviously the Petty Cots, Corsets and Bonnets have largely disappeared. But nothing we do online is casual. You know, it might appear to be that when you whack something into being, they don't even say, being every action online is scrutinized and utilized. Not only predict, but also influence our future actions.

And so all of these things that might seem innocuous to us, whether it's browsing product or leading an article, these are all data points that are fed into these really complex algorithms. And these algorithms then curate our future online experiences. And those choices that we make historically guide us in the future towards specific content, towards products, and even to the people whose posts we see in our social feeds. See, we're at 17 minutes.

I knew you would be able to wrap it up in half an episode. We're gonna have to have a quick break. We'll do browse back. Of course, this is Matt Splainty here on BFM 89.9.

BFM 89.9 at the Business Station. Welcome back to Matt Splainty. It's a Netimology 101 with Matt today as we explore the phrase browsing. We were talking about choices that guide us towards our specific content and products.

Aren't we also being guided over when we browse in real life? Yeah, we are increasingly, and I've got a trademark pending on Netimology. I'm claiming that. No, increasingly we see stores using all kinds of technology to get better idea of what we're doing while we're in a store, especially when we're going into big hypermarkets, RFID in our loyalty cards, cameras inside the stores, entire departments of people and machines that just evaluate where people go in a store, how long they spend in certain aisles, what items do they pick up and try and figure out why they put them down again, why they don't complete a purchase.

And don't forget, a lot of the things we buy have their own RFID tags on them, which are deactivated on your purchase. So if you've used one of those RFID checkouts where you don't do anything except put your purchases down and the machine tells you what you owe, one, that's completely magic. So I think change like the Catalan and Unico started doing those in Malaysia. But we are tracked outside, we've highly tracked inside the stores, but less tracked outside the stores.

So when we're walking around a shopping area or mall, yes, there's surveillance, but it's a lot less joined up than the experiences you find in a web browser. So it still has the hallmarks of that 19th century character of being very casual. If you're walking along a beach, it's unlikely that that's going to be pegged as a data point, unless of course, you're doing something that logs it as a data point, like taking a photo on your phone or using something that's got GPS activated through your smartphone. Which is part of the growth that we're seeing in digital and film cameras.

Partly, I think people want to own the things that they take, although ultimately a lot of those supposedly private images they take on, film or digital cameras will get uploaded to social accounts anyway, but that's by the buy, at least that's by choice. And that's the key difference. When we browse in the real world, we're largely shaping our own experience. When we browse online, that experience is being shaped for us.

So I think the wide piece makes the example of surfing in the 1990s and the early 90s. Again, it's another real life word, surfing, that idea of catching a wave, not knowing where you end up, while we were off air, you mentioned windows, Microsoft windows, that idea of looking onto something and into something and through something. So all of these words we had for our digital life, they were all exciting, they made everything seem limitless. And it still can be, but now surfing is more like surfing in one of those wave holes.

Instead of this vast ocean, you're in a pool that's got walls. Yes, there's still plenty of choice and entertainment there, but we're not casually exploring anymore. We're being enticed to click, we're being enticed to stay in ways that are a lot more coercive than simply piping the smell of cinnamon rolls into the air. And we're a long way from that historical idea of, I think, browsing just as casual entertainment.

Why do you have to mention cinnamon rolls? But it is one of the nicest smelling waste and a segment that we've had. Now, I never know what to call these kind of half shows. Well, I'll keep with the food analogy.

I mean, I guess we can call it flat white. That pretty much catches me in on my glory. So I guess we can do a couple of weird science pieces to round things off. So the first thing I want to talk about is the best mobile VPNs of 2023.

Now, I'm just joking, what could be more boring than that? What do you, I was thinking, what? The ironic thing is, just as you said that, I had a reminder pop up on my desktop, say my VPN subscription is expired. Well, exactly.

VPN subscriptions always expire when you need the most mind-glass expired, when I went overseas, meaning that I had to subscribe back to it in a much more expensive currency. Anyway, I don't guess. But yes, very boring. Let's not talk about that.

No, the most boring thing, of course, has to be living forever. So I was going to do a story about the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicting that by 2030, we'll be able to live forever. But while the story is interesting, and Kurzweil has a great track record of correctly spotting trends and shifts, I don't know about you, but I don't want to live forever. Although, I do kind of like the idea of nanobots in my bloodstream.

That's kind of cool. But I'd rather than nanobots gave me super human abilities rather than just allowing my feeble body to live longer. If they could keep me in kind of tip-top condition, which is obviously better than the condition I'm in now, I could get behind that, even if I just switch off at some point, but not really living forever. So you can just Google Ray Kurzweil in mortality if you want to know more about this one.

So we'll do a minority report style story instead. Predictive policing or ongoing obsession for that man? Tom Cruise. I do have a rather unhealthy obsession with him.

You do, yeah. It's just the older he gets, the more interesting, the film he makes up, except for the new mission impossible. But especially when he does sci-fi, minority report is one of those films that really captured the feeling of something. Obviously, Spielberg as well as Tom Cruise.

And since the film's released, I think probably nearly 20 years ago, we've seen law enforcement pretty much take all the wrong cues from it. So instead of getting the hint that trying to predict crime is a terrible idea. We've had all kinds of leaky and awful systems that misapply artificial intelligence to policing. Things like recidivism calculations that showed bias against people of colour based solely on the places they lived.

Facial recognition software that, again, tends to work better on light skin and creates false positives for people with darker skin. And let's not even get into the surveillance drones that some police forces use to provide long-term surveillance of the people that live in those cities. This is the Wired story on the predpole software developed by Geolitica. Yeah, so Geolitica used to be known as breadball predictive policing.

And I initially found this story via a piece on the Futurism website, but do go and read the whole piece on Wired. The title might give away the context of the story a bit. Predictive policing software, terrible predicting crimes. So, yeah, that's pretty ambiguous.

So the Wired piece found out that out of 23,631 predictions made by Geolitica in 2018, less than 100 actually coincided with real crimes. So the point where the New Jersey police force that was using it, and they were the only force out of something like close to 40 police departments who would actually share the data, the police force said that because of the level of results they got, they actually seldom used it. Well, I mean, I'm not surprised. It's like a success rate of less than half a percent.

Well, exactly. So they subscribed to the service because they thought it would help them to allocate resources more efficiently. They thought it would identify what kind of crimes are likely to occur where in a metro area, you know, what times of day or what days of the week. And they'd be able to deploy officers with the requisite skill sets to police those areas.

However, it seems that actually the reverse was the case. If the police departments that they surveyed had allocated resources according to the predictions, it would have been no better than chance and would probably have been a waste of resources. Apparently, the software was particularly bad at predicting burglaries with an accuracy rate of 0.1% where it fed better, such as robberies or aggravated assaults. It only managed to be accurate about 0.6% of the time.

Look, and if we go back to those, we spoke about, it's a lot of those ideas of inherent bias. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the algorithm predicts more crime in areas that are already heavily pleased due to historical biases and the cycle continues. Well, yeah, so historical crime data reflects not just where the crimes have occurred, but also where policing has been historically concentrated. So this can disproportionately target certain communities.

And as you said, it perpetuates the cycle of over-policing and neglecting other areas where crimes may be underreported. It's a classic case of the algorithm inheriting the biases present in its training data. And then, of course, essentially reinforcing those biases and directing more police to areas that it predicts will have crime based on that historical data of over-policing. So in turn, that results in more crimes being recorded in those areas because police come down more heavily on minor infractions as well as the major stuff.

And again, this further reinforces the algorithm's future predictions. So it's this vicious cycle that doesn't address the root causes of criminal activity and perpetuates all of those disparities and can actually amplify the disparities that already exist in the system. I mean, I've been hearing that there are some reports that this is shutting down at the end of this year. Is that, or could this be the end of predictive policing as we know it?

Unfortunately not, there's a number of companies working in the area. I'm not going to name any, but there have been a lot of issues with software-based policing tools, listening tools that track where they think gunshots have been fired, making reports for police to be deployed based on reports of gunshots, or rather algorithmic catches of gunshots. And I don't think that the failure of systems really puts other companies off. It's that startup fallacy.

It's the idea that the other person's solution wasn't good enough, but ours is. Yeah. And with all the attention on AI tools like chat, GPT, and frankly, because a lot of people misunderstand what these things are and how they work, as we've said before, these things are tools, they're not solutions. Everyone is looking to AI for answers, and that includes the police.

The problem is that in some instances, the answers to the machines create are false. Now, that doesn't really matter when you're writing a blog post, because, you know, put your hands up and say, sorry, I got it wrong and amend it and put a correction in. But it really matters when you're sending out heavily on police officers based on bad data or miscalculations. Okay.

Can we end on something a little bit more upbeat, maybe? Okay. A short story, but worth a Google. NASA has enlisted the help of Fashion House Prada for its new spacesuits.

Wait, why? Yeah, exactly. So there was actually a tie back to police forces here weirdly enough, because some Italian forces have uniforms designed by fashion houses like Amani. Oh, yes.

Yeah. My European cousins tell me about this regularly. I know. The Italian police look, you know, super stylo.

It's good to be arrested by somebody, you know, who's got the look. But this isn't just a style issue for NASA. So Prada also has a reputation for cutting edge materials science. So I'm sure that the eventual suits will undoubtedly look great, but it's actually more for reasons of practicality, reducing bulk, increasing comfort and maneuverability so that astronauts can work for longer in these suits, especially as, you know, with so many space agencies racing to get astronauts back onto the surface of the moon.

I'm expecting some kind of lunar influence catwalk season in a year or two. I can't really see that the models kind of moonwalking down the catwalk. But this is, I guess that's not really a story. That's just a note.

So let's round things off with something that I'm definitely not an expert in, football or soccer, as some of our listeners might know it better. Wait, hang on. How many shows have we done so far in total? So hundreds, hundreds, hundreds.

I mean, yeah, it must be, I mean, I've been doing this for longer than the Matt's plane. So thousands. Thousands. Is this the first story we've ever done on football?

I mean, there might have been one or two others, but there's really not many. I know that for sure, because, you know, I usually just steer clear, because I know nothing. But a new study from Dublin City University looks at the way goalkeepers perceive the way, perceive the world and process information. Goleys, look at me using football slang.

Goleys are required to make incredibly quick decisions, often with very limited information. Girl, that sounds like me. So the studies sort of see whether they see the world differently from outfield players and, you know, the general joke public. So the study involved 20 professional goalkeepers, 20 outfield players and 20 non-players.

And I'm very glad you haven't asked me what an outfield player is. They were subjected to a test involving visual and auditory stimuli. So they were shown brief flashes on a screen accompanied by beeping sounds. Now, apparently, even though this sounds like an experiment from a clockwork orange, you know, if I was a science and I had a chance to experiment on football players, I'd probably do something like this.

Anyway, a common phenomenon is that when a flash in two beeps are present in quick succession, people often perceive it actually as two flashes, because the visual and auditory stimuli actually converge to give this kind of false result. Let me guess, but not goalkeepers. No, otherwise this story would be goalkeepers are just the same as everyone else, which would be amusing. No, goalkeepers were able to accurately determine the number of flashes and beeps with much smaller time intervals between them than the other players and ordinary people.

This suggests, of course, that they can process multi-centred cues both a lot more precisely and a lot more rapidly. And it indicates that they have this enhanced ability to segregate the processing of auditory and visual information. So they have a particular skill set that suits them to be standing there with someone banging balls at them. The real question now, and the one that requires more research or sensory torture, if you prefer, is whether this is actually nature or nurture.

Is this an innate ability that destins you for a career as a goalkeeper? Or is it a skill that you hone as you train to be a professional goalkeeper? I'm guessing it's probably some kind of innate skill because my school years were marked by people throwing fast-moving projectiles at me, and I never developed any talent as a goalie whatsoever. Can I just add something here?

Because the goal is at my school, tended to be the kids that couldn't play football, so they're like, hey, you, go stand in goal. And now you're telling me that goalies could potentially have superpowers? Well, that's the way it seems. I mean, the only one I remember is Bruce Grubler who used to walk around on his hands, so, you know, he was always entertaining.

Well, thank you very much for that, Matt. I've learned quite a bit today. Good. I'm glad.

Yes. That, of course, was this week's episode of Matt's Plane. And if you're interested to find out what Matt is up to, you can find him on X. He's at CultureMap.

Of course, his website is CulturePop.com and his sub-stack newsletter is CulturePop.sub-stack.com. If you missed any part of the show, don't forget to go on download the podcast where we normally get it from. I recommend the BFM app. That's where you can listen to it.

That is available on the Apple App Store or Google Play. My name is Rich Bradbury from BFM 89.9, the Business Station.