Note to Self

High school is pretty much how you remember it, but the mean girls don't have to look you in the eyes anymore.

There has been a lot of back and forth about how teenagers do and don't use social media recently. The conclusions? Don't generalize. Ask teenagers what they think. Listen. So, because phone behavior is endlessly fascinating to the New Tech City team, we decided to do just that.

On this week's episode, 16-year-old Grace was kind enough to keep an audio diary of everything she does on her phone. Hear her navigate through endless app alerts, group messaging drama, clueless grown-ups, that bizarre old technology of email and even how she handles a sext request. Grace has some pretty good advice all around, even if you don't know any teens:

1. Cyberbullying is, more often than not, minor burns.

“Of course people say like snotty things...or someone will unfollow someone on Instagram or something like that, but its not, like, awful awful like ‘Go kill yourself.’”

2. Not every picture goes on Snapchat or Instagram.

In fact, some get locked away. Grace uses the Photo Vault app, which puts pics behind a passcode. It’s free and can be downloaded here.

3. Anonymous Apps like Whisper and Yik Yak? Way over.

Grace did do a little Yakking on Yik Yak, but once too many people joined in on the anonymous posting, "it was just bizarre." Like Tamagotchi and hairbands in Central New Jersey, anonymous apps have come in and out of style.

4.  There's always one kid making everyone jealous.

In Grace’s town, getting a phone at the end of elementary school or beginning of middle school is the norm.

But: “There is always, like, one kid who gets it super early.” 

5. Sexting is not widespread (or, at least, not taken seriously).

6. There is still paper in school.

Besides essays (which are typed, 12-point font, and double-spaced) Grace’s assignments have her writing out her work by hand.

7. There's a trick to recharging your phone faster during class.

Putting your phone on airplane mode before plugging it in speeds up charge times. You might not be able to get Internet or texts, but if you’re in a rush, this is the way to go. This video by CNET last year showed a phone charging a whole four minutes sooner in airplane mode.

Turning it off completely would go even faster. But then, you know, your phone is off.

8. Acronyms: so LOL.

Despite articles like this warning parents about all the acronyms kids use, Grace said it's not the case. Out of the list, she says she only sees “THOT” and “420.”

“These rest are made up or weirdos use,” Grace said. She's got some new ones though that she and friends make up as they go along. 

9. Trust your kids.

This is the most important. Grace advises parents to respect their kids’ phones, unless they have reason to believe their child needs help.

“Not every kid is sexting. Your kid is probably not sexting. Don’t go through their phones, that’s not good... even if you have good intentions, it’s going to backfire.”

It really is probably more innocent than you think.

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Minds need to wander to reach full potential, and all that time on your phone might be getting in the way. We're here to help with a big project called Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out.

This episode kicks off the biggest project New Tech City has ever done: Bored and Brilliant. Our goal is to get you rethinking your relationship with technology. Sign-up for the NTC newsletter to get the challenges. 

    YES! I want to get Bored and Brilliant!

Here's the issue: It goes back to when Apple introduced the first iPhone in 2007 — that's less than a decade ago. Fifty-eight percent of American adults have a smartphone today. Sixty-seven percent of the time, people are looking at their phones without any sort of ring or vibration. Forty-four percent of Americans have slept with their phone next to their beds.

Statistics aside, all you really have to do is go outside and see how many people can't even walk without staring at a screen. We counted them!

When we asked for your stories, many of you told us smartphones make you feel like you have the power to be connected all the time, organized beyond measure, and never, ever without entertainment while you're waiting for coffee. But you've also told us they make you feel dependent, exhausted, and addicted — some of you say you're actually relieved when you lose or break your phones for a day.

There's a paradox here. But one thing is clear: Paying attention to our smartphones through so many of our waking moments means our minds don't spend as much time idling.

And that matters! We talked to boredom researcher Sandi Mann of the University of Lancashire of the U.K.  

Mann's research finds that idle minds lead to reflective, often creative thoughts (we discuss her projects in depth in this week's show). Minds need to wander to reach their full potential. 

During bouts of boredom our brains can't help but jump around in time, analyzing and re-analyzing the pieces of our lives, says Jonny Smallwood, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of York in the UK. He says inspiration strikes in the shower because it's a moment when we're not really looking at or focusing on anything else.

Researchers have only really started to understand the phenomena of "mind-wandering" — the activity our brains engage in when we're doing nothing at all — over the past decade or so.

But when mental stimulation is a touch of the phone away?

"That’s where daydreaming and boredom intersect," Smallwood says. "What smartphones allow us to do is get rid of boredom in a very direct way because we can play games, phone people, we can check the Internet. It takes away the boredom, but it also denies us the chance to see and learn about where we truly are in terms of our goals."

And that's where Bored and Brilliant comes in. 

Let's do it together. Sign up here:

    YES! I want to get Bored and Brilliant!

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Find a 20-something, a 30-something and a 40-something. If you’re feeling especially experimental, add in a 70-something and a teenager. Say the word: “voicemail.” Watch what happens.

Voice messages — and the etiquette around them — are changing. Some people are rooting for voicemail to disappear completely from our communication repertoire.

"Typing and talking have an inverse relationship: as it's gotten easier to write your feelings, it's gotten more difficult to speak them."

Gizmodo writer Leslie Horn makes a powerful case for voicemail in an essay last year that we just loved. It... well, it stuck with us, and we really wanted to hear the voices she described. Because those scratch recordings buried in her phone's voicemail folder got her through the tough months after her father's death. "Voicemail is a default archive of your life. You would miss it if it were gone," she says. 

So this week’s show is about the way listening can jog memories and emotions like nothing else. To that point, we'd really encourage you to listen to this one above even if you have read her post already. (You can listen by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes, or on Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, or anywhere else using our RSS feed.)

And when you’re done, leave us a voicemail! Our number is (917) 924-2964. Don't let our inbox look like this:

Give us a call and tell us your story.

This week, an encore of one of our favorite New Tech City episodes ever: The tale of David Joerg, self-professed tech addict.

David spent years living the life many kids can only dream of: video games at 3 a.m., Nutella from the jar, unlimited hours clicking from one piece of tech news to the next. 

Running on three hours of sleep per night, he became, in his words, “a zombie.” He decided it had to stop - so he put his techie mind to work, and built a system that totally cut him off. Spoiler: It involves his daughter's piggy bank.

Listen above. And if you’re struggling too? You can request a copy of the program for yourself from David here. 

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May we suggest a holiday activity for the family?

Sleep. Without screens. Get a lot of it. 

New research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that that bluish-glow from computers, smart phones and tablets is, in fact, keeping us up at night, and the impacts are worse than scientists previously suspected. Not only are our devices keeping us up later and later into the evenings, they're actually making it more difficult for us to fall asleep at all. The consequences are psychological and biological.

So no, this isn't an excuse to push the kids away on Christmas morning. It's more of a long-term lifestyle plea, culled from a ton of data WNYC collected earlier this year. And in that spirit, we're re-airing one of our favorite episodes from 2014, about something we do every day (or at least we try to do). Getting enough rest to stave off some pretty staggering screen-fueled sleep deficits. 

Give it a listen (or another, if you caught it earlier this year), and join us in getting some much-needed rest this winter.

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Somewhere hidden in the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey, there is a very small town. This all-American village boasts good public transit, its own reservoir, a coffee shop, a church, a bank... you name it. Their international airport rarely has delays. 

Where is this idyllic hideaway? That's a military secret. 

CyberCity, as it's called, serves as a training ground for a new class of specialized "cyber warriors," capable of defending against cyber attack. Every day, soldiers plot to take over the town, by hacking into its schools, its water systems, its power grid, and its Internet, as colleagues and instructors watch on screens in the other room. It's run by the SANS Institute's Ed Skoudis, whom the military hired to design a new generation of training equipment –  and, as Skoudis said, your average digital simulator wasn't going to cut it:

"If you tell them, 'Hey, one of your folks was able to hack into a power grid and turn the lights back on,' certain people in the military leadership would look at that and say, 'You just showed me that my people can play a video game.' Whereas we can say it was a real power grid. Admittedly controlling a city whose surface area was 48 square feet – but still."

While we can't disclose CyberCity's precise location, we can say this: Skoudis' souped-up model train set sits very near the center of innovation in military training, national security and technology-fueled warfare.

We sent radio producer Eric Molinsky (of the podcast "Imaginary Worlds") to check it out in person. We were oohing and aahing right along with him (listen above). Because what Skoudis told him was simultaneously terrifying...

"Those people in CyberCity are not physical little people. What they are is, they’re data.... Most of the residents have birth records in the hospital, some of them are getting various medical treatments, they have prescription medications – all that stuff is in the hospital. We have social networking inside of Cyber City. We have something very like Facebook, we have something very much like Twitter. We have a newspaper in Cyber City. We call it the Cyber City Sentinel. So for example we’ll have a reporter who writes Cyber City Sentinel articles. That reporter also has a bank account. That reporter also has birth records. She has a family. So there’s really – I guess the way to describe it is there’s a fabric to the citizenry of Cyber City."

...and kind of charming. Listen to the full story on this week's episode of New Tech City, in the audio player above, on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, or anywhere else using our RSS feed.

CyberCity by day. Everything has a specific purpose for cyber war scenarios. One mission involves thwarting a train hijacking.

Skoudis is proud of the details within CyberCity like this house with a flowerpot. Those details reminds him that people’s livelihoods are at stake in cyber warfare.

It feels like a hazy bright morning by the power plant in CyberCity.

There are some notes of whimsy on the model, like the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

Some cyber war games involve challenging but realistic rules of engagement, like avoiding the school.

The military requested a mission where a fire breaks out in the chemical plant. They couldn't use real fire, so they use lights and orange and yellow streamers until the "fire" is put out.

The eerie calm of night settles over a city steeling for the next attack.

The power plant may be a plastic simulation, but the computer system that runs it underneath the model is as realistic as possible..

Technicians monitor CyberCity through web cams. They can also use those laptops to make mayhem happen.

Ed Skoudis describes his Steampunk office as “a mad scientists’ lab from the 1880s.” There’s a model train that runs along the ceiling. He also has Edison bulbs, an Enigma machine, vintage radios.

This week, Manoush is up for a challenge: Come up with a topic you know you should care about, but it just sounds so boring. We'll figure out a way to make it interesting, and we'll convince you to care once and for all (well, first we'll figure out if you need to care. That first.)  Email us ([email protected]), tweet at us (@NewTechCity), or leave a comment on our New Tech City Facebook page. 

In this week's show, we offer a humble helping hand through a messy digital dilemma. 

Your Facebook feed has become the new town square. The new water cooler. The new [insert your analogy of choice]. Sometimes your far off "friends" and relatives share views far out of step with your values. It can get ugly. 

“One of my elementary school friends who I grew up with posted a story about hair salons accepting EBT cards," listener Tamika Cody tells us. "Some of her friends started to chime in. They poked fun at how African Americans spoke and how they were 'gonna get their hair did.' By the time they got to the whole 'Chinamen' and doing nails, I just said, 'you know what, this is just too much for me.'”

Tamika quit Facebook. 

Before you go that far, scroll down (or click play). We've called in the experts. We've commissioned a survey; consulted a psychologist about how racism on Facebook slips by; collected some personal examples; and we've adapted a tool for healthy dialogue into this handy flow chart for you to pin on your wall, physical or digital.

"LARA" is a strategy promoted by the National Conference for Community Justice

We commissioned a survey from the market research company Survata. Of the nearly 300 Facebook users polled, 46 percent have seen a discussion about race show up in their newsfeed in the past month. Almost a third of them say they've considered blocking or unfriending someone over offensive comments about the news.

Things get testy on Facebook.

The Bottom of the Barrel

Among those numbers are listeners like Vishavjit Singh, who wrote to tell us about the reaction to his 28-second Facebook video, which has been viewed over four million times. Singh, who has a beard and wears a turban, shared what people said to him:

The internet is not always a welcoming place. (Screenshot, Facebook)

Yeah.   

We've included a few other examples, and some smart, thoughtful, constructive ways to respond, in this week's episode.

What are you seeing out there, New Tech City listeners? Please tell us (and like us!) on our newly-created... you guessed it... Facebook page. 

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What are you willing to automate in your life? How much robot will you accept? 

This week, Manoush goes on a journey to find out what she's willing to automate in her life, what the right ratio of robot to human is. This, it turns out, is a personal choice. 

Maybe you'll book travel online instead of through a travel agent, but you still use a human accountant. Last week, when New Tech City adopted the new robo-friend Amy (http://x.ai) as our personal assistant we had to face facts: our efficiency came at a cost. Not just to the people replaced by automation, but to the beneficiaries too. Actual hands have sewed fabrics; living, breathing office-dwellers prepared taxes; physical human muscles carried cargo, and real people have picked up phones to make real-life telemarketing calls.

And all of those humans bring a human softness to those tasks that is worth something.

But according to a study from Oxford University, close to half of the U.S. workforce is under threat of losing their job to technology in one form or another. The research team ranked 702 jobs from most likely to least likely to be automated, and telemarketers topped their list, just barely beating out title examiners, sewers, and mathematical technicians. Their big conclusion: Amy isn’t the only job-eating robot waiting in the wings.

The quaint travel agency near Manoush Zomorodi's house.

So has the moment come to pity the poor telemarketer? Is automation inevitable? Is their loss everyone else's gain?

Nick Carr, author of "The Glass Cage: Automation and Us," says "not always." On this week’s episode, we talk with Carr (and another special, live, human guest*) about using technology without stopping to consider why—when the process of automation becomes, perhaps, a little too automatic. 

*OK, so this isn't actually Manoush's personal trainer but you can hear him on the show, “You can’t replicate the having-the-person-in-front-of-you-watching-everything-you’re-doing factor. You can’t replicate that on a phone," Nick Vargas tells Manoush. 

Here's the top of Oxford's list of jobs most likely to be automated: 

Next week on the podcast, we're going to delve into the world of racist or race-baiting posts on your social media accounts, where things have gotten pretty tense in recent weeks. We’ll get advice from experts on where race dialogue fits into Facebook. In the meantime, we want to know: How do you deal with those posts that just totally offend you on your feed? Email us at [email protected] and we might put you on next week's show. 

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Imagine a world where everyone could have a personal assistant to schedule meetings for them. Checking in with your team? Ask for it by next Friday and it shows up on your calendar a few minutes later. Drinks with friends? Handled. This is no longer the luxury of executives. Human assistants, even outsourced to foreign countries, are still pretty costly. But a robot, one that lives inside your email and calendar, that's cheap and could catch on. If it works.

"I think it is inevitable that we will reach that point in time where we simply cannot allow you to do a task as simple as this," Dennis Mortensen, CEO of X.AI

In this episode, we test out a new breed of personal assistant. Her, or its, name is Amy Ingram. She's plucky, tenacious, and loves arranging meetings. In contrast to Apple's Siri, Google Now or Microsoft's Cortana, Amy is specialized on one thing and one thing only: scheduling. A new and increasingly common type of software, Amy isn't a program you download, or an app you install.

"I’m just really grateful that I can have that time back to be productive.... I’ve been in heaven honestly," Jonathan Lehr, Co-Founder of Workbench and user of Amy the robot assistant.

You simply email her a request like you would a human—she has her own email address—and Amy comes to understand your natural language. Then she takes over the email ping pong with your friends and colleagues and hashes out the details until a meeting is set. Sound like salvation? In theory. We put her to the test. And also had a little fun using Amy as a daft Turing test on our friends to see if they would know the difference between a robot and a person. Along the way we found out a few dirty secrets about human nature that pop up when you are trying to program a robot helper. Like when our producer Alex tried to break Amy's will.

"For some reason when you know it is a machine the impulse is: I am going to make her cry," Dennis Mortensen.

Next week on the podcast, we'll cover the human cost of automation from job loss to craving that human touch. Subscribe on iTunes, or on Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, or anywhere else using our RSS feed. And follow us on Twitter @NewTechCity.

* A note: Since the taping of this podcast, Amy and X.AI can now interface with more than just Google Calendar.