Hello all! It warms my writer’s heart to be encountering Reboot out there in the world and to be forging new collaborations as a result of some of my media appearances during the launch.
For example, here’s a bit of a fun one with Jamie Claret, fellow explorer at the junctures of psychology, technology, and business, in which we had an eye-opening Zoom call with ChatGPT4. It got both of us thinking even more deeply about the future of work in our sector(s). From this still, you can see that there were a few pretty interesting moments.
(Follow Jamie and me on LinkedIn for more content on our chat with ‘Chatty’.)
Since my last newsletter I’ve signed Reboot copies (which you can order online) at the wonderful Phlox Books and spotted a copy ‘in the wild’ at my local Foyles in Westfield Stratford, which I also signed. One byproduct of my lateral-thinking style is that my writing ties so many diverse threads together that my books are unclassifiable/unshelve-able…they can show up anywhere. (As you can see, Foyles has gone with ‘popular science.’)
I’ve also relaunched both of my websites - one for speaking and writing, with various podcast and video links as well as links to purchase Reboot and All the Ghosts in the Machine, and one for coaching and psychotherapy.
So thank you for all the support. If you would like to buy a signed copy direct from me, I have some left over from the launch — direct message me/comment here.
This week:
Some thoughts on commercial genealogy in older life;
Some audio snippets from folks I interviewed for the Older Adults chapter in Reboot;
and some assorted other resources that you might find fascinating
When I was writing Reboot, I knew I wanted to cover commercial genetic genealogy somewhere within it - I’ve written about this in Psychology Today. The parallels between our DNA and online social networks are clear. ‘Individual’ identity is inextricably socially situated and interwoven, both online and in our genes. When we post something, an image or a comment, we often refer or link to information about host of others. Allowing someone into ‘our’ informational landscape — our password-protected devices or accounts — also affords an incalculable amount of access and insight into the lives and minds of others, just as submitting our biometric data to a commercial genetic genealogy service like Ancestry or 23andMe yields information about many other people beyond ourselves.
The question, though, was where I should place commercial genealogy within the life-span sweep of the book. Then I got to thinking about memoirist Dani Shapiro’s fascinating book, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love. In Inheritance, she describes spitting in a tube and sending off her sample at the suggestion of her husband, who’d been bitten by the genealogy bug himself. Shapiro wasn’t that bothered herself, until the results came back, revealing that the man she’d thought was her biological father was not related to her.
As the book ends, Shapiro is meeting with her actual father, an erstwhile medical student who’d made a donation at the clinic where her parents sought help for their fertility issues, and I wonder about that autobiography, the flip side of Dani’s memoir — it’s the perspective we don’t hear in her book. When she first tracked him down, she the first visual she had of him was some YouTube footage of him speaking at a conference. Having assumed anonymity in perpetuity, this elderly, now-retired doctor, with a host of known children and grandchildren, never expected a biological child to emerge from the woodwork in his twilight years. When Shapiro made contact with him, what might the impact on him have been?
That renowned psychologist of the human life span, Erik Erikson, called the later years the phase of Ego Integrity vs Despair. This is what interests me about technology in the later years…how might technology either serve ego integrity or disrupt it?
A new developmental challenge has now arisen for seniors, courtesy of today’s technology: Coherence vs Fragmentation. For some elders, tech will help them consolidate and maintain identity in their twilight years; for others, it will unearth information that dramatically upsets the Ego Integrity apple cart, deconstructing established life narratives about origins and family and forcing eleventh-hour rewrites of internally held autobiographies. Whether the revelations that come from genetic genealogy will provoke integrity or despair, whether they will cohere or fragment an individual’s sense of self eludes easy prediction. (from Reboot)
One of the reasons that the podcasts for Reboot: Your Life on Tech are a bit behind is because, just as with the Middle Adulthood chapter (bells-and-whistles podcast still in the pipeline) I had way too much fascinating material for the Older Adulthood chapter. Reading and listening to all of these, I think you’ll understanding how challenging it is for this one-woman band to knit all of it together.
I interviewed the perennially fascinating Professor Julia Creet from York University, director of Data Mining the Deceased and author of The Genealogical Sublime, about the interconnectedness of our data and the implications of Blackstone buying AncestryDNA.
I guess there's a lot of morals, you know. The more family, the better. No family should be allowed to have secrets. Secrets are inherently destructive to children. By contributing to pharmaceutical research your DNA is be benefiting everyone. And by allowing your data to be used by law enforcement, you’re contributing to catching the Golden State Killer. - Julia Creet
I chatted to my buddy Al Gidari, incredibly knowledgable privacy lawyer (now retired, after a fashion at least), about his enthusiasm for gifting AncestryDNA kits at Christmas and his (for me) unexpected take on the pros and cons of your biometric data being out in the world.
You can have these rules, but it's, it's not going to stop the, the global trade and industry around DNA analysis in my view, and the applications of it for pharmaceutical purposes, genealogy for history, people are fascinated by their be yeah. And a hundred years from now, I think this will be so commonplace that everyone will have been analysed.
I had a fascinating, long conversation with Jodi Klugmann-Rabb, psychotherapist and founder of Parental Identity Discovery. We discussed the privacy of parents balanced against the need and right of children to connect with their origins.
We all have a right to know where we come from because the lack of that knowledge is so destabilising. It can create pretty significant mental health [issues], between grief, and anger, and anger unchecked. When it's chronic and becomes so pervasive, it creates a whole set of other issues.
And finally, I had a funny, moving interchange with Jeanne, who found her biological mother via 23andMe, just in time to connect with her before she died.
In the beginning when I was looking for my biological mom, I thought she would, that she would feel the peace for me.
But then after talking to her and building whatever relationship she had, I realized that it was my job to close her circle. - Jeanne
I can only hope that, in Reboot, I did justice to the variety of perspectives and experiences captured in these interviews. These interviews made it clear that there are no easy answers, no simple judgements about good/bad, no one ‘truth.’
If you have already read and enjoyed REBOOT, take a few moments to leave a review. Here’s a handy link to take you straight there.
I also have a few signed copies left over from the launch party, so if you become an annual subscriber to this newsletter/podcast, I’ll send you one of those signed hardback copies plus a paperback of my previous book, All the Ghosts in the Machine. Wow! What a bargain, eh?
Another feature of the Older Adults chapter is an exploration of the ways in which technology is helping older adults hold onto identity, generativity, and connection with their communities. Here’s a select roundup of some recent news that caught my attention.
The New York Times reported on 15th October that Wearables Track Parkinson’s Better Than Human Observation, Study Finds - which adds to news stories that have been popping up throughout 2023 about Parkinson’s detection and monitoring of its progression. The piece emphasises - in an increasingly familiar narrative about AI and digital technologies - that it’s about a partnership between experienced, human clinicians and the technology, not the tech as a substitute for the professional.
On 10th October, iNews reported the results of a remote-monitoring study of elderly people’s homes: Elderly are living in temperatures as low as 5 degrees indoors, remote monitoring technology reveals. In winter of 2022-2023, 61% of people monitored were at risk because of low temperatures in their homes. The story reports that UK councils were considering further rollouts of ‘lifestyle monitoring technology’ to protect our senior citizens, and that Reading council had recently received a huge grant for this.
On the 23rd September, The Independent and other news outlets reported that AI Could Cut the Number of Elderly People Falling at Home. Private ‘social care provider and health-tech company’ Cera had piloted its platform and claimed it to reduce falls by 20%. The system involves an automated daily AI phone call that contacts patients to ask specific health questions and determine whether they are at risk. Cera is also using avatars to train its staff.
That’s all for this week…although I’ve still got to get the linked podcast for this and the last chapter out there in the world! The next newsletter and podcast focus on my main specialist subject, digital afterlives…the new last phase of identity.
Take care ‘til then!
Elaine
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