In this conversation, Mindful Communications CEO Bryan Welch and Rick Erwin, CEO of Adstra, lead a conversation about the ethics of data management and how Rick uses mindfulness as a tool to navigate the luring nature of social media apps in this modern-day, interconnected world.
This conversation is part of Mindful’s free Leading Mindfully: Insights from Mindful Executives webinar series. Watch a recording of the conversation below.
[Excerpt from Leading Mindfully: Insights from Executives—a conversation with Bryan Welch, CEO of Mindful Communications, and Rick Erwin, CEO of Adstra]
Bryan Welch:
So there’s the idea that mindfulness practice, that is the self-awareness that we believe comes from it, maybe generates the potential for us to be more conscientious as business people and business leaders. I’m just sort of wondering, there’s a lot of negative attention paid to the aggregation of consumer data to the fact that we are all in business learning more and more about consumers day by day, aggregating data, becoming more sophisticated in how we use it. How do you view the past, present and future of the sort of ethical questions around data aggregation and data management?
Rick Erwin:
It’s said such a great question, it’s been central to my whole career in this industry. And I’ll tell you, there’s certainly an overlap in terms of mindfulness as we think about it in the context of meditation with being mindful about the right thing to do in industry. But I will say there need not be an overlap.
Rick Erwin:
The overlap is coincidental because in my view, being a practitioner in this consumer data industry confers an ethical obligation on one to do the right thing that has nothing to do with whether you decide to ever learn to meditate or become a practitioner of mindfulness or any of the meditative sciences or arts. And so maybe this is a function of the first company I worked for in this industry, but I’ve always thought it was a very, very serious obligation to be extremely thoughtful about managing consumer information.
Rick Erwin:
Well, so for example, one of the implications of that in my industry, in my company is we don’t manage the kind of information that generates a ton of controversy around social media, for example. And so we’re right now hearing a tremendous amount of rather disturbing, from my point of view, revelations about what a social media platform can do to move millions of brains via the limbic system in a direction, whether they’re trying to or not.
Rick Erwin:
That is because the data that is being used to do that is the very most precious personal information which is what you read, what you do with what you read, how you share with other people what you read. Well, my company doesn’t manage that kind of information. The kind of information my company manages is that which is publicly available or permissioned by the consumer.
Rick Erwin:
And it tends to be much more descriptive information that if you are walking down the street past a consumer, you could observe yourself about them. And that is a whole different kind of information that in my view is very useful for building relationships between brands and their customers and very un-useful if you want to foment an insurrection or get a million people to vote a certain way, it’s just not something that I’ve ever had any interest in managing or being a part of, frankly.
Bryan Welch:
Yeah. I just want to remind everybody that we’ll take questions at any time. And here on Zoom, you can just open the Q&A panel and type a question in, and we’ll see it right away and I’ll try to attend to as many of those we possibly can. We’d love the give and take though. So saying all that about how the social media drives the limbic system and the limbic system drives the social media, do you think maybe there should be a limit to the data that the social media platforms are collecting on us or the behavioral data?
Rick Erwin:
Yes. I mean, this is a very big and complicated topic, but the simplest answer is these companies are publishers, they should be treated as publishers. You know about publishing and you have responsibilities in your business as a publisher. And there’s a reason why the social media platforms have very specifically gone out of their way over the years to say, “We’re not publishers, we’re a technology platform. We don’t publish anything.”
Rick Erwin:
And of course, most people, I think, know that that’s not the case. But it’s convenient when your technology platform and the infrastructure, specifically the algorithms that are able to decide what a person sees and what they see in relation to what they’ve done. That infrastructure is actually there to publish information for people to read and it’s just convenient when there’s so much of it and it would be so hard to be a responsible publisher.
Rick Erwin:
It’s convenient to say, “Well, we’re not a publisher because it really would change the economics of the business model probably you could argue would destroy the business model from a financial standpoint if those companies had to behave and be as responsible as publishers have to be.
Bryan Welch:
I think for a lot of people, it’s not apparent that in a way, the big social media platforms are sort of following the instructions of their users in the sense that their algorithms feed off of engagement, they feed off of obsession and people become obsessed when they are triggered by a subject, when they feel a strong partisan inclination toward a topic.
Bryan Welch:
And so I know what my friends that work for social media platforms say, “We’re just listening to the users and making the experience more engaging for them.” But of course, even if it’s drawing out their very worst qualities and aggravating the worst feelings that they’re experiencing. In fact, in a way aggravating, they’re suffering.
Rick Erwin:
I do. I do and that’s the… Now that there is an interesting possible connection between the practice of mindfulness meditation and your experience as a consumer and a user of Twitter or Facebook. And the connection is for me, one of the great benefits I’ve gained from learning and practicing meditation is the ability to concentrate to the extent that you can recognize how to react to something.
Rick Erwin:
That is the opposite of the way social media platforms are designed to operate. They’re designed to make it impossible for the human brain to think about their reaction. And that’s maybe counterintuitive to people who aren’t in that business. And I don’t mean it to say obviously not everything that happens on a social media platform is a bad thing.
Rick Erwin:
It’s just that the bad hijacking of a brain via the limbic system and the good hijacking of a brain via the limb system are both the same mechanism. It just happens that the good hijacking of the brain doesn’t sell as much advertising.
[Excerpt from Leading Mindfully: Insights from Executives—a conversation with Bryan Welch, CEO of Mindful Communications, and Rick Erwin, CEO of Adstra]