Pelican

I'm forever amazed by people who stand at pelican crossings waiting for the lights to change, but not pressing the button. They appear genuinely ignorant to the fact that the lights will not change if they do not press the button. Eventually, many just cross the road in exasperation,  tired of waiting for lights that appear to be never going to change. I find this astounding because it hints at a lack of understanding of the world that I couldn't bear to live with. I realised the other day that I know the phases of all my local traffic lights. I imagine that this is not unusual, but maybe it is. Possibly many more people know the phases of their local traffic lights without realising it, but I'm not sure how many people actively consider this knowledge to be something that contributes to their sense of place or identification with their local area. It is entirely possible that I am what would these days be described as 'a little bit on the spectrum', that this would account for some of how I familiarise myself with an area being about a high level familiarity with the basic mechanics of that area. I'm not saying I stand at road junctions and learn the phases of the traffic lights, I too am barely consciously aware of the process of gaining this knowledge. I just realised it for the first time the other day. I guess the difference comes at the point when one is assessing an unfamiliar road junction, which one does based on an accumulated knowledge of all similar or comparable road junctions. However, if we assume this approach is common to all, there are a startling number of people who have not yet established that where a set of pedestrian lights are not at a road junction, they will not change to favour the pedestrian until the button is pushed. There are a startling number of people who don't press the button when it's there, just in case. There are a startling number of people who have no active or intuitive understanding of even the most basic technology in their environment. I personally find this worrying.
 As we increasingly rely on technology to make decisions for us, the idea that we may not have even a cursory understanding of how those decisions are made is deeply troubling. I'm not saying that I am fully aware of the intricate workings of the Google algorithms, but I understand the broad principles behind them and I think about the rules that they operate by. Not all the time, not when I'm looking for a single piece of information that I am in little doubt will have a single answer (or am aware of the context that will confirm that piece of information for me). But when I am looking for more subjective information, I will know to filter the results, which I will do based on my own bias rather than any knowledge of how to account for algorithmic bias. Quite often I'll filter based on a single news agency, sometimes before I even search, so I'm not necessarily even exposing myself to all the options before limiting them. This is possibly because I am a old enough to approach information on the World Wide Web with with the pre-web view of single source news from a trusted source. Of course this allows for an understanding of the bias at work; I often find the opinions in the Guardian infuriating, but at least I understand the context in which they are generated; if I were to read a piece in the Times about the BBC I would understand the context that it is only ever viewed as a limit to potential revenue for News International. I know that the facts presented will be as accurate as they can be, accounting for the omissions of each bias, because a newspaper trades on its reputation as a purveyor of truth and so must be wary of straying too far from it. Google and Facebook actively avoid any claims to be a source of truth, yet that is how we think of them and they certainly don't discourage that view. As consumers of news, information or facts we need to be aware of the source; the 'delivery platforms' - the new intermediaries of news - can obfuscate source whilst fooling us into ascribing the trust that we would normally reserve for a news agency to the information that they deliver unvalidated, unverified and seemingly unfiltered. Of course we should also be aware that this last is not true: in an attempt to tailor our experience, to make the data we receive 'more relevant' (mainly in order to determine what advertising we will respond to best) the delivery platforms do filter our data, heavily. They give us the information they think we want, regardless of its source or veracity. This distinction is important: the delivery platforms tell us what they think we want to know, whereas a traditional news agency will tell us what they think we ought to know. When approaching information from each of these sources we don't need to know anything more about the process involved in delivering that information as long as we are aware of the principle that underpins it.
We don't need to know the details of the wiring of our local traffic lights, but it helps to know when to push the button.