technology

Are You a Digital Nomad?

Are You a Digital Nomad?

Once upon a time, traveling from state to state and country to country in an RV was the dream of retirees. Then came the Internet, and as early as the mid-1990s, people found themselves able to work remotely. The phrase “digital nomad” was born around that time to encompass those high-tech workers who could work independently, setting up tech networks and working where they wanted to work.

The world’s experiences with the COVID pandemic resulted in an explosion of remote work. Thanks to a lot of creative thinking, all sorts of jobs and activities went online. No longer the purview of purely high-tech workers, remote work expanded to include clothing salespeople, librarians, winery hosts, personal brand coaches, and more. Give people a laptop and a reliable Internet connection, and they’re as ready to work in a hostel in Barcelona as they are in an apartment in Singapore. 

Does that make all remote workers digital nomads? There’s debate on that. 

Some consider only those people who have independent, entrepreneurial-style gigs that let them travel and work from anywhere to be the “true” digital nomad. Others think that the type of employment and employer don’t matter—if you’re taking advantage of 100% remote work and avoiding long-term fixed residences, then you, too, should consider yourself a digital nomad. 

All that to say, since the legal requirements and technical resources for both views are basically the same, the debate seems like a distinction without a difference

Keeping it Legal

Of course, whether you admit to being a digital nomad is another story, particularly when traveling to different countries. From a legal perspective, traveling for vacation is one thing; that assumes a basic travel visa. Those visas usually include in the fine print that you’re there for a holiday, not to work. If you want to actually work in a country, where ‘work’ means “I’m here and will be making money,” then you are often legally required to apply for a work visa. 

Different countries have different requirements, and sometimes those requirements are fairly vague. The most critical thing to remember is to do your research in advance to make sure you are following the proper legal procedures is important when crossing international borders. It’s like insurance. Sure, you can drive without it, and if no one catches you, fine. But if anything goes wrong, you might be in a world of trouble. 

Remember Your Digital Safety

The digital nomad lifestyle depends on technology, and that means you have to be on your A-game when it comes to making sure that your online accounts are protected. Having a password manager and using multi-factor authentication is no longer a “nice to have” but an absolute necessity. 

In fact, you’ll want to step it up and make sure you have a personal VPN, that your bank is top of the line when it comes to security, and a plan for what to do if your devices are lost or stolen (that means backing up your files regularly and testing that you can restore from those backups).

What Resources Exist for Digital Nomads?

Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there to help you navigate the digital nomad lifestyle!

What You Can Do in 5 Minutes 

  • Wikipedia has a great page on being a digital nomad, including links to countries that embrace the concept and have clear(ish) guidelines on how to work in their countries. 
  • Subscribe to the Digital Nomad subreddit to get a sense of what others are experiencing as digital nomads. 

What You Can Do in 15 Minutes

  • This comprehensive article by Legal Nomads offers a LOT of tips and tricks to make working remotely easier. If you’re committed to becoming a digital nomad, definitely check this out.
  • If you have a day job that allows for 100% remote work, check in with your HR person and manager just to make sure there are no restrictions on where you might end up in the world. They might not care, but in some fields, information (like encryption technology) can’t leave a country. 

What You Can Do in 30 Minutes (or more)

  • Want to learn more about the cultural aspects of doing business in other countries? One great site to visit is eDiplomat, which focuses on the cultural do’s and don’ts for many countries around the world. Want to know about cultural etiquette in Vietnam? How about reports on living conditions in Croatia from a diplomat’s perspective? There’s a lot on this site to explore. 
  • Want to get the most out of the experience and actually make enough money to support the lifestyle? You need to sit down and start some serious research and budget planning to figure out where your goals and what you can actually afford to align.

Wrap Up

There are a lot of considerations for entering into the world of the digital nomad. Visas, cybersecurity, banking, and money management… This is the tip of the iceberg! Still, travel is amazing, and you may find that the risks involved are absolutely worth the reward of the experience. Just be careful, make sure you have a community to talk to, and don’t forget to be smart with your passwords. 

Photo by David Espina on Unsplash

Posted by heather, 0 comments
I Saw It On the Internet So It Must Be True

I Saw It On the Internet So It Must Be True

Understanding Confirmation Bias

When you see a story on the Internet that matches what you already believe, it feels true. Right. Everything you’d expect to see in the world. And when you see a story that doesn’t match your beliefs, you’re more likely to be skeptical and doubt the veracity of the information. That’s what confirmation bias is all about. It’s about confirming what you believe, whether or not it’s actually true.

According to Psychology Today, confirmation bias “occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs.” It makes sense, really. Who goes around thinking, “I’m wrong! I’m wrong!”? If you think you’re right, you’ll naturally tend towards information confirming your beliefs. Technology LOVES to enable that for you!

How Technology Makes Confirmation Bias Worse

Confirmation bias isn’t new, but technology today makes it easier to experience. Content providers like YouTube and Instagram want you to spend time on their sites. The more time you spend with them, the more money they make. And they encourage you to spend that time by feeding you stories or posts related to what you’ve viewed and spent time on in the past. (We talked about this in our post on Information Silos.) The more times you see posts that align with your beliefs, the more confirmation you’ll receive that your beliefs are true.

Technology does more than just guide us towards material it thinks we’ll want to see. The sheer amount of information out there means people have to make pretty hard choices about what they pay attention to. The World Economic Forum recently reported that people spend an average of 2.5 hours a day on social media. Expand that to just surfing the web, and that goes up to an average of 7 hours a day! With that much information flowing through our devices into our heads, is it any wonder people will key into what makes them feel better about what they think they know?

So what, though? Why is it a problem that the Internet confirms my belief that cats are gods and rule the world? As long as that’s as far as it goes, it isn’t. Unfortunately, there is a lot of evidence that confirmation bias feeds more than viral memes. It also feeds extremist viewpoints and scary organizations. 

What Can You Do About Confirmation Bias in 5 Minutes

  • Rather than searching for information that matches what you know, try looking for information to refute the idea. For example, don’t just search for the “best.” Also, try the corresponding search for the “worst.”
  • Before you share a post or an idea online, stop for a second and ask yourself whether you’d still believe and share this information if the opposite was published by the same experts and sources?

What Can You Do About Confirmation Bias in 15 Minutes

  • Rather than trying to prove something to be true, spend a few minutes trying to prove it false, either by searching for different terms or becoming your own “devil’s advocate.’
  • Spend time looking through the sites listed on Media Bias/Fact Check and pick at least one news source outside your usual preference. 

What Can You Do About Confirmation Bias in 30 Minutes (or more)

  • You can do this one by yourself or with a team. Try running your belief through an exercise called the Six Thinking Hats. This technique takes a while to work through, but the idea is that you approach solving a problem or thinking through an idea in six different ways: structured, creative, positive, emotional, critical, and factual. The point is to do all six because they’ll each allow for exploration of a different facet of the topic. By the time you’ve gone through all six, you’ll be closer to a more well-rounded truth than you were before.

Wrap Up

Confirmation bias isn’t a technology problem, though technology definitely offers the perfect environment to feed this way of thinking. As long as you’re aware of it and willing to step back when needed, you can go on being quite certain that cats are gods. After all, you saw that truth on the Internet – it must be true!

Posted by heather in Communication, Line Dancing, 0 comments
A Call Made Round the World…And More On Internet Resiliency

A Call Made Round the World…And More On Internet Resiliency

If you look at a map of the world, you see lines around cities, states, and countries that mark the boundaries of those regions. Those lines seem so tidy when looking at a map of the world. Of course, that assumes you’re looking at a well-surveyed area with a stable political infrastructure. 

The Internet is nowhere near that tidy; its boundaries are not well defined. Maps of the Internet don’t look like anything in the physical world. There’s an interesting map based on all known websites and where their domains are registered as of  2011 called The Internet map. There’s a super-fun map called The Map of the Internet that maps out the World Wide Web and gives you a sense of scale. Heck, you can go to Vox and look at “40 maps that explain the Internet,” but none of those map out the Internet itself. When it comes right down to it, there is no single authoritative map of the Internet.

Why is it this way, and why does it matter? Read on!

Why the Internet is Resilient

Did you know the Internet started as a US military defense project? Think about the mindset that would result in: any military would want a computer system to stand up to anything and everything. It would need to be resilient if some pieces went offline. It would need to allow lots of different types of computers to talk to each other any time, day or night. Think of those requirements as the DNA of the Internet. Technical implementations build from there.

But wait, if the Internet started as a military project, how did the rest of us get to use it??? That kind of exchange, from government to private sector and back, is pretty common. That’s a post for another time.

Back to the Internet. The way things work, it’s a lot like a postal letter. Someone writes a letter and it includes the address of where it’s trying to go. And at every step, the delivery system asks, “what’s the best next step from here?” These systems are always chatting with each other, sharing the best path to get from anywhere to everywhere. If one path goes down because a computer broke, that’s ok, because the systems will tell each other a new way to get there. And that happens fast. And it is one part of what makes the Internet so resilient. There is always a path forward.

A while back, I videoconferenced with my mother in Chicago from a hotel in Taipei. I opened an app, clicked on her face, let it ring a few times, and voilá, there she was. WOW, seriously, how cool is it that within a second, the computer I was on in Taipei figured out how to get to my mom’s computer in Chicago? We were nearly 7500 miles apart. I was on a hotel network in Taiwan. She was on a mobile network in Chicago. I opened my app, which itself has the addresses of the computer used by that video service. The network I was on said, ‘ahHA! You’re trying to get way over there! Let’s start routing you through lots of different countries, under the ocean, or maybe into space via satellite.’ 

It is possible for a local region or country to cut itself off from the rest of the Internet, but to do it, it has to get into that delivery system and take its information out of the network. Then any system trying to get there from here won’t know how to do that anymore. (It’s obviously a bit more complicated than that, especially when you throw satellites into the mix, but you get the idea.)

Controlling (Mis)Information

The Internet is resilient, which means it can route information around many different kinds of interruptions like broken computers or weird human error. Yay! That means that cat videos can be available day and night! Well, true, but not everyone is a fan of this level of resiliency, and there are reasons for that. 

The thing about technology is that technology itself is neutral. It’s like a bunch of bricks—you can build houses or you can vandalize windows. It’s not the brick that’s an issue, it’s how the brick is used. But if you’re in a situation where people are using bricks to break things, then you almost certainly want to do something to prevent that. One of those preventative measures is likely to be controlling access to the bricks. Same goes for technology like the Internet—if you use it to harm, someone is going to want to prevent that by controlling what gets posted.

Now more than ever, we are seeing people and their governments demand ways to prevent the spread of information they don’t like on the Internet. From addressing “fake news” that attempts to skew democratic elections to reactions to cyberwarfare, controlling information is considered by many to be necessary for a safe society.

Some governments go so far as to demand restrictions between the Internet within their country and everyone else. This has been top of the news when it comes to Russia, but Russia is just the latest example. China has its Great Firewall, which had its start in 1997. Several other countries in Asia and Africa censor the Internet to various extents. In the US, free speech laws prevent much government censorship, which has many people turning to the social media platforms themselves and demanding action, either to restrict content or to stop restricting content, depending on their point of view.

Why Does This Matter?

Identity Flash Mob is a passion project led by two women who want people to have a better understanding of how the Internet works and why it really matters to know more about it. So, if you take away anything from this article, it should be two things:

  1. The Internet is incredibly resilient, but it’s not invincible. While individuals will always be able to build connectivity to the Internet (if they have the technical know-how and access to satellite networks) that’s not the case for most everyone. Governments may well be able to control big chunks of it, and through that, they control the information people have access to.

Which leads to the second thing:

  1. Not everyone sees the same thing on the Internet. What seems obvious to you based on what you’re reading in the news or social media might not be obvious to others who are not seeing the same thing. 

The resiliency of the Internet that lets me call my mom from halfway around the world is an incredible thing. Hopefully, we’ll still keep in mind all the good things that resilience as a foundational principle allows us in today’s online society.

Posted by heather in Data Security, Mosh Pit, 0 comments