Dystopias

If I have a gripe with the Internet, it isn't short attention spans, it isn't blogging, or it isn't ease of idiot communication. It would be that the initial effect of the Internet, probably because it has academic origins rather than economic origins, was to devalue content. And I mean that in a gross monetary sense. The idea was that information was suddenly free. Information is not free. You [always] pay a price for information. Sometimes the price is just paying attention or being careful. But usually there's a monetary price involved because it costs money to get people out there who know what they're doing and have reasonable judgment and knowledge and perspective and background, and you don't want it to be free. It's not going to be terribly expensive, it's probably going to be cheaper than what newspapers have come to cost.

when it comes to the more important analytical side of news, where it is important say for instance for a news organization to have a team of experienced reporters in place with the background knowledge of the place they're in and contacts they've developed over time, you can't replace that with a random backpacker tweeting from Tajikistan

The job wasn't to speak truth to power. Anybody can speak truth to power if they're far enough away from the power.

people should only go to sleep if they are tired, caffeine and exercising before bed disturbs sleep, and alcohol does not help people fall asleep, but rather disrupts sleep and decreases its quality

The brain is always changed by what it does.  That's how we learn, from infancy on, and that's how a baby born in New York has different cultural patterns of behavior, language, gesture, interaction, socialization, and attention than a baby born the same day in Beijing. That's as true for the historical moment into which we are born as it is for the geographical location.  Our attention is shaped by all we do, and reshaped by all we do.  That is what learning is.  The best we can do as educators is find ways to improve our institutions of learning to help our kids be prepared for their future--not for our past.

I didn't find the article nearly as stigmatizing and retrograde as I do the knee-jerk Don't Tread on Me reactions of everyone I've seen respond--most of which amount to foolish technolibertarian celebrations of the anonymous savior Technology (Cathy, you don't do that there, even if you also have nothing good to say about the NYT piece).If anything, the article showed that these kids (like all of us!) are profoundly distressed by today's media ecology. They seem to have a far more subtle perspective on things than most others. Frankly I'm a bit gobstopped that everyone hates this article so much. As for the old chestnut that "we need new education for the information age," it's worth pointing out that there was no formal, standardized education system before the industrial age. Compulsory education is a century old experiment. And yes, it ought to be discarded. But that's a frightening prospect for almost everyone, including those who advocate for it. I wonder how many of the intelligentsia who raise their fists and cry, "We need a different education system!" still partake of the old system for their own kids. We don't in my house, for what it's worth, and it's a huge pain in the ass.

Cathy -- I really appreciate the distinctions you make between the "the biology of attention" and "the sociology of change." And I agree that more complex and nuanced conversations about technology's relationship to attention, diverstion, focus, and immersion will be more productive (than either nostalgia or utopic futurism). For example, it seems like a strange oversight (in the NYT piece) to bemoan the ability of "kids these days" to focus, read immersively, or Pay Attention, yet report without comment that these same kids can edit video for hours on end -- creative, immersive work which, I would imagine, requires more than a little focus. It seems that perhaps the question is not whether we can still pay attention or focus, but what those diverse forms of immersion within different media (will) look like.

The core problem we face in digital data use and privacy is that we are increasingly transparent in our daily lives, but the norms that govern use of transparent data have not transitioned from the physical world to the online world.

((via @russelldavies from his post here.))

Advertising is probably the worst kind of SciFi in this regard. No integrity. No expectations that what is being presented has any relationship to possibility. Maybe SciFi as it was has switched places with advertising: Warren Ellis says SciFi does extrapolation. Advertising-as-SciFi does..what? Dishonest predicting?

Democratic politics is to a great extent a war of coalitions over what the great political economist James M. Buchanan called "the fiscal commons". Think of government as a huge pool of money. Control of government means control over that pool of money. Parties gain control by putting together winning coalitions of interest groups. When a party has control, its coalition's interest groups get more from the pool and the losing coalition's interest groups get less. So, yeah, it matters who wins. When Democrats are in charge, that's great news for public-employees unions and General Electric's alternative energy division. When the Republicans are in charge, that's great news for rich people and Raytheon.

we shouldn't expect government with a moderate, centre-right House to look a lot different from the moderate, centre-left government we've got now.  

Nevertheless, people are going out of their minds stomping heads and warning of streets teeming with sexual predators because we are all phenomenal dupes willing to pick up the propaganda partisans put down. Our minds have been warped by relentless marketing designed to engender false consciousness of stark political brand contrasts. It's as if Crest is telling us that Colgate leads to socialism and Colgate is telling us that Crest leads to plutocracy and all of us believe half of it.

For most of human history, forgetting was the default and remembering the challenge.

Chants, songs, monasteries, books, libraries, and even universities were established primarily to overcome our propensity to forget over time. The physical and economic limitations of all of those technologies and institutions served us well. Each acted not just as memory aids but also as filters or editors. They helped us remember much by helping us discard even more.

Our use of the proliferating data and rudimentary filters in our lives renders us incapable of judging, discriminating, or engaging in deductive reasoning. And inductive reasoning, which one could argue is entering a golden age with the rise of huge databases and the processing power needed to detect patterns and anomalies, is beyond the reach of lay users of the grand collective database called the Internet.

Even 10 years ago, we did not consider that words written for a tiny audience could reach beyond, perhaps to someone unforgiving, uninitiated in a community, or just plain unkind.

Remembering to forget, as Elvis argued, is also essential to getting over heartbreak. And, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his 1942 (yep, I Googled it to find the date) story "Funes el memorioso," it is just as important to the act of thinking. Funes, the young man in the story afflicted with an inability to forget anything, can't make sense of it. He can't think abstractly. He can't judge facts by relative weight or seriousness. He is lost in the details. Painfully, Funes cannot rest.

Just because we have the vessels, we fill them.

the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible

Perhaps we just have to learn to manage wisely how we digest, discuss, and publicly assess the huge archive we are building. We must engender cultural habits that ensure perspective, calm deliberation, and wisdom. That's hard work.

we choose the nature of technologies. They don't choose us. We just happen to choose unwisely with some frequency

surveillance as the chief function of electronic government

critical information studies

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. His next book, The Googlization of Everything, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

Nietzsche's _On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life_

Google compresses, if not eliminates, temporal context. This is likely only to exacerbate the existing problem in politics of taking one's statements out of context. A politician whose views on a subject have evolved quite logically over decades in light of changing knowledge and/or circumstances is held up in attack ads as a flip-flopper because consecutive Google entries have him/her saying two opposite things about the same subject -- and never mind that between the two statements, the Berlin Wall may have fallen or the economy crashed harder than at any other time since 1929.