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Michel Roland

untitled - 0 views

  • “We begin by assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts,”
  • “We begin by assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts,”
  • Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?
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  • using snapshots of the brain at work to explore the mechanics of reading
  • Blakey Vermeule, an associate professor of English at Stanford, is examining theory of mind from a different perspective. She starts from the assumption that evolution had a hand in our love of fiction, and then goes on to examine the narrative technique known as “free indirect style,” which mingles the character’s voice with the narrator’s. Indirect style enables readers to inhabit two or even three mind-sets at a time.
  • “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished
  • “but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.”
Michel Roland-Guill

The Rise of the New Groupthink / Susan Cain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • SOLITUDE is out of fashion
  • the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted
  • solitude is a catalyst to innovation
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  • Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.
  • “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
  • Wozniak
  • Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink
  • What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed
  • Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.
  • brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity
  • People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure
  • “the pain of independence.”
  • The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.
  • Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone.
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    "Marcel Proust called reading a "miracle of communication in the midst of solitude," and that's what the Internet is, too. It's a place where we can be alone together - and this is precisely what gives it power."
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    merci pour ce lien; un article à forte "valeur heuristique"
Michel Roland-Guill

The bread machine effect: Why it doesn't matter if most people prefer print «... - 0 views

  • e-reader buyers are likely to buy a lot more books than print readers, meaning they’re going to wield market power out of proportion to their numbers
  • those people who stick with print. They might enjoy old-fashioned reading more, but I’ll bet that, on average, e-reader owners get to do a lot more of it.
Michel Roland-Guill

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Minds like sieves - 2 views

  • we may be entering an era in history in which we will store fewer and fewer memories inside our own brains.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      conclusion un peu rapide: plutôt que moins de mémorisation ce peut être une différente forme de mémorisation, plutôt que mémorisation des faits mémorisation des lieux de stockage des faits.
  • external storage and biological memory are not the same thing
  • When we form, or "consolidate," a personal memory, we also form associations between that memory and other memories that are unique to ourselves and also indispensable to the development of deep, conceptual knowledge. The associations, moreover, continue to change with time, as we learn more and experience more. As Emerson understood, the essence of personal memory is not the discrete facts or experiences we store in our mind but "the cohesion" which ties all those facts and experiences together. What is the self but the unique pattern of that cohesion?
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  • We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools
  • "It seems that when we are faced with a gap in our knowledge, we are primed to turn to the computer to rectify the situation."
  • "when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it."
  • we seem to have trained our brains to immediately think of using a computer when we're called on to answer a question or otherwise provide some bit of knowledge.
  • people who believed the information would be stored in the computer had a weaker memory of the information than those who assumed that the information would not be available in the computer
  • believing that one won’t have access to the information in the future enhances memory for the information itself, whereas believing the information was saved externally enhances memory for the fact that the information could be accessed, at least in general.
  • when people expect information to remain continuously available (such as we expect with Internet access), we are more likely to remember where to find it than we are to remember the details of the item.
Michel Roland-Guill

Announcing Kindle Worlds - 1 views

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    "New stories inspired by books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games people love. Kindle Worlds Graphic Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. Television Group's Alloy Entertainment for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way. "
Michel Roland-Guill

- How We Will Read: Clay Shirky - 0 views

  • Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
  • The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers.
  • for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it
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  • The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.
  • When people hear “social reading,” they think that it is proximate sociability on the device in real-time. But let’s not necessarily jam the social bit into the experience of reading. The explosion of conversation around those kinds of works is best done after the fact. The phrase “social reading” often causes people to misunderstand what it is.
Michel Roland-Guill

Larry Sanger Blog » How not to use the Internet, part 2: the pernicious desig... - 0 views

  • The way that the Internet is designed—not graphic design, but overall habits and architecture—encourages the widespread distractability that I, at least, hate.
  • I learned it from Nicholas Carr
  • Interconnectivity: information that is of some inherent public interest is typically marinated in meta-information: (a) is bathed in (b). It is not enough to make the inherently interesting content instantly available and easy to find; it must also be surrounded by links, sidebars, menus, and other info, and promoted on social media via mail. This is deliberate, but it has gotten worse in the last ten years or so, with the advent of syndicated blog feeds (RSS), then various other social media feeds. This is, of course, supposed to be for the convenience and enlightenment of the user, and no doubt sometimes it is. But I think it usually doesn’t help anybody, except maybe people who are trying to build web traffic. Recency: the information to be most loudly announced online is not just recent, but the brand-spanking-newest, and what allegedly deserves our attention now is determined democratically, with special weight given to the opinions of people we know.
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  • soon after we surf to a page of rich media, its interconnections lead us away from whatever led us to the page in the first place,
  • I think there is something really wrong with this design philosophy. We ought to try to change it, if we can.
Michel Roland-Guill

How Our Brains Make Memories / Greg Miller | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

  • Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.
  • In short, Nader believes that the very act of remembering can change our memories.
  • Nader was born in Cairo, Egypt. His Coptic Christian family faced persecution at the hands of Arab nationalists and fled to Canada in 1970, when he was 4 years old
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  • Memories surrounding a major event like September 11 might be especially susceptible, he says, because we tend to replay them over and over in our minds and in conversation with others—with each repetition having the potential to alter them.
  • He attended college and graduate school at the University of Toronto, and in 1996 joined the New York University lab of Joseph LeDoux, a distinguished neuroscientist who studies how emotions influence memory.
  • Scientists have long known that recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons. Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain (the human brain has 100 billion neurons in all), changing the way they communicate. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses. A synapse is like a bustling port, complete with machinery for sending and receiving cargo—neurotransmitters, specialized chemicals that convey signals between neurons. All of the shipping machinery is built from proteins, the basic building blocks of cells.
  • In five decades of research, Kandel has shown how short-term memories—those lasting a few minutes—involve relatively quick and simple chemical changes to the synapse that make it work more efficiently. Kandel, who won a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, found that to build a memory that lasts hours, days or years, neurons must manufacture new proteins and expand the docks, as it were, to make the neurotransmitter traffic run more efficiently. Long-term memories must literally be built into the brain’s synapses. Kandel and other neuroscientists have generally assumed that once a memory is constructed, it is stable and can’t easily be undone. Or, as they put it, the memory is “consolidated.”
  • under ordinary circumstances the content of the memory stays the same, no matter how many times it’s taken out and read. Nader would challenge this idea.
  • Work with rodents dating back to the 1960s didn’t jibe with the consolidation theory. Researchers had found that a memory could be weakened if they gave an animal an electric shock or a drug that interferes with a particular neurotransmitter just after they prompted the animal to recall the memory. This suggested that memories were vulnerable to disruption even after they had been consolidated.
  • the work suggested that filing an old memory away for long-term storage after it had been recalled was surprisingly similar to creating it the first time
  • In the winter of 1999, he taught four rats that a high-pitched beep preceded a mild electric shock. That was easy—rodents learn such pairings after being exposed to them just once. Afterward, the rat freezes in place when it hears the tone. Nader then waited 24 hours, played the tone to reactivate the memory and injected into the rat’s brain a drug that prevents neurons from making new proteins. If memories are consolidated just once, when they are first created, he reasoned, the drug would have no effect on the rat’s memory of the tone or on the way it would respond to the tone in the future. But if memories have to be at least partially rebuilt every time they are recalled—down to the synthesizing of fresh neuronal proteins—rats given the drug might later respond as if they had never learned to fear the tone and would ignore it. If so, the study would contradict the standard conception of memory.
  • When Nader later tested the rats, they didn’t freeze after hearing the tone: it was as if they’d forgotten all about it
  • After Nader’s initial findings, some neuroscientists pooh-poohed his work in journal articles and gave him the cold shoulder at scientific meetings. But the data struck a more harmonious chord with some psychologists. After all, their experiments had long suggested that memory can easily be distorted without people realizing it.
  • To Nader and his colleagues, the experiment supports the idea that a memory is re-formed in the process of calling it up. “From our perspective, this looks a lot like memory reconsolidation,” says Oliver Hardt, a postdoctoral researcher in Nader’s lab.
  • “When you retell it, the memory becomes plastic, and whatever is present around you in the environment can interfere with the original content of the memory,” Hardt says.
  • The question is whether reconsolidation—which he thinks Nader has demonstrated compellingly in rat experiments—is the reason for the distortions.
  • at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. Alain Brunet, a psychologist, is running a clinical trial involving people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The hope is that caregivers might be able to weaken the hold of traumatic memories that haunt patients during the day and invade their dreams at night.
  • In Brunet’s first study, PTSD patients took a drug intended to interfere with the reconsolidation of fearful memories. The drug, propranolol, has long been used to treat high blood pressure, and some performers take it to combat stage fright. The drug inhibits a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine. One possible side effect of the drug is memory loss.
  • Nine patients took a propranolol pill and read or watched TV for an hour as the drug took effect. Ten were given a placebo pill. Brunet came into the room and made small talk before telling the patient he had a request: he wanted the patient to read a script, based on earlier interviews with the person, describing his or her traumatic experience. The patients, all volunteers, knew that the reading would be part of the experiment. “Some are fine, some start to cry, some need to take a break,” Brunet says. A week later, the PTSD patients listened to the script, this time without taking the drug or a placebo. Compared with the patients who had taken a placebo, those who had taken the propranolol a week earlier were now calmer; they had a smaller uptick in their heart rate and they perspired less.
  • The treatment didn’t erase the patients’ memory of what had happened to them; rather, it seems to have changed the quality of that memory. “Week after week the emotional tone of the memory seems weaker,” Brunet says. “They start to care less about that memory.” Nader says the traumatic memories of PTSD patients may be stored in the brain in much the same way that a memory of a shock-predicting tone is stored in a rat’s brain. In both cases, recalling the memory opens it to manipulation.
  • Nader suggests that reconsolidation may be the brain’s mechanism for recasting old memories in the light of everything that has happened since. In other words, it just might be what keeps us from living in the past.
  • Elizabeth Loftus
  • Karim Nader
  • Eric Kandel
  • Brunet
  •  
    may 2010
Michel Roland-Guill

How people read online: Why you won't finish this article. - Slate Magazine - 0 views

  • The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me.
  • lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read.
  • There’s a very weak relationship between scroll depth and sharing.
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  • articles that get a lot of tweets don’t necessarily get read very deeply.
Michel Roland-Guill

Will Gutenberg laugh last? | ROUGH TYPE - 2 views

  • the heaviest buyers of e-books are now buying more, not fewer, printed books
  • Clay Shirky
  • Not once in that half century has anyone successfully invented anything that feels like the digital version of a book. Books online, whether in a Kindle or Google Books, are always (cue McLuhan) the old medium populating the new.
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  • The mainstay of book publishing is the extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice. It is, in other words, a work of art.
  • Count me as a member of the set who prefers my non-fiction in eBook format
  • If this is right, then the twilight of the printed book will proceed on a schedule disconnected to the growth or stagnation of e-books — what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.
  • Clay Shirky
  • the book, a creation of human beings, turned out not only to be a terrific container for distributing speech and then writing; it also, through an intertwined, mutually reinforcing, and unique combination of the mode of reading it encouraged (deep, attentive, immersive) and the modes of expression it inspired (deep, thoughtful, eloquent, emotionally resonant, experimental), actually heightened the potential of human expression, experience, and life.
  • Already the presses have stopped for phone books and encyclopedias, are stopping for textbooks and newspapers, and will increasingly stop for books of all kinds. And I think as that happens, the experience of reading books will be displaced by other experiences.
  • I don’t believe in ‘narrative obsolescence’ — on the contrary, I think that stories, unlike books, are a fundamental unit of human thought, which is to say that in most cultures we know of, there were no books, but there were stories.
  • forms of aesthetic expression co-evolve with their modes of production, and often don’t survive large-scale reconfiguration of those modes.
  • I have several reasons for thinking that the current round of destruction is clearing the decks for something better, but the main one is that historically, media that increase the amount of arguing people do has been a long-term positive for society, even at the cost of short-term destruction of familiar patterns, and the disorientation of the people comfortable with those patterns. I think we’ll get extended narrative online — I just doubt the format of most of those narratives will look enough like a book to merit the name.
  • Where nihilism enters the picture is when you say, sneeringly, that although “half a millenium of rehearsed reverence have taught us to regard [the book] as a semantic unit, [it] may in fact be a production unit: the book is what you get when writers have access to printing presses, just as the album is what you get when musicians have access to LP-pressing machines.” People’s love of books in general and serious novels and poetry in particular is not just a numb act of “rehearsed reverence” (a phrase that is incredibly insulting and demeaning) to an accidental production unit.
  • Reducing aesthetic choices to “rehearsed reverence” is a form of nihilism.
  • Some things — emphasis on “things” — are actually worthy of respect.
Michel Roland-Guill

How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles | Technology | The Observer - 3 views

  • The basic code at the heart of the new internet is pretty simple. The new generation of internet filters looks at the things you seem to like – the actual things you've done, or the things people like you like – and tries to extrapolate. They are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you'll do and want next.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Externalisation de la construction de l'identité
  • you're the only person in your bubble
  • the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart.
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  • the filter bubble is invisible
  • from within the bubble, it's nearly impossible to see how biased it is
  • you don't choose to enter the bubble
  • the filter bubble can affect your ability to choose how you want to live. To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you're letting the companies that construct it choose which options you're aware of
  • You can get stuck in a static, ever- narrowing version of yourself – an endless you-loop.
  • Bowling Alone, his book on the decline of civic life in America, Robert Putnam
  • major decrease in "social capital" – the bonds of trust and allegiance that encourage people to do each other favours
  • our virtual neighbours look more and more like our real-world neighbours, and our real-world neighbours look more and more like us.
  • We're getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging
  • It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years".
  • "It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest," technology journalist Clive Thompson told me.
  • More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.
  • Starting that morning, Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.
  • With Google personalised for everyone, the query "stem cells" might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem-cell research and activists who oppose it.
  • on 4 December 2009 the era of personalisation began
  • What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone – where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you're a dog – is now a tool for soliciting and analysing our personal data.
  • "You're getting a free service, and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that pretty directly into money."
  • Acxiom alone has accumulated an average of 1,500 pieces of data on each person on its database – which includes 96% of Americans – along with data about everything from their credit scores to whether they've bought medication for incontinence.
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    il est temps de proposer une critique - francophone ! - de ce social web que l'on nous propose, et l'on alimente, et qui structure nos vies de plus en plus; indispensable littéracie au delà du search et de l'identité numérique; merci pour ce signet
Michel Roland-Guill

Reading in a Whole New Way | 40th Anniversary | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

  • America was founded on the written word.
  • the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible
  • Being able to read silently to yourself was considered an amazing talent. Writing was an even rarer skill. In 15th-century Europe only one in 20 adult males could write.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Vision technicisée et progressiste des pratiques de l'écriture, où il est assez naturel de retrouver relayé le mythe de la rareté de la lecture silencieuse dans l'Antiquité. Je crois avoir lu quelque part, et même en plusieurs endroits, que la connaissance et la pratique au moins rudimentaire de l'écriture était très répandue dans l'antiquité classique (grecque et romaine) au rebours de ce que soutient Kelly ici. Mais il s'appuie vraisemblablement sur des études sérieuses valant pour le 15e s. et dans sa vision linéaire d'un progrès fondé sur la succession des innovations techniques cela implique qu'on ne savait généralement pas écrire dans l'antiquité.Il n'est pas difficile de deviner combien une vision aussi simpliste, aussi simplement orientée de l'évolution des pratiques de la lettre est aujourd'hui, au moment où il nous faut évaluer une révolution nouvelle de ces pratiques est sinon nuisible au moins handicapante.
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  • But reading and writing, like all technologies, are dynamic.
  • the romance novel was invented in 1740
  • In time, the power of authors birthed the idea of authority and bred a culture of expertise. Perfection was achieved “by the book.”
  • a people of the book.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Intéressant comme est ici condensé un imaginaire américain de la lettre. A remarquer que cet attachement au livre et à la chose écrite ne se double d'aucun intellectualisme, au contraire. La situation française est bien différentes et à plusieurs égards opposée. Au point qu'on peut se demander si la crise de la culture française ne s'explique pas, en partie et à ce niveau, par une contradiction entre ses éléments structurants et ceux de la culture américaine telle qu'elle est transmise par les médias de la culture populaire, cinéma et télévision au premier chef.
  • By 1910 three-quarters of the towns in America with more than 2,500 residents had a public library.
  • Today some 4.5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives.
  • This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Gros enjeu là, voir billet de F. Kaplan sur epub.
  • The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980
  • But it is not book reading
  • It is screen reading
  • it seemed weird five centuries ago to see someone read silently
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      !!! (voir Gavrilov & Burnyeat)
  • dog-ear
  • a contemplative mind
  • a reflex to do something
  • utilitarian thinking
  • We review a movie while we watch it,
  • Wikipedia
  • Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels fast, corrections do, too.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Angélisme. Cf. article à retrouver: endogamie des échanges sur les blogues et les forums
  • Screens provoke action instead of persuasion.
  • On networked screens everything is linked to everything else.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Ici le coeur de la contradiction chez Kelly: la révolution numérique est appréhendée depuis le paradigme américain pré-révolution numérique qui oppose autorité et individualisme. Or la RN redistribue ici (peut-être plus qu'ailleurs) les cartes en contestant, en même temps que le rôle de l'autorité, l'individualisme libéral dont les historiens de la lecture ont montré qu'il s'est construit, depuis Augustin mais particulièrement à la Renaissance par le commerce singulier avec le livre.
  • the degree to which it is linked to the rest of the world.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Page Rank
  • In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own truth from pieces
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Tradition vs. Individualisme.
  • the inner nature of things
  • informational layer
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      Bande de Möbius.
    • Michel Roland-Guill
       
      contradiction apparente: the inner nature = informationnal layer. cf. Derrida.
  • to “read” everything, not just text
  • Not to see our face, but our status
  • lifelogging
  • memory
Michel Roland-Guill

Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr | Britannica Blog - 0 views

  • I think Carr’s premises are correct:  the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought.
  • there are a host of people, from mathematicians to jazz musicians, who practice kinds of deep thought that are perfectly distinguishable from deep reading.
  • in either the availability or comprehension of material on scientific or technical subjects
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  • it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting.
  • The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy‘s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream.
  • we continued to  reassure one another that War and Peace or À La Recherche du Temps Perdu were Very Important in some vague way.  (This tension has produced an entire literature about the value of reading Proust that is now more widely read than Proust‘s actual oeuvre.)
  • because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we’d been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear.
  • William Sayoran once remarked, “Everybody has got to die … but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Luddism is a social version of that, where people are encouraged to believe that change is inevitable, except, perhaps, this time.
  • Luddism is bad for society because it misdirects people’s energy and wastes their time.
  • our older habits of consumption weren’t virtuous, they were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.
Michel Roland-Guill

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The remains of the book - 0 views

  • The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement.
  • The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.
  • To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something's got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.
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  • What people do more of is shift their focus and attention away from the words of the book and toward the web of snippets wrapped around the book - dictionary definitions, Wikipedia entries, character descriptions from Shelfari, and so forth.
  • He is, in a very real sense, treating a work of art as though it were an auto repair manual. Which is, of course, what the web wants a work of art to be: not a place of repose, but a jumping-off point.
  • Up until now, there's been a fairly common assumption that a divide would emerge in the presentation of different kinds of electronic books. Reference works would get the full web treatment, tricked out with multimedia and hypermedia, while fiction and literary nonfiction would be shielded from the web's manifest destiny. They'd go digital without losing their print nature; they'd retain their edges.
  • Updike observed that "the book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets."
Michel Roland-Guill

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - 0 views

  • Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.  
  • A really big discontinuity has taken place.  One might even call it a "singularity"
  • Today’s students - K through college - represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology.
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  • today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
  • it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed - and are different from ours - as a result of how they grew up.  But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed.
  • our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.  
  • Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast.  They like to parallel process and multi-task.  They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked.  They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards.  They prefer games to "serious" work. 
  • They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and "tell-test" instruction. 
  • Often from the Natives' point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience - and then they blame them for not paying attention! 
  • Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate.  Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in the "old country."
  • As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.  The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking.  It's not actually clear to me which is harder - "learning new stuff" or "learning new ways to do old stuff."  I suspect it's the latter.  
  • My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content. 
Michel Roland-Guill

Nicholas G. Carr - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Carr originally came to prominence with the 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" and the 2004 book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business School Press). In these widely discussed works, he argued that the strategic importance of information technology in business has diminished as IT has become more commonplace, standardized and cheaper.
  • In 2005, Carr published the controversial [4] article "The End of Corporate Computing" in the MIT Sloan Management Review, in which he argued that in the future companies will purchase information technology as a utility service from outside suppliers.
  • Through his blog "Rough Type," Carr has been a critic of technological utopianism and in particular the populist claims made for online social production. In his 2005 blog essay titled "The Amorality of Web 2.0," he criticized the quality of volunteer Web 2.0 information projects such as Wikipedia and the blogosphere and argued that they may have a net negative effect on society by displacing more expensive professional alternatives.
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