Lecture et écriture du texte numérique

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.

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.

Erasmus, in his 1512 textbook De Copia, stressed the connection between memory and reading. He urged students to annotate their books

He also suggested that every student and teacher keep a notebook, organized by subject, “so that whenever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.”

kinds of flowers

To him, memorizing was far more than a means of storage

Far from being a mechanical, mindless process, Erasmus’s brand of memorization engaged the mind fully

“We should imitate bees,” Seneca wrote, “and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it is apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.”

Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container.

“commonplace books,”

Francis Bacon

“a gentleman’s commonplace book” served “both as a vehicle for and a chronicle of his intellectual development.”

The arrival of the limitless and easily searchable data banks of the Internet brought a further shift, not just in the way we view memorization but in the way we view memory itself.

Clive Thompson, the Wired writer, refers to the Net as an “outboard brain”

David Brooks

“I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more,” he writes, “but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants—silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.”

Peter Suderman

“it’s no longer terribly efficient to use our brains to store information.”

“Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored.”

Don Tapscott, the technology writer, puts it more bluntly. Now that we can look up anything “with a click on Google,” he says, “memorizing long passages or historical facts” is obsolete.

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking,” he was stating the obvious.

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.

Dehaene and colleagues proposed that skilled reading involves an adaptation of general object-identification processes in ventral occipitotemporal brain areas to the specific characteristics of printed words

according to the dominant theories of reading, orthographic processing is still primarily considered to be an extension of already established linguistic skills in the domain of spoken language processing

We challenged the hypothesis that learning an orthographic code depends on preexisting linguistic knowledge by investigating whether nonhuman primates can learn this skill.

the word versus nonword discrimination could be made implicitly on the basis of statistical dependencies between letters.

More detailed analyses revealed that baboons were not simply memorizing the word stimuli but had learned to discriminate words from nonwords on the basis of differences in the frequency of letter combinations in the two categories of stimuli (i.e., statistical learning).

words that were seen for the first time triggered significantly fewer “nonword” responses than did the nonword stimuli

Even more striking is the strong linear relation, shown in Fig. 4, between accuracy in response to nonword stimuli and their orthographic similarity to words that the baboons had already learned. The more similar a nonword was to a known word, the more false positive responses it produced.

Our findings have two important theoretical implications. First, they suggest that statistical learning is a powerful universal (i.e., cross-species) mechanism that might well be the basis for learning higher-order (linguistic) categories that facilitate the evolution of natural language (18, 19). Second, our results suggest that orthographic processing may, at least partly, be constrained by general principles of visual object processing shared by monkeys and humans.

Our study may therefore help explain the success of the human cultural choice of visually representing words using combinations of aligned, spatially compact, ordered sequences of symbols. The primate brain might therefore be better prepared than previously thought to process printed words, hence facilitating the initial steps toward mastering one of the most complex of human skills: reading.

Our results indicate that baboons were coding the word and nonword stimuli as a set of letter identities arranged in a particular order. Baboons had learned to discriminate different letters from each other (letter identity) and to associate those letter identities with positional information. Their coding of the statistical dependencies between position-coded letters is reflected in (i) their ability to discriminate novel words from nonwords (i.e., generalization), (ii) the significant correlation between bigram frequency and the accuracy of responses to words, and (iii) the increase in errors in response to nonword stimuli that were orthographically more similar to known words.

any comporomises you might be making due to the small screen on your phone are more than met by the joys of finding time to read you would otherwise miss.

La culture avance sur ces petites pattes que sont les guillemets.

Nous devons menacer jusqu'au bout les textes écrits pour le non-lecteur implicite d'être exposés à la lecture réelle, quitte à courir le risque que les auteurs-pirates d'aujourd'hui nous tiennent pour les imposteurs d'hier qui brandissent la menace de quelque chose dont ils ne peuvent assurer la mise en oeuvre.

L'intéressant, ici, est le fait que ce que l'on appelle la lecture réelle ne peut avoir lieu, compte tenu des monstrueuses avalanches que constituent les productions universitaires écrites. Aujourd'hui, seules les machines à lire digitales et les programmes de recherche spécialisés sont en mesure de tenir le rôle de délégués du lecteur authentique et d'entrer en conversation ou en non-conversation avec un texte. Le lecteur humain - appelons-le le professeur - est en revanche défaillant. C'est aussi et précisément en tant qu'homme de l'université que le spécialiste est depuis longtemps condamné à être plus un non-lecteur qu'un lecteur.

Celui qui ne veut pas parler de discours ferait donc mieux de ne rien dire à propos des plagiats.

on ne peut pas démontrer qu'il existe une différence essentielle entre une compétence authentique et une vaste simulation de la même compétence.

Pour appréhender la différence spécifique entre le plagiat universitaire et tous les autres cas de mépris de la "propriété intellectuelle", il faut tenir compte de la spécificité inimitable des procédures académiques.

ceux qui demeurent des gros lecteurs demeurent avant tout des gros acheteurs.

forte progression des ventes de livres dans les lieux de transits (gare et aéroports).

parmi ceux qui lisent le plus, il y a désormais deux profils de lecteurs. Ceux dont l'imprimé est et demeure le média central, mais aussi ceux qui cumulent les modes d'accès à la culture.

alors que les bibliothèques sont devenues des médiathèques pour répondre à la diversification des publics, de l'offre et des demandes, les librairies, elles, sont restées des librairies.

le choix et la diversité sont devenues des valeurs primordiales pour les hyperconsommateurs que nous sommes devenus.

La librairie subit (peut-être d'une manière un peu plus marquée ou forte) le même déclin que les autres petits commerces de proximité et en partie pour les mêmes raisons.

la proximité physique et le conseil, les deux vertus de la librairie ne sont plus de mises. Pire, elles me semblent être devenues des lapalissades, des mantras qu'assènent les libraires pour se convaincre de leur utilité.

Les gens sont derrière les écrans !

Ce qui va compter dans leur décision, c'est le résumé et la couverture du livre (pour 45 %), loin devant le conseil du libraire (13 % seulement).