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I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

“I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.

new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s

“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.

The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”

In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.

even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.

there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin

So be proactive – share FIRST. Don’t wait for someone you’re connected with to share something with you.

6. Engage the people you follow. Be polite, mindful of making demands on their attention. Put work into dialogue if they welcome it. Thank them for sharing.

They’re also a platform for dialogue and discussion, going beyond information exchanges into deeper levels of communication – sharing insights and experiences. Rheingold reminds us to be kind and show gratitude;

7. Inquire of the people you follow, of the people who follow you. But be careful. Ask engaging questions – answers shd be useful to others

Being mindful of being useful to others helps to ensure that we build mutually productive and gratifying relationships in our social channels.

8. Respond to inquiries made to you. Contribute to both diffuse reciprocity and quid pro quo

Your goal is to identify people and potential sources you can add to your personal knowledge network.

In a recent Twitter conversation, he laid out 8 key thoughts on how to build your own personal learning network from your social media channels. Here they are, along with my thoughts on each:

1. Explore: It’s not just about knowing how to find experts, co-learners, but about exploration as invitation to serendipitous encounter.

3. Follow candidates through RSS, Twitter. Ask yourself over days, weeks, whether each candidate merits continued attention

2. Search – Use Diigo, delicious, listorious, to find pools of expertise in the fields that interest you.

You need to be open: To new people, opportunities, possibilities, to knowledge.

Once you’ve identified people who are posting information that appears to be relevant to your areas of intererst, follow them.

Analyze the quality of their social media posts. What is their point of view? Is the information they’re posting accurate? Are they focused or scattershot? What is the “signal to noise ratio” of their feed? In other words, out of everything they post, how much useful information?

4. Always keep tuning your network, dropping people who don’t gain sufficiently high interest; adding new candidates

I follow about 900 people on Twitter. But I’ve developed a list I call “rockstars” who consistently provide the best ideas and resources in their feeds. That’s the tweetstream I visit first, because that’s where I’ll find the best stuff in the least amount of time.

For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.

If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?

The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.

He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,

They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.

A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.

The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.

People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.

Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.

It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.

One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.

knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.

If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.

Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.

SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.

Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.

- How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?

We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?

Most of us are fairly predictable

We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.

“Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.

Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data

We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.

I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world

through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.

There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.

Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.

US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)

What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.

on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.

The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages

I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.

I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.

On the other hand, curators invariably have biases

We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.

Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”

there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots

The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.

It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.

Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.

The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,

A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.

he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.

If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.

Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.

vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.

The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.