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David McGavock

I Was So Right About Distraction in Now You See it: Darn it all! | HASTAC - 1 views

  • I aruge that we are always multitasking and sometimes we do it more adeptly than others and it is incumbent on us to take our own internal inventory and decide what we are doing well and what we are not
  • The problem is that I am having to learn everything from scratch, all the time, all at once.
  • Is it the technology or the stream of non-stop decision-making that doesn't seem to stick to a 9-5 workday but follows you home from the office, at night, on weekends, on summer vacation?  
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  • I advocate avoiding distraction but going deep, introspective, and finding out what exactly is freaking you out.
  • heartache (emotional overload) and hearburn (physical ailments) are far more distracting than email . . . and they make it harder to learn new technologies too.
  • what makes you distracted is that you are doing too many non-automatic, non-reflexive things at once.
  • The same, by the way, is also true when your worklife depends on technology and the technology changes.
  • your former patterns and reflexes don't serve you invisibly, efficiently, automatically. 
  • unlearning, in fact, makes us pay attention to the world in a new way.  George Lakoff says it is useful to become "reflective about our reflexes."
  • I am hoping that the result of this tedious, difficult, uneven, sometimes triumphant, sometime despairing transition time will be a fresh new way of looking at the world, now that so much of the world I took for granted, so many of the collaborations and processes and bureaucracies and patterns and expertise is so vividly transparent.
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    " I am hoping that the result of this tedious, difficult, uneven, sometimes triumphant, sometime despairing transition time will be a fresh new way of looking at the world, now that so much of the world I took for granted, so many of the collaborations and processes and bureaucracies and patterns and expertise is so vividly transparent."
David McGavock

What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space :: Articles :: The 99 Percent - 0 views

  • /// article Appreciate (989) Tweet (512) Comment (106) What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space by Scott Belsky Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world's information at our fingertips.
  • Why do we crave distraction over downtime?

Why do we give up our sacred space so easily? Because space is scary.
  • It is now possible to always feel loved and cared for, thanks to the efficiency of our “comment walls” on Facebook and seamless connection with everyone we've ever known. Your confidence and self-esteem can quickly be reassured by checking your number of “followers” on Twitter or the number of “likes” garnered by your photographs and blog posts.
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  • Our insatiable need to tune into information – at the expense of savoring our downtime – is a form of “work” (something I call “insecurity work”
  • five potential mindsets and solutions for consideration:
  • 1. Rituals for unplugging.

  • We need some rules. When it comes to scheduling, we will need to allocate blocks of time for deep thinking. Maybe you will carve out a 1-2 hour block on your calendar every day for taking a walk or grabbing a cup of coffee and just pondering some of those bigger things.
  • 3. Meditation and naps to clear the mind.

  • It is supremely important that we recognize the power of our insecurities and, at the very least, acknowledge where our anxiety comes from. Awareness is always the first step in solving any problem.


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    Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction.
Charles van der Haegen

Marco Verweij Trust and social capital in Cutural Theory ( and social media) - 0 views

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    I have already introduced Cultural Theory in the SMC MindAmp. I called it Theory of Sodcio-Culural Viability. Here's an indication of its reach: Why do well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail? How can effective and efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems be found? By making sure no voices are excluded. Contrary to the ideas on which current social thinking is based, new research has lead to new theory explaining social systems, showing how deliberative quality is key to sustainable policy-making and implementation. It shows that endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four mutually opposed organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking. They always seem clumsy compared to any of the 4 voices' elegant solutions. Yet being broadly acceptable to all they are sustainable and implementable A new way to look at pluralism in organizations, institutions, policy-making, democracy, technology, geo-politics and many other social fields is offered to us by multidisciplinary research and practice by leading political scientists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, sociologists, geographers, engineers, policy-makers, and other leaders in society. Trust and Social capital are key ingredients for learning and for social media to strive. Here's what the author says: In this article, I trace the contributions that the cultural theory developed by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, Aaron Wildavsky and others can make to the debate on social capital. First, I sketch the various revisions of Putnam's social capital-thesis that have been proposed since the publication of Making Democracy Work. I note that these revisions are illuminating in and of th
David McGavock

Knight Foundation | Reporter Analysis - 0 views

  • The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting. New networks are emerging everywhere. It’s exciting—and frightening. What is this new network-centric world? What does it mean for community change?
  • How might our grantmaking respond effectively to a world in which loose networks of individuals, not just formal organizations, are becoming powerful creators of knowledge and action? What default practices should we discard and what new behaviors should we embrace?
  • We asked our partner, Monitor Institute, to take a critical look at the role of networks in community life. Our lens was apolitical.
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    we were interested in the potential of networks-to create stronger bonds or to split us apart. This essay highlights groups that are creatively connecting citizens who are making a difference today, and explores how technology might impact public participation and leadership in the future. The pages are rich with useful examples and lessons about how networks are unlocking assets in communities to support open government, care for the elderly, help disaster victims and advance women's rights. Throughout, the report considers the role philanthropy can play in harnessing the best network-centric practices, the ones that might unleash individual interactivity to achieve social impact at a scale and speed never before possible.
Charles van der Haegen

Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet! | Video on TED.com - 1 views

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    "In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection."
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    Thanks @SailWozniak for drawing attention on this fundamental problem. A magna carta for Cyberspace... But who is the KING??? #mindamp
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity - 1 views

  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
    • David McGavock
       
      New theme
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
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  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
    • David McGavock
       
      Key to the Mindamp group is finding ways to create this environment
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
    • David McGavock
       
      balance - a good idea
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
    • David McGavock
       
      Applied Serendipity at GE - "having fun?"
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
    • David McGavock
       
      Perhaps an example of embodied cognition. Our senses know something our brains don't.
Antonio Lopez

Four Questions about Civic Media | DMLcentral - 0 views

  • - Organizing in virtual as well as physical spaces, recognizing that online action alone doesn’t move most politicians - Self documentation using participatory media – in this case, documentation as a form of protest in and of itself - The use of broadcast media to amplify beyond the “some to some” space of social media.
  • Global Voices tries to work on the demand problem using three tools: images, narrative, and human connection.
  • I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the most interesting projects encouraging participation involve maps.
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  • But I’m increasingly convinced that there’s another factor we need to consider: participation.
  • How do we help communities annotate physical spaces? How do we make civic maps?
  • Before we deal with dueling data layers, we’ve got some concrete challenges to take on. Just because data exists to annotate a physical place doesn’t mean it’s accessible
  • How do we encourage productive participation?
  • “How do we help marginal and rarely-heard voices find an audience?”
  • How do we map and understand media ecosystems?
David McGavock

Users for Sale: Has Digital Illiteracy Turned Us Into Social Commodities? - 1 views

  • In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
    • David McGavock
       
      key point
  • You warn against the dangers of “selling our friends” by connecting our social graphs to various networks and apps. How does this damage our relationships, even if we’re doing it unwittingly?
  • Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO.
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  • You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?
  • I don’t think the average web users of this century will achieve basic programming literacy.
  • If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.
  • I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?”
  • You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?
  • We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources.
  • It’s a problem of imagination, not reality. We have imaginary boundaries.
  • rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.
    • David McGavock
       
      On one hand Rushkoff is saying all people need to become more literate of "programming". On the other hand he says that programmers need to focus on doing the job well (treat humans more responsibly - reveal their intentions more fully).
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
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  • 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?
    • David McGavock
       
      Conclusions
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      Conclusion?
  • - 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?
    • David McGavock
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • 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.
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • 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?
  • “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 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      key point
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      interesting view of curation
  • 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 concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • 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.”
    • David McGavock
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • 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.
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • 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,
  • 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.”
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • 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.
David McGavock

I Was So Right About Distraction in Now You See it: Darn it all! | HASTAC - 1 views

  • I aruge that we are always multitasking and sometimes we do it more adeptly than others and it is incumbent on us to take our own internal inventory and decide what we are doing well and what we are not. And then to ask why.
  • The point is too many new technologies at once are distracting.   So is too much life.  So is too much anything that is new, cumbersome, non-routinized. 
  • But there's been so much punditry about "multitasking," as if Twitter is the only thing that makes our life's tasks multiple.   As I've said many times, heartache (emotional overload) and hearburn (physical ailments) are far more distracting than email . . . and they make it harder to learn new technologies too.
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  • Multitasking is not a symptom of technology.   The problem is that I am having to learn everything from scratch, all the time, all at once.
  • The same, by the way, is also true when your worklife depends on technology and the technology changes.
    • David McGavock
       
      This is the most frustrating for my computer clients.
  • I say that unlearning, in fact, makes us pay attention to the world in a new way.  George Lakoff says it is useful to become "reflective about our reflexes."
  •  
    "Blaming "the Internet" or "social media" for contemporary distraction falls into a typical pattern of one genereration blaming any new technology for supposed ills, including supposed shortcomings of the younger generation (who seem to adopt new technologies and adapt to them much more easily than do their parents).  "
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