TOK Friends

innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves.

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation.

you could just as easily argue that TCKs will never know some really important things - can never know them - precisely because they've never had the experience of growing up in one culture which they knew (however erroneously) to be the way the world is. 

That isn't simply an indictment of the kind of smug and self-important cosmopolitanism on display in your reader's letter.  Nor is it simply a defense of the kind of organic experiential knowledge that is only possible when one is rooted to a particular place and time.  At bottom, it is a profound statement about the limits of human knowledge itself. 

Travel the world and try to transcend your culture all you want, but you won't ever succeed.  Not really.  As Alasdair Macintyre put it, we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.  There will always be a part of us that it is the product of the time and place and family in which we first came of age, perhaps especially when we are reacting to that experience and trying to "transcend" it.  And even if by some miracle we actually succeeded in that project, then whatever else we may have gained, we will also have lost the ability to be truly a part of any culture from the inside. 

Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced. They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

Obama, is what we call, a TCK—A Third Culture Kid. TCK’s grow up as the children of missionaries, or as military brats, or as the children of businessmen. It means that you grew up during your early developmental years in a culture outside of your parents’ home culture.

TCK’s are usually unable to view the world in a simplistic dualistic way. On the contrary, they are usually over-achievers, get advanced degrees, and are infinitely curious about the world. They can accentuate different facets of their personality and experiences based on who they are talking to—and it’s not fake.

Obama is the classic TCK. This is why he represents the new America so well—he is post-racial, globalized, and a great example of America’s own Third Cultural nature.

Tinderbox “the tool for notes.”

The power of Tinderbox comes from its ability to display those notes in a number of different and helpful ways, and its array of mechanisms for manipulating those notes.

Tinderbox is a toolbox full of tools that let you play with information. DevonThink Pro is a better tool for research, particularly when linked with Devon Agent, OmniOutliner is a better outliner, Scrivener is a better writing tool, and Omnigraffle does a better job of drawing. All of these tools are great, but while they overlap some, they don’t cover everything Tinderbox does.

Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. "I'm not thinking the way I used to," he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. "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. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.... If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."

force us to get smarter if we are to survive. "Most people don't realize that this process is already under way," he wrote. "In fact, it's happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity." He argued that while the proliferation of technology and media can challenge humans' capacity to concentrate there were signs that we are developing "fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge." He also expressed hope that techies will develop tools to help people find and assess information smartly.

76% of the experts agreed with the statement, "By 2020, people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid."

the World Wide Web came along and blew the gatekeepers away. Suddenly anyone with a computer and an Internet connection could take part in the conversation. Countless viewpoints bloomed. There was no longer a mainstream; instead, there was an ocean of information, one in which Web users were free to swim.

Where once Google delivered search results based on an algorithm that was identical for everyone, now what we see when we enter a term in the big box depends on who we are, where we are and what we are. Facebook has long since done the same thing for its all-important News Feed: you'll see different status updates and stories float to the top based on the data Mark Zuckerberg and company have on you. The universal Web is a thing of the past. Instead, as Pariser writes, we've been left "isolated in a web of one" — and, given that we increasingly view the world through the lens of the Internet, that change has frightening consequences for the media, community and even democracy.

Google has begun personalizing search results — something it does even if you're not signed into your Google account. (A Google engineer told Pariser that the company uses 57 different signals to shape individual search results, including what kind of browser you're using and where you are.)

the most interesting explanation for Trump’s rhetoric is that it represents the purest form to date of what is the wave of the future—in which political communication, once mediated by writing, is increasingly liberated by mass media technology and restored to the style of plain speech.

I argued that it was no accident that the virulence of our political rhetoric has risen neatly alongside such inventions as YouTube and high-speed internet connections. Writing, the piece noted, is conscious and slow, and allows an intellectual distance less likely in speech, which is more about the “I” (witness, therefore, the self-directed focus of most rap, a highly “spoken” form of music). Earlier politicians had to rely on writing and speechifying—talking “in writing”—which are better suited for the more cerebral realms

of ambiguity and extended argument. Talk, which comes in packets of, on the average, about ten words at a time, is all about the immediate and the emotional. Today’s broadband, podcasts, and streaming allow one person to get immediate and emotional with the entire nation whenever they feel like it.

Because of the power of optimism, enhancing graduates’ faith in the American dream by presenting them with rare examples as proof may be just what the doctor ordered. Their hopes may not be fully realized, but they will be more successful, healthier and happier if they hold on to positively biased expectations.

Whether you are 9 or 90, male or female, of African or European descent, you are likely to have an optimism bias. In fact, 80 percent of the world does. (Many believe optimism is unique to Americans; studies show the rest of the world is just as optimistic.)

In fact, the people who accurately predict the likelihood of coming events tend to be mildly depressed.

If you want to understand how Google search works, go through this diagram in detail.

Twitter's how and why is essentially anti-literary, anti-creative; Twitter is all about fitting in.

instead of blithely thinking of it as a place of free expression, it might be a good time to wonder if the commingling of public and private realms doesn't potentially make expressing opinions more difficult?Considered in this light, Twitter functions as banally as a school hierarchy: who to like, who not to, who you're allowed to criticise, who you can't etc.

the most striking thing about it is its uniformity of tone, how difficult it is to create any distinctive voice in its tight-lipped text box. Tweets can cause misunderstandings aplenty, but there isn't much room for subtlety.