The Edge question for 2010 is "How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?"
Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People - spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?
Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?
Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".
Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, ponders if ideas themselves are the ultimate social software. Do they evolve via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them?
Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noticed that we are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. Are we turning into a new species - informavores? - he asks.
W. Daniel Hillis goes a step further by asking if the Internet will, in the long run, arrive at a muc
"The manifesto underlines the importance of the public domain as a shared
resource and established a number of principles for the public domain in the
digital age. The first principle is:
The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since
copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of
expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced
worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to
information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is
enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so asto ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge."
Corey Doctorow writing on Boingboing.net
Three universities are getting pumped to hand out free iPads to students and faculty with hopes that Apple’s tablet will revolutionize education.
“Those big, heavy textbooks that kids go around with in their backpacks are going to be a thing of the past,” said Mary Ann Gawelek, vice president of academic affairs at Seton Hill
For textbooks, students can currently access about 10,000 e-textbooks through a third-party company called CourseSmart, which includes titles from the five biggest textbook publishers.
The iPad may succeed where Amazon’s Kindle DX failed.
Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” Aaron Horvath
the iPad is fast, sports a colorful touchscreen and supports enough apps to cater to a broad audience of students
Seton Hill, George Fox and Abilene Christian said that in addition to giving students iPads, they would train teachers to integrate mobile web software and iPad apps into their curricula.
George Fox’s iPod Touch program wasn’t the greatest success, because it turned out that the iPod Touch wasn’t the primary device students were bringing to the classroom.
the iPad’s bigger screen will change that.
Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies at Abilene Christian, called the iPhone program the “TiVoing of education,” because the iPhone was giving students the information they need, when they want it and wherever they want it.
“This is really about people re-imagining what books look like — re-imagining something that hasn’t really been re-imagined in about 550 years,” Rankin said.
“We’re challenging them to design features that would take full advantage of photos and texts and HTML5. There’s an academic component to that — forcing students to think differently about how information is distributed and presented to readers.”
From the 1/12 edition of the NY Times.
"Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist - he popularized the term "virtual reality" - wonders if the Web's structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a manifesto against "hive thinking" and "digital Maoism," by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity."
We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager's bedrooms.
The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular
A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper.
Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.
This is a post from Jenkins' blog that contains course info/syllabus for a new course he is running at USC (Fall 09). His blog contains many references to and discussions about the concept of 'transmedia'