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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

Video Vortex "focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet..." Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone's reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other 'user-generated-content' websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?"

The FTC/FCC are looking into cloud computing and consumer privacy protection. Their findings could pose to be a game-changer for cloud computing and the collaborative web.

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."