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as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.

"Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.

an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).

If you want to learn something from Finland, it’s the implementation of ideas. It’s looking at education as nation-building. We have very carefully kept the business of education in the hands of educators. It’s practically impossible to become a superintendent without also being a former teacher. … If you have people [in leadership positions] with no background in teaching, they’ll never have the type of communication they need.

Finns don’t believe you can reliably measure the essence of learning. You know, one big difference in thinking about education and the whole discourse is that in the U.S. it’s based on a belief in competition. In my country, we are in education because we believe in cooperation and sharing. Cooperation is a core starting point for growth.

If you think e-mail and surfing can make time disappear, wait until you get ahold of Twitter, or more likely, it gets ahold of you. There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.

nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it.

open standards that become plumbing

The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)

This story really sums up what it is to be a student right now in this century. I am actually a student of Professor LaMarre's and in this very class. My generation really does not know what it is like to be outside of this instant communication with friends and other people which has really deteriorated the true relationships people used to and were forced to build with one another. The ability to escape from everyone is impossible. I went to Mexico for 3 weeks over winter break to study and was not able to escape my parents need for me to be in contact through email or text... interesting to think about what it has done to parent/child relationships and especially our interpersonal relationships with significant others.

I moved to U.S. 2 decades ago. I came from a 3rd world country (it was at that time). But I had learned how to use the abacus, and do simple mulitiplication in my head. I'm sorry to say this but Americans are FAR behind on REAL education. While you guys play party games in schools and pass that as education. It is quite pathetic what America pass as an education in the public system. By the time I had caught up with English in my 2nd year in American school, I had realized how stupid American pubilc schools are and how inept they are. By 1st and 2nd grade I was memorizing simple mulitplication and division in my third world country. In U.S. kids don't even know what division is until 3rd grade. We didn't have Stadiums, auditoriums, computer labs, track and field track, swimming pool. We didn't even have central heat or air! We got our excercise out on a dirt field with some swings, bats and balls. What's the next generation going to do for a learning experience? "Walking to the mailbox" ??? Because in a few decades, America will be so fat and obese that it will be a revelation to all the fat americans, what it was like to actually walk to the mailbox.

the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.

the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug

if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.