Breathe In, Breathe Out

Who's Making Who Stupid?

Is Google Making Us Stupid? I've written here about that before, and Nick Carr's essay has gotten its fair share of reaction in the press and on the net. David Wolman weighs in on the "probably not" side of the argument in Wired. He ends his rant emphatically after singing the praises of the collective intelligence the web is providing today:

It's naive to think that the digital age will magically remedy stupidity. We need better schools as well as a renewed commitment to reason and scientific rigor so that people can distinguish knowledge from garbage. The Web is not an obstacle in this project. It's an unparalleled tool for generating, finding, and sharing sound information. What's moronic is to assume that it hurts us more than it helps.

So maybe the question should be turned around: Are We Making Google Stupid? Let's see where that one ends up in the index.

Go On, Distract Me with Something Interesting

I love surprises, especially the informational kind. Most days bring the same types of news and subjects that I follow in my RSS aggregators and various social media sites I look at. I've written about this before, but I keep hoping for new, unexpected ways to discover new information. That is, I like finding stuff I didn't know I was interested in until I found it. You know, that "aha, I didn't know about this, but,gosh, it's interesting."

So when I saw a Profy post titled; Twitter and FriendFeed Leave No Chance for a Balanced News Consumption to a Technology Blogger I was on it like my cat on his toy mouse. Among other issues Sevtlana Gladkova paints this sort of problem in geographical terms: when you're getting information in an echo chamber of tech news and the sort, you miss local news that may matter to you. Her solution is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of local news sources in Friendfeed.

I've had a similiar concerns, and I now get the headlines for the Columbus Dispatch in my twitter feed. For the most part, that works.

Locality news issues aside, this got me thinking about how I've found news and information in the past, and especially how I've developed new informational interests. Not surprisingly, at least part of the answer is traditional media like newspapers (and their websites), and television or radio news. With traditional journalistic media like these, the editors aggregate information into a package: a business section of the newspaper, a half hour nightly newscast, a magazine, etc. In other words, information is filtered by a team, not an individual, an algorithm or a keyword search.

When consuming the package, I can be exposed to stories that I might find interesting, but had not been exposed to before. From there, I can develop subject and keywords to follow online.

In social media, information is mostly filtered by individuals or by keyword or subject. As Svetlana points out, individuals who share your interests aren't likely to turn up new information outside of that sphere. And keywords just point to stories that are somehow related.

Social media sites like Friendfeed and twitter are individually based. Individuals are the filters. To be sure, almost nobody subscribes to just one individual, so there is a kind of aggregation going on. And some individuals offer great filtering. But the team aggregation effort, per se, is not there.

So this gets me wondering: Do we need some sort of broad (read more than individuals or algorithmic) non-keyword based aggregation service here? Is there an opportunity for a new kind of collaborative-based information aggregation service that might help with the discovery process in a new kind of way?

Or are we already beyond caring about something like that, content to consume and discuss everything based on a familiar subject? I hope not, but I fear so.

Attending to Reading: On and Off the Web

I’ve been giving a lot of attention to attention. Well, as far as following a debate about web reading vs book reading goes. The debate surrounding Nick Carr’s Atlantic essay Is Google Making Us Stupid is generating a lot of text. Never mind that it’s on the web instead of in hard print.

The serendipity of reading RSS feeds regularly has brought me another wad of words on the subject, though this time largely from the educational perspective. Literacy Debate: Online R U Really Reading on the New York Times homepage looks at the pros and cons of school-age kids reading text on the web and on paper.

As I expected, one group of experts were all for books and all against web reading. But another group surprised me with the idea that web reading has value for kids.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Carr and others talk about skimming text on the web vs being able to read a whole text off the web. But here the differences are more specifically spelled out.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

When you think of reading from a conceptual view, to gather information and apply those ideas to what’s happening in the flow of life, web reading may even provide an advantage.

Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.

“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.” Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”

And so the debate goes on. But at least now we have an idea that it may not be condemning all of us to a life of virtual illiteracy. Somebody may even figure out how to give War and Peace the blog treatment. And, who knows, Great Books in 140-character installments might just …. Hm, better not go quite that far.

I Love the Smell of Distraction in the Morning

teamaskins, via Flickr (CC license)

there are some software-related tricks that might help damp down internet distractions

Nick Carr's essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? has gotten a lot of play recently. Extended discussions on Edge.org and the Britannica Blog are worth spending some time with, if you can resist distractions long enough to read text that fleshes out concepts and is longer than 140-characters.

Those discussions gave me appetite for more. And, yes, it was a web search (Summize/Twitter, no less) that turned up what I found an entertaining feature on all this in the Times Online. That Times piece kind of summed things up with regard to attention/distraction and broadened the discussion to general informational stuff, not strictly limited to the long books or text works that Carr talked about.

As I was reading it, I had a thought about the usual source of distractions: the internet and by extension the applications and information on our computers or mobile devices. To me, what makes distraction probable in this environment is multitasking. Not our own multitasking, but the computer's. That is, today's operating systems allow you to run multitple programs simultaneously, which allows (encourages?) distractions with programs running in the background. And if those programs are hooked to the web ... well, you know.

You know when an email or tweet arrives because a sound goes off. It's a trivial matter to simply switch windows to attend to it, distracting yourself from whatever you were doing before. But if you had to close the program you were running and open the other program, it might be a different story. Like the iPhone 2.0 apps.

And like operating systems used to be. One application at a time; if you wanted to switch from word processing, you had to close, say, Wordstar and open your communication program. But of course we're not going to go back to MS DOS anytime real soon.

But there are some software-related tricks that might help damp down internet distractions while you're at the computer, and might help you attend to longer amount of text without skimming.

About those networked distractions: if you turn off the network while you're reading or writing something, emails, tweets and urges to look up something on Google disappear. You aren't connected anymore, so it's useless to try reading email, IM, twittering, or whatever. The easiest way is to pull out the network cable or just turn off your system's network settings. But it's just as easy to plug it back in or turn it back on.

If you're on a Mac, you're in luck. Freedom is an application written by a grad student plagued by distraction at dissertation time. You give Freedom the amount of time you want to be unconnected from the web, and it dutifully complies for just that amount of time. And, as I undertand it, nothing short of a reboot can shorten that time. (Disclosure: I haven't tried it myself: too busy getting this blog post out.)

For attending to long pieces of text and resisting the urge to just skim them, I've been using Videocue, a teleprompter application. I simply paste the text of almost any length. It automatically strips out links and formatting so there's no temptation to follow a link. Instead, it forces me to run through the text sequentially, without stopping. I have to pay attention if I want to get anything out of it. I wouldn't want to read War and Peace this way, but it works for Atlantic essays I might stumble across

Expecting the Unexpected, But Not Finding It

Here's something I just came across that stopped me in my tracks:

Homophily makes you stupid.

I get kind of buzzed when I find something that excites me, but I might not have found it before. A web site, news article, book, podcast - almost any bit of information can surprise and delight me when I'm not expecting it. I end up liking it, but wouldn't know that I did before I somehow stumbled across it.

Jon Udell talks about this in a recent blog post. But what I like most here is the idea that you don't too much find these sorts of things when you rely on recommendations from like minded people.

That's a problem for me in Friendfeed and other social sites these days. I liked the flow of stuff from the early tech adopters who hang out on these sites - at least, for a while. But it gets old when the range of subjects posted and discussed doesn't change that much from day to day.

Sure, it's easy enough to filter out stuff you don't want to be exposed to anymore. But how about filtering in stuff you might like to be exposed to? I don't know how to do that, and I'd like to.

Not much encouraging news here, at least not from Udell:

Recommendation systems don’t help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I’ve shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven’t yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.

Me either. I do like Stumbleupon, a web app that takes you to random pages with the press of a button. It sometimes works, but not enough to feed my appetite for serendipity.

Anybody have some ideas here?

Finding What You Weren't Looking For

Image: rorris, via Flickr (CC license)

"Pay attention to irrelevant details and follow intriguing but useless connections."

I like attention. No, not being paid attention to at any cost, but the topic of how humans learn to pay attention to the stuff around them. Earlier I wrote about continuous partial attention, the notion that some of us aren't paying anywhere near full attention to stuff because we're too busy looking at email, texting or whatever on our mobile devices. (My wife and I got new IPhones over the weekend, and that's been a festival of continuous partial attention at times. But more on that another time.)

One of the people paying the most attention to paying attention is writer Howard Rheingold. He's doing so in service of teaching social media and other tech stuff to college kids.

Rheingold recently published a draft of a commencement speech he wrote for himself.

A very brief speech as commencement talks go, Rheingold advises the new graduates to "Pay attention to irrelevant details and follow intriguing but useless connections."

Not advice the typical future employer would give, but somehow Rheingold makes it sound like the right thing to do.

But how do you do that?

One way I've found is searching the growing stacks of short updates and brief discussions about all sorts of things in social media sites like Twitter and Friendfeed. People are tweeting and discussing almost anything you can think of. But it's not really possible to follow everyone, so you miss out on a lot of potential irrelevant details and intriguing but useless connections.

Fortunately, search sites like Summize let you retrieve things you may have missed. In fact, that's how I found Rheingold's speech - by following an intriguing but useless connection that turned up in a Summize search.

At the Apple Store

It even does screenshots!

iPhone 2.0

I'm trying out the new Typepad iPhone app, so this won't be much of a post.

Robot Policy?

A few days ago there was a discussion on Friendfeed about tech policy in the election and the new administration. Like any discussion, there were a range of opinions. But in the end, it boiled down not to the U.S. presidential candidates themselves, but a question about who was advising them on tech matters. Sure, John McCain admits he can't operate a computer, but does it matter if he's got the sharper advisors on tech policy? That remains to be seen; there's a long way to go until November.

But if you think the tech policy decisions are tough now, wait until the later half of this century. What will be different then? According to some present day authors quoted in Android apocalypse, artificially intelligent robots will surpass human intelligence. There probably not much of a debate about that. But it's what's predicted to happen as a result that's the stuff of nightmares - political, ethical, scientific, any-sort-of-ific you can think of.

Will they give us short shrift and annihilate us accidentally or on purpose, as AI expert and author Hugo de Garis writes about?

And with the advent of what artificial-intelligence expert Professor Hugo de Garis calls artilects - massively intelligent artificial intellects - there is the risk that not only will we have created our successors but also that such machines may wipe humans out by accident or design.

Or will they work with us (and for us) as envisioned by author and technologist Raymond Kurzweil?

Others are more optimistic. In his book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, writer and technological visionary Ray Kurzweil says that "within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself".

As futuristic and far out as all this sounds today, I don't think it's too early to start thinking of the policy implications of this kind of stuff. I'm not talking about any sort of planning here, since it really is too early for that. But good discussions of scenarios that might play out? Never too early for that.

After all, we don't want robots taking over Friendfeed, right?