Clearly my essay blogging is geared ever more towards the general population.
Funny thing: while making some diagrams for this post, I needed a table of Riemann zeta function values. My CRC Mathematical Tables and Formulas didn’t have it, so I reached for Billingsley’s Probability and Measure, but before I opened it I googled “Riemann zeta function table,” and found what I needed.
This Internet thing is worth saving, really.
| — | Me, on Facebook yesterday. |
The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (by theRSAorg).
Pretty much all Tim Wu’s book (The Master Switch) said, minus the irrelevant political asides, pop references with 3-year shelf lives, citations of pop books (like Malcolm Gladwell’s) instead of the underlying — and correct — references; in other words, much better than the book.
Or you could read Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian’s Information Rules and get a much better, more balanced, more nuanced view. But it doesn’t have the cutesy stories that the I want to sound educated but I don’t like to read anything harder than a harlequin novel market likes.
RSA Animate - The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens? (by theRSAorg)
Watching this, I’m reminded of those “cyber-theorists” who write “manifestos” telling governments (paraphrased):
This is our world and your rules don’t apply here. We’re free and we care only about ideas. Go away, you’re not invited.
Usually with some provisos like:
(Unless we invite you to kick companies we don’t like or to impose rules that we think are important or to otherwise do our bidding.)
Of course, these cyber-theorists tend to be in their comfortable homes in the U.S. or Western Europe. Cocooned among others who think exactly like them, their words well received, and no consequences ever felt, they feel superior to their neighbors.
But the activists who believe this drivel — typically in countries with less toleration for idiocy — soon learn that cyberspace is a fiction and that a physical body lives in a physical place and can be physically injured by those people whom the cyber-theorists think have no say in this new cyber-utopia.
Utopians have always been willing to sacrifice others in the pursuit of utopia. Nothing new here, except their high numbers.
Only by combining data stored deep within our brains can we forge new ideas. No amount of magpie assemblage can compensate for this slow, synthetic creativity. Hyperlinks and overstimulation mean the brain must give most of its attention to short-term decisions. Little makes it through the fragile transfer into deeper processing. Clearly, argues Mr Carr, this is a radical upending of the “literate mind” that has been the hallmark of civilisation for more than 1,000 years. From a society that valued the creation of a unique storehouse of ideas in each individual, man is moving to a socially constructed mind that values speed and group approval over originality and creativity.
True, there are compensations: better hand-eye co-ordination, pattern recognition and the very multitasking skills the machines themselves require. Sceptics will rightly point out that similar concerns have accompanied each new technology. Something is always lost, and something gained. Some evolutionary biologists claim that the scholarly mind is an historical anomaly: that humans, like other primates, are designed to scan rapidly for danger and opportunity. If so, the net delivers this shallow, scattered mindset with a vengeance.
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The effects of the internet: Fast forward | The Economist I find much to agree with in this summary of Carr’s new book. But Carr may be cherry-picking. Is the Internet is making people shallow thinkers (Carr’s point), or are people are generally shallow thinkers, except in things that they care a lot about, and the Internet just makes that shallowness more visible (what I believe is happening)? As for multitasking: machines do it with minimal process switching overhead; brains, at least where attention is concerned, do not. People who “multitask” are generally scattering their attention and not working anywhere near their actual capacity, were they to do one thing at a time. |
