Seth’s Blog: Deliberately Uninformed, Relentlessly So [a rant]
I’ve always said that being stupid is nobody’s fault but your own.
Access to knowledge, for the first time in history, is largely unimpeded for the middle class. Without effort or expense, it’s possible to become informed if you choose. For less than your cable TV bill, you can buy and read an important book every week. Share the buying with six friends and it costs far less than coffee.
Or you can watch TV.
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
I’ve been hearing about the concept of the semantic web for a while, but I don’t think I have ever understood the whole gist of it. The basic idea is to find better ways to “manage information in way that matters to individuals”. The 14 minute video is a good introduction to the idea, but a lot of it seems like one those surreal Bing commercials. You know, like when the daughter mentions jeans and the mother says “Moms who wear jeans to match their teen’s jeans”. I hope it’s not like that.
(Via MF)
David Gelernter says that we should start taking the internet more seriously.
One symptom of current problems is the fundamental puzzle of the Internet. (Algebra and calculus have fundamental theorems; the Internet has a fundamental puzzle.) If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about? What do our children know that our parents didn’t? (Yes they know how to work their computers, but that’s easy compared to — say — driving a car.) I’ll return to this puzzle.
via MF
Popmatters has been running a feature called Pixalated Brains and New Media which are a series of articles that deal with the web, reading, our short attention spans, online social networking, and many other digital concerns, worries, hopes, and dreams. I started with Scratching the Surface: Your Brain on the Internet via Metafilter. Here’s a snip to the intro of the series:
There’s a great deal of concerned talk, talk, talk out there about our shortening attention span, and it seems our demise (because let’s be frank – the overall tone is that whatever is happening to us is bad for the species) is all thanks to the advent of New Media. You know, all those pixel bits of blog entries, TV news quips shouting at us between blaring 30-second commercials, three-line gossipy blips under BIG PICTURES in glossy mags, proper grammar and punctuation lost to text messaging, sound bytes bouncing along the airwaves at varying decibels … Via these methods we nibble from an array of fast foods for thought, taking from what’s presented that which we like, eschewing the rest and flitting off, or perhaps Twittering off, to the next pretty shiny thing.
How the Brain Hard-Wires us to love Google, Twitter, and Texting
Slate article on why hitting refresh is like getting a fix. Why?:
Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don’t even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, “My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we’re out to dinner.” We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days “refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.”
Excellent article describing the history of how information and news has been transmitted since the 1800 to today, and how it will probably look in 2020. Here’s a snip of how it was back in the day:
In the 1800, the only way you could really interact with other people was to go out and meet them. It was all about face-to-face communication. If you wanted to sell a product, you would go to the local marketplace, where you would setup a stand. But this also meant that the only way for you to get information – or to give information back – was to be at the right place at the right time. You didn’t really know what happened in another part of the city, nor could you sell your products to people in another place.
Some people did talk about this new thing called the newspaper. But it wasn’t really the same. You had to meet people in person. That was the only good way to interact.
People in the 1800 were really weird. Face-to-face communication? That’s just so ancient and gross.
via Snarkmarket
As a medium for the display of information, the printed page is superb. It affords enough resolution to meet the eye’s demand. It presents enough information to occupy the reader for a convenient quantum of time. It offers great flexibility of font and format. It lets the reader control the mode and rate of inspection. It is small, light, movable, cuttable, clippable, pastable, replicable, disposable, and inexpensive. Those positive attributes all relate, as indicated, to the display function. The tallies that could be made for the storage, organization, and retrieval functions are less favorable.
When printed pages are bound together to make books or journals, many of the display features of the individual pages are diminished or destroyed. Books are bulky and heavy. They contain much more information than the reader can apprehend at any given moment, and the excess often hides the part he wants to see. Books are too
expensive for universal private ownership, and they circulate too slowly to permit the development of an efficient public utility. Thus, except for use in consecutive reading — which is not the modal application in the domain of our study — books are not very good display devices. In fulfilling the storage function, they are only fair. With respect to retrievability they are poor. And when it comes to organizing the body of knowledge, or even to indexing and abstracting it, books by themselves. make no active contribution at all.
If paper were invented today, the first paragraph is a very convincing selling point.
via Short Schrift
Excellent example guide on how to cut the whif from the chaf for when it comes information consumption by Ben Casnocha.
First, I never try to keep up with breaking news. I don’t care if I hear about something a couple days after everyone else. Besides, when you find out about something a few days after it happened you get to read an analysis versus a mere summary.
How the e-Book will Change the Way we Read and Write
Steve Johnson over at WSJ makes some interesting speculations about how the book industry could change. He writes about the “aha” moment he had with the Kindle, which everyone that reviews a Kindle has. (I haven’t seen that much negative “aha” moments when people write about the Kindle.) Here’s his take on how with the marriage of Google, books could become into some sort of “booklog”:
With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”) You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.
Via Kottke.org
