The nuts and bolts of searching. Kind of reminds me of the Matrix, but less sexy.
Inside Google’s brain
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Category Archives: Networks
In praise of pancake people!
Don’t get me wrong, I think Nicholas Carr is doing us a great service by raising the alarm of how the Internet is ruining our minds. I don’t agree with him 100%, though, and the quote below from a recent interview explains why. The lament is that we cannot contain civilization in our heads anymore. This is a complaint of a book culture that privileges information over relationships. In a book world, ideas are self-contained objects, and we are isolated individuals, which correlates directly with our disconnection with nature.
Instead, we are networks and processes coming into being. Even one of the latest management books from Harvard Business School acknowledges that our minds are open loops. That is, we synchronize via emotional intelligence with other people in the same way that groups of women who live together start having their periods simultaneously. I don’t want to have the whole of civilization contained within me– if that’s the case I would probably nuke myself. The problem with me is that I have civilization as my reality filter, and it often makes me a sad, lonely person. To paraphrase Gandhi, when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “It would be a good idea!”
The Sun Magazine | Computing The Cost:
Cooper: You’ve quoted Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, who says we are turning into “pancake people.”
Carr: We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Foreman suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people,” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.
Twittering danger
Twitter is the fad of the day, so we’re bombarded with news of twitter, making me increasingly numb to it as an interesting story. But what if news on twitter has an equally numbing psychological impact?
Scientists warn of Twitter dangers – CNN.com:
(CNN) — Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.
New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s “moral compass” to process and could harm young people’s emotional development.
Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern California study.
And then, how do you weather a twitter shitsorm?
How to Weather a Twitterstorm – Advertising Age – Digital:
“Credibility is the currency of the ‘new normal,’” said Steve Cody, managing partner and co-founder of Peppercom. “Tell me what happened yourself. Don’t allow me to hear it from others. If I do, I’ll lose my faith and trust in you. And, in an era when faith and trust has been tested to the breaking points, brands like Amazon and Domino’s need to be a whole lot smarter and a whole lot swifter.”
Here, six tips for if — or when — it happens to your brand.
Candy is not community: more marketing anthropology
This slide show is definitely worth giving this presentation a whirl (press the green button to hear the narrative). It’s interesting how marketers and media theorists read the same books, but the difference is what people do with the information. In this presentation by John V Willshire at PHD Media, he breaks down the major media revolutions described in Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, but comes up with some bizarre (but not surprising) conclusions.
For example, I don’t agree with Willshire’s definition of community. It is very mechanistic. Communities are not just people who communicate with each other, they are people who have shared meaning and symbols. Talking about a product is not shared meaning. However, I do think there are some good ideas here, particularly about attracting people through engagement and giving them something useful (for free) as a way of drawing people into the kind of services you offer. I just hope it is something more meaningful than a candy bar.
The three Cs
A short history of marketing from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.
There is something a little ironic about this video. On the one hand it paints a pretty good picture of the transition from one to many to many to many media, and how that has created a problem for advertisers. But it implicitly assumes that people care about little more than brands, despite the admission that consumers are increasingly skeptical. This is all by way of making an important point that systems theorist Ervin Laszlo makes in Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, in which he argues that the previous historical epic was dominated by three Cs:
Conquest, colonization and Consumption.
Advertising, PR and propaganda were the necessary tools to facilitate policy and technology for those goals. We are now shifting into a new set of Cs:
Connection, communication and consciousness.
I think this is the complaint and challenge of the videomaker, without being conscious of the real choice, which is about intention, not products. If we stick to the old model the human species will become extinct fairly soon.
FYI: Google’s carbon footprint
Googling Is Not the (Environmental) Problem | Wired Science from Wired.com:
As for the carbon footprint, Google says each search is only responsible for 0.2 grams of CO2, not the 7 grams that the Harvard researcher claims, but the dispute misses the larger point. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are estimated at 16.9 billion kilograms of CO2-equivalent per day. Again assuming 5 billion daily searches, Google would be responsible for either 0.2 or 0.006 percent of the nation’s carbon footprint, depending on whose number you choose.
When it comes the world’s energy system, Google is not the problem. They are, however, embedded in the energy-intensive infrastructure that we’ve been building ever since we figured out how to tap the earth’s fossil fuel resources.
Converging Jenkins
An entertaining mash-up of Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture. If you haven’t read the book, I suggest you do as Capitão Nascimento says, or else!
Thanks Peter!
Stupid human tricks
It’s that time of year for lists. Here’s a link to Feed’s Top 10 Viral Video Ads of 2008.
Two questions:
1) Can you guess the magic formula to make your video viral? Hint: see this post’s header.
2) Can you guess which ones are selling a product?
Downloading the public domain
James Boyle has a written an important book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, which you can also download for free from his site. He has the following intriguing proposition:
In the tradition of the environmental movement, which first invented and then sought to protect something called “the environment,” Boyle hopes that we can first understand and then protect the public domain – the ecological center of the “information environment.”
I’m in the process of trying to link network media practices with the environment. In other words, is there an ecological architecture behind new media practices that can be made more evident in order to encourage new business practices? Part of which means open systems and sharing. As the following snip from his Website attests, Boyle believes you can give something away and sell it simultaneously. True enough. I often prefer a book as opposed to a PDF, so usually after reviewing a PDF of a book, and I like it, I’ll buy it. Also, as a college professor (wow, it sounds weird saying that), I find copyright restrictions an unbearably difficult barrier for exposing students to a lot of material that, if forced to make them buy, I usually won’t, especially considering the onerous pricing of textbooks.
You might wonder why I didn’t go this route with my own book. It was my sincere desire to publish with a the Creative Commons license, but the publisher didn’t understand the concept (it was hard enough to get the copyright in my name as opposed to the publisher). In the future, I hope to publish using Creative Commons. Boyle argues the benefits below.
Questions from Authors.. | The Public Domain |:
[For] an academic who wants to write a book that isn’t directly aimed at the mass market, (The Particle Physics Diet, How to Use the Secrets of Behavioral Economics to Improve your Golf Game, Secret Dating Strategies of Accountants etc.) but which has substantial potential reach in lots of different types of audience — academic and lay — the CC license might well be the best strategy in terms of sales. There the key thing is reaching your potential readers when you don’t know exactly who or where they are. And free (potentially viral) distribution does that extremely well. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is a nice example of this phenomenon. It turns out that many more people than one would imagine are fascinated by the economic characteristics of networks, peer production and so on.
The “stupid” argument, again
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Such is the lament of the bookish mind as it faces annihilation from the Internet.
Restating my mantra, media constantly go to war with other. They constantly compete for the center of attention by moving in and out of the periphery to the center and back again as new technology changes how we consume and share information. Often the winner incorporates/repurposes/remediates elements of the old into the new (the Internet, for example, uses text, and newspapers use more images, color and article summaries for Web influenced info snackers).
So as the Internet is pushing books to the edge of the mediacological ecosystem, book people are fighting back. The most prominent pugilist recently entering the fray is The Atlantic’s Nicholas Carr, whose article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, revises the persistent argument that new digital media are dumbing us down. The thing I don’t like about this argument is that it assumes there are good kinds of aptitude and bad kinds, the classic-book-deep-thinking being a good kind of intelligence, and the being-in-the-moment of net surfing is bad. We need both.
Carr’s article is actually quite good and outlines how knowledge work is an extensions of Taylorism and the systematizing of work and thinking. Where I fault the piece is how it focuses too much on loss, and not enough on gain. Some of the major benefits of the information economy, which MIT new media guru Henry Jenkins refers to as Convergence Culture, are described by the following characteristics (BTW, I go into this in more detail in my book, Mediacology, ch. 8, “Media Lit’s Mediacological Niche”):
- collective intelligence,
- affective economics,
- transmedia storytelling, and
- participatory culture.
Consequently, Jenkins believes that in order to be fully engaged participants of convergence culture, students (and teachers) need to develop skills that allow for
the ability to pool knowledge with others in a collaborative enterprise (as in Survivor spoiling), the ability to share and compare value systems by evaluating ethical dramas (as occurs in the gossip surrounding reality television), the ability to make connections across scattered pieces of information (as occurs when we consume The Matrix, 1999, or Pokemon, 1998), the ability to express your interpretations and feelings toward popular fictions through your own folk culture (as occurs in Star Wars fan cinema), and the ability to circulate what you create via the Internet so that it can be shared with others (again as in fan cinema) (p. 176).
There is nothing stupid about these kinds of skills. Thus, I think the argument that the Internet makes one more shallow often ignores the other aspects of emerging cultural practices that are greatly needed and are deep in their own way. In particular, I find these latter skills necessary to develop strategies for sustainability, just as much as those cultivated by the isolated mind of the solitary book reader.
Still, I have to admit. I was depressed after reading the article because I felt that there really is too much to do, read, search, and write. The Internet compounds that. Upon reflection I thought some meditation would do the trick, because what I really needed was to clear my mind of books and the Internet. As Skype tells us, just breath.
A viral song about viral songs
Great Wall 2.0
Does information want to be free? A case study in how to control the Internet.
Great Wall 2.0: How China Leads the World in Web Censorship – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News:
The virtual People’s Republic abides by other laws than the rest of the Internet. But how do the communist sentinels of cyberspace manage to control the information flow so precisely?
Surveillance computers form the backbone of the Chinese security system, monitoring the bulk of online communication round the clock. The machines are supported by an army of government censors, whose numbers are estimated at over 30,000. This Herculean effort is on the increase as Internet users multiply at a record rate. As of February, China officially has the most Internet users in the world (221 million to America’s 220.6 million). And what happens in China can easily change the Internet as a whole. Experts believe that the country has already exported its innovative censorship methods to countries such as Iran and Vietnam.
Dozens of media researchers are now studying the architecture of the Great Wall 2.0 with a mixture of horror and fascination. What they’re discovering is how surprisingly dynamic, subtle and state-of-the-art the censors of the 21st century are.
Amnesty for the Internet
Piracy is chicken soup for the economic soul
Now that you have seen Yochai Benkler’s TED talk, you should also view this clever little Slidecast by Matt Mason who presents the main thesis of the fascinating book, Pirate’s Dilemma.
Quotable: Benkler on open-source economics
Yochai Benkler is one of my favorite thinkers writing about the network economy. He argues that new networks are reversing the centralized control of industrial media. His book, The Wealth of Networks, is required reading. If you don’t have time to read it, try watching this video.
Hard times for old media
We Tell Stories – ‘Hard Times’ by Matt Mason & Nicholas Felton
As part of Penguin’s We Tell Stories series, this update of Dickens’ Hard Times is a pretty cool little tour of our current state of the stats by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma. The above is from the page, “Ideas are traveling faster.” Admittedly I find the graphics a little hard to follow. Maybe I’m too old. Anyhow, take it a tour, it’s worth the trip.
The world is coming
No doubt about it. The media world is changing as we know it. And guess what? It isn’t white.
PS I recommend clicking through to Slideshare in order to view the presentation full screen.
When the Internet died
This is the first time this episode of South Park hit my radar. Gawker resurrects it in time for us to ponder some of the latest hysteria concerning net addiction. Thing is, the Internet is the least of our problems, really. Shopped for food or been to the gas pump lately?
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Is the iPhone killing the Internet?
Oxford University Professor Jonathan Zittrain, who wrote The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, says closed systems are destroying innovation.
How the iPhone Is Killing the Net | Free Press:
Zittrain records the same phenomenon with networks, as the open Internet surpassed proprietary networks like the telephone system, AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. For example, it took the break-up of the AT&T monopoly for third parties to create new devices such as answering machines, fax machines and dial-up modems. The Internet, on the other hand, had an open design and a philosophy of sharing and trust that fostered development from outsiders.
Zittrain argues that today’s era of generative PCs combined with a generative Internet is coming to an end. By generative, he means systems that can be leveraged to many tasks, are adaptable to a range of uses, easy to master, accessible to many and allow for changes to be easily transferred.
“The status quo is drawing to a close, confronting us — policymakers, entrepreneurs, technology providers and, most importantly, Internet and PC users — with choices we can no longer ignore,” he writes.
Technorati Tags: iPhone
Mapping media
Media Map – Visualizing Ownership in the Media and Telecom Industries:
The landscape of the media industry is rapidly changing, with increasing consolidation and convergence between companies. Researchers and journalists have a need to track these changes, yet no interactive visualization tool is freely accessible online to enable this.
Check out this very cool tool to visualization corporate media interrelations.