Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Hi Howard, really enjoying Net Smart.

> we are human precisely because we co-evolve with our technologies...

Certainly a core human characteristic is our tool making and using
abilities. But we often seem to think of technological artifacts as
essentially external -- almost taking on a life of their own.

The section head in your book "(Using) the Internet Makes Us Stupid
(or Not)" suggests the related, but crucial question:

   Is it us or the Internet that's responsible?

You are suggesting that to become net smart, we need to take
more responsibility for our own behavior on the net.

What are the prospects for moving the public framing of such questions
away from the perspective that sees technology as something that is
generally imposed on us?
  

    
Along with that, Howard, can you talk a bit about co-evolution and
augmentation; how these technologies and ourselves are beginning to
blend? This will have an impact on the evolution of consciousness, in
the manner you mentioned before, yes?
  

    
Jon -- I always advocate creating a lightweight structure to start
with when using wikis, to avoid that kind of structurelessness vertigo.


Craig -- Hi! Great to hear from you again. The whole issue of
technological determinism is arguable. Probably the strongest and most
articulate advocate in favor of the view that technologies are
autonomous is Langdon Winner, who I always take seriously. But many
cases indicate that social, psychological, and cultural factors -- how
people perceive and use technologies in their living context -- can be
decisive. The printing press is a case in point. It was invented in
China and Korea centuries before Gutenberg. In addition to the
technical difficulties of ideographic versus alphabetic writing, there
were strong cultural factors that led to the dominance of Europe in the
print era. China had a strong central government (which had reversed
China's sea exploration by fiat); Europe had many competing states.
China's religious environment was relatively stable; Europe was in the
throes of the Reformation -- and it didn't hurt that Protestant
theology was all about reading your own Bible at a time when printers
were looking for new markets. Epidemics had severely reduced the
European population in previous years, and there was a surplus of used
linen clothing, which helped drop the price of paper. You see where I'm
heading. In terms of online technologies, we've seen innovation coming
from physics laboratories in Switzerland, dormitories in California --
the network is an innovation amplifier as well as an innovation. You
will note that in the book I am very careful to frame statements in
terms of human agency. Whether or not determinism is the correct
viewpoint, I see it as disempowering. 

Ted, note that while Engelbart didn't talk about Darwinian evolution,
he did emphasize the "bootstrapping" process of co-evolution of
inventors and machines to think with. People who built the first
augmentation technologies were the users of those technologies, and
they used them to build improved augmentation technologies. 

In terms of the evolution of consciousness, I did touch on that in
Smart Mobs -- speech, writing, the alphabet, printing press, telephone,
Internet were all inventions that enabled people to think and
communicate more effectively and in new ways, and literate populations,
equipped with better thinking tools, created ways of life that enabled
human populations to expand and to live in environments that were
previously inhospitable. The results of civilization are a mixed bag.
For more on that, see the book Pandora's Seed.

I was very much taken by Teilhard de Chardin's notion of a noosphere
when I was an undergraduate, and while I don't really subscribe very
much to mystical ideas of technologically-mediated worldbrains, the Web
does seem increasingly like a noosphere.
  

    
Howard, you recommend tools for crap detection, curation, social
dashboards and collaborative work. 

What tool would you like to emerge in this regard - something which
has not yet been developed in a satisfactory way, but which would
fulfill important needs of net smart people?

But also, are there developments which seem like a loss - for instance
it seems rss-feeds are less promoted these days (at Google and other
important venues) and there is this trend toward an internet of apps -
which sometimes seems as the rebirth of the walled gardens.
  

    
In the Crap Detection chapter I write about several approaches that
are attempting to combine social and algorithmic means of adding
automated crap detection -- a browser add-on, for example. 

RSS is less promoted, but I don't see it going away. That means a
knowledge-gap between those who do and don't know how to use
RSS+search+Twitter, etc to roll their own information radars.

I've written in all my books about being alert and politically active
regarding attempts by the state and corporate interests to enclose and
otherwise gain power of the Web. In regard to the surveillance state
and dataveillance markets, I think personal liberties have somewhat
irrevocably lost ground, particularly since 9/11.
  

    
Can you say more about loss of liberty - how you think that's
happened, what specific freedoms have been challenged? I'm always
fascinated by the conflict between assertions of liberty and assertions
of some forms of higher level control. Libertarians talk about doing
away with laws and regulations that limit freedoms, especially that
limit free markets. However deregulated finance markets tend to blow
up, as we've seen recently. 

How important are freedoms, how valid is a state claim to limit
freedoms? How do we draw the line?
  

    
(That should have said "a state claim to a right to limit
freedoms"...)
  

    
Here's one:

" right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

We have video cameras on the street that can recognize individual
faces, a million square foot NSA surveillance computation center being
built in Utah (and, according to one prominent whistle-blower, to spy
on US citizens, which was forbidden previously), the legalization of
drone aircraft, massive dataveillance. And it's amazing that the
question "what freedoms" have been challenged can even be asked. For
the most part, American citizens have accepted outrageous acts like the
extrajudicial killing of American citizens and the kinds of
surveillance I noted. How valid is a state claim to limit freedoms?
This isn't my bailiwick, but of course any state has the right to take
measures to defend the safety of its citizens. At which point does
surveillance and control outweigh safety?

There is no such thing as a free and fair market. Someone needs to
punish the people who put their thumbs on the scales. If a corporation
publishes its financial data, then it's not a free market if those
reports are not independently audited and the auditors are prohibited
from accepting bribes. So I'm somewhat libertarian, but I contest this
business about regulation killing markets. This is getting far beyond
Net Smart, however.
  

    
Howard, it's so great to see you here.  And thank you for this book!  I owe
you a personal debt of gratitude for your leadership and inspiration here
int he WELL, where I did a hell of a lot of growing up with your help.
  

    
Hello, David! And thank you for your role in making the WELL a real
community. I clearly remember the first time we met. Do you? It was at
the bandstand in Golden Gate Park between the DeYoung and the Academy.
You were just moving out of my neighborhood to the East Bay.

We all helped each other, did we not?
  

    
By the way, some of you may remember my 3 year old daughter running
around WELL parties. Here she is, interviewing me about Net Smart for
Aughors@Google (where she now works). http://youtu.be/vajSK1jV56A
  

    
MAMIE!
  

    

> the bandstand in Golden Gate Park between the DeYoung and the Academy.  You
> were just moving out of my neighborhood to the East Bay.

Was that a WELL gathering that took place kinda of under a tree?  WHat I
remember most about that day was walking up with my then-girlfriend,
decidedly not a techie, and hearing Hugh Daniel speaking the punchline of a
story: "Bang fortune minus O," he said, generating much laughter among those
around him and an immense question mark over the head of my companion.
  

    
I think that WELL gathering in the Arboretum was after I met you. I
still have a photograph of me holding Mamie at that Arboretum party. It
was cold and foggy.
  

    
I don't know that the discussion of freedom/privacy and constraint
thereof is too far off topic. The skills you want people to learn are
just the skills they'll need to protect their freedoms, their privacy,
and a way of life we took for granted (possibly too much for granted)
in the latter part of the 20th century.

One protection we've had a reasonably strong, active, and often
courageous Fourth Estate. However market support for in-depth
journalism is evaporating. I recently attended a journalism conference
where there was much excitement about new, computer-mediated tools for
gathering and publishing news, but a complete fog about how to make the
business of news work, and how to ensure funding for the kind of deep
and sustained investigations we often need to protect our freedoms. We
the people may have to do some of that work. Your chapter on
social-digital know-how and collective intelligence should be required
reading for every citizen, if not the whole book.

What are some good examples of emerging platforms for collective
intelligence?  Where do we see collaborative news gathering by
professionals working with citizen journalists?
  

    
I think wherever skills disappear others will arise to take their
place. Bloggers and fact checking sites are taking the place of
investigative journalists. The skills are being deployed by different
people in different ways.

In the introduction (p.14) you quote Nicholas Carr’s as saying that
the internet is changing how we thinks so that we are losing an
essential ability to focus and dive deep.

Probably analogous to the shift from scrolls to codex (1st to 6th
century CE), then people probably said we would lose the ability to
think rationally since information could now be accessed randomly. 
  

    
Just watched the interview - good on both you and Mamie!
  

    
In Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google making us stupid?” he
quotes Maryanne Wolf as saying that deep reading is “indistinguishable
from deep thinking” yet for many, me included, writing is the best
access to deep thinking – yes writing in response to reading and
thinking but writing nonetheless. 

Thus, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing
an exact man.” (Francis Bacon) The internet provides people with
undreamed access to both conference and writing.

Carr in his essay quotes playwright Richard Foreman as predicting that
we will be spread too thin, to become “pancake people”. 

Given that the ideal of a liberal education was to know something
about much and to be aware of many perspectives it could be described
as pancake education. Not long ago, and probably still, people decry
the tendency of colleges and universities to create narrow specialists
rather than liberal scholars. Is the internet the antidote?

Finally the world of the Western Tradition that Forman and Carr extol:
“Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense
and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate
personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally
constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.” is
an elitist, male dominated, Euro-centric world view that again, the
internet may actually correct.
  

    
Thanks, Elin. Now I've read that article twice. I'm tempted to say
that the only people that really need to read it, won't.

Or maybe I should point out that if being a flibbertigibbet was
Google's fault, we wouldn't have invented the word so long ago.

Perhaps it's enough to point out that the solution to Net Dumb is
Net Smart.
  

    
I confess that since I stopped teaching digital journalism I've
stopped tracking the rapidly-moving developments. I bet you know more
about what's happening in regard to citizen journalism than I do right
now, Jon.

If you want to look at it that way, I've been writing about
computer-mediated collaboration for a long time, from virtual
communities to smart mobs. When I started thinking about and
researching the chapter for Net Smart, it became clear that multiple
genres and literacies of mediated collaboration are emerging -- virtual
communities and smart mobs, but also crowdsourcing, crowdfunding,
collective intelligence, collaborative consumption, distributed
computation, social production, each with its distinct advantages,
barriers, heuristics. A lot is happening with scientific collaboration
-- the way researchers around the world put together ad-hoc networks
and worked literally around the clock on identifying SARS comes to mind
(http://www.who.int/csr/sars/project/en/), INSTEDD is proactively
trying to forecast and prevent epidemics and respond quickly to medical
emergencies
(http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/InSTEDD/introduction-to-instedd/1),
Ushahidi and crisis mapping (http://ushahidi.com), HIV research by
online gamers
(http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/v18/n10/abs/nsmb.2119.html),
networked science
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653573191370088.html
)
-- those are a few of many examples I've collected lately.

 
  

    
One downside of online collaboration is that it's not always clear
who's in the mix and how engaged they are in the collaboration. What
are some best practices for making a virtual, distributed collaboration
work? 
  

    
You hint at one of the answers in your question, John -- the better
people know each other or at least know something of each other, the
richer the collaboration is likely to be (although there are forms of
collaboration such as crowdsourcing that don't require people to know
anything about each other). So informal channels of communication seem
to be helpful -- at least they have been in open source production, in
Wikipedia, in the creation of the Internet and the Web. Be careful
about extrinsic rewards, especially financial, which can kill the
collaborative spirit in some circumstances. But leaderboards can be
useful. Regular synchronous meetings with platforms like Googlt+
Hangouts or Blackboard Collaborate have worked with me when people
spend most of t heir time communicating asynchronously. And of course,
when there are possibilities for face to face meetings, take them. And
don't forget that idle chit-chat lubricates trust, which leads to more
contributions, so encourage off-topic conversations.
  

    
Twitter chats seem are popular, yet it seems like a media mismatch for
what people are trying to do - i.e. taking a medium created for short
burst drive-by "microblog" post and try to adapt it for sustained
conversation. Do you have any thoughts about the strengths and
weaknesses of Twitter, and where it best fits in a suite of tools for
collaboration? 
  

    
I haven't hung out on the WELL in many years. Are you telling me that
people no longer use "Send?" For the kind of person who is amused
rather than confused by multiple channels, part of the fun of the WELL
for me was the mixture of long, thoughtful (or not) asynchronous chunks
of writing with short, synchronous bursts. Twitter chat is not really
such a great medium, but it IS a way to draw people into a community,
since it is open to anyone who uses the hashtag -- the educators on
Twitter have a regular, lively tweetchat (#edchat) and there are others
who meet regularly. I did write at some length in the book about
Twitter, which was adopted from the piece I wrote some time ago when I
got tired of shallow critiques of Twitter who didn't know how to use
it:
http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/05/11/twitter-literacy-i-refuse-to-make-
up-a-twittery-name-for-it/
  

    
Many people don't use "send" because they're not using the
command-line picospan interface, they're here via the WELL Engaged web
interface instead. However there are so many alternatives now for
instant messaging, I'm sure there's still many combining async with
realtime yak.

Twitter can be adapted to so many uses. I first learned of it at SXSW
2007, where it started building a critical mass of adopters; we were
using it there to coordinate ad hoc meetings. SXSW was starting to
grow, it was harder to find your friends in familiar places, and great
to have a way to coordinate on the fly.

I found myself comparing Twitter to the sort of IRC chatrooms you
leave open as you're doing other stuff, and jump in and out of
conversations as they're happening in realtime. As you say in the book,
trying to read Twitter as somehow continuous, keeping up with every
post, could drive you stark raving mad. Dipping in and out at random
can be interesting, information flow as i ching, and there are
structured ways to search and track conversations. 

I thought Facebook was going to die at one point, but it succeeded -
by making its activity stream a bit more like Twitter.