There’s a new book out that Taylor pointed me to a few weeks ago called Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. The book’s website describes the phenomenon in question and the purpose of the book:
The first generation of “Digital Natives” – children who were born into and raised in the digital world – are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed.
But who are these Digital Natives? How are they different from older generations – or “Digital Immigrants” – and what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of these young people who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow.
A book about the impact of technology on an entire generation, written by two law professors? Consider it Kindled, my friends. But wait, there’s more! Make the jump!
Continue reading ‘Who Are The Digital Natives?’
What follows is a recollection of what I remember from 9/11, and how that day changed me. We have little right asking for your participation since we’ve barely been participating in the blog ourselves, but I want to open the comments section of this post to your recollections of that day and how it changed you.
It’s hard to believe that September 11, 2001 was seven years ago. I was a high school junior sitting in French class when our headmaster, Mr. Hames, came over the intercom. Mr. Hames was a highly eccentric man, given to exaggeration and flowery language. So when his impassioned voice communicated to us that “a plane has hit the World Trade Center”, we shook our heads. “Probably a Cessna doing an aerial photo shoot or air tourism”, we all thought (which still would have been a tragedy, but hardly worth interrupting class for).
When the bell rang after class, we turned on the TV in the classroom and saw a picture of the famous smoking scar the plane had punctured in the first tower. The angle and zoom of the camera were such that the size of the hole wasn’t immediately evident; this was certainly a terrible accident, but it was still odd that Mr. Hames has chosen to announce it to our entire school during class. In addition to his eccentricity and proclivity for hyperbole, he was also an academic purist. Our small private school was his domain, and any interruption of the ordinary — from backpacks strewn in the hallway to proposed curriculum changes — was met with an unenviable, one-on-one tirade in his office.
Following my French class, we had a thirty minute “activities period” to have club meetings, attend assemblies, etc. I had lingered a little in the French classroom, and had learned there that it was in fact an airliner that had hit the tower. “What on earth was an airliner doing that close to the city?” I thought, still not knowing that it wasn’t an accident. I made my way to the library, where almost all 350 students and the dozens of teachers at the school were crowding around a row of televisions.
Continue reading ‘How Could I Forget?’
Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, contributed a fascinating piece to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You” examines the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that has been developing alongside the evolution of the Web. Thompson brings a balanced perspective to the debate over the influence that the Internet has on our lives, a debate which recently has been dominated by alarmists who claim (often with little data) that the digital millennium will actually take us a step backwards as a race.
Ambient awareness is the term applied to the “incessant online contact” that characterizes the current developments on the Web. From the Facebook News Feed to Twitter, users are currently preoccupied with accessing an aggregation of tiny details to form a larger picture. The metaphor Thompson chooses is beyond perfect:
Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
And so the mystery behind the obsession with keeping on top of our friends and their “updates” is revealed, even to those who think they had it figured out. It’s not the trees that fascinate us; it’s the forest. It’s on a level just beyond passive perception. We skim and absorb the information, choosing only to dive into the details only when something piques our interest.
So is this good or bad? A step forward, or a step back?
Continue reading ‘When I Heard The Learn’d Software Engineer’
When I first started using a Mac, I read several different blog posts that recommended a program called Quicksilver. Quicksilver, according to its developer, is a “unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.” Put much more simply, it is designed to be a more natural way to interact with you computer.
The basic premise of Quicksilver is that, after “invoking” it with a quick keystroke, you more or less type what you want to happen, and it happens. From sending an image to a friend by email to burning a playlist onto a CD, tasks that would take a few minutes of searching and a multitude of clicks and drags can be accomplished in a few keystrokes.
I never got hooked on Quicksilver, but today Mozilla has released a test version of a similar tool for its popular Firefox browser — ambitiously called Ubiquity — that I believe I will come to embrace and rely on every day. If you’ve ever been frustrated by tasks that you think should be remarkably easy to execute — defining a word, checking the weather, mapping an address and copying that map into an email, etc. — then Ubiquity has that, and more, for you. By invoking the tool and typing “define”, “wikipedia”, “weather”, “google”, “imdb” and other commands followed by a word, the Web’s most popular services are at your fingertips.
Continue reading ‘Ubiquity: Embrace The Rich Web, Naturally’
Well hi there, folks. Massive apologies to you, the readers, for my prolonged absense from the blog, and massive thanks to Taylor for diligently plugging on. I thought I’d be able to devote some time to blogging after finally getting settled in my apartment, but those free hours very quickly turned into hours in front of the TV watching people in much better shape than myself achieving incredible feats of athleticism. I’m also still searching for the right theme upon which to reassert myself here. Now that my job is taken up with thinking about Google and its industry, the last thing I want to do in my free time is think about them some more. Send any tips my way.
Enough with the blabber, let’s get you linked up for the week:
- The good folks on the Google Reader team have invited some political power players to use their product to share the news stories they’re reading, including Senators McCain and Obama.
- France’s reliance on nuclear for almost 80% of its energy is not a vestige of the last century, as demonstrated by the new reactor being built in Normandy.
- The Washington Post reports (and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch laments) that everyone’s favorite Internet radio station, Pandora, might be shutting down soon:
Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies. Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures. As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.
- We’re slipping from frenemy to full-on enemy status with Russia. So this is what the Cold War felt like…
- When asked about his explosive and ever-rising popularity in an interview with Bob Costas, Michael Phelps referred to Facebook and how he’d received so many friend requests from tag-a-longs, some of whom had even bullied him in his youth. You could feel the awkward, silent incomprehension from Bob Costas and Phelps’ mom. Friend requests? Facebook? Whaaaaa?
Short and sweet. I’ll try to pry myself away from Beijing to put fingertips to keyboard this week. Adieu.
