Archive for the 'Culture' Category

He Links Me, He Links Me Not

Published by Jarred on June 7, 2010 in Blogging, Culture, Google, Reading and Web 2.0. View Comments

I’ve been following Nicholas Carr’s thoughts and writing since I picked up The Big Switch a couple of years ago (I analyzed one particular section of the book here on Tropophilia). Shortly after that — right around when I was getting ready to move to California to join Google — Carr published the very controversial piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. Since then, he has been developing and expanding his theory that the Internet is rewiring our brains for the worse. He has just this month released the results in book form with The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.

Carr’s central argument is that with the increased use of the Web comes a decreased ability to engage in long-form reading and deep thought. Now, a while back, I blew up at another author who made similar claims without providing much, if any, causal evidence. I am happy to see from a few of Carr’s recent shorter pieces that he at least relies on published research to back his arguments.

Calls for “Delinkification”

Believe it or not, I’ve actually just committed what Carr deems to be one of the primary crimes perpetrated by the Web against deep reading and thinking: inline, contextual hyperlinking. He explains in a post (oops, I did it again!) on his blog:

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.

Carr describes a multiplicity of reasons why the link distracts from long-form reading and comprehension:

The link, by its very existence, makes us pause in our consideration and comprehension of the overlying and surrounding text to make a decision: do I click this, or do I ignore it?
If we choose to click it, we are taken to a different page completely. Our brains must reset to prepare to capture and understand the new information. We lose focus on what we were on before.
The problem can compound if the new page itself has links for us to decide on, and possibly follow further away from the original document.

Carr concludes that “people who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.”

In his blog post, Carr cites a few experiments in “bottom linking” that seek to mitigate this allegedly attention-degrading practice. It’s just what it sounds like: instead of linking within the text to other destinations on the web, one simply collects links at the bottom of the post. I’ve seen this from time to time, and I don’t like it for a few reasons.

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Book Review: Rework

Published by Taylor on March 23, 2010 in Book Reviews, Books, Business, Careers, Culture, Entrepreneurship and Productivity. View Comments

The dream employee for a lot of companies is a twenty-something with as little of a life as possible outside of work–someone who’ll be fine working fourteen-hour days and sleeping under his desk. But packing a room full of these burn-the-midnight-oil types isn’t as great as it seems. [. . .] You don’t need more hours; you need better hours. When people have something to do at home, they get down to business. They get their work done because they have somewhere else to be. They find ways to be more efficient because they have to.

-Rework (affiliate link)

The 37 Signals team behind the project management software I and thousands of others use daily (Basecamp) published a new book laying out some of the principles behind their success. They call Rework a “by product” of their business; the equivalent of a cookbook written by a chef confident enough that their mastery will still trump any upstart competitors armed with detailed instructions. One of the ideas promoted in Rework, after all, is to strengthen and promote your business by teaching–customers, other business owners, even competitors:

[E]mulate famous chefs. They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? This book is our cookbook.

And it’s full of direct, combative, written-with-purpose recipes for running an un-apologetically small but thriving business. The book is organized into a series of brief essays on a variety of work topics; read on for a few passages I found particularly compelling and a special video dialogue where Jarred and I discuss the book:

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Ideas About Ideas

Published by Jarred on December 20, 2009 in Advertising, Books, Business, Computing, Consumer Behavior, Copyright, Culture, Design, Environment, Google, Health, Legal Issues, Lifestyle, News, Politics, Privacy, Science, Social Networks, Space and Web 2.0. View Comments

The New York Times recently issued the ninth edition of its annual Ideas feature for its magazine. I’ve read through most of the entries and found several really fascinating; others were also interesting but neglected to surface other important angles. I thought I’d use this space to highlight both, seeing as Tropophilia is all about ideas that may bring about change in our world.

The Advertisement That Watches You - I’ll leave the details of this particular implementation to the article, but the essence of the technology is a billboard with a built-in camera that, through facial recognition technology, can tell when anyone within a certain radius of the advertisement is looking at it. This one, interestingly, changes to its main message when people are not looking. You can imagine, however, how this technology might develop over time: electronic ads could be powered off until it new there were passersby actually looking at the space. Facial recognition could also be used to power an impressions-based ads payment system, much like exists on the web: advertisers would only have to pay per “view” or elapsed “eyeball time” on the ad. Of course, such commercial use of facial recognition technology also raises enormous privacy concerns (How long are camera images kept? Would the technology eventually be used to identify people and serve ads based on their personal interests, or even the clothes they were wearing or the book they are reading at that moment?). It will be interesting to see how this area grows, if at all.

Bicycle Highways - I thought this was a cool idea, but I’m not sure I see it gaining widespread adoption outside of cities that have significant numbers of bike commuters. What I think is really clever is the possibilities raised with GPS and RFID technology that would allow for bikers to create on-the-fly pelotons, which in turn would be able to gain privileges for traffic lights and such: a mix between EZPass and carpool lanes. Throw in a custom social network for the city so you could plan your departures in order to meet up with a regular riding group, and this could be really great for those cities with big biking cultures.

The Counterfeit Self - I think this research has implications for the Web. There has long been a debate about authentication online: when writing a blog, posting comments, or joining a social network, is it “better” for users to have the ability to remain anonymous or pseudonymous, or should they be encouraged or required to use their real identity (obfuscated to whatever degree they prefer). Many argue that encouraging or requiring authentication would, for example, solve the problem evidence by the (often hateful and troll-like) comments of any given YouTube video. Opponents summon the right to free dom of speech as a defense of anonymous use of the web. Some governments, like South Korea, actually require what is referred to as “real name verification” for websites in their jurisdiction that surpass a certain threshold of users; users are required to authenticate against a national registry before they can interact with the site. Considering the idea of how behavior is influenced by fake identity could offer a fresh perspective in this debate.

Good Enough is the New Great - One aspect that this idea doesn’t cover (and I can’t remember anymore if the Wired article does or not) is information. Just as consumers are turning to cheap cameras, low-fi music files, and YouTube videos, they are also turning to Twitter for their information fixes. Many argue that in moving from mainstream to social media as our main source of information, we make a similar sacrifice of quality for convenience. I think that may be true in the short-term, but I’m hopeful that just like companies are starting to fit better and better sensors into those tiny Flip cameras, so will Twitter eventually recapture some of the fidelity of the “news” that it carries.

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Reconsidering Personal Branding as a Concept and a Practice

Published by Taylor on December 18, 2009 in Careers, Culture, Lifestyle and Social Networks. View Comments

A thought on personal branding from my friend Luis Sandoval, from his latest newsletter:

All of us have a level of personal value that in today’s connected community driven conversations, we can establish very quickly. This personal value relies heavily on the skills you hold and in how you use them. With access to social networks, online media outlets, and the ability to expand your network, personal branding can catapult you and the knowledge you have to new heights.

This strikes a chord with me, as I’m typically skeptical of “personal branding” as a discipline. It always feels inherently phony; as something you do to hide anything that doesn’t fit in whatever box you’re carefully crafting for yourself. But lately I’m giving in a bit to the personal branding evangelists, mainly because I’m gaining more and more confidence that who I am personally and professionally will, on balance, lead to more opportunities than disappointments if it is reflected online.

Part of what always bothered me about personal branding was a sense that you needed to be “on message” at all times. I first experienced social media in a purely social way as a college student on Facebook. The evolution of social media into a tool for business, politics, and activism still hasn’t changed my prevailing view that certain social networks can and should remain social in nature. Any friend of mine who seems “on message” on Facebook actually strikes me as being “incredibly dull.” Thus, any attempt at message discipline on my part results in a bit of self-loathing: I worry that I’m becoming “one of those people” who seem unable to let their guard down long enough to genuinely converse with people online or publish an honest, unfiltered reaction to news or life events.

All of the personal branding experts (and blogging experts, for that matter) will tell you to pick a single topic and stick to it. The word from social media “pros” is to develop expertise and build your reputation. I’m interested in many different things, and I go through phases of intense interest in very random industries, issues, concepts, and hobbies. I liken my consumption of online content to a continuation of the liberal arts education I so enjoyed. As a result I have trouble focusing with any consistency on one topic, one angle, or one message. Nowhere is this more apparent than, well, right here: the theme of this blog is “change.” And to think, Jarred and I worried that would be too limiting.

But now I’ve come to view my own brand—and, by extension, the concept of personal branding—to be inclusive of both my authentic self (versus a caricature crafted for the internet) and of my varied, ever evolving interests.

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Worrying About the Real Time Web

Published by Taylor on October 25, 2009 in Culture, Sociology, Twitter and Web 2.0. View Comments

Paul Carr at TechCrunch as a long and thoughtful post questioning triumphialism about the real-time web. Carr ties together experiences at a recent Weezer show (similar to the mobile-phone-armed masses I wrote about in this post) as well as his discomfort watching how social media seems to be driven in the wake of disasters, and how perilous Twitter and other real-time communications can be in an environment like a jury room (an issue I’d like to see some lawyers respond to like this). It’s well worth reading the full piece, which I’ll pull a few large chunks from here:

[The] real-time mentality – pictures/tweets or it didn’t happen – continues to seep into every aspect of our lives, both personally and professionally. Whereas once we might attend a conference to watch the speakers and perhaps learn something, today our priority is to live blog it – to ensure our followers know we’re on the inside; first with whatever news might be broken. And it’s not just journalists doing the live-blogging, but anyone with a laptop and a wifi connection.Worse still, we’re told that this is the future. The real-time web – a web where every single thought that enters our head, or image that passes our eyes, can be instantly captured, shared and archived for the approbation of our friends and followers. [..]

The assumption at all of these events is the same: real-time is where we’re heading; real time is good. Newspapers were good, cable news was great, blogs were better, instant attention bursts are best.

Hmmmm.

[...] it’s not just a question of micro-ego: when a juror is tweeting teasers from the jury room, part of them must know that a guilty verdict is much more exciting to their audience than one of innocence. How can that not subconsciously influence them? Likewise when we – the real-time generation – watch someone being attacked in the street or a plane crashing into our building and instinctively reach for our phones, can we be sure that our first impulse will be to dial 911, rather than firing up Tweetdeck or clicking the camera icon to ensure we get props for being there? I mean, really sure? In a perverse twist on the uncertainty principle, knowing that our behavior is being observed inevitably changes it for the more dramatic. Just look at reality TV.

And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.

When I wrote about some of these difficult questions, I defended those who would tweet and share and document their experience online out of the belief–one I still hold–that the enriching experience of the social web is our ability to be many places at once and maintain an ambient awareness (Jarred brought this term to my attention, and I love it) about the activity of those we love and those with whom we wish to be connected. Ultimately, understandings of balance and moderation fuel this debate. Journalists try their hardest not to “become the story.” That mandate is hard to follow when we can all be at times documentarian, entertainer, friend, expert, citizen, community leader, the subject of news or the target of criticism. The ubiquity of self-publishing tools (in other words, the social- and real-time-web) demands that we define for ourselves how far we will go, and at what cost (if at all) we will craft our reality to draw pageviews and re-tweets.

I think it is absolutely correct and important to question the real-time web. But at this point, the “real-time generation” that Carr describes has arrived. It is incumbent upon us–content creators and, perhaps more importantly, consumers–to embrace technology in ways that enrich our lives without detracting from the offline obligations that ultimately define our relationships with others and our commitments to values like integrity, honesty, and justice.