Do any of us honestly believe that our powers of concentration are enhanced by multitasking? Of course not. The question is, what are we gaining by having all this near-instantaneous access to information, and does it in some sense outweigh what we give up in sustained concentration?
Not only that, but the internet gives us the ability to interact—at virtually no cost, and across vast distances—with other individuals; and of course it gives us the ability to participate, ourselves, in discourse. This social, interactive dimension of the internet can't be dismissed as just another source of distraction. It's the ability to collaborate in real time, to compare, to debate. That kind of connection and combination--that's a rich primordial soup out of which emergent phenomena are apt to arise.
Many have argued that what we've arguably surrendered in depth we've more than made up for in increased breadth—that we've had a net gain in total volume, in depth times breadth.
I'm more interested in another kind of breadth—the expansion of information horizons the internet has brought to a much, much greater portion of humanity. There's been, in short, a kind of democratization of intelligence.
When you hear people say that "the internet is making us stupid," you need to ask yourself who this "us" they're talking about actually is. If you think about it, in most cases it's implicitly being defined in a very elitist way: Is "us" just a privileged intelligentsia that enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted hours of reading with concentration? I say let us use a more inclusive "us."
One that includes the hundreds of millions in lower-tier cities and in rural areas of China, for instance, who've begun using the internet just in the last five years: tell them that the internet's making "us" stupid. So a generation of privileged Americans and Brits find they can no longer power through chapter after chapter of Tolstoy or Proust. If a much larger generation of long impoverished people across the developing world are seeing their information horizons immeasurably broadened in the bargain, I call that an excellent deal.
Not only is the "us" too narrowly defined, but so is the intelligence that my opponents claim is being sucked out of us by the evil internet. Sure, I'd admire anyone with the pure power of concentration to allow him or her to digest at one sitting several hundreds of pages of Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason. But is that the only type of intelligence worthy of the name?
You see, we're being asked to lament the decline of what is in fact a too-narrowly defined idea of intelligence. Should we prize the ability to concentrate and to read deeply? Absolutely. Should we privilege that type of intelligence over other types? I can't see why we should.
excellent challenge to west-centric pov
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Digital butler: This universal in-box pulls in e-mails, text messages, tweets, Facebook updates, and more. It’s an effort to make it easier for people to handle all the communication technologies offered by a smart phone.
Credit: Nokia Research CenterCommunications
Out of Many, One In-box
Nokia experiments with a universal in-box that combines messages from many separate apps into a single place.
- Wednesday, November 24, 2010
- By Tom Simonite
Excerpt:
"The universal in-box looks superficially like a regular e-mail in-box. But the stream of recent messages can be a mixture of e-mails, text messages, call logs, tweets, Facebook updates, Flickr photos, and more.
Just last week, Facebook launched its Messages product—aka an "e-mail killer"—to combine e-mail with text messages and private Facebook messages. Smart phones can already receive messages sent over those and other communications channels, but the messages are stuck in separate app "silos." "The universal in-box brings together all those communications into one place so the user does not need to check separate apps," says Rafael Ballagas, a researcher at Nokia Research Center, in Palo Alto, California.
That makes it easier to track and carry out conversations that span different kinds of messaging. For example, it would be simple to see that someone responded to a Twitter update with a text message. It would also be possible to seamlessly switch methods of communication, and reply to a person's latest Facebook update by e-mailing them."
read full post on www.technologyreview.com
Excerpt:
"Has a viable new medium emerged yet? Who's getting it most right, or least wrong, at the moment?
JL: There are plenty of interesting experiments but no clear direction. Digitally, the iPad has shown potential but little true definition of what might come next. It hints at how curated content might be better presented than it has been on free-for-all websites. The iPad social network aggregator FlipBoard is an excellent example of how material could be presented using algorithmic design to take raw words and lift them beyond a mere list. Some of the blog apps are interesting: Mashable, Coolhunting. Pulse News is another interesting app to watch. But there's also the business side. A key development will be how publishers manage to link print and apps.
JJ: Making our editorial content available on key platforms means we can be sure we are reaching as big an audience as possible. Just as there are several strong British and American news websites, there are several strong iPhone and iPad apps in the news category. It is no concidence that they have been developed on the whole by the blue-chip publishers on the US east coast and in London.
JLW: Who knows, but if we sit around waiting for the perfect medium, we'll never progress at all. Everyone who has made a start deserves a pat on the back, but it's probably the companies with the deepest pockets that are going to make the biggest advances and the biggest mistakes. It may get even more interesting when the smaller guys get involved.
Where do the iPad and similar tablets fit in with that? Are they the answer?
JL: They are only the latest step to what's next. They are excellent devices for enjoying video and browsing the web but have yet to definitively prove themselves as a workable home for magazine-type content.
JJ: The iPad is a fabulous piece of kit and still in its infancy; that is perhaps the most exciting aspect of it. Version one offers stunning opportunities for publishers and consumers alike, but what about versions two, three, four. . .? The iPad is just one way forward — and not the answer — for publishers as they adapt and progress in the fast-changing digital marketplace.
JLW: If tablets become as ubiquitous as the radio became in the Twenties and Thirties, so that even poor people have access to one somewhere, we may see a big change. There may be unintended consequences: Hitler, for example, wouldn't have been so effective without radio, nor would Bing Crosby."
read full post on the telegraph.co.uk