Candleblog

Here are a few bits and pieces that have made me go “hmm” and rub my chin beard in the last few days…

Spine linked to an Atlantic Monthly piece about how Google may be making us stupid, or more accurately, how the ways our brains are made to work when interfacing with the ‘net can make us less adept at consuming longer, more complex forms of media, like books…

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Dan Gilmore has a piece at Center for Citizen Media about helping “almost-journalists”  like the ACLU do real journalism…

The ACLU still works hard to get its reports covered by the Times and other national media organizations. The traditional media retain a powerful role in helping the public learn about important issues. But advocates have new avenues, which they are learning to use more effectively.

They’d be even more effective, I believe, if they applied the principles of journalism to their work.

They’re falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.

Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they’ve been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.

By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides’ arguments, however weak. (That’s sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow posted a review of Jonathan Zittrain’s provocatively-titled The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It.  He praises Zittrain’s writing and thinking but disagrees on some of the fundamentals…

Zittrain fears that the power of the Internet to let creeps do bad things will lead to a regulatory backlash and a series of Draconian laws that take away all the social benefits of the Internet, and that this will be enabled by a consumer backlash against general-purpose PCs in favor of “tethered appliances” — TiVos, iPhones, etc — that grant a measure of security by taking away the user-modifiability that is at the heart of the principle of generativity.

Here’s where I started to get a little frustrated. I agree that the legislative backlash is here — it’s impossible to miss — but I disagree that it’s being driven by identity thieves and spyware vendors. I think it’s being driven by the same authoritarian urge that gave rise to all the other spying and control laws that have been passed for centuries. Net-creeps may be the rubric, but that’s as far as it goes.

And speaking of Mr. Doctorow, check out his talk at the American Library Association conference last month.  It’s about privacy and the net and he makes an important distinction between “private” and “secret….”