The Shallows at SXSW
March 09, 2010
I will be reading from my forthcoming book, The Shallows, a week from today at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. The reading is scheduled to take place on March 16 at 11:30 am on the Day Stage. If you are in the neighborhood, and are properly badged, please stop by.
Nowness
March 07, 2010
“Ripeness,” Shakespeare told us, “is all.” The Bard did not anticipate the realtime web. On the New Net, ripeness is nothing. Nowness is all, as David Gelernter tells us in his essay "Time to Start Taking the Web Seriously." Web 2.0 was supposed to bring us a creative outpouring of “social production.” Instead it's tossed us into the rapids of instant communication. The Web has become a vast multimedia telephone system, where everyone is on the same party line, exchanging millions of bite-sized updates and alerts with every tick of the clock. Google, Facebook, Twitter: the Net’s commercial giants are locked in a fierce competitive battle to speed up “the stream.”
The Net’s bias, Gelernter explains, is toward the fresh, the new, the now. Nothing is left to ripen. History gets lost in the chatter. But, he suggests, we can correct that bias. We can turn the realtime stream into a “lifestream,” tended by historians, along which the past will crystallize into rich, digital deposits of knowledge. We will leap beyond Web 2.0 to "the post-Web," where all the views are long.
It’s a pretty vision. I wish I could believe it. There are times when human beings are able to correct the bias of a technology. There are other times when we make the bias of an instrument our own. Everything we've seen in the development of the Net over the past 20 years, and, indeed, in the development of mass media over the past 50 years, indicates that what we’re seeing today is an example of the latter phenomenon. We are choosing nowness over ripeness.
This post, which appeared originally, in a slightly different form, at Edge.org., is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.
The crystal stream
March 05, 2010
David Gelernter peers into the ineffable nowness of realtime:
Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.
And then, like his forerunner Vannevar Bush, he conjures up a future in which a technology is refashioned to solve the problem it created:
Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact ... Images, videos and text will accumulate around such streams. Eventually they will become shared cultural monuments in the Cybersphere. Before long, all personal, familial and institutional histories will take visible form in streams. A lifestream is tangible time: as life flashes past on waterskis across time's ocean, a lifestream is the wake left in its trail. Dew crystallizes out of the air along cool surfaces; streams crystallize out of the Cybersphere along veins of time. As streams begin to trickle and then rush through the spring thaw in the Cybersphere, our obsession with "nowness" will recede, the dykes will be repaired and we will clean up the damaged piazza of modern civilization.
Around every technological bend lies utopia, where the streams are crystal and the levees never break.
This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.
A typology of crowds
March 04, 2010
Over the last few days, I've been involved in an email discussion on "The Crowd," which will be excerpted on PBS's Digital Nation site. One thing that has long bothered me about discussions of online crowds is that they tend to yoke lots of different sorts of groups together under a single rubric. Important differences end up being glossed over.
With that in mind, I've been trying to think through the various forms that online crowds take. As a rough starting point, I came up with four:
"Social production crowd": consists of a large group of individuals who lend their distinct talents to the creation of some product like Wikipedia or Linux.
"Averaging crowd": acts essentially as a survey group, providing an average judgment about some complex matter that, in some cases, is more accurate than the judgment of any one individual (the crowd behind prediction markets like the Iowa Electronic Markets, not to mention the stock market and other financial exchanges).
"Data mine crowd": a large group that, through its actions but usually without the explicit knowledge of its members, produces a set of behavioral data that can be collected and analyzed in order to gain insight into behavioral or market patterns (the crowd that, for instance, feeds Google's search algorithm and Amazon's recommendation system).
"Networking crowd": a group that trades information through a shared communication system such as the phone network or Facebook or Twitter.
Clay Shirky, who is also participating in the discussion, suggested a fifth crowd type for this list:
"Transactional crowd": a group used to instigate and coordinate what are mainly or solely point-to-point transactions, such as the type of crowd gathered by Match.com, eBay, Innocentive, LinkedIn and similar services. (I would think that contests like the Netflix Prize also fall into this category.)
Each of these "crowds" (and there are surely others) has its own unique characteristics and its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Some crowds, for instance, gain their usefulness from the individual talents of their members. Others (notably the "averaging" sort) gain their usefulness by essentially filtering out those individual talents. Some crowds might be called "hives," which implies some degree of individual unconsciousness about how one's work or behavior fits into the larger whole, while others aren't anything like mindless hives. Some crowds become more useful as they get bigger; others work best when kept to a small scale. "Crowdsourcing" and its cousin "digital sharecropping" may draw on any or all of the different types of crowds, to various effects and with various ethical implications.
As this nascent typology indicates, there's not really any such thing as "The Crowd."
UPDATE: Tom Lord, in a comment, suggests a sixth category:
"Event crowd": A group organized through online communication for a particular event, which can take place either online or in the real world and may have a political, social, aesthetic, or other purpose.
Raising the realtime child
February 21, 2010
Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type's Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell.
Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned - and rightly so - that their kids will be at a disadvantage in the realtime milieu in which we all increasingly live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days. If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers. "Can we even be said to be alive," one agitated young mother wrote me, "if our status updates go unread?" The answer, of course, is no. In the realtime environment, the absence of interactive stimuli, even for brief periods of "time," may result in a state of reflective passivity indistinguishable from nonexistence. On a more practical level, a lack of realtime skills is sure to constrain a young person's long-term job prospects. At best, he or she will be fated to spend his or her days involved in some form of manual labor, possibly even working out of doors with severely limited access to screens. At worst, he or she will have to find a non-tenure-track position in academia.
Fortunately, raising the realtime child is not difficult. The newborn human infant, after all, leads a purely realtime existence, immersed entirely in the "stream" of realtime alerts and stimuli. As long as the child is kept in the crosscurrents of the messaging stream from the moment of parturition - the biological womb replaced immediately with the wi-fi and/or 3G womb - adaptation to the realtime environment will likely be seamless and complete. It is only when a sense that time may consist of something other than the immediate moment is allowed to impinge on the child's consciousness that maladaption to realtime becomes a possibility. Hence, the most pressing job for the parent is to ensure that the realtime child is kept in a device-rich networked environment at all times.
[photo credit: Wesley Fryer; CC BY 2.0]
It is also essential that the realtime child never be allowed to run a cognitive surplus. His or her mental accounts must always be kept in perfect balance, with each synaptical firing being immediately deployed for a well-defined chore, preferably involving the manipulation of symbols on a computer screen in a collaborative social-production exercise. If cognitive cycles are allowed to go to waste, the child may drift into an introspective "dream state" outside the flow of the realtime stream. It is wise to ensure that your iPhone is well-populated with apps suitable for children, as this will provide a useful backup should your child break, lose, or otherwise be separated from his or her own network-enabled devices. Printed books should in general be avoided, as they also tend to promote an introspective dream state, though multifunctional devices that include e-reading apps, such as Apple's forthcoming iPad, are permissible.
The out-of-doors poses particular problems for the realtime child, as nature has in the past earned a reputation for inspiring states of introspectiveness and even contemplativeness in impressionable young people. (Some psychologists even suggest that looking out a window may be dangerous to the mental health of the realtime child.) Sometimes it is simply impractical to keep a child from interacting with the natural world. At these moments, it is all the more important that a child be outfitted with portable electronic devices, including music players, smartphones, and gaming instruments, in order to ensure no break in the digital stream. If you are not able to physically accompany your child on expeditions into the natural world, it is a good idea to send text messages to your child every few minutes just to be on the safe side. The establishment of Twitter accounts for children is also highly recommended.
[photo credit: Robert Scoble; CC BY 2.0]
The challenges of keeping your child in a realtime environment can be trying, but remember: history is on your side. The realtime environment becomes increasingly ubiquitous with each passing day. It is also important to remember that one of the great joys of modern parenthood is documenting your realtime infant's or toddler's special moments through texts, tweets, posts, uploaded photos, and YouTube clips. The realtime child presents ideal messaging-fodder for the realtime parent.
Realtime is a journey that you and your child take together. Every moment is unique because every moment is disconnected from both the one that precedes it and the one that follows it. Realtime is a state of perpetual renewal and unending and undifferentiated stimulus. The joy of infancy continues forever.
This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.
The end of corporate computing, revisited
February 10, 2010
Five years ago, in early 2005, I wrote an article for the MIT Sloan Management Review called "The End of Corporate Computing." The article, which predicted an imminent shift to "utility computing," was the seed for my book The Big Switch. Usually, the article lies behind the Review's paywall, but for the moment it is freely available to read. Here's a bit from the beginning of the piece:
[Information technology] is beginning an inexorable shift from being an asset that companies own in the form of computers, software and myriad related components to being a service that they purchase from utility providers. Few in the business world have contemplated the full magnitude of this change or its far-reaching consequences. To date, popular discussions of utility computing have rarely progressed beyond a recitation of IT vendors’ marketing slogans ...
The prevailing rhetoric is, moreover, too conservative. It assumes that the existing model of IT supply and use will endure, as will the corporate data center that lies at its core. But that view is perilously shortsighted. The traditional model’s economic foundation already is crumbling and is unlikely to survive in the long run. As the earlier transformation of electricity supply suggests, IT’s shift from a fragmented capital asset to a centralized utility service will be momentous. It will overturn strategic and operating assumptions, alter industrial economics, upset markets and pose daunting challenges to every user and vendor. The history of the commercial application of information technology has been characterized by astounding leaps, but nothing that has come before — not even the introduction of the personal computer or the opening of the Internet — will match the upheaval that lies just over the horizon.
A little breathless, maybe, but I was looking in the right direction. Here's the rest of it.
Also out from behind the Review's paywall is Andrew McAfee's influential 2006 article "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration."
The library, debooked
The New York Times has published a debate on the question "Do school libraries need books?" I am one of the contributors, along with Cushing Academy's James Tracy.
Information wants to be free my ass continued
February 09, 2010
Some followup on my earlier post:
In today's New York Times, Jenna Wortham reports:
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline. And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.
Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes:
Even if we feel like we're consuming the New York Times and Taylor Swift's new album for free over the Internet, we're paying thousands of dollars a year to access all that "free" content ... We tell ourselves that we're paying for connectivity, but obviously we're paying to be connected to information. So how are media publishers failing if we're paying more than ever for our media? The key seems to be that consumers have learned to put a price on access, but not on individual content ... Today's media mindset is "A thousand dollars for access, and not one cent for content."
As an example of the prevailing trend, the US Department of Labor reports that over the past decade (through 2008) the amount an average American spends annually on newspapers and magazines has dropped by about 40%, from $97 to $61, but the amount spent for Internet access has more than quadrupled, from $49 to $222:
The average American's annual telephone bill, including both landline and cellular, rose from $914 in 2001 to $1,127 in 2008, an increase of nearly 25%, according to the Labor Dept.
As for spending on cable television, the Census Bureau reports that the average American's annual bill has gone from $256 in 2004 to a projected $401 this year, a jump of 57%.
How about radio, the original free broadcast medium? The Census Bureau reports that per capita expenditures on radio programming have increased about tenfold from $1.19 in 2004 to an estimated $12.25 this year.
I'm telling you, that free information really adds up.
Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly
February 04, 2010
I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.
Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It's even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers - those over 30 - who are doing more blogging than they used to.
Here's how Pew puts the bad news:
While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.
They even have a chart, just to rub salt in the wound:
When I blog these days, I feel like I should be sitting in a rocking chair, wearing a highly absorptive undergarment, and writing posts debunking some overhyped new bunion treatment (iPads?).
Yesterday I was out taking a walk and I happened to pass a group of tweens congregating on a street corner. I heard one of them say, "Hey, that guy's a blogger," and then they all started throwing their empty energy-drink cans at me. I had to take refuge in a Starbucks. I spent a half hour crying into my double-tall.
I hear that in middle schools "blogger" has become the most common term of abuse, playing roughly the same role that "wuss" used to play:
"You're such a blogger, Derek."
"You're the blogger, Sean."
"Am not."
"Are too!"
Blogger jokes are turning into the new big thing on college campuses:
Q: How many bloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Who cares?
Very funny.
Eric Schmidt's second thoughts
January 30, 2010
I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I've been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net's effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which came yesterday:
July 30, 2008: "I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? The Atlantic: ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ I mean, we’ve got a problem if this is true, right? In the article, the author ... points out that deep reading is equal to deep thinking, and since we’re not reading deep anymore, we’re obviously not deep thinking. And what I was realizing in reading this – and I encourage you all to read it – is that this is exactly what people said when color television arrived in my home in Virginia 40 years ago. This is also what people said 25 years ago when the MTV phenomenon occurred, about short attention spans and so forth. And I observe that we’re smarter than ever. So the important point here is that [despite] all of these sort of histrionics about the role of information and other changes, society is enormously powerful, enormously capable of adapting to the threats."
March 6, 2009: “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that.”
January 29, 2010: “The one thing that I do worry about is the question of 'deep reading.' As the world looks to these instantaneous devices ... you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines and so forth. That probably has an effect on cognition, probably has an effect on reading."
I'm glad Schmidt has continued to ponder this issue, and I salute him for having the courage to air his concerns publicly.
Tweet fantasy
January 28, 2010
How cool would it have been if Twitter had been invented a couple hundred years ago so our forebears could have used it?
transcendo: RT @emerson new idea: "the making a fact the subject of thought raises it" http://bit.ly/cAhzDL (expand)<----interesting!
J. D. Salinger and me
I just heard the sad news that J. D. Salinger has died. He was 91.
I went to school at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is just a few miles north of Cornish, New Hampshire, where Salinger lived. During the summer between my junior and senior year, I had a job at the circulation desk at the Dartmouth library. I was working one morning when my boss tapped me on the shoulder and motioned with his head over to the side of the desk. I just caught a glimpse of a tall, slender, slightly stooped man going through the doorway into the stacks. "That's J. D. Salinger," my boss whispered.
Holy crap, I thought. I just saw J. D. Salinger.
About ten minutes later Salinger suddenly reappeared at the desk, holding a dollar bill. I went over to him, and he said he needed change for the Xerox machine. I took his dollar and gave him four quarters.
That's my claim to fame: I gave J. D. Salinger change for a buck.
From writing to texting
The Britannica Blog is running, in conjunction with The Futurist magazine, a forum on Learning & Literacy in the Digital Age, which includes a piece by me on the resilience of the written word. (The brief piece actually originally appeared in a recent issue of The Futurist).
First paragraph:
The written word seems so horribly low tech. It hasn’t changed much for a few millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks invented symbols for vowels. In our twitterific age of hyperspeed progress, there’s something almost offensive in such durability, such pigheaded resilience. You want to grab the alphabet by the neck, give it a shake, and say, Get off the stage, dammit. Your time is up.
Read the rest of it.
Hello iPad, Goodbye PC
January 27, 2010
The New Republic has published my commentary on Apple's iPad announcement. I reprint it here (with the important second sentence, which was cut from the New Republic version):
The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs mounted a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer. What made the moment epochal was not so much the gadget itself - an oversized iPod Touch tricked out with an e-reader application and a few other new features - but the clouds of hype that attended its arrival.
Tablet computers have been kicking around for a decade, but consumers have always shunned them. They’ve been viewed as nerdy-looking smudge-magnets, limited by their cumbersome shape and their lack of a keyboard. Tablets were a solution to a problem no one had.
The rapturous anticipation of Apple’s tablet - the buildup to Jobs’s announcement blurred the line between media feeding-frenzy and orgiastic pagan ritual - shows that our attitude to the tablet form has shifted. Tablets suddenly look attractive. Why? Because the nature of personal computing has changed.
Until recently, we mainly used our computers to run software programs (Word, Quicken) installed on our hard drives. Now, we use them mainly to connect to the vast databases of the Internet - to “the cloud,” as the geeks say. And as the Internet has absorbed the traditional products of media - songs, TV shows, movies, games, the printed word - we’ve begun to look to our computers to act as multifunctional media players. They have to do all the work that was once done by specialized technologies - TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, books - as well as run a myriad of software apps. The computer business and the media business are now the same business.
The transformation in the nature of computing has turned the old-style PC into a dinosaur. A bulky screen attached to a bulky keyboard no longer fits with the kinds of things we want to do with our computers. The shortcomings of the PC have created, the iPad hype suggests, a yearning for a new kind of device - portable, flexible, always connected - that takes computing into the cloud era.
Suddenly, in other words, the tablet is a solution to a problem everyone has. Or at least it’s one possible solution. The computing market is now filled with all sorts of networked devices, each seeking to fill a lucrative niche. There are dozens of netbooks, the diminutive cousins to traditional laptops, from manufacturers like Acer and Asus. There are e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. There are smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus One. There are gaming consoles like Nintendo's Wii and the Microsoft’s Xbox. In some ways, personal computing has returned to the ferment of its earliest days, when the market was fragmented among lots of contending companies, operating systems, and technical standards.
With the iPad, Apple is hoping to bridge all the niches. It wants to deliver the killer device for the cloud era, a machine that will define computing’s new age in the way that the Windows PC defined the old age. The iPad is, as Jobs said today, “something in the middle,” a multipurpose gadget aimed at the sweet spot between the tiny smartphone and the traditional laptop. If it succeeds, we’ll all be using iPads to play iTunes, read iBooks, watch iShows, and engage in iChats. It will be an iWorld.
But will it succeed? The iPad is by no means a sure bet. It still, after all, is a tablet - fairly big and fairly heavy. Unlike an iPod or an iPhone, you can’t stick an iPad in your pocket or pocketbook. It also looks to be a cumbersome device. The iPad would be ideal for a three-handed person - two hands to hold it and another to manipulate its touchscreen - but most of humans, alas, have only a pair of hands. And with a price that starts at $500 and rises to more than $800, the iPad is considerably more expensive than the Kindles and netbooks it will compete with.
But whether it finds mainstream success or not, the iPad is the clearest sign yet that we’ve entered a new era of computing, in which media and software have merged in the Internet cloud. It’s hardly a surprise that Apple - more than Microsoft, IBM, or even Google - is defining the terms of this new era. Thanks to Steve Jobs, a bohemian geek with the instincts of an impresario, Apple has always been as much about show biz as about data processing. It sees its products as performances and its customers as both audience members and would-be artists.
Apple endured its darkest days during the early 1990s, when the PC had lost its original magic and turned into a drab, utilitarian tool. Buyers flocked to Dell’s cheap, beige boxes. Computing back then was all about the programs. Now, computing is all about the programming - the words and sounds and pictures and conversations that pour out of the Internet’s cloud and onto our screens. Computing, in other words, has moved back closer to the ideal that Steve Jobs had when he founded Apple. Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer.
Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.
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