Question Technology

The Tender Ears of the Blogosphere

Pretty much everyone and their dog has commented on Nick Carr's piece "Is Google making us stupid?"  Most offer up banal anecdotes to counter Carr's claim but ignore the primary sources/studies he mentions.  I didn't offer my own opinion because I don't think this is a matter of opinion, it's a matter of science.  Either research shows there is a new effect or it doesn't.

Two responses in particular bother me.  First, Seth Finkelstein criticised Carr for not being "technology-positive" enough and for writing too much in the style of "fogeyism."  His worry is that techies won't listen to people who sound old or cranky.  That may be true but the answer isn't to water down criticism.  Part of growing up is learning to listen to people unlike yourself -- even people you disagree with.  A technology background does not teach you to think critically about technology and society; if anything it leaves you with a deficit (yes, I speak from experience).

Link: http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001349.html

The second response is by Danah Boyd and I don't know whether she's talking about Carr's piece or something else, but I'll assume she is (my second guess is Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation).  Her post is another meta-comment and is about how to respond to "quasi-legitimate trolls in an attention economy."  She characterizes some writers as attention-seeking trolls and is having trouble ignoring them so asks for advice.  I asked in a comment for clarification of what defines a troll vs. a rational critic you disagree with and also what books she was talking about.  I was rebuffed so I won't ask again -- I'm afraid of appearing to be a troll myself.

My problem with Boyd's point is that it's grossly unfair to call Carr or Bauerlein trolls (Keen and Siegel may be a little closer, but still don't meet the definition in my opinion).  To be a troll (a term borrowed from the Internet, of course) implies an irrational attention-seeker who ignores logic and simply repeats their opinion to annoy someone.  These writers, however, are drawing on real evidence to support their arguments and are engaging in rational discussion.  They may be wrong but they deserve an intelligent response.

There's an irony in Boyd's post -- she claims Internet-style trolls are showing up more and more in real life.  What she misses is that maybe real life is the same and what has transferred over from the internet is the habit of labeling people as trolls as an excuse not to listen to them.

Link: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/06/22/feeding_quasile.html

I started this blog three years ago to try to point out the many good books that have been written on technology's impact on society, as well as the excellent work that continues to be done by people in fields such as science and technology studies.  What still surprises me is how shallow and closed-minded most discussion on the Internet tends to be.  Most of the smartest stuff is still offline.

Understanding Web 2.0

Gag gift spotted in a bookstore today: pills for Understanding Web 2.0 from PlacebosRUs.com.

The net has no time for respect

The Internet got and spread the news of Tim Russert's death a whole 30 minutes early, subverting NBC's wishes to keep the news private until Russert's family could be informed.  The person who "broke" the news, on Wikipedia, has been fired from his job at an NBC-affiliated company.  Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider writes "Well, Internets, time to rally around your Woodstein."  (Wikipedia/Tim Russert Deep Throat: Fired)

Oh please.  Without knowing the details of the employee's contract, it's hard to judge whether firing was warranted, but still -- the comparison is just silly.

From the New York Times: Delaying News in the Era of the Internet.

Tom Slee's new book that you can write: Explosion!

This is pretty funny: My New Book: Explosion!

p.s. I'm sticking to short/few posts for the near future because TypePad is all kinds of broken since they "upgraded" their editor. May be time to switch to WordPress or something.

More hydrogen

There's lots of debate happening about this topic, of course.  Romm sounds convincing but I don't know enough to say whether he's correct.  I just listened to a debate about this topic on CBC Radio's Ideas: The Hydrogen Solution (it's a 3-part series, but I've only heard part 3).  David Scott argued the pro-hydrogen side and Norm Rubin argued the anti- side.  It was interesting but I came away feeling more confused (though still leaning towards anti) because both were pretty good at demolishing their opponent's arguments.  Scott did a good job of poking holes in some standard environmentalist lines against hydrogen and nuclear.  Rubin sounded at times suspiciously like a climate change denier, so I don't know how credible he is.

Hydrogen Car Hype

Joseph Romm has a good post at Technology Review debunking the current hype about hydrogen cars.  Excerpt:

Would you buy a car that costs 10 times as much as a hybrid gasoline-electric, like the Prius? What if I told you it had half the range of the hybrid? What if I told you most cities didn't have a single hydrogen fueling station? Not interested yet? This should be the deal closer: what if I told you it wouldn't have lower greenhouse-gas emissions than the hybrid?

Other than the traditional media, which is as distracted by shiny new objects as my 16-month-old daughter, nobody should get terribly excited when a car company rolls out its wildly impractical next-generation hydrogen car. Too many miracles are required for it to be a marketplace winner.

Take Honda's new FCX Clarity. As the New York Times reported, "the cars cost several hundred thousand dollars each to produce," although Honda's president Takeo Fukui "said that should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as production volumes increase."

But why would production volumes increase for a car that delivers no real value to the consumer and has no significant societal benefit to motivate government support? Answer: They wouldn't, so prices may never drop below $100,000.

And who, exactly, is going to buy a car that can't easily find fuel? On the other hand, who is going to build tens of thousands of fueling stations--price tag $2 million apiece or more--until the cars are wildly successful? That is the so-called chicken-and-egg problem, which is especially acute for hydrogen. After all, why should oil companies spend tens of billions of dollars building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure, which at best will take away business from their tremendously profitable gasoline sales, and at worst will be a complete business loss, assuming, as now seems likely, that hydrogen cars never catch on?

And yet the media can't get enough of these hi-tech Edsels.

Link: The Last Car You Would Ever Buy -- Literally.

Twitter Your Book

Too frazzled to sit down and write more than 140 characters at a time, but still want to write the great American novel? Quillpill may be for you. It lets you spit out your novel in tiny pieces over your cellphone.

I'm sure some creative people could make good use of this, but most of the results will probably be crap. This is not to say that novels in fragments haven't been done well before -- they have, but not by people who just twittered them out (see most of David Markson's books, starting with Reader's Block, and Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines, for example).

(Via TechCrunch.)

Aging with Aubrey de Grey Event

Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah foundation is having an event in LA later this month called Aging 2008.  From the description:

Applying the new technologies of regenerative and genetic medicine, the engineering approach to aging promises to dramatically extend healthy human life within the next few decades.

How do you and your loved ones stand to benefit from the coming biomedical revolution? Are you prepared? Is society prepared?

At Aging 2008 you will engage with top scientists and advocates as they present their findings and advice, and learn what you can do to help accelerate progress towards a cure for the disease and suffering of aging.

It looks to be a fairly one-sided affair, with no ethicists or skeptics on the program, but nonetheless it's free and might be interesting if you want to hear more about what these people are up to.

You can win "VIP" entry to the event and free admission to a dinner with Aubrey et al. by going to a contest page and describing what you'd do if you lived to 150.

Tech firms fighting information overload

From today's NYT:

The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.

Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.

Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.

The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.

Intel and other companies are already experimenting with solutions. Small units at some companies are encouraging workers to check e-mail messages less frequently, to send group messages more judiciously and to avoid letting the drumbeat of digital missives constantly shake up and reorder to-do lists.

Link: Lost in E-mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast

Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr has a great article at the Atlantic about the effects of the Internet on attention and reading and writing.  From the intro:

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

Link: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

You really ought to read the whole thing ("if you can," as he says at his blog).

Techno Tuesday: Tracking Device

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

The Need for a Treaty to Control Human Genetic Engineering

Jamie Metzl has an article in the current issue of Democracy magazine calling for a global treaty, modeled after the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to manage the risks of human genetic engineering.  Some excerpts:

What would a Genetic Heritage Safeguard Treaty (GHST), based on the NPT model, look like? Above all, it would require states possessing greater knowledge in the field to share basic-science capabilities with others, in exchange for all members agreeing to common protocols and appropriate regulations (requiring, for example, the non-inheritability of germline genetic manipulations and the banning of human reproductive cloning). [...]

Although the prospect of human genetic modification is terrifying to many, it is an emergent reality that holds both tremendous promise and unimaginable danger for the world community. As difficult as it will be to establish an international framework for maximizing the benefits and minimizing the dangers of this revolutionary advance, the alternative–allowing these capabilities to emerge unregulated and unchecked–will prove nationally and internationally destabilizing and dangerous to the future of our species. This may sound like science fiction, but it is fast on its way to becoming our reality. America and the world must do far more to prepare. A Genetic Heritage Safeguard Treaty, modeled after the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, can be one important step in the right direction.

Link: Brave New World War (free registration required).

The article was also reprinted by the Center for Genetics and Society (no registration required): Brave New World War.

Techno Tuesday: Attention Deficit

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

New Book: Enhancing Me - The hope and the hype of human enhancement

I just picked up a copy of Enhancing Me: The Hope and the Hype of Human Enhancement by Pete Moore.  From the book description:

In Enhancing Me, Pete Moore examines the ways in which technology can change our bodies, our brains, our emotions, and how long we live. He talks to people who have actually been 'enhanced' to find out what it's like and how beneficial it is; and to the experts to find out what the future holds - including a look at some of the more controversial, headline-grabbing claims.  He also looks at what drives us to want to be 'superhuman', and the consequences for the individual and society alike:I

• If you could live forever, would you want to?
• If you could download your mind onto a computer, would you still be you?
• Should we insert chips into our children, so we can track where they are?
• Should we force violent criminals to have mood-controlling brain implants?
• Would you want technology to improve your memory… or help you forget?

I've only read a couple of chapters, but it seems quite good.  It's written for a popular audience but is not too terribly dumbed down.  The glossy full-color presentation makes it look a bit like a museum guide (which it sort of is -- see below) or a Rough Guide.  That also makes it a bit pricey at $20 in the US.  My only other quibble is that it's missing a bibliography or further reading guide (though Pete Moore does have suggestions on his own website).

Enhancing Me is part of a book series called TechKnow, produced by the Dana Centre, which is affiliated with the London science museum. The Dana Centre is "a stylish, purpose-built venue in London (UK). It is a place for adults to take part in exciting, informative and innovative debates about contemporary science, technology and culture." They host multiple events every week on science and technology issues. It sounds like a fantastic project -- I wish they had something like that here.

So far there are four other books planned for the series, covering computer games, human enhancement in sports, living online, and the consumer electronics industry.  The site has previews, blogs, and videos for each.