Interesting piece re: Twitter

Interesting piece re: Twitter, by Howard Rheingold

two articles on Attention, missing something, but what is attention?

Howard Rheingold's recent article on focusing attention in class and the book review he cites are both of interest, but both seem to miss that dealing with attention is as much about wanting it as how to focus our own. 

Speaking of focussing it, if you have the patience, here is my long chapter on what attention is, (if I haven't given it to you previously).

Topic for April 27, 2009

For the next class, I have several suggested readings. First my article "The Mentality of Homo interneticus". Second, an article in the NY Times Magazine by Clive Thompson :"I'm So Totally Digitally Close to You", and third and fourth two short pieces from my blog on the "Net as Superself" and "Are We losing the Narrative Self?" .

News about the class

Hi all. I have reconsidered the subject for the next session, Monday April 20th. The topics will be the Intellectual Property (especially copyright and copying) debate and its effects on newspapers and books in particular. How will the delivery of news  change? Can newspapers survive? If so how? I apologize in advance for any disappointments about not covering the topics originally planned, but I think this will make for a more interesting discussion.  

Moral values affected by media such as Twitter?

Some serious brain researchers are worried  (see this) that moral values will be hurt by the rapid changes of attention suggested by Facebook and Twitter. I cvansee reasons to think otherwise, but they may be right. 

A Good use of the Internet

This one-minute video on the history of the Planet Earth puts everything in a valuable perspective.

The Twitchhiker: Using online attention to in the material world

A new blog on language in the NY Times describes someone using Twittering to travel half way around the world, with no other sources of aid, supposedly. 

Multiply this many fold, and it indicates how an economy not involving money , but based strictly on attention, might work.

A few interesting articles about the Internet and ordinary politics

It appears only one issue of this journal , Politics and Technology Review, was published, in March, 2008, but the articles are all somewhat interesting and relatively short. It came out of Washington DC, so the prime focus is on how to use the Internet to support and/or draft candidates. 

Article on Internet governance

This op-ed in today's NY times by one of the founders of the Internet goes along with the Benkler video and in a way segues in to next week's discussion.

Class presentation for last Monday, April 6

Some asked me to post the presentation, including the parts I didn't get to. 

A version  that, as in class, you can click through and see many of the “slides” change click by click, or go here:

http://tinyurl.com/chqosu

A "pdf" (Acrobat) version of the presentation in which each slide appears only once. The second slide therefore looks garbled, so if you want to review it, please use the other version.  Or go here:

http://tinyurl.com/d9qakr

In both versions the video of me explaining how you pay attention doesn't run. If you want to see this, please view it on YouTube.

Benkler video

Had time permitted I would have shown this video in class yesterday. (If you have a choice of browsers, I would use firefox.) 

Incidentally, I am still trying to find a way to post the presentation I was using yesterday, so that the parts I didn't get to would be there for you to preuse. 

Google and Libraries: The controversy

Interesting news about the controversy between Google and others about the pending settlement re:copyrighted books online just appeared. Some (admittedly biased) background can be found here. It is relevant to the discussion on the Attention Economy, planned for Monday.

Revised Assignment for week 2

For week 2, please read, instead of what I mentioned in class, my article on the Attention Economy and the Net. Sorry for the error. 

There's a Facebook page for the OLLI class

Facebook page for OLLI Class

click on the line above; you will be urged to sign up for Facebook. Do so; upload a photo of yourself if you have one on your computer, and join the group. Your face will appear and classmates will be able to post to you or to all of us who have signed in. 

An Evolutionary Approach to Certain Human Abilities and Media

As the title of the course suggests, one of the main outlooks I will offer is that the Internet should be viewed as taking the human species to a new (not necessarily better, but still new) stage of evolution. Some earlier stages in such a view are partially captured in the interesting paper by Merlin Donald entitled "Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature".

You don't have to be an Internet user at all to take this course (though if you're not, you won't see this blog). If you are a user, what do you do?

here are some uses and sites you might want to look at think about or ask others about, if you have the chance.

1. e-mail, e-mail groups

2. search engines: Google , Yahoo!, Cuil

3. encyclopedias and dictonaries: wikipedia, wiktionary

4. new sites and blogs: New York Times; San Francisco Chronicle; UK's Guardian; France's Le Monde; thousands more

5. (nearly) free international Internet phoning: skype

6. short videos: YouTube

7. Music: iTunes; rhapsody; Kazaa; Limewire; nprMusic; 

8. longer video debates and interviews: Blogging Heads TV; Charlie Rose

9. maps: mapquest; Google earth; 

10. art:  Boston Museum of Fine Arts acquisitions;  New Art TV; Google Earth Prado Museum; (You must download Google Earth as first step) 

11. Books: Project Gutenberg; 

12. Science, popular and scholarly: World Science; Public Library of Science One (PLoS ONE)

13. Philosophy: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

14. Movies:  Internet Movie Database; Netflix

15. Social networking: MySpace; Facebook; Twitter

16. Dating: Match.com ; Chemistry

17. Selling or buying a used something: craigslist; e-Bay

18. taking a survey: Surveymonkey

19. online banking or finance (caveat emptor!): Motley Fool

One way to think about the Internet: new options are created every day, and they succeed or fail (evolve) based on the environment -- that is to say, us, the  direct or indirect Internet users. Successful new options draw in more of  us,  to the point where we too evolve. 

Compared with other animals, proto-humans at some point developed culture, which allowed changes far faster than normal gene-based evolution. We came up with fire; tool-making; art; languages; domesticated animals; the planting of crops; clothing; the horse halter; metal working; cities; pictographic, ideographic and phonetic writing and on and on. 

That leads to the question: which of the epoch-making inventions of the past  is most analogous to the Internet: Cities? Language? Writing? The printing press? Donn Downing, who is planning to take the course, made an excellent video some time ago, in which he argues for the printing press. The video is well worth watching, if not without controversy. 

The birth and growth of the Internet over the last thirty-five years marks a major turning point in human history. It has few parallels in terms of depth, intensity and speed — as if the end of the dark ages, the era of European exploration, nineteenth-century industrialization, and the birth of modern science were all folded into one and took place in a tenth the time. It transforms who we are as human beings, how we think, how we relate with one another, what drives and motivates us, how we form communities, what passes for knowledge, how we cooperate to alter our world, the  nature of technological change, our relation with the arts, our economic involvements, the opportunities open to us, how politics works and what it is about — and much else. 

In this course we will look at what innovations  are behind some of these some of these changes are. I will offer short handouts in each class, including suggested options for further exploration, and a list of additional readings.

WEEK 1.  What is the Internet? A brief overview. I will go over and explain when necessary  some terms now in common use, such as: e-mail; search engines; listservs; file sharing; open source; cloud computing; mashups; massively multiplayer games; social network sites; blogs; vlogs; Internet radio, YouTube; portals; wikis; SecondLife and Voice-Over-Internet Protocols (VOIP). 

WEEK 2 . A changed reality. If what is real is what we collectively experience and can influence but cannot change just by wishing it, the Internet is an increasingly important part of it. This leads, for instance, to a new kind of economy, that I have termed the Attention Economy (see http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/   ). Unlike earlier great waves of new technologies, such as the steam era or electrification, the Internet itself become a major medium of social interaction leading to further innovation, in an accelerating way.  

WEEK 3. Blogs, listservs and social networks, and how they transform politics and community, with emphasis on the democratizing of both national and international politics, the effects on war and peace and other forms of opinion formation. 

WEEK 4. The new forms of culture and cooperation: meetups, Internet dating, file sharing, mashups, open source, Wikipeida, PloS, new communities including virtual ones such as SecondLife, and new kinds of art 

 WEEK 5. As Walter Ong has emphasized, when literacy become common, the new ways of acquiring knowledge and paying attention changed cognition in a deep way, in effect bring about a new human being. Now we have a new transformation. What I have called Homo interneticus is being born http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/goldhaber/index.html; New developments such as social networking and Twitter go even deeper, affecting our emotional and psychological character as well, as Clive Thompson has described http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?scp=1&sq=clive%20Thompson&st=cse 

WEEK 6. Some future possibilities, along with  a summation of pluses and minuses of the Internet. The Internet leads us towards new ways of being human, even though some of that is not necessarily beneficial. How do we weigh the net value?