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?