because bored people make bad decisions
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“it is the first social environment created for the asocial individual, and in that respect it divides us into anomic particles and conquers us as effectively as any political tyranny. It returns us to high school, where popularity is the only standard of success, where taunts are the dominant style of amusement, and where self-absorption has yet to ripen into self-awareness.”
Lee Siegel at Comment is Free on why the internet isn’t an unqualified good
This month’s FUMSI included Derek’s Law introduction to Digital Natives but not everyone is taking the concept of ‘digital natives’ at face value. Academic Sue Bennett of the University of Wollongong, Australia is trying to take a scientific approach:
“The idea that a new generation of students is entering the education system has excited recent attention among educators and education commentators. Termed ‘digital natives’ or the ‘Net generation’, these young people are said to have been immersed in technology all their lives, imbuing them with sophisticated technical skills and learning preferences for which traditional education is unprepared. Grand claims are being made about the nature of this generational change and about the urgent necessity for educational reform in response. A sense of impending crisis pervades this debate. However, the actual situation is far from clear. In this paper, the authors draw on the fields of education and sociology to analyse the digital natives debate. The paper presents and questions the main claims made about digital natives and analyses the nature of the debate itself. We argue that rather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a ‘moral panic’. We propose that a more measured and disinterested approach is now required to investigate ‘digital natives’ and their implications for education.”
The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence
Further reading :
TED.com just won a Webby for best navigation.
Now TED is a great site to while away hours with and still feel like you are improving yourself. I’ve spent lots of time there and I’d be struck by the navigation but not always in an entirely approving way. As with most new and exciting attempts at navigation there’s something fun about it and also something kind of irritating when you need to get something done.
Good
Bad
But going back and playing with it some more I think all in all that the good outweighs the bad. Would like to see that mouseover sorted though. It is a bit too much like the problems I have with the Windows Start menu(!)
Is Google making us stupid? is the title of Nicholas Carr’s article in Atlantic about the impact of the internet on how he thinks.
“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.”
Part of me thinks there is something to this but the other part believes this is just an attempt to deny that this is happening because we’re not as young as we used to be.
One casual definition of extroverts is ’someone who thinks whilst they are speaking”. Introverts, on the other hand, have to work out exactly what they think before they tell everyone else.
Introverts often fear (sometime rightly) that everyone else equates extrovertion with creativity (genius-recluse myths notwithstanding). Whilst this is mostly rubbish, it might help everyone else to realise the introvert’s general brillance if they actually told someone else what their ideas are, maybe once in a while anyway.
Pre-blogging I assumed that blogging was the clearest possible indicator of extraversion/exhibitionism/attention seeking and that the social media phenomenon is for extraverts only. But a surprising side benefit of blogging has been getting this introvert’s vague, unformed ideas out there. It takes quite a lot for me not to see this as a bad thing, given the earlier definitions of introvert.
But I can’t deny the blog has been helpful in getting ideas to completion. It creates expectations from others that you are going to do something you’ve blogged about (aka nagging), flushes out co-enthusiasts, and other people build on the idea and suggest directions. Mostly this hasn’t been with the assistance of internet users around the world but with people that I work with everyday. I recognise that it is slightly ludicrous that I need a blog to share ideas with people a few desks away but there you go.
Nice to see a story suggesting that everything isn’t going to the dogs:
books are thriving despite the internet
“Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies”
In Slate last month, The Wisdom of the Chaperones was not exactly the first article to suggest that a lot of the rhetoric around social media sites is not borne out by reality. The title however is probably the best attempt to coin a rival turn of phrase.
“Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.”
“While both sites effectively function as oligarchies, they are still democratic in one important sense. Digg and Wikipedia’s elite users aren’t chosen by a corporate board of directors or by divine right. They’re the people who participate the most. Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn’t feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it’s curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they’ve sought to supplant.”
This doesn’t surprise me at all. But that’s because it is more evidence to support my prejudice of ‘new technology, same old people’.