When Alexis Gorman, 26, wanted to tell a man she had been dating that the courtship was over, she felt sending a Dear John text message was too impersonal. But she worried that if she called the man, she would face an awkward conversation or a confrontation.
Alexis, did you really want to achieve your first real fame in life by getting described in the New York Times as someone who used Slydial to ditch some guy? Also, did you do this as a way to make him hear it twice?
If you get bad news from a romantic interest in email, well, they didn't want to tell you directly.
So she found a middle ground. She broke it off in a voice mail message, using new technology that allowed her to jump directly to the suitor’s voice mail, without ever having to talk to the man — or risk his actually answering the phone.
The technology, called Slydial, lets callers dial a mobile phone but avoid an unwanted conversation — or unwanted intimacy — on the other end. The incoming call goes undetected by the recipient, who simply receives the traditional blinking light or ping that indicates that a voice mail message has been received.
That is what I like: Technological ways to avoid undesired intimacies.
More ways to avoid intimacy might make people more willing to engage in it in the first place. If you can back out of a relationship more easily it is less risky to start one in the first place. Perhaps Ms. Gorman sees voice mails as a more humane way that text messaging to stop after a couple of dates. This option cuts the emotional cost of dating. With an easier exit ramp you are more likely to get on the highway in the first place.
“If it’s some jerk I went out on a couple of dates with, I can do without that drama,” she said.
“Text messaging someone ‘I would prefer not to see you again’ is really not my style,” she added. “But at the same time, I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation.”
I think the bigger problem with phone conversations is that they can be hard to end even with people you know you will speak with again. You might feel assorted obligations to the other person and don't want to signal that you are uninterested in hearing yet more of what they have to say. I didn't get a cell phone until last year for just this reason.
BTW, the New York Times picture of Ms. Gorman doesn't look as good as this Facebook picture which seems like it is her.
But most of the time the victims are the texters, who wind up with bumps and bruises. Northwestern Memorial Hospital's emergency room has been ground zero in Chicago for texting goofs. Located downtown near shopper-clogged Michigan Avenue, the emergency room is also close to the exceptionally busy lakefront path, where pedestrians and joggers share a lane with bikers.
James Adams, Northwestern's chairman of emergency medicine, says he has treated patients involved in texting incidents nearly every day this summer. He says fallen texters are more prone to facial injuries: They tend to hold their devices close to their faces, so their hands are less likely to break their fall. "By the time their hands hit, their face immediately hits and they smash to the ground," Dr. Adams says. The common outcomes are scraped chins, noses and foreheads, along with broken glasses.
We are not in the environments where we evolved to be adaptive. So we get addicted to drugs, alcohol, video games, Blackberries, and other new things in our environments that we are not genetically designed to handle.
The texters would be less dangerous to themselves and others if they didn't have to look down to see the screen. What is needed: Head Up Display Glasses tied to a cell phone. Then one could look ahead and see the text mixed in with sidewalk or whatever else is in front of you.
But how to type when walking? Avoid the need to type with voice recognition software. Except, people can hear you then. How to maintain the privacy that typing provides? The in-brain implant cell phone that "The Phone Company" tried to convince The President's Analyst (1967 with James Coburn) to tell the US President to allow transplanted into everyone's brain.
Another alternative: develop a drug that breaks down the text messaging addiction.
These companies are just figuring this out? Slow learners anyone?
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.
Tom DeMarco and Anthony Lister explained this problem back in the 1980s in their book Peopleware. Yes, interruptions are costly because it takes a while to get the mind refocused with all the mental chess pieces back where they were. Yes, people get addicted to their email. But partly that's because bosses will call meetings in email for meetings that are supposed to start in 45 minutes (and I hate that). How you going to know that unless you are checking your email every half hour?
The New York Times reports on the growing use of illegal cellphone jammers by people who do not want to hear one side of many different phone conversations.
As cellphone use has skyrocketed, making it hard to avoid hearing half a conversation in many public places, a small but growing band of rebels is turning to a blunt countermeasure: the cellphone jammer, a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent.
The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.
The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.
My sympathy is with the jammers. I'd love to see jammers used during concert, movie, and opera performances. We need a political movement in support of the legalization of jammers under at least some conditions.
Cellphones are not just a hazard while driving. Cellphones make many otherwise peaceful settings into irritations. Restaurants become less enjoyable. Meetings of people get interrupted by cellphone ringtones. Why don't people put their phones on vibrate? Given that a substantial fraction of humanity has no problem with imposing themselves on others we need technological counters to these impositions.
Hearing half of a phone conversation is more distracting than hearing both sides. The brain can't make sense of it and that causes greater distraction (and I can't find a report on a study that showed this result - anyone know the study I'm referring to?). If you are sitting somewhere trying to think it sure is handy to have a way to block out electronic sources of distraction.
The article above reports that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and cellphone companies such as Verizon try to catch the people who use jammers. Business owners who are trying to jam continuously in a fixed location are most likely to get caught since a place that consistently has no reception gets reported and investigated.
Also see my posts Work Distractions Lower Effective IQ and Brain Limits Ability To Multitask Interruptions. Oh, and don't forget Locking A Car With A Short Horn Blast Is Rude And Obnoxious.
Rather than check out provided references after interviewing some employers are using social networking sites to find work acquaintances to ask about prospective employees even before calling them in for interviews.
Job interviewees, beware: Your prospective boss may have called your references before you walk through the door -- and they may not be the contacts you provided.
Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn Corp. and Jobster Inc. are making it easier for employers to get in touch with people who have worked with job candidates in the past or know them personally. Recruiters say they use such sites -- where people create online profiles and then link to professional colleagues who are also members -- to find mutual connections they can hit up for information. Many hiring managers say they even check to see if they have mutual connections with a candidate on Facebook and MySpace, the popular social-networking sites.
Companies are even trolling social networking webs to find job candidates. So you can get your references checked out before you even know about a job opening.
This is an automation of what has gone on informally and less efficiently for years. A person who has previously worked at companies Y and Z gets a job at company X and tells people in company X who the big talents are in former employers Y and Z. Then company X personnel call up these talents and try to recruit them. This is great fun when you are the person who gets asked to come in and interview for a position in a company you never heard of before. Well, the web is going to make this so9rt of thing happen more often. Want to find out who is good at company W? Find connections between current and former employees and then start trying to email and call them. In many cases just one or two names will be enough to start the process of finding lots of connections.
This ability to find out the appraisals of more former colleagues will increase the value of working hard wherever you are. Each job becomes more of an audition for other jobs.
This phenomenon is part of a larger trend: the death of privacy. Communications and computing advances mean that more about us gets recorded and knowable by electronic means.
An article in the Wall Street Journal relays the claim that changes to recordings to make them sound better when played from MP3 format causes the pre-MP3 original releases to sound worse.
"Right now, when you are done recording a track, the first thing the band does is to load it onto an iPod and give it a listen," said Alan Douches, who has worked with Fleetwood Mac and others. "Years ago, we might have checked the sound of a track on a Walkman, but no one believed that was the best it could sound. Today, young artists think MP3s are a high-quality medium and the iPod is state-of-the-art sound."
It isn't. Producers and engineers say there are many ways they might change a track to accommodate an iPod MP3. Sometimes, the changes are for the worse.
Is this claim true?
Eventually storage will become so cheap that compression of recordings will become less desirable. Also, newer formats will support more bits of resolution than CD offers and so especially at the lower frequencies sound quality should improve.
There'll be no need to force people to undergo Borg assimilation. The hive mind can take over by getting people addicted to computer games with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
Several makers of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs -- devices that facilitate operating a computer by thought alone -- claim the technology is poised to jump from the medical sector into the consumer gaming world in 2008.
Companies including Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky say they've released BCI-based software-development kits. Gaming companies may release BCI games next year, but many scientists worry that users brains' might be subject to negative effects.
For example, the devices sometimes force users to slow down their brain waves. Afterward, users have reported trouble focusing their attention.
Trouble focusing their attention afterward? Maybe the games are so mentally demanding that playing them is akin to doing a physical work-out on one's muscles. The game work-out leaves the mind fatigued just like gym work-outs leave muscles fatigued.
Biofeedback was developed for medical purposes. Such serious technology shouldn't get treated like just another toy! Toys are undignified and medical technology should only be doled out by licensed doctors. Okay, I admit I'm exaggerating - there's a role for nurse practitioners in deciding how many hours a day Johnny can be jacked into the world wide head.
"Most biofeedback is used for clearly defined clinical purposes, specifically to try and eliminate or ameliorate a problem," says Alan Garos, president of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback. "Using feedback of brain activity for non-therapeutic purposes is something that we have to look at carefully."
When LSD hit the streets of San Francisco that's kind of like what computers did when they became available for home use. The difference is that parents applauded the computer addiction craze. Therefore we can not expect a cautious approach toward BCI by electronic game playing addicts. BCI game playing will be seen as training for upscale jobs done through BCI devices.
Yet BCI poses problems We didn't evolve to handle computers. Therefore we aren't well adapted to their presence in our environments. We can either use genetic engineering to adapt ourselves to computers or let natural selection run its course. Eventually those who can't resist their addiction to brain-computer interfaces will die out due to failure to reproduce. Natural selection will spread genetic alleles that make people less susceptible to malfunction when connected to brain-computer interfaces.
It could be that more knowledgeable people are more likely to read the web. But I say down with TV and up with link-rich news sites.
As candidates and pundits look to the Internet in the 2008 presidential campaign, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study shows that Web users during the last election cycle had a more thorough understanding of presidential politics than users of other media.
"We did not find significant links between television news use and factual knowledge, but we did find significant links from both print and online use to factual knowledge in 2004," says the study by graduate student Kajsa Dalrymple and Dietram Scheufele, a UW-Madison journalism professor.
More importantly, however, online newspapers were the only medium that had significant effects on integrated knowledge - the ability of readers to "connect the dots" by combining bits and pieces of knowledge into a meaningful understanding of politics.
Writing web logs and connecting up the dots from newer posts back to older posts and to other sites has changed my mental model of many subjects very substantially. Reading 3 different dead tree newspapers a day would not have done that. I've discarded many incorrect opinions and moved on to better ones. I've been able to get answers to many questions I've had for years (and thanks to those readers who posted some of the answers in comments). So I'm mighty inclined to agree with the conclusions of this report.
Also, TV worthless for news? You bet. TV is there for the Sci Fi channel, the Comedy Channel, and the occasional good show or old movie on other channels. Don't try to treat TV seriously as a news source. You are likely to hurt your brain trying to do that.
People who are engaged in building web logs or cruising through news sites, web logs, policy analysis sites, and other web sources of information are able to find out answers and connect up the dots in ways that readers of the dead tree formats just can't do. The quality and quantity of data on the web keeps improving. Plus, the web provides a way for many specialists to tell us how to think through subjects that otherwise would be hard to navigate. Great voices that would never make it into the public square in the dead tree era find places to reach us on the internet. This is great.
The electronic access to data on web pages is a stepping stone. I treat my blog posts as an extended external memory bank. This extended memory bank makes me think that some day people will sign up to get cybernetic implants of nanodevice memory devices and network connections. The implants will provide people with instant access to large volumes of reference data and analytical tools for chomping through and formatting the data for viewing in their minds.
If we get implants that contain memory then we'll probably put different globs of data into our memory implants depending on what job we are doing. Change jobs or change work tasks at a job and suddenly it becomes time to update the contents of one's memory implant.
"Hallo!" he shouted, struggling to hear over the big diesel engines of his 74-foot boat, Andavan. "Medium sized! Medium sized!" he said, estimating the haul for a wholesale agent calling from port, who had heard by cellphone from other skippers that Rajan had just set his nets.
Minutes later Rajan's phone rang again -- another agent at a different port.
...
"One element of poverty is the lack of information," Prahalad said. "The cellphone gives poor people as much information as the middleman."
The fisherman Rajan says his income has at least tripled since 2000 to $150 per month and that cellphones have enabled him to get the information he needs to make the middlemen who buy his fish to pay much more for them.
Poor people in India use cellphones in many occupations.
For less than a penny a minute -- the world's cheapest cellphone call rates -- farmers in remote areas can check prices for their produce. They call around to local markets to find the best deal. They also track global trends using cellphone-based Internet services that show the price of pumpkins or bananas in London or Chicago.
Indian farmers use camera-phones to snap pictures of crop pests, then send the photos by cellphone to biologists who can identify the bug and suggest ways to combat it. In cities, painters, carpenters and plumbers who once begged for work door-to-door say they now have all the work they can handle because customers can reach them instantly by cellphone.
Computer networks are going to enable small numbers of sharp experts and smart software to boost the productivity of billions of people around the world. What we are seeing now with cellphones and search engines such as Google is just the beginning of what is coming. Computers will provide much more useful answers than we can get from looking at pages dug up by current generation search engines.
While I think search engines and the growing size of the internet are an enormous boon current search technology still seems crude. I spend many hours every week doing searches looking for answers to questions. But the ways that searches can be phrased are much too crude. I want to say things like "Only show me pages with tables of information that have have entries which are names of foods and a column which is potassium or magnesium". I end up having to look at lots of pages that do not have the format I'm looking for before finally finding a couple that do.
This stage of search technology is going to give way to much smarter methods of looking for answers. The smarter search methods are going to enable non-experts to do tasks that currently only experts can do. If you can get very quick answers to questions you can do many more tasks. Getting answers is going to become much easier and quicker. As the answers become easier to come by labor productivity will rise dramatically.
If the findings of a British researcher are correct then obsessive compulsive mobile cell phone users have a substance abuse problem where the substance is a cell phone.
Psychologist Dr David Sheffield asked to group of students to fill in a survey based on one used to diagnose gambling addiction.
The volunteers, who were aged between 18 and 25, were asked questions such as whether relatives had ever asked them to cut down on their mobile use and if they became bad tempered when denied access to their phone.
Analysis of the results showed one in seven became restless and irritable when they couldn't make phone calls and had no qualms about would lying to cover up the amount of time they spent on their handset.
Ninety per cent said they took their mobiles wherever they went and third used phone calls to lift their mood. Seven per cent even said they would rather lose a job or relationship than give up their mobile.
They have to have their mobile cell phone fixes.
People who gave up mobile phones experienced a drop in blood pressure.
People are becoming addicted to mobile phones, causing them to become stressed and irritable, work suggests.
Dr David Sheffield, of the University of Staffordshire, found problem behaviour linked to using a mobile in 16% of 106 users who were studied.
In a separate study, to be presented at a conference in Essex later, he found blood pressure was lower in those who had given up using mobile phones.
I know people who excessively use their cell phones. So this report rings true. Humans are not evolved to live in the technological societies we've created. They are not adapted to use the technologies they encounter in their environments.
Do not expect your written communications to be understood.
In effect, e-mail cannot adequately convey emotion. A recent study by Profs. Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago focused on how well sarcasm is detected in electronic messages. Their conclusion: Not only do e-mail senders overestimate their ability to communicate feelings, but e-mail recipients also overestimate their ability to correctly decode those feelings.
One reason for this, the business-school professors say, is that people are egocentric. They assume others experience stimuli the same way they do. Also, e-mail lacks body language, tone of voice, and other cues - making it difficult to interpret emotion.
"A typical e-mail has this feature of seeming like face-to-face communication," Professor Epley says. "It's informal and it's rapid, so you assume you're getting the same paralinguistic cues you get from spoken communication."
I see the same thing all the time in post comment discussions here and all over the blogosphere and in various discussion forum venues and the Usenet. People misinterpret my posts. They misinterpret each other. They get morally indignant and insulting. Things descend from there. I try to read my writings for alternative explanations to reduce the extent of the problem but still expect to be misunderstood some of the time.
Peope think they are just as clear in email as they are on the phone. How can humans be that foolish? (er, never mind, we are that foolish all the time)
| Frequency that.. | Phone | |
| Communicator believes he is clearly communicating | 78% | 78% |
| Receiver believes he is correctly interpreting | 89% | 91% |
| Receiver correctly interprets message | 56% | 73% |
So then the internet is automating the process of producing misunderstandings! We internet dwellers have more communications misunderstandings than those who still restrict their lives to the real world.
Cell phones eliminate home as a refuge from work and work as a refuge from home.
MILWAUKEE — Are the electronic gadgets designed to make us accessible anytime, anywhere making the lives of dual-income families easier? Maybe not. A study by a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) indicates that use of cell phones and pagers by one large sample of married or partnered couples is adding stress to family life – especially for women.
The study finds a link between use of cell phones and pagers and increased psychological distress and lower family satisfaction among the sample, says Noelle Chesley, an assistant professor of sociology, because it allows yet another way to bring job worries home after work.
Women in the study were doubly affected because they indicated that the greater access also allowed home concerns to spill over into the work day, something the men did not experience.
"What we found was that it was a negative experience for both men and women, but women had the added problem of home life invading work," Chesley says. For women, the consequences of cell phone access may be increased calls from children or elderly family members, calls that are usually placed because a problem has arisen at home.
The survey sample included 1,367 people who were employed at one of seven organizations in upstate New York. To be eligible for the study, respondents had to be married or partnered with someone who also worked outside the home.
"We wanted to get a sense of the trends or patterns for a larger group," she says, "but it was by no means a national or random sample. You can, however, get a sense of – ‘is this more of a blessing or more of a curse?' – among a large group of workers."
I watch people in offices scramble to run back to their desk when they hear their cell phone ringing and think that surely if they weren't within hearing range of the cell phone the vast bulk of the time no damage would be done. Their spouses call up and unload on them about some worry or problem that the spouse could handle or wait to tell them later. So the results of the study above sound very plausible to me.
People need time to relax and an absence of interruptions at both work and home. There ought to be way for people to call up with differing levels of urgency signalled by how they dial the number they are calling. That way a person could set their interrupt level higher when they need to avoid interrupts while still being available for emergencies. Granted, some would abuse the ability to signal an emergency. But others would respect the priority levels and not abuse the top priorities except when necessary.
I've yet to get a cell phone and some people act surprised when I say this. But I see it as a productivity degrader and stress enhancer. I get too many phone calls as it is and I have no spare time. Why make the problem worse?
"Appointment-based television is dead," said William Randolph Hearst III, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. "The cable industry is really in danger of becoming commoditized."
Mr. Hearst sits on the board of Akimbo, a provider of an Internet service that permits users to download video content via the Internet to a set-top box digital video player. This week, Akimbo announced its first mainstream content deal to enable its customers to download Hollywood movies for later viewing on their televisions.
The "appointment-based television" does have one big advantage in popular culture: It allows a large group of people to simultaneously have the same experience and then to share their reactions to it at work or at play the next day. Part of the pleasure that many people derive from viewing some popular show is the ability to react to it together when socializing. I can recall guys at work discussing a new X Files episode and I've certainly heard women discuss a Desperate Housewives episode. Will all TV shows continue to have synchronised first viewings before becoming available for download?
Every year broadband connections get faster and cheaper and that trend looks set to continue for some years to come. Video on demand is now reaching the point where the download times are getting reasonable. Also, lots of other enabling technologies such has hard drive capacities, video browsing software, and display device improvements make the availability of TV shows and movies by download offer a lot of advantages. There's no need to stick to a single broadcast standard for resolution of shows. Every show could get downloaded at whatever resolution your display device reports itself as supporting.
Experience with downloadable music web stores has probably helped warm up the entertainment industry to the idea of downloading video for sale as well. CD recordings can already be copied illegally. The video downloads for sale do not make the pirating problem much worse. But they do open up the possibility of a lot more impulsive purchases by customers who can instantly order something without going to a video store.
Google has just announced their own service for selling video on the internet.
The Google video service will allow content providers to post videos for downloading on the company's online store. Providers will decide on pricing and levels of copy protection, but all video would be viewed via Google's own media player.
"It lets anyone sell video," Mr Page said. "The content producers decide what to charge."
"Google video will let you watch lots of high quality video on the web for the first time. You can search and browse, and we make it fast and easy for you to watch," said Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president, Products. "For video producers and anyone with a video camera, Google Video will give you a platform to publish to the entire Google audience in a fast, free and seamless way."
I expect this technology will allow independents to get distribution for things that large companies won't want to bother with. So more niche video will get made.
Google has already lined up some big media players including CBS for TV shows and a Sony music division that will provide music videos of many big names such as Alicia Keys and Christina Aguilera (whose impressive vocal range unfortunately comes combined by her attempt to be as tasteless as possible).
"This is yet another exciting platform in which CBS can leverage its market-leading content to a whole new audience," said Leslie Moonves, President and CEO, CBS Corporation. "Making our programming accessible to the Google Video Store guarantees our shows significant new exposure to millions of users who are likely to access this Web service and who may not be traditional TV viewers. As the industry's most prolific generator of popular TV content, it's only natural that CBS would partner with Google on this service, which is destined to become one of the web's most popular destinations."
Google is such a heavyweight with so many web site visitors each day that they have an enormous ability to launch a new web service.
Both cable TV companies and satellite TV companies stand to lose marketshare to internet video. But the satellite people have it worse since they can not provide separate feeds to millions of people. At least the cable TV companies can compete against phone companies to provide broadband services.
Lawyer, novelist, and aspiring screen writer Julie Hilden writing in FindLaw analyses a hypothetical not very distant future created by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson where a hypothetical merger of Amazon and Google produces sophisticated software which reads all the news stories on the web and writes personalized news articles that synthesize the knowledge from many news sources.
In 2010, Googlezon wins its fight with Newsbotser by inventing a clever new technique that further tailors content to the user: "Googlezon's computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a [personalized] news story for every user."
For the copyright holders who funded the writing of the original stories the problem arises when increasing numbers of readers no longer read the original stories. The New York Times or Washington Post get fewer visitors to their site or fewer subscribers for home delivery and hence less revenue from ads and subscribers.
So to give an example - mine, not Sloan and Thompson's - suppose the knowledge that Googlezon uses to customize content indicates that a particular user is very interested in international news. In putting together a news story even on a domestic happening, Googlezon could emphasize the international aspects - stripping from other sites (including blogs), say, only five sentences on the domestic happening, and twenty sentences on its international implications, to make a story.
Returning to Sloan and Thompson's predictions, in 2011, the New York Times and other media whose content is not customized to the user go the Supreme Court, "claiming that [Googlezon's] fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law."
But - according to Sloan and Thompson - the old media lose. As a result, they disappear - relegated to the status of newsletters for the elite and the elderly!)
Read the full article for Julie's discussion of the legal angles and how the hypothetical future legal case might turn out.
Consider how media firms might respond if no legal remedies are available. One response would be to reduce what gets put on the web. But even if the New York Times reduced how many articles it put on its web site the mythical future Googlezon company could still buy hard copies of daily NY Times newspapers, scan them into their computers, and use optical character recognition technology to convert the articles to text. Then their software could parse that text just as search engines read text on web pages. The knowledge extracted by the sophisticated parsing along with the knowledge extracted from all the other newspapers in the world could still be used to write news stories.
In one sense the Googlezon automated news story writer is not qualitiatively different from what already goes on. Talk show hosts read newspapers and then tell their listeners about what is going on. Have you ever watched C-SPAN where they read local newspapers from around the country? Or look at web logs which excerpt from various newspapers and other news sources.
The problem with the Googlezon idea is that once it becomes possible (and I think it is a matter of when, not if) this future tool will very efficiently separate the original gathering of information from the writing about it so thoroughly that news organizations that pay news gatherers (a.k.a. reporters) to go into the field to collect information will have a hard time generating much revenue to pay for their information gathering efforts.
I see this as part of a wider problem. Movie makers, music makers, software writers, and other content providers suffer economic losses from bootleggers who make copies of work which is copyrighted or in some other way owned as intellectual property. New technological developments continue to make copying easier. Faster internet connections make downloads easier. Cheap internet hosting services and the spread of the internet to countries with less intellectual property protection provide easy ways for bootleggers to make copyrighted material accessible for copying in violation of laws in many jurisdictions. Mass storage device capacities keep going up while their sizes shrink.
As the Googlezon example demonstrates, not all undermining of the value of legally protected material takes the form of violation of copyright law or of violation of other existing intellectual property law. Here is the root problem: New methods of information processing and information distribution effectively undermine old models for funding knowledge gathering and content production. The new methods of information processing, transmission, and storage may not - at least initially - provide a different set of incentives and mechanisms for doing as much content generation as is done today.
This wider problem extends even to the point of reducing the economic incentives for governments to fund basic research. When information flowed much more slowly basic research funded in one country which yielded economically valuable discoveries was most likely to go through commercialization where the basic discoveries were made. The value of propinquity between researchers and start-up companies was so high that, say, a Stanford professor who made a commercially valuable discovery most likely caused the formation of a company near Stanford to commercialize the knowledge from the discovery. But in the future the odds of a discovery in America first being commercialized in China or other countries will become much higher as the details about scientific discoveries propagate around the world more quickly via the web. When that happens many governments will see fewer incentives to pay for basic research. The resulting decrease in funding will be a loss for us all.
These problems are market failures. The concept of property has been extended from land and physical things into ideas, designs, and other intellectual creations that basically amount to patterns. This extension of property into the intellectual realm has caused a boom in efforts to generate useful knowledge and other products of the mind. But technological advances are increasing the cost of protecting existing intellectual property. The market for intellectual property increasingly fails due to the ease with which people can benefit from knowledge without financially contributing to its creation. Those technological trends in computing and communications show no sign of running out of steam. The solutions to this problem are not obvious to me.
Update: On the bright side advances in computing and communications technologies also lower the cost of knowledge creation and other forms of content creation. For each type of content we need to ask what is happening more quickly: Is "stealabilty" (for lack of a better term) going up faster or slower than costs of patterns production are dropping? Even if "stealability" is not advancing more rapidly than technological advances lower production costs we still suffer losses from a reduction in the amount of content generated as compared to an environment where more content use must be paid for.
Business models can be adjusted to respond to the new environment of rampant intellectual property theft. For example, rather than sell a shrinkwrap piece of software that does some function a business can sell the service of actually doing that function. Then the software can be loaded only on a server controlled by the business and customers can send in data to be transformed by the software or interact with the software over the web and pay per use. However, these adjustments will not restore all the incentives for knowledge production which are being lost due to easy copying and uncompensated reuse.
Yahoo! Inc. and the OMD media agency sponsored a study of how 28 people reacted to being deprived of the internet for two weeks. People reported feelings of withdrawal and isolation.
It's a sign of the times that to get people to agree to the deprivation in the first place, researchers paid as much as $950 per household. In video diaries, participants talked about feeling "withdrawal" as they resisted the temptation to log on.
Neighbors? Such things exist in the physical world? But our virtual neighborhoods are so much more interesting. I can't find real neighbors nearly as interesting as my virtual neighbors.
Could a study like this be done as a reality TV show? Picture people being interviewed about their feelings of withdrawal from the internet. Picture some guy flipping between TV channels to try to recreate the experience of changing web pages. Or a girl could go by and see her girlfriend to ask her what topics are being discussed in instant messaging chats with their other friends. Take away phone use and really watch the girl beg for information.
At least three-fourths said they spent more time talking on the phone, watching TV or movies, and reading newspapers. Some reported visiting their neighbors, playing games, and exercising more.
The internet makes people feel more secure and powerful. (same article here)
Internet users feel confident, secure and empowered. The Internet has become, to some, the ultimate symbol of modernity to the point that participants were hobbled without convenient access to routine information like maps and telephone numbers. The pervasive nature of the Internet is such that participants often forgot or lost the desire to use "old fashioned tools" like the phone book, newspapers and telephone-based customer service.
The loss of communications ability was felt more keenly than the loss of the ability to do research, look up information, or engage in commercial transactions.
"I haven't talked to people I usually talk to and have been tempted to go on instant-messenger because I feel out of the loop," said study participant Kristin S.
"I'm starting to miss emailing my friends -- I feel out of the loop," said study participant Penny C.
According to the research, communications figured most prominently in the withdrawal process, demonstrating a new social network paradigm. The study shows that the Internet affords people the ability to overcome time and distance and to manage communications with a larger social circle, thereby creating an effortless community. Participants in the study found they missed the ability to exercise control over the pace and content of communication with different layers of friends and families. As a result, during the deprivation period, participants' outer circle of relationships suffered.
One can end an online work break faster than a physical work break. That makes sense. It is probably harder to politely end a conversation in the hallway at work as compared to ending a messaging session.
"I miss the private space the Internet creates for me at work." Kim V.
"I've been taking physical breaks instead of online breaks at work. The difference is that I can't get right back into what I was doing," said Ryan V.
Have you tried kicking the internet for a few weeks? Do you feel an emptiness if you go on vacation without it?
Serendipity will help find people you want to meet.
Serendipity, a form of next-generation networking, was developed by Nathan Eagle, a graduate student and Media Lab Europe Fellow working with Alex (Sandy) Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences in the Media Lab’s Human Dynamics group.
The system uses Bluetooth, an RF (radio frequency) protocol that works like a low-power radio in most cell phones, sending out a short-range beacon. “Think of it as each person having a 16-foot bubble around them, blinking out a unique ID," Eagle said. “When two or more people running Serendipity come into the same ‘bubble,' their IDs are sent to our server, which looks for their profiles. If there’s a match, each gets the other’s name, thumbnail photo and common interests on his or her cell phone." Then it’s only a matter of introductions.
And it’s quick. The server scans for IDs every 60 seconds and only takes about five seconds to find a match, so the whole sequence takes about a minute at the most.
How does the server know about your interests? Just like web-based social network systems like Friendster or match.com, Serendipity depends on profiles that users write about themselves. But Serendipity is unique because it allows the user to “weight” his or her profile to emphasize interests that are of greatest importance to the user’s current social situation.
This reminds me of a proposal I made a few months ago:
Another possible interesting application would be to manage affinity groups. Imagine a traveller who is cruising down a road trying to decide which night club to try out. If people registered with an affinity tracking service then a traveller could choose a club or restaurant whose currently present patrons fit some desired demographic profile. One obvious problem with such a service is that just because one person likes a particular type of person doesn't mean that most who fit a desired profile will like that person in return. Look at celebrities for example. They are loved by all sorts of people who the celebrities would very much like to avoid. So a service would need to develop eligibility criteria that require matching of preferences in both directions before that person driving down the street would get a flashing light on their car LCD pointing them to a particular bar or night club.
Now I'm actually expecting to see this sort of thing to really be implemented and to become widely used. For bar scenes one of the difficult challenges will be the development of image processing software that can analyse the image of a person you haven't even seen yet to decide whether you might find that person attractive. You could just drive through downtown and be told where to stop. In a bar situation the algorithm would have to be fairly sophisticated and use not just images of a person and background info but also your degree of inebriation (higher levels mean lower standards - imagine an embedded nanotech sensor reporting blood alcohol to your cell phone), the time of night (later means lower standards), how long it has been since you last hooked up, and perhaps similar information from the other person to factor in whether you both ought to be told by your avatars to seek each other out.
Heck, the avatar might even tell you how many drinks you'll have to drink to be able to feel that your realistic choices are acceptable. In the longer term as neurobiology and neurochemistry become more advanced you will be able to have embedded implants installed that will release compounds to make you find many more people attractive than you would naturally. Of course in the longer term gene therapies, stem cell therapies, and other therapies will raise average attractiveness that this will be far less of a problem anyhow. As I've argued previously, the female desire for high status males is going to be harder to solve than the male desire for more attractive females.
Of course, some statistical outliers will actually use this technology to meet more interesting people. I'm not trying to argue that the only application for this technology is meeting people for sexual hook-ups. But my guess is it will find wider use for sexual purposes than for intellectual ones.
Writing for the MIT Technology Review Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies, argues that the new media technologies are causing human minds to develop to more easily switch between and process multiple information sources.
Contemporary aesthetic choices—the fragmented, MTV-style editing, the dense layering of techno music, the more visually complex pages of some contemporary comic books—reflect consumers' desires for new forms of perceptual play and their capacity to take in more information at once than previous generations. Think for a moment about the scrawl—the layering of informational windows—in today's TV news. Like Arcadia’s minigames, there is a trick: any given bit of text is simplified compared to previous news discourse. Such graphical busyness also has an advantage—we can see the interrelationship between stories and pay attention to simultaneous developments. We probably don't read everything on screen, but we monitor and flit between different media flows.
This kind of argument is frequently given a negative spin with the argument that younger people have shorter attention spans. Is that really true? Or is that just another case of older generations always seeing decay in the younger generations?
My guess is that the effect of the modern forms of media is not uniform. At one extreme there are most for whom the web, hundreds of satellite TV channels, XM Radio or Sirius satellite radio, video games, MP3s loaded into Walkmans, and like technologies just fragment their minds and media become something akin to a drug that stimulates and provides a thrill. The mind just reacts, learns little, and is mostly in a state of continuous distraction. A poorly trained mind that is innately easily distracted may well suffer from the easy availability of so many forms of media in the same way that a drug abuser suffers from easy availability of recreational drugs.
But consider the limitations of the pre-internet era. The older information sources take more time and money to access. We do not all live right next to a huge university library. Any physical library of books and other hardcopy publications will not have many of the kinds of information that are now available on the Internet. For minds equipped to handle the modern media the many media sources become something akin to a symphony of sources that can be creatively orchestrated to provide convenient combinations of information that provide the raw material for analysis to reach a larger number of new syntheses and insights than otherwise would have been possible.
We certainly have different information contents in our minds as a result of the new media. For some people that means that they know more about their favorite celebrities. But for others (e.g. people who spend way too many hours per day searching for content to post about on their blogs) they know more about political and economic developments or discoveries in science or how demographic and technological trends are interacting to cause social changes both harmful and beneficial. Generally speaking, people are more likely to look up and know things that would have been too much troulbe for them to look up previously.
The interesting question is whether the experience of the internet and other modern media is causing minds to develop in a different fashion. If youth really are able to handle more media feeds at once is it simply because their minds are younger and more energetic? Or by first encountering the modern media at a younger age with minds that have more malleability are their minds being more reshaped by the experience? Is this experience with modern media making their cognitive processes qualitatively different from the minds of older generations?
Henry Jenkins, director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, has written an essay in Technology Review about his son's experiences as an adolescent developing relationships with girls he has met online:
They may have met online but they communicated through every available channel. Their initial exchange of photographs produced enormous anxiety as they struggled to decide what frozen image or images should anchor their more fluid online identities. In choosing, my son attempted to negotiate between what he thought would be desirable to another 15 year old and what wouldn’t alienate her conservative parents.
The photographs were followed by other tangible objects, shipped between Nebraska and Massachusetts. These objects were cherished because they had achieved the physical intimacy still denied the geographically isolated teens. Henry sent her, for example, the imprint of his lips, stained in red wine on stationery. In some cases, they individually staged rituals they could not perform together. Henry preserved a red rose he purchased for himself the day she first agreed to go steady. Even in an age of instant communication, they still sent handwritten notes. These two teens longed for the concrete, for being together in the same space, for things materially passed from person to person.
Of course, as technology advances the distance that a relationship can progress online will similarly advance. Next stop will be live video feeds. Even that is possible already, albeit limited by a rather low frame rate and/or resolution. Remotely controlled prosthetic sex toys can't be very far behind. Anyone know whether primitive remote controlled prosthetics have reached the consumer market yet?