I just finished a Ted Talk with James Surowiecki, the author of the Wisdom of Crowds. Although his talk took place in 2005, he made some keen observations about what he calls the dark side of the blogosphere. Basically, it is easy to celebrate the decentralized aspects of the internet. The ideal is that anyone can have a voice in ways unheard of previously. However, James points out that as the network becomes tightly linked to each other, the harder it is to be independent. In other words the network begins to feed on itself, shaping the views and interactions of others.
A good example that has emerged post James’ talk is the Digg effect. I agree that it is problematic, yet seemingly inevitable that memes, or viral content become self-propellant fed by the characteristics of the network itself. The result is that despite the ideal of the internet, many voices become lost once again.
I recently watched a video from the Pop Tech conference. A video of Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, describing the difference of living life as a conversation of possibilities rather than a downward spiral. What was most interesting was that in order to demonstrate his thinking ne brought on stage a young celloist, and walked him through a practice session.
One great moment that came out of the practice was Zander telling the young person that when they made a mistake, instead of constricting and pulling downward, they should instead spring upwards shouting “How Fascinating!”
Pop Tech is an annual conference, held in October in Maine, about people and ideas shaping the future.
This is one of the most profound videos I have watched recently. Richard Dawkins, explains from an evolutionary biologist point of view that our sense of reality is designed to function on a “middle earth” scale. That is, we, by design, value a certain manifestation of the world, that would be much different if we evolve on a much smaller or larger scale.
For me, what was very interesting is the implications for what it means to talk about reality. This may not be radical stuff for people in the field, but the way Dawkins describes this is beautiful and fascinating. It raises an interesting question of whether there are limits to our understanding of the universe, whether in our own reality or from another point of view? Enjoy!
Whenever I hear the phrase “this is for your own good”, I instinctively wonder, whose good? I had this in the back of my mind as I read an article about how China is treating internet addiction (via Washingtronpost.com). Internet addiction has long since been associated with substance abuse. It is hard to deny both the internet and alcohol share a commonality of people using both in significant quantities. Yet, alcohol is not usually associated with being productive. This is where the approach of treating internet addiciton like substance abuse fails for me. The internet is ubiquitous in my life. That is not to say alcohol can be a ubiquitous tool in an alcoholics life. But if you make that connection, than any business and school in the nation are actively supporting this addiciton. And if everyone is addicted, is it an addiction anymore?
It seems as though the treatments both in Eastern and Western countries have been to treat internet addiction in a similar way one would treat substance abuse problems. In China, this translates to goverment policy banning internet cafes, and also control programs, which, like American clinics, isolate people from both the problem and the rest of society. One of the concerns I have about this approach is that so often we have been wrong about our diagnosis of psychological problems. It seems as though anything that is abnormal, which in the case of the Washington Post article means “ behaving well — playing basketball, reading books about success”, is met with opposition. Kimberly Young’s book Caught in the Net, came out in 1998, the very beginning of the mainstream introduction of the internet in the United States.
The internet is a different place than it was 10 years ago. China, however, seems to be treating this phenomena like it was 1998. The problem with this is we know more about communication on the internet than we did before. One of the big assumptions in the past was that face to face (F2F) communication was superior to computer mediated communication (CMC). Although, F2F communication has many valuable attributes, we now know internet communication can in some cases exceed F2F. We also know that online relationships can be just as meaningful as F2F. Overall, we know that the feeling of being online is not perverse, but a very real, and very normal reaction people have to this media.
What this means is that we need to rethink how we understand internet addiction. The internet is not a bottle of alcohol. This does not mean internet addiction does not exist, however, networked lives are becoming more common, which means asking quesitons like “How often do you check your email before doing something else you need to do?”, which comes from Kimberly Young’s book, may no longer be the appropriate way to spot addiciton. And locking people away may result in exactly what Sun Fengxiang did, one of the people described in the Post article; Once he got home from the clinic he went online to tell his “worried Internet friends where he was these past few weeks.”
