Farhad Manjoo has a short interview with Clay Shirky about his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing with Organizations.

Two brief quotes:

I’m somewhat more sanguine about the echo chamber than some people. I think a lot of what we feel on the Internet is not only about associating with people who share our views but also the sudden shock of exposure to people whose views are very different from ours. I think that eventually we’ll see that what we dubbed as the echo chamber effect is often produced by evidence that people don’t share your views, which causes the leaders of those communities to double down.

[...]

One of the most fun things for me in researching the book was going over the changes that happened after the invention of the printing press. It became clear that the story that I’ve learned in school — that the printing press comes along, and you get the Enlightenment, the Treaty of Westphalia and the rise of the nation-state — that kind of crosses over a hundred years of chaos and bloodshed. And for the first hundred years, the printing press broke more things than it fixed. You had a continent that truly did not know what to think, whose citizens did not know what to think about their allegiances.

Clay is way up there on my list of people who make sense and who I’d love to be more like. I can’t wait until my copy of his book arrives.

[Incidentally, Shirky's title puts him in good company. The Here Comes Everybody blog is a completely different project, but one I used to read all the time, featuring thoughts on writing by a variety of contemporary post-avant poets; the first Here Comes Everybody book is a study of James Joyce by Anthony Burgess that I've not read even once but has been recommended to me many times.]

From a flickr set of scans from the book 1975: And the Changes To Come by Arnold B. Barach. Depicted above is the:

Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.

Says Lanny Arvan:

If we think of direct democracy and the Borg as two distinct ways the collective might function, what determines the one from the other? If we think of teenagers, in particular, their desires to be well liked and hence to be part of the crowd, isn’t there a force that drives them to behave like the Borg? Might social networking a la Facebook be considered more an encourager of Borg-like behavior than of direct democracy? And likewise for Twitter and text messaging?

What of learning technologists in this regard? (Just about everyone I know in the profession is at least 30.) Does this direct democracy versus the Borg distinction make sense for them? Are they wary of any of these technologies because they might promote an undesirable view of the collective?

And what of faculty whom learning technologists might lobby to use some of these technologies? What will the selling point be – the kids are doing it so they need to also to keep the kids’ attention? Do we really expect that argument to work? Faculty want depth of argument from the students. If these technologies are associated with shallow, quick-hitter response, how should a sensible non-Luddite faculty member react to them?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. My concern here is not with the answers. It is that the profession doesn’t seem to be asking them. It seems to be blindly accepting. Part of that is in the spirit of experimentation with the technology. The experimentation per se is fine. But such experimentation can co-opt a critical perspective.

As far as I can tell, the spectre of the “blind acceptance of technology” is a fiction. I suspect the source of the fiction varies: for some, an appeal to this fiction is a way of setting themselves apart from a group. For others it appears to be borne of a systemic pessimism. Some simply don’t pay attention, assuming that promotion of particular technologies must be happening without thought or knowledge of their productivity and problems.

Whatever the case may be, while I am sure there are examples of blind acceptance of technology somewhere, they must be in a tiny minority of educators. There might be something like this going on at the administrative level in particular institutions, but in every case I have experienced it comes from a long-standing legacy of fiscal philosophy that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the material nature of good and products– and the lessened requirement for sustainability that is assumed to come with them.

I also find the intermingling of technological methods of communication and social practice in Lanny’s post– the assumption that technology must not be neutral– and the conflation of short thought with shallow thought troubling. I’m not advocating that more communication has to be better (this is part of my own position when it comes to connected learning and connectivism, where I explicitly believe that this is not the case, though for a different reason), only that this obligation to skepticism is a bit overwrought given that the alternative experiment is not only in place, but entrenched in our educational system.

View the Video

As I struggle with trying to update a video embedding plugin on a blog it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind what it used to be like, not so long ago. Although I wasn’t into the technical details back then, I remember using a Mac Classic and text-catting with a friend on the other side of the desk. And the TI-99/4A with its awesome application cartridges, the Commodore and Vic 20 churning away to save files on tape that I had typed in from a magazine (peek, poke) so I could play a game. Or the first time I used QEMM and Desqview and could switch between multiple applications– Sidekick and Lotus Symphony, I think… with 16 colors! And all the hours I spent on a VAX terminal, writing papers in LaTeX with TPU and processing them for the one laser printer on campus, a hugely expensive monstrosity guarded carefully by the “nodies” who ran the “computer node” aka lab.

The whole conceptual shift from using applications to “being online” has been so fundamental and overpowering– coloring everything we do– that it’s hard to remember that crazy computing land before time, all of 15 years ago.

[I probably shouldn't post a draft like this without proofing and revision, but I am bone-weary and managed to fat-finger away a dozen hours of work that I have to make up before Friday... so I know I won't come back to it. Caveat emptor.]

Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech has predictably ruffled some bloggers’ feathers. I posted the offending tidbit to my blog yesterday knowing it was a provocative lead. What surprised me was that so few appear to have looked at the rest of what Lessing said (I posted one important snippet to my Commonplace Book), much of which is spot-on. In fact, I’m not even sure she’s wrong when talking about the Internet and Television.

But let me dispose of one canard first. A number of people have pointed out the “irony” that, were it not for blogs and the Internet, they never would have seen Lessing’s speech. That’s wrong thinking on two levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Doris Lessing is a worthy and fitting winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her acceptance speech makes clear that she is both engaged in extraordinary work and mired in an old conception of writing, creativity, and the web:

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, “Reading maketh a full man” - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

The official followup to Did You Know: Shift Happens, Did You Know 2.0 is worth the 8 minute viewing time for anyone involved in technology, culture and education.

Discussion, sources, and reactions can be found at the ShiftHappens wikispace.

Nicolas Nova highlights a very interesting quote from Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s paper “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?”, which I also will quote in full:

“Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas’s powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single stroke, Gibson’s powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community that established the grounding for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction. As with Paul and Virginia in the time of Napoleon and Dupont de Nemours, Neuromancer in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses in the large.”

As much as we like to consider the influence of technology on our stories, fictions and narratives, it is a fascinating thought exercise to think about how some of those fictional and cinematic narratives have come to influence, positively and negatively, our conception of the technological future. Sadly, we get only the tiniest glimpses inside mental wonderland of individuals. I, for instance, have seen my understanding of technology and the future shaped by influences that range from an early encounter with a book about Einstein to the hidden workings and mechanical claptrap of The Price is Right. But it isn’t hard to understand that very few of those pondering this part of our future– and even fewer of those who are actively working on bringing it about– can do so without these widespread ideas sneaking in.

Who can think of artificial intelligence without invoking the voice of HAL? Who can consider humanoid, or even human-task capable, robots without a bit of Asimov, Star Wars, and Blade Runner shaping their thoughts? Our conception of virtual worlds is heavily influenced not just by Gibson and Lucas, of course, but by Stephenson and Star Trek. And in a dizzying way that can lead to sleepless nights, all of these are heavily influenced by a variety of ubiquitous classical texts and authors.

Perhaps that is the definition of one kind of truly great speculative writing or cinema, that which creates a disruption in what we expect so great– and yet so plausibly and/or believably (and those two are not equivalent!) that you can’t help but be shaped by, or in reaction to, it.

Incidentally, the paper first appeared in Cyberspace: First Steps, a volume edited by Michael Benedikt. I look forward to tracking the essays down. And for inquiring minds: no, it’s probably not the same Michael Benedikt who put together one of the earliest and most influential anthologies of the english language prose poem… which itself created a norm for that very young kind of writing whose influence– a kind of soft, minimalistic surrealism– is still strong today.

I sit at the coffee shop table writing in one of my myriad paper notebooks, at a table well away from the power outlets (I’ve learned that if I sit too near an outlet it isn’t too long before my space is being eyed hungrily by someone wielding a laptop, all of whom have learned– as I have on those rare occasions that I fire my own up– to always plug in when possible same way it is wise to always fill your water containers when trekking through the desert, into the Appalachias, or around and around the shopping mall).

At one of the window tables with power and a view (the owner has literally screwed the cord powering the open/closed sign to one of the outlets using the kind of one-way screws usually seen only in bathroom stalls and prison visiting areas) a girl has nested with her canary yellow notebook computer, a stack of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs at her side. A friend joins her and she talks about the mixes she is making for friends and family she has recently left to come to school here in the wild north. I have my crazy earbuds in with my ridiculously capacious digital music player’s sound turned off, the highest-tech way of enabling old-fashioned eavesdropping I am capable of.
Read the rest of this entry »

“We need a basic currency for measuring good deeds, so I’m going to go with the aforementioned lunch. One meal for one person. And, in honor of that woman by the hot dog stand, I’m calling it the Stacy.”

While trying to figure out what is happening and what I am doing with my life (and how to survive it), a timely pointer (life preserver?) was sent my way to an essay/presentation by Darren Barefoot for the recent Gnomedex conference. The piece is about doing good in a technological time, some of the ways that it is possible and an incitement for each of us to think about what we could and should be doing ourselves.