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I was led to this by a CritLit2010 Tweet from Ruth Howard.

In it Clay Shirky responds to Nick Carr and others who worry that “the internet is making us dumber”. But I think to some extent Shirky misidentifies the concerns of the “dumber” camp (and certainly says nothing about making us smarter) although he does  address some important issues.

Carr and his ilk worry about the impact of web-based media on our reading habits and attention spans, and although I think that the evidence they cite is questionable I can’t really deny that their concerns about a potential issue may be legitimate.

Shirky looks instead at the concerns about quailty of content being drowned in a flood of garbage, which are also commonly expressed but not really as “the case for digitally-driven stupidity”.[1]

What I think is most useful in Shirky’s article is his claim that we will address the abundance issue by “invent(ing) cultural norms that do for the Internet’s abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print”. This is already happening (via “like this” buttons, “people who bought this also bought that” recommendations, and other reputation management schemes) but Shirky is right to draw attention to it as something that still needs work.

Addendum (June 13): Stephen Pinker does a better job of addressing the actual question of effects on intelligence.

I have nothing to add to this, just want to keep the link.

Howard Knopf doesn’t like The SAC Double Negative Option Celestial Jukebox, but I have to quarrel with a number of his reasons.

Many of these have to do with defending the existing media levy schemes which unfairly extract funds from people who have no intent of copying copyrighted work and who are provided no option for declaring and committing to avoiding such activity when making the purchase.
Until there is provision for specially marked exempt media, the existing levy scheme is just legalized theft and like any other manifestly unfair law it undermines public respect for the law in general.

Also particularly galling is #6 “It’s inherently socialistic” - not because I have socialist tendencies myself (though I do), but because (a) it’s not, and (b) whether it is or not has no relevance to the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, so (c) the accusation is just presented as name-calling.

EXCESS COPYRIGHT: More Myths about Myths about File Sharing

Coincidentally I read ‘Born on a Blue day’ just yesterday - i.e. one day before zac at squareCircleZ posted his summary review - (having been led to the order the book after watching a video posted - also at SqCZ I think - a couple of months ago). My only difference with the review is that I would reverse what Zac says about the last quarter and the finale. (And anyone who reads any of my views about climate etc may rightly suspect that I couldn’t help having reservations about the breeding practices of Daniel’s parents - admirable though their parenting may have been.)

OK this is Mark Bauerline again, this time writing in the ChronicleReview.com with a rehash of the ideas he expounded in ‘The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future’ and particular emphasis on the discovery by Nielsen et al in 2006 that “Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern”. Now, Nielsen’s discovery is actually not surprising since much if not most web content is designed to be skimmed in search for particular items rather than to be read completely; Nielsen both acknowledges other possibilities with his “often” and doesn’t claim any earth shattering implications other than to make reasonable conclusions about how to design web pages of the kind intended for skimming in such a way that that skimming will be effective. But Bauerlein infers a lot more. Mostly unfounded nonsense. …more »

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com

But what do they think I just did with that article? I read it online!

…more »

This article by Keenan Malik (from Butterflies and Wheels via ALDaily) challenges some of the attitudes attributed to cultural preservationists and comes close to, without quite making explicit, the essentially organic nature of cultures and their interactions. What he misses I think is the question of whether and how to mitigate the adverse effects on individuals of transfer between cultural contexts (either involuntary or voluntary) and of the phenomena of cultural blending and, yes, decay. Also relevant but ignored is the fact that one individual may be a member of several distinct cultures.

Perhaps I would have written a book on this if my attention span had not been depleted by exposure to the internet.

My friend Gerry Pareja sent this article by John Naughton from The Observer, responding (I think very well) to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘ in The Atlantic, but I can’t say that its arrival is what distracted me from my previous line of thought. In fact I was just tired, but feeling my need for sleep as a sign of lack of commitment-to-task prompted me to start also on my own intended response to Carr - and others who decry the influence of the web and other technology on our mental capacities. …more »

Toronto Star reporter Lesley Ciarula Taylor took issue with the idea of a language test for immigrants, citing a silly question about whether standard-of-living should be said to increase or to rise, but blogger Brett disputes the source of the question. Arnold Zwicky clearly doesn’t understand how to evaluate sources. The question was reported in print in a newspaper with professional writers and editors, so it must be real. That the denial comes in a mere “blog” makes it inherently less credible. If Zwicky had taken the trouble to read the real book ‘Cult of the Amateur’ written by Andrew Keen he would have understood this and could have joined happily in the chorus of dismay about the silly test question.
…more »

Mike Caulfield provides a brilliant rebuttal of a rather silly column (by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post) supporting the ideas of Andrew Keen about the supposed relative unreliability of the web relative to print. (This came to me via Stephen Downes’ always interesting OLDaily)

“Holding theorems in their hands” is a blog post about the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project. It’s a wonderful story about collaboration on many levels and across many interest groups - and with beautiful images to boot. I saw it via Stephen Downes.

Columnist Jan Freeman defends the habit, common in some regions, of using the past participle in place of the gerund or infinitive phrase - ie saying “t’lawn needs cut” rather than “the lawn needs to be cut”.

The main issue here is that the past participle is an adjective and the problem with using an adjective as a noun is that we seem to have a built in syntax checker that works independent of semantics. So if in “I work fed” the adjective applies to the subject, then it should also do so in “I need fed”, which therefore means that after being fed I apparently still need something else!

… of course the fact that in English the gerund (noun) has the same form as the present participle (adjective) also needs fixing - and if Jack was hungry when he got to the top of the beanstalk he would be as leery of saying “I need eating” as of “I need eaten”. I do like eating though….

But it should be clear by now that I don’t need confused since I already am!

Why a Great Music Site Died :: Mediacheck :: thetyee.ca

In Do the math - The Boston Globe columnist Jan Freeman dismisses objections to the common usage of “three times less than” to mean equal to one third of.

But the Merriam-Webster editors (per JF) are completely off base if they claim that “times less” has never been misunderstood. …more »

My friend Gerry Pareja forwarded a link to this story from ‘Improbable Research’ about the first prize winner in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2007 Illusion of the Year contest.

The image certainly is pretty cool. But to test the explanation I tried covering each image in turn and the effect was still there! I wondered if there was a perceptual delay effect in that our memory of one picture affects our interpretation of the other but then I also noticed that the effect changes depending on where the picture is in our field of view. If I position myself facing the right hand edge of the monitor, then the right hand tower seems more vertical and the left one almost seems to lean left or backwards. So the illusion may be more (or at least partly) due to the fact that in the absense of other visual cues in the picture we tend to interpret as if viewed from the direction at which we are looking at the picture - ie we interpret the picture edge as a window frame.

David Basskin, Director of the CanadianPrivate Copying Collective, has written a letter to the Star in response to Michael Geist’s earlier comments about the media levy and its prospects of its being extended to mp3 players and perhaps even computer hard drives.

Basskin says “The private copying levy is an important source of revenue for music-rights holders and is an issue of fairness”, and goes on to claim that “The levy is often misunderstood. It is not a tax or subsidy, but payment to individual rights holders for use of music by Canadians in the privacy of their homes. Compensation for use – that’s fair”.

But of course the levy is NOT fair because it extracts funds from people who purchase data storage media for purposes having nothing to do with the products of Basskins’ clients and so in fact it IS a tax and subsidy.

What is particularly frustrating about this is the fact that there is a perfect opportunity for the sellers of music recordings to obtain compensation for whatever pattern of reproduction they expect from their customers, and that is at the point of sale. Extracting that compensation later from others who may have no interest in the product just amounts to artificially lowering the price. This may be good for sales and it may even be in the public interest to subsidize artistic products in some way, but this particular approach to gaining that subsidy is fundamentally dishonest and the legislators who were persuaded to go along with it have been conned and bamboozled.

One other aspect of this situation that is worth mentioning is that many who object to the levy might still be willing to entertain a more honestly defined subsidy - paid from honestly defined taxes. But taxes should be collected by the government not by private organizations.

The peace and wellbeing of society is harmed by laws whose perceived unfairness or unenforceability reduces public respect for the law.

In a large body of legislation it is hard to avoid parts which will appear unfair to some, but it is foolish to unnecessarily enact provisions whose manifest unfairness will be frequently imposed on large segments of the population.

A case in point is the media levy in Canadian copyright law. …more »

In TheStar.com - entertainment - Tax on MP3 players may return, David Basskin, director of the Canadian Private Copying Collective, is quoted as saying:

“When you have bought a CD, you don’t own the music – you own the copy of the music that you’ve purchased,” he says. “You’re not buying the rights to make copies.”

“People are going to do private copying, and the levy legitimizes it and provides compensation to the people who created the music. It’s pretty hard to say why that’s not fair,”

No its bloody well not hard to see at all!!!

{Warning:obscenities coming} …more »

ok, This may be a picayune comment in the context of a serious issue, but in David Remnick’s Letter from Jerusalem: The Apostate: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker he refers to Avram Burg’s “flouting of the fact that he holds a French passport”. Of course the common ignorami more often go the other way and have angry demonstrators “flaunting authority” so at least favouring the more hi-toned word is consistent with the New Yorker’s self-perceived station in the world. But perhaps this flaunting of editorial incompetence may encourage others to flaut the magazine’s presumed authority.