Memes
Child Reference
Not Everything is On the Internet
The Internet shows me more and more about those who participate in it, but I worry lest I forget that not everything or everyone in the world has a home on the Internet. Missing are those who cannot read or write, who have no access to a computer, or who chose to remain disconnected. There is a danger of coming to think that what cannot be found on an Internet search doesn’t exist, and that the virtual world is the world. It isn’t. However bizarre and incredible the people populating the ...It's easy to forget that there is a large portion of the population that is not online or not contributing because they cannot afford it or outright reject it.
Child Reference
The Unfeeling Space of the Internet Makes Us Prize Physic...
Before the Internet, I made more trips to the library and more phone calls. I read more books and my point of view was narrower and less informed. I walked more, biked more, hiked more, and played more. I made love more often. [...] How has the Internet changed my thinking? The more I’ve loved and known it, the clearer the contrast, the more intense the tension between a physical life and a virtual life. The Internet stole my body, now a lifeless form hunched in front of a glowing scree...Stone notes that the Internet has caused her to enjoy the physical world less often, but more intensely when she does surround herself with it. The key being intention to be in one or the other at a particular time.
Child Reference
Experienced Becoming Replaced with Facsimile
Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated self within the artist’s vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile. As admittedly useful as the Internet is, ea...We are replacing the real world, real experience, with images and film, replicating it, but the experience is degraded in the replication.
Child Reference
Ignorance Coupled with Intellectual Hubris
I used to think that the problem of information is that it turns homo sapiens into fools — we gain disproportionately in confidence, particularly in domains where information is wrapped in a high degree of noise (say, epidemiology, genetics, economics, etc.). So we end up thinking that we know more than we do, which, in economic life, causes foolish risk taking. When I started trading, I went on a news diet and I saw things with more clarity. I also saw how people built too many theories ba...When we work with knowledge wrapped in complexity, we grow overly confident. Economics is a perfect example.
Child Reference
Effects of Technology on the Brain
We already know that our use of technology changes how our brains work. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired, change the way in which the brain processes information. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences, and not just when the subjects are reading. Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was diff...Some examples of the technology impacting brain development, including thickening of portions from reading and writing.
How Technology Makes Us Smarter and More Uncertain
When I do long division or even multiplication I don’t try to remember the intermediate numbers. Long ago I learned to write them down. Because of paper and pencil I am “smarter” in arithmetic. In a similar manner I now no longer to try remember facts, or even where I found the facts. I have learned to summon them on the Internet. Because the Internet is my new pencil and paper, I am “smarter” in factuality. But my knowledge is now more fragile. For every accepted piece of knowledg...The Internet is a cognitive prosthesis, helping our brains to summon facts, but it also makes us more uncertain about the facts we take for granted, because there are challenges to what we know everywhere online.
Smaller Fragments of Information Command Attention
I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers really are be...Kevin Kelly describes how he his attention is grabbed by smaller bits of information and his mind more active as a result.
Child Reference
How Brian Eno's Mind has Changed Through Use of the Intenet
I notice that I now digest my knowledge as a patchwork drawn from a wider range of sources than I used to. I notice too that I am less inclined to look for joined-up finished narratives and more inclined to make my own collage from what I can find. I notice that I read books more cursorily — scanning them in the same way that I scan the Net — ‘bookmarking’ them. ... I notice that more of my time is spent in words and language — because that is the currency of the Net — than it was...Some observations made by the author about how his thinking and behaviors have changed through online technologies.
Child Reference
Attention is the Fundamental Literacy
Attention is the fundamental literacy. Every second I spend online, I make decisions about where to spend my attention. Should I devote any mindshare at all to this comment or that headline? — a question I need to answer each time an attractive link catches my eye. Simply becoming aware of the fact that life online requires this kind of decision-making was my first step in learning to tune a fundamental filter on what I allow into my head — a filter that is under my control only if I prac...Life online requires properly allocating our attention to maximize our productivity.
Child Reference
The Internet is Empty Calories
But sometimes I think much of what we get on the Internet is empty calories. It’s sugar — short videos, pokes from friends, blog posts, Twitter posts (even blogs seem longwinded now), pop-ups and visualizations…Sugar is so much easier to digest, so enticing…and ultimately, it leaves us hungrier than before. Worse than that, over a long period, many of us are genetically disposed to lose our capability to digest sugar if we consume too much of it. It makes us sick long-term, as well as...Is the information we consume on the Internet like refined sugar, leaving us hungrier than before?
Child Reference
A Reason Not to Use Bookmarks
The plural of anecdotes is not data — but anecdotes are all I have. We don’t yet understand how we think or what it means to change the way we think. Scientists are making inroads and ultimately hope to understand much more. But right now all I and my fellow contributors can do are make observations and generalize. ... Someone pointed out to me once that he, like me, never uses a bookmark in a book. I always attributed my negligence to disorganization and laziness — the few times I atte...A bookmark is an artificial place in a book, without which we return to the last point in a book that made an impact on your brain.
Child Reference
The Population Explosion of Celebrities are Cancelling Ea...
The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything. The Internet forces me, as a creator, to figure out who I really am and what is unique to me — or to anyone else, for that matter — I like this. ... The Internet forces me to renegotiate my relationship to the celebrity dimension of pop culture. There are too many celebrities now, and they all cancel each other out (15 minutes...With the increasing number of celebrities in the world, the value of each celebrity is reduced, when everyone is a celebrity, we should all fee free to be eccentric ourselves.
Child Reference
Reading Comments on the Internet Feels Like It's the End ...
Watching an unbelievably beautiful video of Hubble probing the edge of space: unfathomable 17.000 comments, but half of them inane, gross, with atrocious spelling, insults from childish name-calling, immature outbursts, vicious moronic bullying to outright gibberish insanity. Reading YouTube comment threads can make you sense the end of the world as we knew it. How sad, but I guess one doesn’t have to look? ... The Internet brings the promise of connecting it all. But it could also conne...A shared sentiment, the idea that reading youtube comments robs our faith in humanity.
Child Reference
WWW has Replaced Sex as Propagator of Junk Data
For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role. A single illegal download can propagate more parasitic bits of information than a host of mating Tse Tse flies. Indeed, as I looked further afield, I found that it was not just Wikipedia that was in error: essentially every d...DNA has often propagated bad ideas, evidenced by all the extinct species throughout Earth's history; today the Internet propagates vast quantities of bad data.
Child Reference
The Internet is Fueled by Curiosity and Generosity
The Internet relies on our greed for knowledge and connections, but also on our astonishing online generosity. We show inordinate levels of altruism on the Internet, wasting hours on chat room sites giving advice to complete strangers, or contributing anonymously to Wikipedia just to enrich other people’s knowledge. There is no guarantee or expectation of reciprocation. Making friends and trusting strangers with personal information (be it your bank details or musical tastes) is an essentia...It takes inquisitive minds to browse the Internet and generous minds to fill it with content.
Child Reference
Can Social Networking Change the Human Brain
Consider, for example, the fact that the size of military units has not changed materially in thousands of years, even though our communication technology (from signal fires to telegraphy to radio to radar) has. The basic unit in the Roman army (the “maniple”) was composed of 120-130 men, and the size of the analogous unit in modern armies (the company) is still about the same. The fact that effective human group size has not changed very substantially — even though communication techno...While we may have hundreds of friends on social network sites, the human brain is only capable of handling a smaller social network.
Child Reference
Cultural Impacts of Easy Access to Pornography on the Int...
The Internet is awash with sex. In a few hours, an innocent can see more of the pleasures and perversions of sex, in a greater number of close-up couplings, than a eighteenth century roué could experience in a lifetime devoted to illicit encounters. The Internet is the greatest sex education machine — or the greatest pornographer — that has ever existed. Having spent time teaching at a Muslim university, where the torrent of Internet sex was a hot topic, I would not underestimate its imp...What are the cultural and emotional impacts of the flood of pornography to people accessing the Internet?
Child Reference
Internet as Social Amplifier
Electronic communication and social networking enable Tea Partiers, global warming deniers, and conspiracy theorists to isolate themselves and find support for their shared ideas and suspicions. As the Internet connects the like-minded and pools their ideas, White supremacists may become more racist, Obama-despisers more hostile, and militia members more terror prone (thus limiting our power to halt terrorism by conquering a place). In the echo chambers of virtual worlds, as in real worlds, s...Social networking allows conspiracy theorists to insulate themselves in tribes of like-mindedness.
Child Reference
The Difference Between the Internet and the World Wide Web
It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people, are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. No one has expressed this misunderstanding more clearly than Tom Wolfe in Hooking Up: I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mai...Hillis notes that people equate the www with the internet, failing to realize they are actually very different things, with www being just one thing out of many running on the internet. He compares it to people equating electricity with electric lights, and failing to realize all the other applications the invention makes possible.
Child Reference
C is for Curating the World
The Internet made me think towards a more expanded notion of curating. Stemming from the Latin word 'curare', the word 'curating' originally meant 'to take care of objects in museums'. Curation has long since evolved. Just as art is no longer limited to traditional genres, curating is no longer confined to the gallery or museum but has expanded across all boundaries. The rather obscure and very specialized notion of curating has become much more publicly used since one talks about curating of...With the www, we should reconsider or recontextualize the meaning of the word "curator," someone who takes care of things in museum, to include those who digitize art, prose, or ideas online.