Deep Thoughts: Cultural Impacts of the Internet
I'd like you to consider the 165th issue of the NetFuture newsletter. Written in response to Wired editor Kevin Kelly's utopian essay about recent internet history, Steve Talbott takes a more critical tack.
Maybe you don't read this kind of thing often -- it's 4000 words, and it's critical of the social impacts of networking technology. But, as I read it, I found his descriptions of what we were before the internet and what we are after to be true. To me, at least.
I think his major points are these:
- "[We cannot] ignore the classic paradox arising when we shift our attention from the particular services of the machines we call "labor-saving" to the people whose labor is being saved. Our jobs now *demand* of us these "conveniences" of instant access. Are our lives less complicated, less hurried, less pressured? Are they less *laborious?*
- "That my "input" can now come from fifty million bloggers rather than the newspapers, journals, and friends I formerly attended to does not enable me to assimilate more words than before. It only alters (and very possibly scatters) the distribution of my attention."
- You have to recognize that what the electronic town meeting most critically substitutes for is not the one-way broadcast, but the original, vibrant community gathering with all its sweaty human presence, intense personal challenges, full-bodied engagement, and serendipitous community-building. And so far as this is the case, the new,interactional technologies do not counter the effects of previous, more limited media, but rather extend them. They embrace a vastly larger field of human activity, enabling us to reduce even the most multidimensional and deep-reaching human exchange to forms that are relatively thinner, more distant, less focused, less communal, and not always easily distinguishable from mere distraction.
Perhaps I'm just responding to good writing and compelling arguments. I tend to do that. But, at the very least, this is worth reading and discussing.
Steve Talbott's essay:
http://netfuture.org/2005/Oct2505_165.html
Kevin Kelly's article:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html
I think you may want to take a look at something called Attention Trust.Org if you havn't already. It argues that given the massive amounts of content that we are exposed to, it's becoming important to record where you focused your attention for both personal sanity and personal gain. In general, I agree with your assessment, but I also think that technology will evolve to help us reduce the signal to noise ratio
One of the tendencies Mr. Talbott identified with technologies that evolve to improve our interactions with computers is that even if they work well for their intended purpose, they tend to be deployed beyond their useful scope. His example was the voice recognition software that customer service departments use -- even if you agree that they serve a useful purpose in allowing you to reach the person who can help you, they will soon attempt to use the technology to actually *replace* the person who can help you!
So far, perhaps the technology mostly widely used to automatically edit media consumption is TiVo's "Suggestions" feature, which automatically records shows it "thinks" you'll like. What I want is a feature that automatically *deletes* shows it thinks I won't like! I mean, I would definitely have trust issues with such a technology, but it's far closer to what I need.