Clicking Aimlessly

The Internet is supposed to make us smarter. Where have I heard that before? Oh, it's the tagline of this blog which, by the way, is a quip I borrowed from comedian Lewis Black.

The truthiness of that supposition, though, seems to be a hot topic this week.

Clay Shirky, who teaches New Media as an associate professor at NYU, talks about the media revolution in his article Does the Internet Make You Smarter:

Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.

He makes a good case that increased freedom to create gives us all kinds of silly, time-wasting distractions. For example cute cat videos, Farmville and the House Republicans' web site. But we also get revolutionary tools like Wikipedia which, according to Shirky, is becoming the most important English reference work since its creation in 2001.

But even the "good stuff" can distract me as I demonstrated in my Six Degrees of Wikipedia post last year.

Obviously there's a massive amount of informative, interesting stuff out there. I load a program called Trillian, which manages all my chat accounts, plus my Facebook and Twitter streams, and I'm instantly inundated with all kinds of witty comments and links to interesting news articles. I want to click each and every one because now I'm aware that there is something I don't know! Now I'm aware that there's new information I'm not aware of!

And knowing that there's something I don't know doesn't make me feel smart. It gives me an urgent feeling that I'm falling behind all those other smart people out there. So I read as much as I can, yet I can't commit it all to my long-term memory. Damn it.

I know I'm a total multitasker because the New York Times told me so. I scored 100% on both their Test How Fast You Juggle Tasks quiz and their Test Your Focus quiz.

But I'm not sure what those results really mean. In fact, asking whether the Internet makes us smart or dumb might be the wrong question. A better question is "What kind of brain is the web giving us?"

I think the most alarming part of this NYT story about a guy hooked on gadgets was the theory that heavy technology use diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another.

There's further evidence that the web is turning us into shallower thinkers with weak reading comprehension:

Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext ubiquitous and presumably less startling and unfamiliar, the cognitive problems remain. Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

Well, that's discouraging. Here I am trying to inform and entertain, and yet, hyperlink by hyperlink, I'm slowly turning my audience into uncaring, scatter-brained introverts. That should be my new tagline.

The Death Tweeter

Gawker has the scoop on one of the dummies who tweeted Obama death threats last night. His name is Jay Martin and he sounds apologetic and slightly less angry than he did yesterday. This is the part of the interview that stood out to me:

GAWKER: So you were speaking out of anger. What prompted your anger I'm guessing the health care vote?
JAY: Yes. And my beliefs on it from what I have researched.

Well, there's the problem. If you research online and only find garbage about death panels and Nazis, you're going to be angry... and misinformed.

Socialized Book Care

At CPAC last week, Glenn Beck encouraged his followers to educate themselves at our nation's socialized book care centers:

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I'm not sure how people can watch Glenn Beck's mental patient impersonation for hours at a time, but apparently some people do, and they take him very seriously. If you caught the recent NYT article on the teabaggers, you probably noticed that Beck and his 9/12 project came up disturbingly often:

Most of the people there had paid only passing attention to national politics in years past. “I voted twice and I failed political science twice,” said Darin Stevens, leader of the Spokane 9/12 Project.

He sounds like a typical teabagger to me along with the 66 year old Mrs. Stout who is taking a Twitter class... I'm derailing a bit here, but I had no idea such a thing was needed or I would have hired myself out as a private Twitter tutor. Moreover, I think the existence of a Twitter class suggests that many people have been left behind as the world progresses without them. They probably feel insecure and rush to catch up, but their efforts include bogus classes and Glenn Beck books... which they'll have to buy at Borders once they figure out that the libraries are a socialist thing.

Anyway, George Packer explained it better. Mrs. Stout represents a certain type of person we've seen throughout US history:

There’s nothing new about Mrs. Stout. She’s a familiar figure in American life, always latent, but coming to the surface in national emergencies. Richard Hofstadter described her mental world in detail. In the seventeen-eighties she lived in Sheffield, Massachusetts, during a period of tight credit and land foreclosures and was sympathetic to the farmers’ uprising known as Shay’s Rebellion that began there. In the eighteen-fifties she was a non-voting constituent of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. In the eighteen-nineties she was the wife of a Nebraska farmer who joined the People’s Party and voted for William Jennings Bryan and free silver. In the nineteen-thirties desperate poverty drove her to fall for the simple solutions of Huey Long’s left-wing demagoguery, or Father Coughlin’s right-wing demagoguery, which often sounded similar. In the nineteen-fifties she listened avidly to radio personalities like Fulton Lewis, Jr., and Walter Winchell, thought President Eisenhower was a knowing agent of the Communist Party, and was a passionate supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy. In 2001 she knew that the Bush Administration orchestrated 9/11. In 2008 she showed up at Sarah Palin rallies.

And that's the problem. Teabaggers think the answer to their discontent can be found in militias, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin.

Future Woman

(Image found on Twitpic. Click to enlarge.)

I have a repeating dream -- actually it's a daydream -- where I imagine that somehow I've traveled back in time. Not too far back in time though. Maybe it's around 1947 where my government hosts will at least know what a transistor is. And then, much like the picture above, they want to quiz me about modern technology.

I could probably explain integrated circuits, personal computers, the rise of the Internet, and maybe even Moore's Law. But I'm not really sure I could ever explain what we do with it all and why.

Filtering the Revolution

In the aftermath of the election in Iran, Twitter emerged as the most powerful way for Iranians to disseminate information and organize protests. The Iranian government has been censoring the Internet for years, but of course -- as the Cute Cat Theory explains -- firewalls don't stop anybody for long.

But don't expect our own government to understand technology, firewalls, or cute cats. Sens. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., plan to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran from receiving federal contracts.

My first thought -- have these senators heard of China? China's net censorship is well documented. American companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all been complicit in China's human rights abuses. Heck, you might even say they were enthusiastic.

But why do these companies make technologies with wiretapping features built in anyway? Our lawmakers should know the answer to this simple question. In the EU and the US, telecommunications networks are legally required to have those capabilities for Lawful Intercept. Unfortunately, the exact same network hardware that is sold over here is also sold over there.

This fact shouldn't give the above mentioned companies a free pass for supporting oppressive regimes. However, our own government has to see the bigger picture. We want our law enforcement agencies to be able to wiretap (with a court order -- wink wink), but these Lawful Intercept requirements have consequences far outside our own borders.

Oh, and this leads me to my second thought -- why the hell aren't we punishing the companies who enabled warrantless wiretapping within the US? Schumer and Graham ought to work on that one for a while.

Ranks of the Insane

"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." — Marcus Aurelius

I thought I had said enough about that tea party thingy two weeks ago, but apparently it's the gift that keeps on giving:

An Oklahoma City man who announced on Twitter that he would turn an April 15 tax protest into a bloodbath was hit with a federal charge of making interstate threats last week, in what appears to be first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site.

Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, was arrested by FBI agents who identified him as the Twitter user CitizenQuasar. In a series of tweets beginning April 11, CitizenQuasar vowed to start a "war" against the government on the steps of the Oklahoma City Capitol building, the site of that city's version of the national "Tea Party" protests promoted by the conservative-leaning Fox News.

"START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!," read a tweet at 8:01 PM that day. "After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!," he added five minutes later. Then: "Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps."

Hayden's MySpace page is a breathtaking gallery of right wing memes about the "New World Order," gun control as Nazi fascism, and Barack Obama's covert use of television hypnosis, among many others.

I'm wondering if the Republicans will come to regret embracing those tea parties? I dared to view Dan Hayden's MySpace page -- the deluge of videos is enough to crash your web browser -- and I saw an awful lot of crazy there. His blog posts are long winded, paranoid, political rants. He claims Obama has some kind of hypno power and Bush was drunk at G20. Looks like he supported Ron Paul, but I get the impression he really hates all government.

But I give him credit for making that recent DHS report on right-wing extremism seem even more urgent.

I'm honestly trying to understand this new conservatism. AlterNet has a compelling article about the different moral priorities of Republicans and Democrats, and one of the observations is that Republicans have much more respect for authority and order. Well then, why all these threats of violence against the police? "Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads..." Huh? They must have changed their moral priorities when they lost the election.

Twits on Twitter

I thought the days of investing millions in internet startups with no plans for profit were over. But apparently if that startup company is Twitter, it's raining money like 1997 all over again. One of the venture capital firms behind Twitter also invested in eBay in the early days... so I guess they've got some credibility.

In case you don't know what Twitter is, I'll explain as best I can. It's a "micro blogging" site where you enter your messages (or "tweets" as they call them) in 140 characters or less. You can submit them on the web site, through a 3rd party application, or from your cell phone. You can follow as many other Tweeters as you like and they can follow you.

The results should be an interesting mix of conversations. More so, I find it to be a bunch of people self-promoting their projects, products, and blogs... like me.

I try to be thought provoking and creative in my tweets, but ultimately it's the stupid messages like "should I drink this expired orange juice" that gets the responses from the strangers who are following me. It's all rather weird.

But I suppose the service is handy if you're a news correspondent who wants to get quick input from viewers.

And it's also perfect for a politician who wants to reach out to the masses... or potential terrorists. Rep. Peter Hoekstra made a rather bad judgment call when he gave detailed updates on his recent trip to Iraq via Twitter.

Now Karl Rove wants in on the fun. The former presidential political adviser recently twittered his Texas hunting trip. I admit that I'm slightly relieved that his tweets are no more exciting than mine. Yet I have to wonder -- what if Rove had been tweeting the last eight years? Might we have seen something like this:

KarlRove @JohnMcCain I know about your black baby.

KarlRove Damn! Misplaced my caging lists again!

KarlRove @W woke up with a great idea! Let's out a CIA agent for shits and giggles!

KarlRove I'm just going to blow off that whole subpoena thing today.

KarlRove Let's kill stuff.

So now that I have a direct link to Rove, I feel rather icky. But besides that, I'm wondering if I can craft the perfect 140 character message that will make him open his eyes, repent for his transgressions, and become a better man. Probably not, but I'm so glad we have the internet.