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Cognitive Surplus Review

What do I actually do on the Internet? I have been thinking about this and more, as I contemplate what the Internet is doing to our brains, culture and society. By reading The Shallows (Nicholas Carr), Macrowikinomics (Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams), and a host of others, such as some of BrainPickings‘ list of seven must-read books about the future of the Internet, I’m realizing that this can be quite a polarized debate. Clay Shirky’s latest, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, gives us a rational, optimistic, and grand view of what the internet is doing to us, how it’s happening, and what it means.

In this quick and thought-provoking read, internet guru Clay Shirky writes about the effect that the Internet is having on our society. He defines and explains the book’s title in the opening chapter: “The cognitive surplus, newly forged from previously disconnected islands of time and talent, is just raw material. To get any value out of it, we have to make it mean or do things. We, collectively, aren’t just the source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use, by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness.”

The book opens by comparing our transition into the digital age to that of the Industrial Age in 18th century London. (If this sounds very familiar, you may have read something similar in Tapscott and Williams’ Macrowikinmoics, or seen Tapscott speak about it on CBC’s Mansbridge One-On-One.)

Shirky tells the story of London’s excessive gin drinking, brought on by society’s inability to adapt to the massive change that was going on around them. The gin drinking consumed all aspects of the Londoners’ lives, taking up most of their free time. In our shift to the digital age, Shirky says that our escape, our gin so to speak, has been the sitcom. The Londoners of the 1720’s drank gin; the North Americans of the 20th century watched Gillian’s Island. We watched Cheers, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons. When we came home from work, we turned on the TV, even if we had nothing to watch.

Internet > TV

In 2011, that trend is shifting. When we come home from work, we open the laptop. We don’t even really need to check anything in particular; we just turn it on out of habit. Our Gilligan’s Island no longer exists. The Internet creates diversity by offering personalized content, and for the first time in human history, offers to the masses the ability to produce and contribute to the media, rather than just consume and observe. Increasingly, more people are spending their free time on the Internet, contributing their cognitive surplus to the world wide web. The effect this is having on society is profound, and Shirky looks at how our tools connect us more than ever before, why we contribute and share with strangers, and what it ultimately means for mankind.

The Paradox of Revolution

In one of the book’s strongest sections,  Shirky compares this digital revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries to the 15th century’s transition into a world of print. He tells the story of Gutenberg and his printings of Bibles and indulgences (granted by the Catholic Church after the sinner has confessed and been forgiven), which at first glance seemed like they would further strengthen the “economic and political position of the Church”. Instead, just the opposite happened.

According to Shirky, “This is the paradox of revolution. The bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous shape of society. So it is today. The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the twentieth-century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead.”

The changes happening in our world as we adjust to the digital world of computers and the connectivity of the Internet are comparable to the changes that occurred in the 15th and 16th centuries as a result of the printing press and the subsequent flood of information.

The Spectrum of Internet Use: Personal, Communal, Public, Civic

In chapter 6, Shirky demonstrates how “the organization of sharing has many forms” and points out that “we can identify four essential points on the spectrum”. The four essential points are:

  • Personal sharing: “done among otherwise uncoordinated individuals” (eg. ICanHasCheezburger, most general uses of Facebook etc)
  • Communal sharing: “takes place inside a group of collaborators” (eg. Meetup.com)
  • Public sharing: “when a group of collaborators actively wants to create a public resource” (eg. open-source software such as Linux and Apache, WordPress, Wikipedia, etc)
  • Civic sharing: “when a group is actively trying to transform society” (eg. Pink Chaddi, organized protests in Tunisia, Egypt etc.)

Shirky argues that personal sharing is not as beneficial to society:

“We should care more about public and civic value than about personal or communal value because society benefits more from them, but also because public and civic value are harder to create.”

He goes on to he draw from a previous reference to the Invisible College, a group of intellectuals in 17th century England who shared ideas and laid the foundations for modern science. Shirky cleverly lays out the choices the internet offers us:

“The choice we face is this: out of the mass of our shared cognitive surplus, we can create an Invisible University – many Invisible Colleges doing the hard work of creating many kinds of public and civic value – or we can settle for Invisible High School, where we get lolcats but no open source software, fan fiction but no improvement in medical research. The Invisible High School is already widespread, and our ability to participate in ways that reward personal or communal value is in no imminent danger.”

As we move further into this digital age, we have to be aware of how radically different our world is becoming, especially when comparing it to the industrial age our parents and grandparents grew up in. The digital age makes necessary “a huge increase in the number of people paid to think or talk, rather than to produce or transport objects”. As others have said before him, Clay Shirky makes it extremely evident that we are living in a world of bits, not atoms. For instance, in analyzing Napster’s success, Shirky writes that “Napster, like all forms of digital data sharing, took advantage of the fact that music could now be shared like thoughts rather than like objects.”

Music shared like thoughts, rather than like objects. Bits of information, rather than atoms of matter.

This distinction makes a world of difference.

Final Thoughts

Shirky’s book has made me acutely aware of what I’m doing on the Internet. Is it personal, communal, public or civic? Am I contributing my free time, my cognitive surplus, to a greater, collective cause? Perhaps by writing Wikipedia articles or by providing homework help for math students? Or am I laughing at lolcats and looking at people’s photos and commenting on statuses on Facebook?

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky will make you realize just how dramatically the world is changing due to the Internet and how important it is to be aware of the changes in order to influence the future.

The internet is affecting my reading habits

I’ve been working my way through a list of books Maria Popova posted last month: seven must-read books on the future of the internet. Since reading Nick Carr’s The Shallows a few months ago, I’ve been extremely aware of the time I spend on the internet, and really try to think about how I use it. Carr’s book actually made me take a step back, use my computer a bit less (for a week or two), and wonder if Nick Carr is right, that maybe the internets are making us stupid. The internet has certainly changed the way I function on a day-to-day basis, as I find myself increasingly attached to both my laptop and Android smartphone.

The Battle: Internet vs Book

I sometimes feel like this guy, with a book replacing the typewriter.

From approximately age seven until eighteen, I had a pretty standard routine before I went to bed. I would lay in bed and read a book until I felt tired, often spending hours tearing through books, staying up until 3 in the morning (on a school night too, nonetheless) to finish whatever I was reading at the time.

Then in 2003, I went to university, and by necessity (the room was tiny) had a computer beside my bed in my dorm room. Ever since, there’s been an increasing amount of nights in which I grapple with the choice of reading a book until I fall asleep, or turning on my computer (or more recently, using my smartphone) to browse the internet. More often, I turn to the computer rather than the book, and I realize that I’m not alone. Other people are going through the same thing, and they’re writing books about it. Reading thought-provoking books (such as those found on Popova’s list) about the internet’s effects has made me extremely self-aware of the changes happening in our world. I have been trying to figure out just what it is that makes me turn to my laptop or smartphone instead of a book. Perhaps it’s fitting that I am coming to a better understanding of why this is… by reading books.

On a sidenote, speaking of smartphones, this month will mark my one-year anniversary of owning a smartphone, Google’s flagship Android phone, the Nexus One. Just eighteen months ago, I was one of those people who said, “I don’t need the internet on my phone! I’m distracted by the net at home enough as it is.” But once you’ve lived with a smartphone, and all the conveniences an instant connection to the internet offers, it’s hard to go back. My phone functions as a newspaper, the yellow pages, an e-reader, a map of the world, a GPS system, a camera, an mp3 player, a restaurant guide, and a connection to social circles through text messages, Facebook, and Twitter. E-mail and Facebook messages are becoming instantaneous, with avid smartphone users expecting a reply within a few hours. What will our world be like in twenty, thirty, or forty years? Will we even read books anymore?

Typing this out is making me realize that I should finish up this post and get back to reading. Next up on the list for me is Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, which after a few chapters, is strengthening my belief that this is a profound shift we’re experiencing as a society, as we move further into the digital age.

 

 

The Questions which Postman ponders

“Why history and geography? Why not cybernetics and ecology? Why economics and algebra? Why not anthropology and psycho-linguistics? It is difficult to escape the feeling that a conventional curriculum is quite arbitrary in selecting the “subjects” to be studied. The implications of this are worth pondering.”

“What’s worth knowing? How do you decide? What are some ways to go about getting to know what’s worth knowing?”

– a couple of the many questions asked in the chapter “What’s Worth Knowing” from Teaching as a Subversive Activity

Neil Postman

As I’ve been “learning how to teach” for the past six months, I’ve been reading a number of Neil Postman books in my spare time. Postman has been called a media theorist, cultural critic, and a teacher, to name a few. He is the author of 18 books and over 200 articles or essays, many of which were concentrated on the role of education in society, such as 1995’s The End of Education, 1993’s Technopoly, and 1967’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (co-authored with Charles Weingartner). I read The End of Education and Technopoly back-to-back (you can read a bit about them here) a short while ago, and have now started to read this older book, written over 40 years ago.

As I’m reading Teaching as a Subversive Activity, with all of its references to the Cold War, these new machines known as computers, and the new education (aka education reform), I’m taken aback by how relevant the book still feels. Many of the questions Postman ponders, the critiques he slams down, and the suggestions he makes are still entirely applicable to the world of education in 2011.

Why is that? I think that many of the suggestions made in Postman’s 1967 work were so radical for their time, they are just now seeing the light of day in North American classrooms. It takes time for change to occur.

The Historical Perspective

The Historical Lens (from DeviantArt's ami46)

Neil Postman has a countless number of ideas about the role and process of education. One of the ideas that has stuck with me is that he believes every subject should be taught from an historical perspective. That is, the content of the course should be given context by examining it through an historical lens. One should learn and teach some history about the subject, rather than just teaching the basics of the subject. For example, in Science class, if your goal is to teach high school students about the stars and planets, you have to guide them to discover what people used to think, and how they discovered what they know. You might want to teach students that for thousands of years, humans thought the Earth was the center of everything, with the Sun, moon, and “wandering stars” (the planets) moving around the Earth. It wasn’t until the 16th century that this idea was formally turned on its head by Nicolaus Copernicus (among others) and it would be much later until the general public accepted this idea. By approaching a topic such as the solar system with an historical approach, students would see that science is a ongoing process and realize that what we know now is not the end of the line. There are still many discoveries to be made, and understanding the past can guide us towards understanding the present and perhaps more importantly, the future.

Exploring the past helps us to understand how we got here, which in turn assists us in comprehending where we’re at in the big picture of Earth’s history, and can ultimately help to direct us to where we’re going. I think that this historical approach can be used effectively in any subject, from Math and Science to Art and PE.

The McLuhan Connection

One thing I recently discovered is that Postman was good friends with perhaps the most well-known media theorist, and cultural critic of all time, the man Wired magazine named its ‘patron saint’, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and media critic. He was perhaps most famous for coining the phrase “the medium is the message”, in attempting to explain the influence that our media have on us. I’m just recently discovering McLuhan’s writings, and am eager to get reading them. I recently had some good finds at used book store, picking up McLuhan’s most well-known book, 1964’s Understanding Media (for $4.50!) and Donald Theall’s analysis/biography, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. And the new Vancouver Public Library site has lead me to The Gutenberg Galaxy and Douglas Coupland’s biography of McLuhan. Hopefully I can find some time to read them during my practicum.

Forcing Knowledge Into Students’ Heads

Is this what learning should look like?

Villemard's 1910 prediction of schools in the year 2000. Yeah, mash those books up!

In the year 2000, every classroom will have a giant blender. It’s a smoothie machine for learning, if you will. But the ingredients aren’t fruits, they’re books! Throw some books in this magical blending machine, and the knowledge is fit to be pumped out, travel through pipes, and enter the minds of school children.

This picture comes from a collection of illustrations from a French artist named Villemard, showing the year 2000 as he envisioned it in 1910.

I’m sure Ray Kurzweil has made a similar prediction actually, but it would look more like this:

Will we have computer chips in our brains one day? Who knows? But it sure is fun (and scary) to think about. I think that some talented artist should make an update to Villemard’s collection, with images predicting what the year 2100 will look like. Too bad I’m not a talented artist.

Thanks to @strombo for the link.

In a Technopoly, to what end do we educate?

“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public.” – Neil Postman, in The End of Education.

What’s the point of school? Why do we educate our youth? Postman explores these questions and much, much more in his thought-provoking look at our systems of learning, in the cleverly titled The End of Education (1995). The title certainly implies a double-meaning, but leans much more heavily towards the use of the word “end” as a goal, rather than a conclusion. In analyzing why we teach, Postman suggests five narratives that educators may use “to provide an end – that is, a purpose – to schooling.” Postman points out that we all have narratives in our lives, whether they’re religious, scientific, or something else altogether. He clarifies: “By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.” The narratives (each of which is given its own chapter) he suggests are:

  1. The Spaceship Earth – “The story of human beings as stewards of the Earth, caretakers of a vulnerable space capsule.” As an astronomy major, this chapter was particularly interesting to me, as Postman describes astronomy as “the subject that most explicitly depicts our planet as a spaceship, and its study inevitably raises fundamental questions about ourselves and our mission.” In thinking of the Earth as a spaceship in a vast universe, Postman argues that archaeology, anthropology, and astronomy should be stressed in our curriculums, as we attempt to better understand our spaceship’s past, its crew, and its relative role in the grand picture of the cosmos.

  2. The Fallen Angel – A religious metaphor explains that as humans, we make mistakes, but we are entirely capable of correcting them. Teachers should be encouraging students to find mistakes – in the teacher’s words, the textbook’s writings, any voice of authority – and analyze them through discussion. This narrative goes on to suggest some radical ideas, such as getting rid of all the textbooks in order to make the subjects less boring, and express more human personality through the passions of the educators. In fact, Postman goes on to describe textbooks as “enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning.” This narrative looks at education as a Great Conversation, and good conversations need to have more than one voice.

  3. The American Experiment – The idea that education is an experiment, “a perpetual and fascinating question mark” and that we should seek to “provide our youth with the knowledge and  will to participate in the great experiment”, that is, to teach them how to argue, how to question, and how to critically analyze those questions.

  4. The Law of Diversity – This narrative invokes the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which states, in its most basic form, that all of the energy and matter in the universe tends to ‘sameness’ as entropy increases) in that Postman contends that we must fight the effects of entropy and celebrate diversity. Postman demonstrates “how the vitality and creativity of humanity depends on diversity”, that we grow as humans through the “intermingling of different ideas”, and ultimately that the law of diversity “makes intelligent humans of us all.”

  5. The Word Weavers/World Makers – This last narrative is based on the notion “that we use language to create the world” and our ability to speak is part of what makes us human. We have continued to transform the world through language with the use of “surrogate languages” such as writing, printing, photography, radio, television and the computer – tools which have “transformed the world – sliced it, framed it, enlarged it, diminished it.”

Postman’s writings have made me acutely aware of the importance of the narratives which educators subscribe to, and how these are portrayed in the classroom.

Do we live in a society dominated by technology?

In Technopoly (1992), one of Postman’s earlier books, the prolific author makes the compelling argument that throughout human history, our technologies have increasingly dehumanized us, as each new technology “increases the available supply of information.” As we struggle to cope with the new influx of information, we use “control mechanisms that are themselves technical”, thus extending the supply of information. It appears to be an exponentially increasing spiral we cannot escape from. Postman’s cautionary advice in a world that functions as a Technopoly is to be aware of our technologies, and understand their histories, for “Without defences, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.”

One of Postman’s most powerful suggestions is that education should focus on each subject through a historical lens. Too often, we teach about the present without any mention of the past; we jump into math and physics problems without realizing where the formulas and concepts are derived from. Instead, by teaching each subject through the lens of history, we can give our youth “a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn.” If we subscribe to the belief that “human’s destiny is the discovery of knowledge” (as Jacob Bronowski suggests in the Ascent of Man), then this historical approach will help immensely in our understanding of the world we live in. Teaching every subject as history will help students to begin to understand “that knowledge is not a fixed thing but a stage in human development, with a past and a future.”

I’ve long held this belief about the need for stressing the history of each subject, and it felt great to hear it from a well-articulated voice such as Postman’s. Too often I’ve seen students question why they need to learn something, or they lose sight of the context of the questions they are asked to solve. By providing a look at the bigger picture, through the teaching of our subjects through historical perspectives, we are better able to grasp the nature of what is being asked of us. I think that students too often see school as something they need to do as a pre-requisite for the ‘real world’, and in doing so, lose sight of the beauty of learning for the sake of learning. People often come to this realization long after they have left public school, and then express frustration that they got so little out of their 12 years in the system. Perhaps my view is naive, and an historical approach will not solve anything at all. I will however, attempt to give it a try, sprinkling in a dash of historical perspective to my lessons whenever I can.

The 4-Hour Body Review

The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss

This is a great read, but not from start to finish.

I would say that 2/3 of the book really appeals to me, and the other 1/3 does not, and yet I feel like the $24 I spent on this 500 page beast of a book was well worth the price. From reading some reviews and discussion surrounding this book, I’ve come to realize that a lot of people really seem to hate it, and its author Timothy Ferriss. I’ve seen him being accused of hacking Amazon’s rating system (check the comments) and it’s been said that he’s just a sleazy marketer who knows how to talk up a room. As for the book, there are some people who write it off as being “nothing new” or full of unsubstantiated claims. I’d venture a guess that 99% of those people haven’t actually read it. The book does make a lot of bold claims, some which may seem unbelievable (gain 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days by only working out for 60 minutes per week? Yeah, right!) at first, but then become more plausible as you delve deeper into the book.

You don’t have to read it all

This is one of those books that has a little bit of something for everybody, and is not intended to be read from front to back. There are sections on how to build muscle, how to lose fat, how to get a 6-pack, and even how to improve your sex life.

This is one of those books that has a little bit of something for everybody, and is not intended to be read from front to back. There are sections on how to build muscle, how to lose fat, how to get a 6-pack, and even how to improve your sex life. Most of Ferriss’ ideas are based around the question “How can I get the most out of doing the least?” The minimalist approach should appeal to anyone who’s ever said, “I’m too busy to be healthy.”

What I got out of this book

I’ve learned a lot from reading this book, and one of the most important things I’ve come to realize is that what you eat, and when you eat it, matters a lot more than how many hours you spend on the treadmill. Exercise is obviously important, but ultimately it’s all about what you eat. You can go to the gym everyday, run 60 minutes on the treadmill and lift a bunch of weights, but if you go home and eat a bunch of packaged foods and drink a keg of beer, you’re going to get fat. Eating the right stuff at the right times throughout the day can really help you out, and help you reach your goals.

Some other things I’ve learned, had reconfirmed, or changed about my day-to-day life:

  • Don’t drink calories. Pop, juice and even milk are mostly just empty calories. Drink lots of water, and some green tea and a glass of red wine doesn’t hurt.
  • Eat carbs, but only after you’ve just worked out.
  • Mixed nuts such as cashews, Brazil nuts, and almonds are great snacks and are full of stuff (vitamins, minerals etc) that is good for you.
  • Vegetables should comprise the biggest chunk of your meal. Start with vegetables, then add protein.
  • Fish > Chicken > Beef
  • Eat a high-protein and carb meal within 30 minutes of finishing your workout.
  • Don’t eat (a lot of) dairy products. Cheese and milk might taste good, but they’re not all that healthy for you. You can get the calcium and vitamins from nuts and fish instead.

There’s a lot of information in this book, and it is actually a bit overwhelming. Anyone who’s spent time in the gym or has even a bit of education in human kinetics will probably find a lot of the material is just rehashing things they already know. That being said, Ferriss’ gift is that he puts it all in an easy-to-follow framework, with short chapters told through engaging stories. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in their own well-being and actually wants to think about what they eat and how to get the most out of a workout.


The Relativity of Critical Thinking

In our Social Studies class (EDCP 331), we had a guest speaker from the Critical Thinking Consortium give a talk about how to embed critical thinking into our Social Studies lessons. I think that this is increasingly important in a digital age where information is at our fingertips; where Google and Wikipedia are the new fountains of knowledge. The guest speaker, Roland Case, broke down the types of questions we can ask into three levels:

Level 1: Basic rote questions – Look up the fact and write down the answer. (eg. When was the original Super Mario Bros video game released?)

Level 2: Opinion questions – Give a response that’s about how you feel. (eg. What is your favourite videogame?)

Level 3: Powerful questions – Forces the responder to judge the merits of possible answers in light of criteria. (eg. Should children be allowed to play videogames?)

Case suggests that powerful questions can be asked and answered by students of any age; they just need to be taught how to do so. It’s the level 3 questions that really get the students talking, and it’s when the talking starts that the learning actually starts to happen. Most people can’t learn by simply sitting and listening.

The Relativity of Wrong

This talk reminded me a lot of a 1988 Isaac Asimov essay I read recently called The Relativity of Wrong, in which Asimov discusses the spectrum of “right and wrong”.

The essay is found in a book of the same title.

He argues that there are degrees of being right or wrong, and uses a child being asked to spell the word sugar as one example. If the child spelled it “pqzzf” we would say that he or she is more wrong than if it had been spelled “shuger”. “Shuger” is incorrect, but it’s more right than “pqzzf”. Further, a really bright student might write “sucrose” or even “C12H22O11“. How would a teacher grade that?

Asimov’s essay is fascinating and touches on many aspects of learning which are much less trivial than the spelling of the word sugar. Hundreds of years ago, people thought the world was flat, and it turns out they were wrong. Then people said the world was a sphere, which is almost right. But in actuality the world is not so perfectly round, with its deep valleys and grand mountains. So to say the world is round is more right than saying the world is flat, but it’s still not entirely correct. In Physics, we’ve seen this type of progression transpire countless times. For instance, Newton’s formulas have stood the test of time and work well on the macroscopic level, but in the 20th century our physicists have discovered the alarmingly strange world of quantum mechanics, which makes Newton’s laws look a little bit less correct than before. As humans, we’re always building on the ideas and knowledge of our ancestors, trying to come up with ideas that are more right than the ones before them. It’s a continuing process with seemingly no end, and ultimately I think it’s what drives us as human beings.

What does this have to do with teaching?

Roland Case’s talk got me thinking about the types of questions we ask our students. We bore them to death with facts and dates which they will not remember the day after the test, and which they can simply look up with their iPhones anyway. That’s not to say that all Level 1 questions are bad questions, but we should definitely be putting some thought into how we are asking our students to understand the curriculum’s content.

Level 1 questions involve right and wrong answers. You either know it or you don’t, and if you don’t, you can use the wonderful world of the Internet to look it up. Level 3 questions  require you to judge the merits of possible outcomes in light of criteria. There are many possible answers, some of which may be better or more advanced in their scope. Level 1 is Trivial Pursuit, and Level 3 is Scattergories.

I think that as you move from Level 1 to Level 3 questions, there is a large increase in the number of possible answers to the questions, and this contributes heavily to the power of Level 3 questions. For example, in a simple Level 1 question such as, “In what year did World War II end?” there is basically one right answer: 1945. One might argue that there are a few other possible answers if you were using a different calendar, but for the most part, there’s one right answer, and everything else is wrong. Conversely, in a Level 3 question such as, “Explain how the world would we different if the Germans had won World War II” there are many possible answers, and not a whole lot of wrong answers. Who’s to say if it’s wrong? As long as the response is reasoned, logical and/or well articulated, it should be awarded full marks.

It is these Level 3 questions, with their infinite amount of possible answers, which make the most powerful questions. Why is that? I would argue that it’s due to the nature of who we are. As humans, we like to socialize, and what is more social than debating and inquiring through conversation? Level 3 questions encourage people to defend their answers and analyze their thoughts against a criteria. These types of questions encourage conversation and deliberation. You actually have to think to answer them.

I really enjoyed this talk from Roland Case and it will definitely influence me in my long practicum as I design lesson plans for teaching the Renaissance to middle schoolers.

Are the Internets Making Us Stupid?

In summer 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a poignant and thought-provoking article, asking the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. The article explored the idea that the Internet, as it becomes our primary means of accessing information, is affecting our ability to focus on any one task that requires deep concentration, such as reading a book. Carr laments that as he spends more and more time online, he has had trouble reading more than a few pages of a book anymore, and anecdotal evidence from his friends and acquaintances seems to support the hypothesis.

In May of 2010, Carr released a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which explored the ideas of his Google article in much more detail.

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2010)

To fully understand what the Internet is doing to our brains, we must first understand our brains. Carr highlights results from a variety of iconic and more recent studies that illustrate the plasticity of our thinking organs. We see experiments ranging from the severed sensory nerves of monkeys’ hands in the 1960’s (and their brains subsequent ‘rewiring’ in response) to London taxi drivers whose posterior hippocampuses (the “part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial represenations of a person’s surroudings”) were much larger than normal. In short, we see plenty of evidence that the brain can reorganize itself, and is certainly not fixed in one state for all of its adult life.

The Shallows then explores the history of the written word and its explosion due to Gutenberg’s invention, and even further back to the argument between Socrates and Plato concerning the value of the written word. Socrates argued that if we committed all of our thoughts to paper, we would not have to remember anything. How do we know this? From the writings of Plato, of course. The soundwaves of Socrates’ voice, as wise as he was, cannot travel through time like written words can.

With the first half of the book detailing the brain’s plasticity and our species’ history with regards to the accumulation of knowledge, Carr sets up the latter half of the book perfectly, and his ideas might be grossly simplified into something like this:

P1: Experiments of brain plasticity have proven that our brains change over time.
P2: We are using the Internet for an increasing amount of our activities, including work, entertainment and commerce.
P3: The Internet is a medium that encourages distractedness and makes our brains inept at remembering.

C: We are all becoming a lot more dependent upon our digital devices, and in doing so, are increasingly distracted in everything we do, both online and off.

As I was reading this book, I was reminded many times of Mike Judge’s criminally underrated futuristic comedy, Idiocracy. Starring Luke Wilson, the film tells the tale of a mediocre Army librarian who is frozen in a top-secret military experiment. He awakens 500 years in the future to find that he is the world’s smartest man, by far, as confirmed by an IQ test. This seems to contradict the controversial Flynn effect, which shows that IQ has increased quite linearly over time from when it was first measured until now.

Idiocracy, a 2006 Mike Judge film set in 2505.

Somewhere, something went wrong, as the rising IQ scores of the Flynn effect are nowhere to be seen in Mike’s Judge’s depiction of Earth in 2505, which is a greatly dumbed down dystopian version of the world we knew in 2005. The oversaturation of cheap media (in the form of oddly familiar YouTube-esque videos), and rampant anti-intellectualism have resulted in what Wikipedia describes as “a uniformly stupid human society devoid of individual responsibility or consequences”. Adventure ensues, as our protagonist soon meets The President of the United States of America, who just so happens to be a former porn star and professional wrestler named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. This zany, satirical look at the future certainly has its moments, and offers a bleary look into our dumbed down future.

Carr’s book is a giant caution sign on the side of the road that we ride into the increasingly digital future. The caution sign might be too far behind us already, as we’ve blazed ahead and rewired our minds to think like computers – logical, task-switching, and distracted at every second of the day. If people in their 30’s and 40’s (who may have had the Internet for approximately 25-40% of their life times) are experiencing these changes in their brains, imagine the effect the Internet is having on our youth. The Net Generation is defined to be those who have grown up with the Net for more than half their lives. There are still others who have had Internet for 100% of their life times. Imagine that, never knowing a world without the Internet. Imagine explaining to your grandchildren that you grew up in a time that didn’t have the Internet, let alone the information organizing superpower known as Google.

Will we look back at this period of transition from a print to digital culture and see it as being as momentous as the shift from an oral culture to a print culture? What would Socrates have thought? Have we become lesser human beings, inextricably tied to the addictive external memories of our computers and mobile phones?

Could it be that George W. Bush’s infamous “the Internets” quote was just a sign of the stupidness to come? Perhaps Bush was ahead of his time. Perhaps the Flynn effect is about to come to a crashing halt, as IQs peak, or maybe they already have. Could the greatest learning tool ever created be so useful that we forget how to think as we use it?

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Procrastination?

This New York Times cover story has inspired quite the debate. What effect is social media having on students? Are they too distracted by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and text messages to focus on their homework?

Don Tapscott, the author of Growing Up Digital and Grown Up Digital, had this rebuttal on the Huffington Post.

I think that this is a really interesting discussion, and from reading the comments on some of those sites, I see that it’s quite a polarized debate. We’re living at an incredibly interesting point in history, as our society shifts from a world of atoms to a world of bits. Everything seems to be going digital, and while there are obvious benefits to this digital revolution, there are also some serious limitations and potential pitfalls that we have to be careful of.

When we browse the Internet, opening tab after tab, are we really focusing on anything of any substance anymore? How does this fragmented and disjointed flow of information affect us? Do you know many people under the age of 30 who can sit down and read a book for two uninterrupted hours?

I’m about to start reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, which he adapted from his thought-provoking Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I just read the very optimistic Macrowikinomics recently, so I’m curious to see how these books compare. Tapscott and Williams mention Carr’s book near the end of Macrowikinomics, and agree that it raises some good points.

Macrowikinomics Review

Macrowikinomics Book CoverDon Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams are two men on a mission. Like another reviewer said on Amazon.ca, “this book is not an operations manual; rather, it is a manifesto.” This book provides a blueprint for the future, offering fresh ideas to help us reboot outdated and failing systems, such as healthcare, journalism and education.

The book’s scope rivals The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, its ideas and content parallel Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing, and its extreme optimism calls to mind the writings of futurist Ray Kurzweil (of The Singuarlity is Near and The Age of Spiritual Machines fame). Kurzweil uses his law of accelerating returns, based on Moore’s law of increasing technology, to make predictions about the future. Tapscott and Williams don’t have any fancy laws, but they do have plenty of examples of applications of wikinomics happening right now, all over the world in all types of industries.

The Age of Networked Intelligence

This inspiring book argues that we are in the midst of a revolution, entering a new age in history. Just like the printing press helped to provide the shift from an agrarian society to an industrial one, we are now leaving the industrial age, with the assistance of the Internet, and entering an Age of Networked Intelligence. Sound like the stuff of science fiction? Think again.

Reproduced with permission from Anthony D. Williams.

Networked intelligence is on display in all ranges of industries, at all levels. The Web 2.0 is connecting us in ways we could not have imagined ten or even five years ago. Websites and communities such as Wikipedia, Innocentive, VenCorps, and Kiva.org represent just a handful of the countless examples the authors use to illustrate the workings of the age of networked intelligence. Tapscott and Williams take us on a tour of the present world of wikinomics and the coming future, splitting the book up into sections encouraging us to Rethink the Fundamentals , Reindustrialize the Planet, and Reboot the Public Square. Other sections include a wikinomic approach to Learning, Discovery and Well-Being as well as a look at the newspaper’s demise, and the future of music, television and film in Turning the Media Inside Out. The book is split up into countless subsections, so you never read more than 3 or 4 pages without coming to a new subheading. While some readers might find this annoying, I think that it was intended with the reading habits of the Net Generation and blogosphere in mind, and I enjoyed it.

Macrowikinomics shows us astounding examples of crowdsourcing: from R&D at Proctor & Gamble, via an impressive website called Innocentive, to amateur astronomers helping to identify galaxies at Galaxy Zoo. We are treated to speculation about the future of the car (its dashboard will be an open set of APIs, connected to the Internet and able to download songs and connect to Skype) and given a great perspective on why open-access knowledge is so much more powerful than subscription model in the world of science. Quoting Peter Binfield, publisher of PLoS ONE at the the Public Library of Science: “There’s an entire 99 percent of the rest of the world that might have an interest in that content that can never access it in a subscription model,” he says. “But with a wiki model you’ve got a chance to get some useful insights out of those 99.9 percent of people that you couldn’t have got otherwise.” There are certainly some insights to be had here, to say the least.

New Paradigms

Their prequel, Wikinomics (2006) was often criticized for being too general and repetitive, with most critiques saying that while the book shows great examples, it doesn’t actually offer any concrete demonstrations of how to use wikinomics in a practical sense. I think they tried to tackle this with their chapter on Ground Rules for Reinvention: Making Wikinomics Happen in Your Organization, although it is a short chapter. That being said, I don’t think this book is intended to explicitly show you the way or fix your company with one fell swoop. It’s next to impossible to accurately predict the next big thing, and Tapscott and Williams illustrate how difficult it is to create the new in this passage, which I quote in full:

“The law of new paradigms has kicked into play: leaders of the old paradigms have great difficulty creating the new. In hindsight their record is pretty predictable, even pathetic. Why didn’t Rupert Murdoch create The Huffington Post? Why didn’t AT&T launch Twitter? Yellow Pages could have built Facebook. Microsoft had the resources to come up with Google’s business model. Why didn’t NBC invent YouTube? Sony could have pre-empted Apple with iTunes. Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for The New York Times or any regional newspaper. As the media becomes democratized and as those vested in the old paradigm fight change, a historic period of calamity is in the making. At the same time there are fresh, sometimes breathtaking new innovations in every medium – experiments and juggernauts that show us the way forward.”

When you think  of it this way, it makes you wonder how can anyone can possibly predict what the next big thing will be? What Macrowikinomics does is give us countless examples of how other people and organizations are utilizing wikinomics principles, in hopes of inspiring you or your organization to take those principles and put your own spin on them.

It’s called Macrowikinomics for a reason. It’s focusing on the big ideas. Macrowikinomics is not so much an operations manual or map (maybe this will come in the form of  a Microwikinomics sequel) as it is a bold blueprint of a future world which is rapidly becoming more connected, more collaborative, and more open in the age of networked intelligence. As anyone who’s ever built anything knows, blueprints can often change, and renovations can occur. Many of our industries are broken, outdated and failing, and this book, if nothing else, provides us with some ideas and inspiration to reboot them.

Bottom Line: Extremely readable, with a little something for everybody. From climate change to collaborative healthcare, from Twitter revolutions to earthquake rescue teams, this book has it all.

Check it out on Amazon.