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Sorting through the Noise: Trends vs Fads

12/21/2009

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It seems somehow fitting that at the end of 2009—and at the end of this bizarre decade—a couple of the online experiments hailed by many as ground-breaking trends are turning out to be simply large-scale fads. First I heard rumblings about editors leaving Wikipedia in droves. Now there are signs that teenagers are devising ways to end their addiction to Facebook.

Wikipedia started in 2001 with the intention of creating free access to “the sum of all human knowledge.” The underlying intention was naively democratic. In theory anyone could participate, starting a new topic or editing an existing page. Wikipedia’s editorial pool actually peaked in March of 2007 at 820,000 (it is worth noting that contributors are above average in technical knowledge and that only 13% of them have been women).

The so-called wiki democracy proved to be an unruly herd. There were hoaxes, misinformation, and a great deal of bickering on discussion pages. By then there were plenty of rules, several committees, and a growing hierarchy of editors with special privileges. “Wikipedia is becoming a hostile environment,” says Felipe Ortega, who has analyzed Wikipedia data regarding its editorial process. “Many people are getting burned out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again.” And the online encyclopedia now is constantly threatened by vandals who insert irrelevant political views, obscure jokes, or self-serving marketing messages into articles left and right.


Of course the other obvious reason for the decreasing participation is that, with three million articles in the English version, there are fewer and fewer things to write about. The days when anyone could freely start a new page are over. New pages are reviewed before they are posted. Most are deleted as irrelevant. Newcomers who try to edit a page are often told they have broken a rule. (I have written about this transformation elsewhere.) Wikipedia is trying to create diversity in its contributors. It is launching a new editing system to replace the Byzantine one that newbies have always had to struggle with. But it remains to be seen if Wikipedia just got too big to prevail.

Crowdsourcing, as the wiki method of building content is called, is based on the assumption that mass collaboration will inevitably separate the wheat from the chaff and create the “wisdom of crowds.” Books such as  Don Tapscott “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” and James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” have expressed this decade’s enthrallment with all things wiki. What seemed to be a trend, however, a few years ago, shows signs of a fading fad now.

Facebook could be heading for a crisis as well, but for entirely different reasons. People, especially teenagers, are discovering that they have real lives (RL, as opposed to VL—virtual life) that demand some attention from time to time, such as when they are trying to complete college applications or studying for finals. Instead of constantly updating their own records of their lives and reading messages from friends, some young adults are choosing to conduct their social lives offline.

For many, Facebook has actually become an addiction. Young adults are consequently devising strategies for weaning themselves “off” the social networking website. Some make pacts with friends. Other have someone manage their password so they can only view their Facebook page on weekends or once a month. The live feed format recently added to Facebook has made it especially difficult to turn away from the site. Educator Rachel Simmons explains it this way: “You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing. You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”

It’s unclear how widespread the deactivation and limited access strategies have become. Facebook won’t say how many users have deactivated their accounts. It could be that yet another Internet phenomenon is in for some fundamental changes. Other institutions, however, are surely here to stay. Take heart, Internet aficionados, we’ll always have Google.

 
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PowerPoint: The Tyranny of the Digital

12/18/2009

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Powerpoint. Some people can take it or leave it. Edward Tufte, on the other hand, abhors the program. The Yale political scientist/graphics expert has laid out all his objections to the ubiquitous program in an essay called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (see www.edwardtufte.com).  Basically, Tufte says, Microsoft’s popular presentation software creates a forum that focuses on the presenter, at the expense of both the audience and the content. It creates a situation in which format trumps all, breaking any story or argument into fragments, sounds bites of text delivered in a dazzling array of bullet points. The results are closer to a sales pitch than any kind of nuanced or complex set of observations.  

Tufte argues that PowerPoint encourages impoverished thinking, vagueness, overly generalized statements, poor evidence, and very little real information. By leaving out the connections between the bullet points, PowerPoint is “faux-analytical.” Bullets appear to organize thought but what they really do is destroy thought—they make us stupid.

To someone who avoids PowerPoint whenever possible, Tufte’s arguments make a lot of sense. There is however one overarching point where he goes too far. Tufte writes:

“The metaphor behind the PowerPoint cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and marketing (fast-pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics).”

Tufte proceeds to associate PowerPoint with all hegemonic systems from the Roman Empire to Stalin. He goes too far—and in the wrong direction in my opinion. PowerPoint and Microsoft may share a cognitive style but its derivation stems more from the essential principle inherent in both digital technology and modern corporation: an advanced, relentless, and massive division of labor.

Software is code, lines and lines of codes, that runs sequentially with many conditional branching statements (if-then statements) and a hierarchy of interacting software objects (sets of code), all of which manipulate information in a logical succession of small steps. Each step contains explicit instructions. An entire sequence of such instructions, that is, a software program, works more like a calculator than a “thinking machine.”

To build software programmers must break down processes into discrete steps, effectively systematizing and standardizing how work is done. Many software products are rigid in how they allow people to work. PowerPoint, with its discrete slides and panoply of hierarchical bullet points supports, nay encourages, a bald declarative style without any room for ambiguity or subtlety. Most workers get caught up in the formatting and the special features, such as animation, leaving content in a decidedly secondary position. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, they become tools of our tools, caught in the tyranny of the digital. 
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First Post: Is It an ePhone or an iReader?

12/9/2009

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I have been telling friends for years that I would never read War and Peace on my cellphone. Little did I realize how soon I might have the option. Not only has Amazon offered an app version of its e-Reader for the iPhone, it will soon be offering something similar for the Blackberry. Essentially this means that instead of reading the Kindle's 6-inch diagonal screen, you can now read the iPhone's 3.5-inch diagonal screen, and soon you'll be able to read on the Blackberry's 2.44-inch diagonal screen (is this technically an upgrade?). Which means you'd only have to turn 10,000 or so pages to get through Tolstoy's tome.

Maybe what we really need to accommodate this convergence of all things digital is a return to the days of Shrinklets. Remember Shrinklets? This was a pretty hilarious book published some years ago that cut down to size seventy of the world's great books. Here's the shrinklet of Moby Dick:

Whale chomped Ahab's leg in two.
"Hunt that beast!" he tells his crew.
First, a welter of whaling schmoose,
Then comes Moby and hell breaks loose.
Smashup! Ahab's drowned in brine,
Lashed to the whale by a harpoon line.
Good (symbolic) with Evil vies,
If you'd fathom it, you must rise.

Look, maybe I'll never read War and Peace in any medium. The book has already defeated me on four previous attempts to get through it. Perhaps I should wait for the shrinklet.
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