Cognitive Surplus

Jul 13th, 2010
by Mc.Mamudah

Cognitive Surplus

Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a description of London in the 1720s, when the city was in the midst of a gin binge. A flood of new arrivals from the countryside meant the metropolis was crowded, filthy, and violent. As a result, people sought out the anesthesia of alcohol as they tried to collectively forget the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

Shirky’s hypothesis is that a lot of the 20th century stuff we used to take for granted — most people didn’t want to create media, people didn’t value homemade and amateur productions, no one would pitch in to create something for others to enjoy unless they were being paid — weren’t immutable laws of nature, but accidents of history. The Internet has undone those accidents, by making it possible for more people to make and do cool stuff, especially together.

They’re online, prowling the world wide web. Shirky describes this shift in media consumption as a net “cognitive surplus,” since our brain is no longer mesmerized by the boob tube. Needless to say, he describes this surplus as a wonderful opportunity, a chance to get back some of the productive social interactions that were lost when we all decided to watch TV alone. And when this new pool of free time is combined with the internet-a tool that enables strangers all across the world to connect with each other-the end result is a potentially vast new source of productivity. “The wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource,” Shirky writes. Furthermore, the web allows people to “design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.”

After Shirky introduces his argument, much of the remaining 170 pages of the book are devoted to outlining what this surplus has produced. The author begins by describing the protests in South Korea over the importation of American beef. Interestingly, a majority of the protesters were teenage girls, who had been motivated to take to the streets by their online conversations. (Many of these conversations took place on a website dedicated to a Korean boy band.) Shirky describes this protest movement in breathless terms: “When teenage girls take to the streets to unnerve national governments, without needing professional organizations or organizers to get the ball rolling, we are in new territory,” he writes.

But are we really? There were, after all, a few political protests before the internet. Somehow, the students at Kent State found a way to organize without relying on the chat rooms of Bobdylan.com. While the internet might enable a bit more youthful agitprop, it seems unlikely that we are on the cusp of a new kind of politics, driven by the leisure hours of the young.

The most compelling example of Shirky’s cognitive surplus is also the most obvious: Wikipedia. He estimates that the pages of Wikipedia represent more than 100 million hours of human thought. All that unpaid labor has produced, by far, the most comprehensive, thorough, and intelligent summary of human knowledge that has ever existed. And it was all done by perfect strangers, most of whom are not experts in anything. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something, and someone making lolcats has bridged that gap.

There are two things to say about this. The first is that the consumption of culture is not always worthless. The second thing is that it remains entirely unclear if the creative and generous acts made possible by the internet are really a replacement for time spent watching sitcoms. After all, people have always had hobbies; although they watched plenty of bad television, they also read newspapers and built model airplanes, went on hikes and volunteered at the local shelter. In other words, we weren’t quite as mindless or disconnected as Shirky seems to believe. In his zeal to celebrate the revolutionary capabilities of the internet, Shirky downplays the virtues of the world before the web. And then there is the terrifying possibility (not addressed by Shirky) that our online life is detracting, not from time spent watching TV, but from our interest in things that have nothing to do with technology, such as talking with friends or taking walks in the park.

Shirky is very good on the connection between trivial entertainments and serious business, from writing web-servers to changing government. Lolcats aren’t particularly virtuous examples of generosity and sharing, but they are a kind of gateway drug between zero participation and some participation. The difference between “zero” and “some” being the greatest one there is, it is possible and even likely that lolcatters will go on, some day, to do something of more note together. These sections are a warm and compelling rebuttal to people who argue that the net is a fad or a toxic waste heap, and his systematic argument is so well-reasoned that it might as well be a road-map for winning frustrating arguments about the net.

The last chapter of the book is a kind of roadmap for building your own structures for enabling participation, drawn from Clay’s long history of teaching and consulting, and it’s as practical as the rest is theoretical.

Cognitive Surplus continues to prove that Clay Shirky is one of the best thinkers and advocates the net has. It’s a delight to read and will change how you think about the future. Shirky has written an important book about an interesting moment in human history.

Filed under: Book Review | Tags:Clay Shirky, Clay Shirky is one of the best thinkers, Cognitive Surplus, difference between zero and some, intelligent summary of human knowledge, online conversations, Shirky's cognitive surplus | 0

Reading in the Brain

Nov 27th, 2009
by Mc.Mamudah

Humanity’s greatest invention

Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species’s past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us “to listen to the dead with our eyes.”

But how, in such a short time, did the human species evolve this unique skill, one that requires the brain to decode written words visually and process their sounds and sense rapidly? In this fascinating and scholarly book, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explains what scientists now know about how the human brain performs the feat of reading, and what made this astonishing cultural invention biologically possible.

Amazingly, most children become proficient readers during elementary school (although learning to read Italian is easier, and learning to read Chinese harder, than learning to read English). In recent years, new imaging techniques have allowed researchers to watch normal brains in the act of reading, and studies have shed light on why the brains of dyslexic children, as well as those of certain stroke victims, fail to process written words successfully.

“Only a stroke of good fortune allowed us to read,” Dehaene writes near the end of his tour of the reading brain. Experiments in monkeys show that, within this area, individual nerve cells are dedicated to respond to a specific visual stimulus: a face, a chair, a vertical line. Research suggests that, in humans, a corresponding area evolved to become what Dehaene calls the “letterbox,” responsible for processing incoming written words. Located in the brain’s left hemisphere near the junction of the temporal and occipital lobes, the letterbox performs identical tasks in readers of all languages and scripts. Like a switchboard, it transmits signals to multiple regions concerned with words’ sound and meaning — for example, to areas that respond to noun categories (people, animals, vegetables), to parts of the motor cortex that respond to action verbs (”kiss,” “kick”), even to cells in the brain’s associative cortex that home in on very specific stimuli. Children learn reading in a stepwise process: first, awareness that words are made up of phonemes or speech sounds (ba, da); then the discovery that there’s a correspondence between these speech sounds and pairs or groups of letters.

Later the child begins to recognize entire words, and after a few years, reading speed becomes independent of word length. Dehaene deplores the whole-language approach to teaching reading in which beginning readers are presented with entire words or phrases in the hope of fostering earlier comprehension of text. He cites research showing that children who first learn which sounds are represented by which letters, and how pairs or groups of letters correspond to speech sounds, make steadier progress and achieve better reading scores than those taught using the whole-language method. For example, in preparation for learning to read, young Montessori students are often asked to trace with their fingers the shapes of large letters cut out of sandpaper. Between 5 percent and 17 percent of U.S. children suffer from dyslexia, or severe difficulty in reading.

Several susceptibility genes have been identified, most of them influencing the migration of nerve cells within the developing brain of the fetus. Research suggests that, even as infants, many dyslexic children have trouble hearing the difference between similar-sounding consonants such as b and d; but about one in four dyslexics has primarily visual difficulties with word-processing. Although there is no prospect of a cure for dyslexia, Dehaene points to promising results with various intervention strategies aimed at strengthening awareness of speech sounds and letter differences.

READ ELSE BOOKs:

The interrogative mood

Sixty Feets, six inches

Memories of the Future

Filed under: Book Review | Tags:cultural invention, Dehaene, difficulty in reading, Francisco de Quevedo, French neuroscientist, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, greatest invention, Humanity's greatest invention, Humanity's invention, listen to the dead with our eyes, SDehaene, Stanislas, Stanislas Dehaene, suffer from dyslexia, to listen to the dead with our eyes | 0

THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL

Nov 2nd, 2009
by Mc.Mamudah

THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL

The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

By John Freeman

On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven google alerts on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters.

By John Freeman’s lights, that makes me a bad guy. In “The Tyranny of E-Mail,” he writes that “one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-size message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion.” And the problem is? Take the time to make 50 separate calls, intruding on people who aren’t interested in this issue? (Scan and delete an e-mail message: three seconds at most, at a time of one’s choice. Conduct a telephone call with me: 30 seconds, minimum, at a time of my choice, resulting in major interruption.)

The case of the Russian spam illustrates a problem with this book. In his zeal to expose e-mail’s dark side, Freeman, the editor of Granta, ignores its good and useful features.

I am far from the proverbial power user (the “average corporate worker,” Freeman tells us, in a characteristically unsourced factoid, gets about 200 e-mail messages a day). But I have felt e-mail’s tyranny, and Freeman has some good innings on this subject. It is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces. (Sixty-two percent of Americans, Freeman read somewhere, write and answer work e-mail on vacation.) It is abused by spammers, identity thieves, phishers and chronic forwarders and cc-ers.

Unfortunately, Freeman’s Chapters 1 and 2 undercut his jeremiad, which appears in Chapters 3 and 4. An editorial in an English newspaper in 1901, referring to the telegraph, lamented: “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love. Remove the quotation marks, and the lines would fit perfectly into Freeman’s argument.

Books about social problems are often strong in describing the problem but fairly lame when it comes to suggesting solutions. The opposite is true of “The Tyranny of E-Mail.” Among other things, Freeman advises us to limit how many e-mail messages we send and how often we check our in-box, to keep a written to-do list, to be careful reading and composing e-mail, and not to “debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail.” Ultimately, e-mail is a social, cultural and literary phenomenon that demands a more nuanced approach than Freeman’s high dudgeon provides. Every day, I get a half-dozen or more fine e-mail messages: short, (often) witty, (usually) pointed, (sometimes) thoughtful and always written in that correspondent’s particular register. You could have the book here.