iandelaney's posterous

Ermm... haven't I seen this somewhere before? Say in about 2002?

Nobody bought Tablet PCs then, either.

More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done." In the review she lays out the concept of "group polarization"

People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still.

The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” (Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email)

It's often remarked that customisable start-pages, self-selected RSS feed readers and social network dynamics tend to result in:

(a) a lack of conflict. People take their cues from the best-established commentators and simply chime in to agree. The number of 'me-too' posts that appear supporting whatever the top ten blogs say is indicative of this.

(b) delusional hysteria. The recent Twitter campaigns against Jan Moir, Nick Griffen, Retweet changes, etc. seem to suggest that many people believe that a trending hashtag can change the world. It can not.

Ironically, it sometimes seems as though nowhere is there less acceptance of differing points of view than among the social media / social networks crowd, where 'discussions' are largely limited to describing just how much of an idiot a particular opponent is.

I believe that the Internet can make us better people and that it can help us make a better world. But this probably isn't the way forward.

So how can we embrace and foster pluralism, diversity, real democracy in networked society?

Maybe I need more unpleasant people around me.

I'm tempted to argue for some return to anonymous debate, a la Usenet and IRC twenty years ago. They could be ridiculous and frustrating in equal measure, but at least your views got challenged and you were (vigorously) exposed to people who think very differently from yourself.

I think we need to think about ways to divide people's work and their online activity in some way. Often, when I read blogs and tweets, I know that the person writing is doing so because it in some way amplifies or enhances their professional career. A lot of people I connect with are consultants of some description in their jobs. Their job is to be wise and right. That makes them lovely people, by and large, but there are arguably downsides. It can very often have the side-effect of meaning that they are never going to go out on a limb or wish to seem controversial. It's also a job where you need people to want to work with you, so you won't go around telling potential clients or collaborators that they're wrong.

42.6% of respondents say they feel less inhibited interacting online than face-to-face.

20% say they lashed out at companies or products thanks to the anonymity of online interaction.

31.5% say that online interaction let them do something they’d been wanting to do.

Reasearch from Euro RSCG suggests (as you'd have guessed) that people become 'disinhibited' as a consequence of an increased ability to interact with brands, products and people.

There's a positive element to this, of course. Being inhibited is by no means a pure good.

For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering - sometimes more so. Without it, we are all bound to lead the miserable life of A. R. Luria's patient Solomon Shereshevsky, who was crippled by his boundless, indelible memory, or his fictional counterpart, Jorge Luis Borges's Funes. No forgetting implies no generalisation, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives.

More on the nature of memory in the digital era with a review of two books. Total Recall is a utopian view of a not-too-future world where nothing is forgotten, thus fulfilling a desire for eternal life, according to the reviewer.

Delete (the subject of the quotation) suggests that we need to build technologies that will put 'expiration dates' on past data, to allow us to better grow as human beings.

I find it interesting that both books, and the reviewer, imagine that we, as individuals, will be empowered one way or the other. A less optimistic view, one I've mentioned earlier, is that it will be third parties - governments and corporations - that make the decisions regarding our memorabilia, and consequently, our memories.

Like many people, I'm really looking forward to the UK publication of David McCandless' The Visual Miscellaneum.

This graphic might come as a surprise to some people. If the main way you've found out about social media is through conference programmes and the most frequently cited blog posts, you could not be blamed for assuming that the social web is a world of men. The opposite is nearly always the case.

Interesting that digg is the only male-dominated social network in this sample. I will leave it to the reader to draw any conclusions between that and the tone of the comments and focus on winning that site has.

Getting clever with webcams...