This is, perhaps, the best illustration I have seen so far of what Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus is about — at least the best illustration in comic strip form.

Related posts:

1. Cognitive Surplus and The Shallows
2. Beautiful
3. Shirky says micropayments won’t work

I also bought The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which I will read immediately after Shirky’s book. I imagine that I will be somewhat more angry after reading Carr, but that’s generally how I feel after reading something he’s written about the Internet. I expect it from him.

You can credit Nieman Journalism Lab with getting me to buy Carr’s book. On the lab blog, Matthew Battles is writing ongoing reviews of both books as he reads them (in five parts, as of this writing — 1 2 3 4 5) Battles has inspired me to do my own “reviews” — or at least thoughtful write-ups. I hope this will get me back into an academic frame of mind; since leaving grad school, that sort of deep analytic reading and writing has fallen by the wayside.

I should also mention that I bought both of these books not on paper but in iBooks. This will be my first serious experience in reading a book entirely in an electronic format. I’ll share some thoughts on that as I go along too. So far, so good.

(The above image is borrowed respectfully from the Nieman Journalism Lab.)

Related posts:

1. Notes on Nicholas Carr
2. Annotations
3. Google as the news industry’s middle man

Once you start the process, there’s no stopping it. It executes a python script that kills your social media profile, one contact at a time. The only thing is doesn’t do is actually delete the accounts.

My question is why doesn’t it actually delete the accounts? Is this because an automated script can’t do that? Is it prohibited in the Facebook and Twitter terms of service? Or is it intentional? Do we always want to allow for the possibility that we’ll want to get back in to our social networking accounts?

I went through this a year ago with my old Hotmail account. To delete or not to delete? I ended up keeping the account mostly because I couldn’t deal with losing the possibility of having access to that account again (or the possibility that someone else could adopt that username).

Maybe the Web 2.0 suicide machine is not really a final solution. Maybe it’s just a cry for help?

Related posts:

1. Test post from Web site
2. The Great Twitter Experiment of Late 2008
3. Facebook as a harbinger of the closed-Web apocalypse

The other difference between writing for print and writing for one’s blog is that there comes a moment with the print essay when it has to be ‘finished’ and dispatched to the sub-editors: there’s an ‘end-point’, in other words. But, in a sense, a blog post is never ‘finished’; there’s always the possible of ongoing revision in the light of comments, or second thoughts, or sheer, unreasoning loss of nerve. You could say, therefore, that writing for print is like sculpting in stone, whereas writing for a blog is like sculpting in jelly that hasn’t quite set.

It’s a nice post that also visits the difference between blogs and their less-wordy antecedents, Web logs. I’m glad for evidence that I’m not the only one to remember the original purpose of blogs: to collect interesting links to other places online.

I come back to that definition every time I start to feel guilty about not posting enough longish pieces to this blog. I reason with myself, saying that it’s okay to post mostly short posts and links with excerpts. That is, after all, how the founding fathers of the blogosphere would have done it.

Still, when I sit down to write a longer text of any kind, I worry that my tendency to post short, unremarked items has eroded my attention span. I worry that every time I sit down with my iPod Touch at night to read or do whatever rather than read from an actual book.

It’s an old complaint, in Web terms, and I know it’s something of an overstated complaint. Yet I try to think back to my time in college as an English student, reading long, un-wired texts for hours at a time with only a pencil and a lamp. I try to think about doing that again and I wonder if I could.

Related posts:

1. Survey: Nearly one-third of journalists don’t use social media or read blogs
2. The slow decline
3. If it’s in the blog, is it in the newspaper?

As such, citizen reporting is a good thing because I generally think “the more information to work with, the better,” no matter the source. As responsible professional journalists, it’s our job to filter through that information and present the best version of the truth we can at the time we have to publish it.

That said, I’m not blind. I know that social media has its dark side. When those of us with cell phone cameras and pocket HD cams get hypnotized by the viewfinder and see the events around us as more breaking news and less real life, we cross into dangerous, almost inhuman territory.

In the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, Paul Carr wrote an essay for TechCrunch that criticizes a blogger at the base for sending out tweets from within. He acknowledges that this woman probably thought she was doing the right thing by spreading information, but the fact is that she was wrong on almost every detail she tweeted.

Here are three paragraphs from his essay. I urge you to read it in its entirety at TechCrunch because we need to remember that living in this wired world has a price.

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

What’s most alarming about Moore’s behaviour is that she probably thought she was doing the right thing. Certainly, looking at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the portrait of a patriot. Someone who clearly cares a great deal about others, and who – despite the rhetorical question “remind me why I joined the army again” on her profile – is proud to serve her country. In tweeting from the scene, and calling out the media for not reporting the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference.

And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.

Edit: More thoughts on Carr

Related posts:

1. Reconsidering Carr’s citizen journalism essay
2. David Carr and the iTunes model for journalism
3. In which the author condemns echo chambers and begs for startup money: Or the imminent death and rebirth of journalism

On top of that, the coverage assume that readers already possess some knowledge about the issue, which isn’t always the case, Alexander says:

Many have said that Post stories routinely assume a foundation of knowledge that they simply don’t have. Some said that they don’t understand basic terms like “public option” or “single payer.” They want primers, not prognostications. And they’re craving stories on what it means for ordinary folks and their families.

Focusing on the conflict instead of on the useful facts tacitly lets the rhetoric take over the news coverage, he says. “By ‘gravitating toward controversies’ such as the recent boisterous town hall meetings on health care ... the media may ‘unwittingly’ be allowing coverage to be shaped by evocative rhetoric and images.”

This column is a good reminder to all journalists that it’s readers who matter most, not the people who are subjects in our stories. Journalism is best when it provides people with information they can use to make their lives better.

Focusing on conflict can be a good thing, but conflict itself should not the point of any story. Conflicts should instead be where we begin discussion about solutions and lessons. Making a spectacle of conflict just to sell papers is tawdry, and it should be beneath proper journalists.

Related posts:

1. Pat Thornton: Journalism needs to get down and dirty
2. New healthcare-related meme just as pointless as all the rest
3. Better donate, or coverage will be left to the bloggers

Lunsford has conducted a five-year study of college student writing. Between 2001 and 2006, she collected more than 11,000 pieces of student writing and found that students writing today have a greater sense of their audience than any generation before them.

Clive Thompson, writing about the study in the most recent issue of Wired, says that the students have an astonishing grasp of kairos, the rhetorical ability to assess one’s audience and adapt your message to best influence them. “The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago,” Thompson writes.

Thompson:

“We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.”

I hate to admit it, but I think that Thompson and Lunsford are on target here. While I’m a journalist and have a notion of what is right and what is wrong, stylistically, in writing, I also acknowledge that plenty of meaningful communication happens outside of formal styles and patterns of writing.

But this spawn of New Writers will be limited to more urban areas for a few more years. I base that statement on my time spent teaching college freshman writing classes at Montana State University. I asked students to write blogs and to post to message boards and to read each other’s writing. I was trying to instill in them the idea that they were writing for an audience and that these thoughts — the ones they manifested for my ENGL 121 class — were useful outside of class, whether they were studying engineering or nursing.

Well, my attempts to get them to write socially were abysmal failures, for the most part. They just didn’t accept that my course was anything more than a dreaded prerequisite they had to get out of the way to complete their core requirements. Yet I’m fairly sure they went back to their dorm rooms in the evening and chatted it up online and on their Facebook profiles.

Perhaps things have changed even more in the years since I was a teacher. Facebook has grown even hotter than it was then — back when it was just open to college students. I’m quite certain that every student arriving on campus this fall already has some sort of social networking profile set up online. I think the teachers teaching ENGL 121 now (it’s not called that anymore, something like WRIT 101, I think) will be most successful at engaging their students if they find a way to bring that online social interaction into the classroom. Hitch a wagon to that comet, so to speak.

As for the quality of writing, well, many of the freshmen I taught had a hard enough time putting subjects and verbs together. “Style,” in the literary sense, was not on their radar. I’m of the opinion that anything that gets them stringing words together is a good thing, since a little more practice seldom hurts anyone.

Related posts:

1. More About Student Writing
2. Thought on the rhetorical and righteous mind
3. The “Student Writing Problem”

Ben Huh, CEO of Pet Holdings, the company that owns Fail Blog, told the Times that “fail” really took off because of the financial crisis. As NYT writer Ben Zimmer notes:

The fail meme met the financial crisis head on at a Senate hearing in September, when a demonstrator held up a sign reading ”FAIL” behind Henry Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Online snark had graduated to political protest, though as a rallying slogan, the vagueness of fail leaves much to be desired.

Zimmer notes that the “fail” phenomenon has its detractors and quotes Anil Dash, from a comment appended to his June 2009 essay, “The End of Fail”:

“‘FAIL’ isn’t advocacy; it’s the tool of those who don’t know how to be advocates, who don’t know how to persuade,” Dash argues. ”It puts the ego of the complainers ahead of the cause they’re trying to advocate.”

I include this, from the body of Dash’s essay:

They choose a reflexive shorthand instead of a reasoned critique, and they bring out the worst in a community. I care deeply about people being creative on the web, and I care almost as much about people having thoughtful and productive conversations on the web.

Dash is right, of course. “Fail” is ridicule and insensitivity, wrapped into a conveniently short and pithy four-letter word. In fact, the whole fail issue reminds me of a scene from Hamlet. Bear with me on this.

It comes from Act III, Scene II, when Hamlet is giving the players their final instructions before they go on in Elsinore castle.

Hamlet: ...There be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise [...] that [...] have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. [...] And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that’s villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.

In other words, these “players,” these users of “fail” strut and bellow, but they are socially constructed creatures, bred by a society that praises them and rewards them for being blowhards and hams. These clowns distracts us from more important matters — which Dash argues are how we might improve ourselves and each other. Rather than working together to move forward, the Web smashes failures with snark and ridicule. And for anyone who has been the target of such a reaction, it’s enough to drive you to tears.

Yes, I’ve laughed empty laughs at the Fail Blog. I probably will in the future, but maybe I’ll stop to think that some of those fails just aren’t funny. I uninstalled the “Icanhazcheezburger” app from my iPod Touch; maybe that’s a step in the better direction.

But Zimmer from the Times is right. Regardless of the morality of “fail,” the word is, for better or worse, here to stay.

Related posts:

1. NYT uses anonymous source to expose anonymous blogger but gets it wrong
2. Twitter Hype Fail
3. More TriCityNews reaction

In an age when flamboyantly gay characters are sitcom staples, a Jew was but a few flutters of a butterfly wing away from being in line for the presidency and women account for a record-smiting 13 percent of the Senate, nothing seems as despised, illicit and un-American as atheism.

Angier goes through various polls to show that, of course, the number of Americans who say they are religious on polls doesn’t reflect reality. The questions are skewed, unclear and wrongly oriented, for the most part. Yet even if the questions were perfectly crafted, that doesn’t stop many people from lying to pollsters, saying they are more religious than they are simply because that’s the polite answer to give.

Yes, Americans are comparatively more religious than Europeans, but while the vast majority of them may say generically that they believe in God, when asked what their religion is, a sizable fraction, 11 percent, report “no religion,” a figure that has more than doubled since the early 1970’s and that amounts to about 26 million people.

She also points out that, in a 1999 poll, 92 percent of Americans said they would vote for a women for president. Ninety-five percent said they would vote for a black person for president; 92 percent said they would vote for a Jew. Yet only 49 percent of Americans said they were willing to vote for an atheist.

She quotes Dawkins and echoes some of the ideas I’ve run into in his book so far:

“Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities,” says Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. “If I say something offensive to religious people, I’ll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.”

And here are a few pearls of optimism from near the end of the article. Call them defenses of religion, I suppose. At any rate, they acknowledge that organized religion can play a beneficial role in society.

“By providing us with helpful gods, and showing how to appeal to those gods, religions armed our ancestors — and continue to arm us — with a feeling of control,” they write. “As long as we have the methods to propitiate the gods, or solicit their interest, or appeal to their sense of fairness and justice, or to connect with the presence of an eternal unity, we feel that an underlying order and purpose exist in a seemingly chaotic universe.”

One other thing I find fascinating about this article is that Angiers mentions George W. Bush. When she wrote the article, he had just been elected to his first term, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were still eight whole months away. I wonder, in reading her essay, how her words would be different if she wrote the essay now.

Related posts:

1. Pew Report: Most Americans wouldn’t care much if their local newspapers disappeared
2. The Focus of Our Public Libraries
3. Thoughts on Pew statistics

Image courtesy of tschoerda on Flickr

A British neuroscientist, whose work I’ve written about before, was the subject of an article in the Guardian yesterday. In it, Lady Susan Greenfield, a professor of synaptic pharmacology a Lincoln college, Oxford, tells us that the fast-paced, instant gratification world of social networking is probably changing the way a generation of networked children’s minds work.

If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.

In other words, the symptoms of brains that have spent too much time online might be similar to the ones we equate with ADHD. Maybe that’s going to be the new normal. It’s really too soon to tell.

Greenfield goes on to speculate that the instant gratification, push-button generation’s brain decrepitude might make them more susceptible to the pleasures of drug addiction and other addictions. Also, she says that children reading fewer novels makes them less empathetic because they are learning to interact with a world of things that are the objectives of quest-like behavior. That is: You don’t have to identify with Princess Toadstool in order to save her from Bowser.

I’m convinced that Greenfield is a smart and capable scientist and that most of her words in the Guardian article are taken out of context. I say that because three-quarters of what she says sounds rational and only a quarter of it sounds like stodgy traditionalism.

At any rate, it’s worth a read.

Related posts:

1. Is “quitting Facebook” the new Facebook meme?
2. Facebook is the path to Krypton
3. Bozeman police officer resigns over comments he made on Facebook