The End of Cyberspace

Spelling with my hands

I have a strong interest in learning how people's uses of technologies changes the way they think-- or less grandly, how it shapes the way they perform cognitive tasks or approach problems. Recently, I found an example of something I do that's definitely an artifact of my long engagement with a very specific technology: I realized I spell with my hands.

The other night, my wife and I were at the dining room table, each of us working on stuff. (Since she's a teacher at a pretty demanding school, she often has papers to grade in the evening.) She asked me how to spell a long word. I thought about it for a second, and couldn't just recite the letters, even though I was sure I knew how it was spelled. So I typed it.

Of course, I can recite the spelling of plenty of words, but after thirty years of typing, complex spelling is something I do with my hands more than my mind's eye. I know a word is misspelled when I feel my fingers hit the wrong keys, or reverse the order of a pattern. For me, correct spelling is a matter of feeling my fingers move over the keyboard in the right, comfortable way, not a matter of thinking "this word is spelled like this," then translating that into a set of motions. The keyboard has become an interface between the words I know how to spell, and the actual act of spelling them correctly.

This helps explain why I find using the predictive text feature on cell phones a somewhat puzzling experience. On a keypad with predictive text turned on, you really do have to think about the spelling of a word, because you're essentially feeding the phone clues about the word you want it to spell. Hit the wrong number on the keypad, and it's led astray, a sure as giving someone the wrong clue in a mystery will lead them to a mistaken conclusion. What makes it more confusing is that as you hit the keys, the phone may guess a completely different word than it had before; and of course, some keypad combinations can spell several different, equally popular words (46 can be "in" or "go," or a bit less likely, "ho").

For someone accustomed to spelling on a QWERTY keyboard, this is a pretty mystifying interaction. Of course, I'm getting better at it; but writing on a traditional keyboard and a keypad aren't merely different activities in terms of the fingers you use, or the prominence of the thumb versus the other digits; it places different cognitive demands on someone who's grown up spelling with his hands.

Technorati Tags: cognition, end of cyberspace, interface, keyboard, N95

The complex relationships between media

From Marc Andreesen's blog, quoting the New Yorker, July 14, 1951:

The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.

"They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book."

Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory -- movies, comic books, radio.

Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.

It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.

Okay, leave aside the point that watching books on TV would be only a little more boring than golf. But anyone who watches an hour of cable news is probably exposed to more words and numbers-- in the form of headlines, crawls, stock tickers, etc.-- than their grandparents saw in a day; likewise when browsing the Web. Of course, that's a total guess. But as I mentioned a little while ago, my son is keen to start reading more on his own so he can play more advanced video games. The bottom line is, the relationship between new media and old skills is always more complicated than we think.

Technorati Tags: reading, technology, television

The new impetus to literacy

A couple months ago, we bought Nintendo DS machines for the kids. Of course, before we got them, my wife and I talked about whether the kids were old enough for the games, and whether we really wanted them to have access to the technology at all. Finally, we decided to buy them, but to put some firewalls around their game-playing time. (I later learned that they're instruments of Satan, but by then both kids were experts at Mario Kart, and it seemed a shame to waste all that skill.)

One thing I did not expect was this: my son now wants to learn to read so he can play Pokemon Diamond, which is full of captions and written instructions. (Without literacy, he's stuck in the Mario Kart and Lego Star Wars ghetto.) Of course we read to the kids constantly-- my son insisted we read the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets this morning, rather than watch cartoons-- but I think this may be the first practical use of literacy my son has encountered. He doesn't have to pay his own bills, figure out who to vote for, read nutrition labels, or interpret traffic signs. But he does want to conquer the Pokemon world, and to do that, you need to be able to read.

Maybe everything bad really is good for you.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Rock and Roll," from the album "Led Zeppelin (Disc 2)".]

More on memory

Swarming Media thinks about Out-Sourced Memory:

Certainly if we rely on devices and services to remember facts for us, we have no need to commit them to memory. Yet to imply that that this represents a cultural or even generational loss of memory misses the mark. The rote memorization of facts indeed may be off-loaded, but that hardly represents memory as a cultural force. This latter form of memory takes the form of nostalgia, tradition, and history - each of which is heightened in different ways by these same networked-archival entities that have become our outsourced memories.

I return to this often here, but the phenomenon of mourning on social networks is fascinating. From the profiles of the deceased on MySpace to dedicated networks like Respectance, the argument that networked-archival environments diminish memory on any large scale is clearly off. If anything these technologies/devices/services/etc have allowed us to revel and wallow in memory. We are faced with an abundance of memory and if there is a crisis, it is a crisis of nostalgia waiting to happen.

Technorati Tags: memory

Sue Thomas on transliteracy

Today Sue Thomas gave a talk at the Institute on "transliteracy." I've communicated with Sue for the last couple years about the end of cyberspace-- last year she published an article in Convergence titled "The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises" that said nice things about my work-- but this was the first time we'd met in person.

Transliteracy is "the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks." It's a concept that the De Montfort University PART (Production and Research in Transliteracy) Group, which Sue leads, is working on. I found the talk quite interesting, but it made me aware of something I hadn't realized:

I hate the term "literacy."

Obviously this needs some explaining.

I certainly agree with the basic the idea that the repertoire of skills that we need to express ideas is multiplying, as the variety of media in which we work grows; that the cultivation and exercise of those skills probably affect not just how we can communicate, but how we think; and that all this deserves lots of attention.

Where things go off the rails is using the term "literacy" to talk about things as different as game-playing, geo-blogging, writing, and picture-taking. I think there are two possibly insurmountable problems with it.

First, among academics, the term "literacy" may be irretrievably bound up in assumptions of literacy as fluency with texts. The danger with applying the term to other kinds of creative and communicative activity is that it ends up reviving the post-structuralist imperialist project-- the intellectual enterprise that saw everything from nuclear war to dressing to Photoshopping as engagement with one or another "text."

Second, among just about everyone else, "literacy" isn't a description of a particular kind of skill, but instead is a claim about the importance of a skill. Skills that have economic value or give power to their users-- or more specifically, are believed to be skills that are valuable now but will become more valuable in the future-- are defined as types of "literacy:" we talk about computer literacy, visual literacy, economic literacy, information literacy, and other forms of 21st-century "digital literacy." On the other hand, we don't talk about "bicycle literacy," "walking literacy," or "sexual literacy" (except perhaps in certain chat rooms)-- these are either universal and hence trivial, or not economically significant. The word "literacy" signifies importance. It's an argument masquerading as a definition.

Finally, and separately, I wonder about how long the particular condition that the PART Group is interested in-- the need to have different forms of literacy that allow for fluent use of different kinds of media-- is going to last. Today we talk about visual literacy, television literacy, and computer literacy as different things because they've been separate media; but in the YouTubed, mashed-up, RSSed future of media, will we need different kinds of skills to deal with each? Is transliteracy an artifact of today's fractured media situation?

Again, this is not to say that the underlying issues don't deserve to be studied; they most certainly do. I just wonder how long it will be before the concept of "literacy" will be more trouble than it's worth.

Technorati Tags: culture, literacy, media

Apropos of the outboard memory issue:

From someecards:

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, memory, psychology

Clive Thompson on outboard memory

From his Wired column, republished on Collision Detection:

[T]he cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I'm using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat.... Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence.

You could argue that by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely "human" tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming. What's more, the perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking. For example, I've been blogging for four years, which means I've poured out about a million words' worth of my thoughts online. This regularly produces the surreal and delightful experience of Googling a topic only to unearth an old post that I don't even remember writing. The machine helps me rediscover things I'd forgotten I knew -- it's what author Cory Doctorow refers to as an "outboard brain."

Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?

Technorati Tags: cyborg, end of cyberspace, memory, psychology

A thought about the future of memory

How many of your loved one's cellphone numbers do you remember? In my case, it's exactly one: the number of the phone my wife and I shared, and which she still has. My brother's, father's, stepmother's, or virtually any of my friends? No. I can't remember my mother's number, and she's on my account-- I pay for that phone, and I can't remember it.

It would be more accurate to say that I haven't even tried to memorize it. Why would I? I put it in my cell phone, and put her on speed dial. My mother's not a ten-digit number: she's "hold down the 5 for three seconds."

This kind of thing is not at all unusual: most of the high school or college interns who've worked for me in the last few years confess they program phone numbers, rather than memorize them. Likewise, I don't know anyone's e-mail address; I've got them in my address book. This kind of thing usually inspires hand-wringing about how young people can't remember anything any longer, the arts of memory are being lost, etc. etc. I take a different view, though it's informed mainly by my own experience.

I think the following shift is going on. Those of us who live in a world of cellphones, PDAs, e-mail programs, etc., are spending less mental energy memorizing things that we used to have to remember. For those of us who remember when we used to know our parent's and friends' phone numbers, this feels like a collective, mild case of Alzheimers' syndrome. At the same time, we're better able to remember (or at least recall) specific episodes in the past, single events, places we've visited, etc.

Tools like blogs, Nokia's Lifeblog, Flickr, del.icio.us, and others create records of things that previously would have been quickly forgotten; but the act of using them often helps us fix those things in our memories. The books I remember best are the ones I've taken the best notes of: that's because the act of note-taking helped me commit the book to memory. For me, note-taking is more important as a mnemonic device than as a record-creating tool. Something similar happens when, for example, I geocode pictures on Flickr. Tagging pictures helps me remember taking them, and associate that picture with a place.

So ultimately, the story of computer memory's impact on human memory isn't merely one of "offloading" or externalizing or digital amnesia: it's a story of a shifting of mnemonic resources, and a reconfiguration of the contents of our memories, not a simple shrinking of our memories.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, memory

David Weinberger at Oxford

Webcast of a talk Weinberger gave at Oxford last year:

The New Shape of Knowledge: From Trees to Piles of Leaves

The digital revolution is enabling knowledge to slip the bonds of the physical which had, silently, shaped it. Now we get to see its "natural" shape. What does it look like? How big are topics when they aren't determined by the economics of paper? Who gets to organize it? What are the new principles we're using to organize it? David Weinberger proposes that in the digital world, the most "natural," efficient and responsive way to manage knowledge is to create huge, distributed piles of leaves, each tagged with as much metadata as possible - including treating the content as metadata - and postponing until the last minute the taxonomizing of the information. What will be the social effects as we move from trees to piles of leaves?

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

MIT has a new Center for Collective Intelligence:

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

Via Kempton

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collective intelligence