Category Archives: Web/Tech

The conversation is back with the release of Nick Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. I haven’t read it yet but you can get the gist by perusing the reviews, following Carr’s blog, or reading RSSted Development where I briefly contrast Carr and Cowen. To see some back-and-forth on what the studies actually say about technology and distractability, read the comments section of Jonah Lehrer’s post.

I continue to try to figure out how I can improve my ability to concentrate, and I worry about how the internet is adversely affecting that mission. In the end I fall into the pro-internet camp, if such a crude distinction can even be made, but I do not think this is mutually exclusive with whole-hearted support of the broader conversation Carr has ignited or this Alain de Botton quip:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is how we can relearn to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything.

Recent steps I’ve taken to improve my ability to concentrate: a) track my time more rigorously, b) use self-control to block access to twitter, facebook, and other time sink sites; c) turn off email for hours at a time, d) don’t use mobile email, e) wear Bose headsets to block out noise and to remind myself I’m supposed to be working.

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• Speaking of books I haven’t read yet, The Authenticity Hoax sounds interesting.
• Here’s a clip showing what not to do if you’re a PR person faced with an inquisitive reporter via SF’s Laguna Honda hospital.
• AEI crunches the numbers on how much money U.S. airline consumers would save if Open Skies were global.
• Colin Marshall asks how much human energy is wasted on personal relationship re-engineering (aka therapy).

"We flatter ourselves by imagining that we live in an age of endless invention and innovation," says Paul Kedrosky. A classic approach is applying Moore's Law to…everything, and then leaping to claims about unprecedented change in society more generally. I'm reading a number of commentators call bullshit. They are arguing that the number of new important innovations has been steadily declining and that the pace of change is slowing.

Here's Philip Longman in U.S. News & World Report:

There is a distinction to be made between inventions that are merely sophisticated–such as, say, personal digital assistants–and those that fundamentally alter the human condition. The invention of the light bulb created more useful hours in each day for virtually every human being. The electric motor directly raised the productivity in every sphere of life, from speeding up assembly lines to creating so many labor-saving devices in the home that millions of housewives were able to join the paid work force. The internal combustion engine allowed for mass, high-speed transportation of both people and freight while also opening up vast regions of cheap land to suburban development. The materials revolution that brought us petroleum refining, synthetic chemicals, and pharmaceuticals involved learning to rearrange molecules in ways that made raw materials fundamentally more valuable. Without the genetically improved seeds that brought us the "Green Revolution" of the late 1960s and '70s, there would be mass starvation.

Can we make any parallel claim about the single greatest technology of our own time? It remains possible that networked computers and other new information technologies will one day create similar, societywide bursts in productivity, health, and wealth. Yet to date, the marginal gains computers have brought to communications are modest even compared with the improvements made by the telegraph. The first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1866 reduced the time required to send a message from New York to London from about a week to a few minutes. Notes economist Alan Blinder: "No modern IT innovation has, or I dare say will, come close to such a gain!"

Here's Scott Sumner with a personal observation in a post about economic growth rates:

My grandmother died at age 79 on the very week they landed on the moon. I believe that when she was young she lived in a small town or farm in Wisconsin. There was probably no indoor plumbing, car, home appliances, TV, radio, electric lights, telephone, etc. Her life saw more change than any other generation in world history, before or since. I’m already almost 55, and by comparison have seen only trivial changes during my life. That’s not to say I haven’t seen significant changes, but relative to my grandma, my life has been fairly static. Even when I was a small boy we had a car, indoor plumbing, appliances, telephone, TV, modern medicine, and occasional trips in airplanes.

Michael Lind makes similar points in his Time magazine piece called "The Boring Age."

Here's Peter Thiel:

The question about what sorts of innovations we are likely to see in the next 10 or 20 years depends a great deal on what people do. The pessimistic view is that we are living in a society that depends on innovation and science and technology, but that is actually not focusing on these things nearly enough and that as a result, we are headed towards an extended period of stagnation and very slow growth throughout all the nations of the developed world.

The more optimistic view is that we somehow figure out a way to restart the innovative engine that's probably gotten stalled. And my version of this would be that we go back to where the '50's and '60's ended and look back at the great technologies people were pursuing at the time; space, robots, artificial intelligence, the next generation of biotechnology and sort of look at where people thought the future of the world was going to be in 1968 and we try to take off from where things got detoured at that time.

Here's a different 10 min video of Peter Thiel in which he talks about the lack of innovation in the context of financial markets. There is an attitude that "someone else is doing it" but in fact no one is doing it. "There is a lot less going on than people think," he says.

So: Why is this happening?

Tyler Cowen once said, "If we had to build today's energy infrastructure working under the current regulatory and NIMBY burden, it probably could not be done." Can we extract from this a larger claim that a bloated government and burdensome regulatory environment are significantly dampening innovation? An ever-powerful bureaucratic class strangling creativity? Or is it that the government is not doing enough in funding basic research toward big innovation (as it did with Darpa and space program of the past)? Are there cultural norms around conformity that are causing too many to be too deferential to the status quo? Are too many smart young people going to school? (In the past boy-geniuses had more unconventional educations which helped lead to extreme innovation, perhaps.) What are other reasons?

One counter-argument to all of the above is that there is indeed accelerating change and new innovation, it's just that we don't yet see it. As David Dalrymple said to me in a tweet, "The exponential trend only applies directly to enabling technologies, not to technologically-enabled milestones like flight."

(thanks to Michael Vassar for helping brainstorm some of these ideas.)

On Facebook the other day I viewed a profile of a "friend" who's in college and she typed this as her bio:

me? hmm. well, i'm a fighter. i'm a little crazy, but i'm passionate and i love hard when i do let myself love. when i'm upset, i need ice cream and to have my back rubbed. i'm restless by nature, and am happiest when i'm moving. i'm athletic but not a jock, musical but not a musician, and neither side of my brain seems to be dominant. sometimes i find comfort in words, and sometimes in numbers, but always in the smell of spring and my best friends. i'm bad with change, but get tired of staying the same. i'm contradicting and i think too much, but i'm told that it's cute. i believe in things that happen for a reason, and i hope that Vassar is one of them. i am extreme, i am loved. i am hopeful.

When reading her rather self-conscious, careful bio (though the lowercase letters and opening phrase "me?" attempt to signal the opposite), I was struck: When else have so many millions of people under age 22 been asked to write their "biography" for public consumption? When else have hundreds of millions of people been asked to (essentially) publicly list their interests, favorite quotations, religious views, and political views?

Imagine the tens of millions of 15 year-olds who go to set up their profile and see a big white text book that says "Bio." As the cursor blinks, they ask themselves, "What is my biography? What are my interests? What are my religious views? What is my relationship status? Am I sexually interested in men or women?"

Social network people say that the profile we look at the most is our own. We are very interested in how we present ourselves to the world. But perhaps more important, we are interested in trying to figure out ourselves. As younger and younger people set up profiles, they end up confronting some of the central angst-inducing identity questions early in life.

Insofar as this all prompts reflection on issues, I say 'tis a good thing. But there's also a risk of people too quickly pouring cement on their identity. A 15-year-old selects from a drop down menu "Liberal" and views his page a few times a day. What does that do to his willingness to evolve his mindset?

There should be a checkbox at the top of your profile labeled "Keep Your Identity Small" and it would keep the "bio" box open but disable the other drop-downs. There should be a drop-down option for "Uncertain" in each category.

(A hat tip is owed to somebody for talking to me about this, but I cannot remember who.)

There are self-centric and reader-centric ways to use social media. “Self-centric” = an approach that serves you the author best, “Reader-centric” = an approach that serves your readers best. Some examples:

The frequency of blog posts: Self-centric bloggers blog whenever they feel the inspiration, the reader-centric blogs at traffic-maximizing optimal levels (usually once a day).

Method for sharing links: Almost daily, Tyler Cowen posts “Assorted Links” which is a series of interesting links posted in a numbered form. Steve Silberman does the same on Twitter — he posts tons of interesting links. Tyler and Steve are being reader centric — the link is published in an easily viewable, common format that readers enjoy. But, it does almost nothing for Tyler and Steve. It is very hard to search through and access these links in the future. By contrast, I rarely do link dumps on my blog, and instead have categorized over 6,000 web pages on delicious. I am self-centric — I am storing the links in a bookmarking system that sorts by date and category and can be easily backed-up and searched.

Content of blog posts and tweets: The self-centric writer posts whatever is on his mind, including the proverbial “what I had for breakfast” dispatch. The reader-centric writer thinks hard about what will be interesting to an external audience, and shapes it as a product for a customer. Self-centric blogs are more personal; reader-centric blogs tend to be about a specific topic.

Replying to tweets: Hundreds if not thousands of people have replied to me (@bencasnocha) on Twitter, but I rarely post replies of my own because I don’t find it an efficient conversational medium. (I do read all replies.) Also, I don’t want my main Twitter page to be polluted with all random replies to random people. Compare my Twitter page to this popular twitterer. I’m being self-centric, instead of reader-centric.

If you replace “self-centric” with “selfish” and “reader-centric” with “selfless” you can see how the old adage “it’s selfish to be selfless” applies in this case. Many times reader-centric uses of social media, by increasing total readership, become long-run self-centric.

Alain de Botton recently blogged about “one of the challenges of our time”: re-learning how to concentrate. To sit quietly and think without distraction. I agree, except I’m not sure if we’ve ever known how to do so.

Technology broadly defined is usually seen as both culprit and savior. For example, we get nothing done when compulsively checking our BlackBerries, so we must take Adderall to focus. The issues related to how technology affects the way we think are complicated. But apparently this doesn’t deter smart people from making uninformed, simplistic judgement calls.

Steve Coll is a veteran journalist who writes for the New Yorker. (Here’s my 1,700 word review of his book on the CIA and Afghanistan.) Like any curious person, Coll is reflecting on how the internet has changed his profession. Just recently he went on Twitter for the first time. Here’s his report:

I had never been on the Twitter site until I read his recent posts…Last night, fearing what I would learn, I went on the site and scoped out my Twitter fingerprints. There were dozens of recent tweets emanating from South Asia linking to an interview I had given to the Times of India about Indo-Pakistani relations. There were a handful of nice tweets from random people reading one of my books. It all seemed fine. It also seemed like a space that did not require my direct participation anytime soon.

Despite this five second superficial investigation, Coll goes on to riff on whether “technological systems have moral characteristics” and the “qualities of excellence in a great tweet.” New rule: stop listening when someone refers to it as “the Twitter site.”

Michael Lewis, God bless him and his brilliant journalism, alas does the same here:

I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message. I don’t actually see the point of limiting communication to a haiku. I find the whole effusion of communications technology bewildering. All you have to do is overhear a certain number of cell phone conversations to see that the vast majority of what people say and write to each other is totally pointless.

In other words: I don’t want to try it, I don’t know nothin’ about it, but I sure as hell will judge it. I find this willful ignorance unforgivable — just spend a week using the free technology and see how it goes? Then decide how you feel.

I discussed the issue of information diets, bits vs. books, and whether the web is harming our ability to concentrate in this piece for The American. It is long and therefore itself poses a concentration challenge! But I do hope you read it if you haven’t already. I believe it represents one of the most thorough analyses of these issues yet written.

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The Atlantic is doing a series on the information diets of notable journalists. Felix Salmon is the only one who uses an RSS reader. Susan Orlean uses Twitter to get news headlines which I personally find inefficient. Everyone subscribes to tons of print magazines.