I must follow up by saying there are a few here who impress me consistently. A small few have wisdom, wit, and heart. That is why I return.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
I must follow up by saying there are a few here who impress me consistently. A small few have wisdom, wit, and heart. That is why I return.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Well, I guess it depends on how interested they are.Originally Posted by Black Cloud
Technically, indeed - people with a normal brain should be able to compute a logical reasoning without too much of a problem, provided that they have no language problems.
Generally though, try to apply the same exercise on a group that is not interested or motivated, and you'll get different results.
The problem with open/free/ubiquitous information is that you can ignore it whenever it suits you. A text seems to difficult to continue reading? - drop it. You'll find a simpler version on the radio, internet - or when you don't, it looks as if it wasn't important to bother anyway. As a result, people seem to think that texts generally don't have to be "challenged" and that they carry their information on their sleeve.
Some texts do, yet many still don't. And of course you could shift the burden of explanatory adequacy on the writer of a text ("write clearly"), but it's a two-way system (actually, more than two) and hence you may also expect that your reader does a bit of an effort.
And that idea of "effort" is slowly fading away. Texts have to be simple. Because simple is clear. Clear is fast.
Unfortunately, our evolution did not prepare us for flying airplanes. Modern society is rather complex. And understanding complexity requires effort.
And indeed, it's not a question of intelligence, but rather of motivation (or lack of it), versus laziness.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
The general approach I was talking about can best be described as participatory or empowerment evaluation. Local governments, NGO's, foundations, and universities use it.
You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
So, the elite no longer have the monopoly on context and meaning in our society, and people have more ability than ever to decide whether information is relevant to them. I think this is great.
You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
If my kids could eat nothing but potato chips, ice cream, and popcorn three meals a day, they would.
It's not like information is being presented on an open menu, from which you may choose the full version if you're intellectually curious, or the Reader's Digest iPhone edition if you're short on time. The short versions, the edited, biased, pre-digested versions, are being marketed to us as a better version of the real thing. It's not "Fox Opinion Network," it's "Fox News Network." This is the crisis of credibility. "Now you can get the news on your cell phone!" This is great, except that what you're getting on your cell phone is not the same "product" as news formerly was.
At the same time, "news" is becoming far more complex and difficult to understand. Has any of us really read the healthcare reform bill to know exactly how it will affect each of us? How many of us really know how the banking industry reforms passed this week might cause changes to our jobs, our bank accounts, our mortgages? We need more, and more thoroughly reported news, not less.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Definitely. The more options the better.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
I've looked up to see what empowerment evaluation is. This description of the advisor or facilitator came up in similar fashion in many of the texts I saw:
"An outside evaluator who is charged with monitoring the process can help keep the effort credible, useful, and on track, providing additional rigor, reality checks, and quality controls throughout the evaluation. The evaluator is a coequal in this endeavor, not a superior and not a servant; as a critical friend, the evaluator can question shared biases or “group think.”"
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
What's meant with "elite" anyway, nowadays it simply means "having loads of money".
People should have the ability to decide what's relevant to them. That doesn't mean their decision is good, nor wise. But at least it's theirs, and you would like them to be able to argue their point of view. That's fair.
One could hope that education systems teach people how to use their brain so they can decide for themselves. That would be fair.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Back to the original posted article: "fair" has nothing to do with it. For the most part, companies are looking to "leverage" these information sources. I'm not talking about newspapers trying to break even, they have a right to earn enough money to afford to report fairly. It's that there is little thought of the public interest, it's all about how profit can be made.
Instead, our education system is making a grand mistake, thinking that if you teach kids to Google, you're teaching them to think. I agree that more access to more information is useful--as long as it's a net gain and not a substitute for other types of learning and thinking skills. I see kids being taught to take standardized tests, given Google searching tips, and set loose on the world. That's not education, and under those circumstances, greater access to all information may be worse than useless.
All is not lost, this is just something we need to keep a close eye on.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
I think "elite" there means power and not money. You don't have to have very much money at all to have the potential to have your voice heard all over the world. Have you ever seen one of those comparisons about how the poor people today have access to things that the wealthy could not have imagined not very long ago? We are all gaining access to things that were once impossible for the most elite.
Of course education, learning to use our new tools, is critical, but there is hope. The Internet will make you smarter, say experts
Intelligence in the Internet age
New Neurological Evidence That the Internet Makes People Smarter
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
OK, I meant "fair" as in "people have rights, and duties". "Fair" being a delicate balance between "choice" and "justification" - i.e. responsibility. There can't be one without the other - on any level - citizens, corporations etc.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
I lecture an awful lot these days, and I find that the internet facilitates my research no end; my field of "expertise" is obscure, and formerly I would have had to spend a lot of time in libraries, bothering the librarians for books that no one's checked out since 1982.
Now I just google, and I have access to Samuel Pepys letters, and someone's thesis on mineral collecting during the Regency era, or reprints of early catalogs from defunct fraternal organizations.
The real work, however, comes when you tie all these facts up into a narrative - when years of experience and an immersion in a certain culture allow you to present a coherent, focused, (hopefully) comprehensive view of the evolution of an idea. The facts aren't enough, it's the knowledge that comes from years of study and a lifetime in the field that allow a person to create something of depth and meaning.
It's easy to look something up, it's even easier to multi-task while info-snacking; what's hard is immersive study, what's hard is to devote yourself to an idea and follow it to all its conclusions. It is a pipe-dream that anyone can understand anything if only they have access to the facts; personal biases and ideological blind spots warp understanding. I know my limitations, and when I don't understand something I go to an expert that has devoted themselves to study in a certain field. Education is not simply posession of the facts, it is the training of the mind to push the limits of its capacity.
As has been said here - this isn't about smart and stupid, it's about hard work and time and seriousness of purpose. It's about putting a value on the long, slow process of comprehension, as opposed to easy, knee-jerk conclusions.
We are getting more sophisticated in some ways, no doubt about it; I'm grateful for the access that I now have to seemingly unlimited research at a click. But I'm also wary of the fact that someone can spend a week googling something and think that this makes them an expert. Only time, discipline, and experience in any given field can yield a certain depth of understanding.
We are redefining what it is to be informed, but access to more and more knowledge is useless if you don't have the capacity to think critically, form coherent ideas and understand context. I'm not an academic - as a matter of fact, I lecture without a license, but I have the utmost respect for intellectual rigor.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Asimo has the ability to recognize objects and determine object families. [Hopefully it goes without saying that you should get your rifle and make your way as quickly as possible for the proverbial hills. Like, right now.]
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Those brains scans merely show that people are more active in those specific regions. Good for them - but they could probably have achieved the same results while making a sudoku or making crossword puzzles. If measuring intelligence were that easy... That cannot be considered "hope", that's "rubbish". Patients who suffer from brain damage also tend to develop new activity in regions that were previously used less in specific tasks - again that's not intelligence. That's just the circuitry trying to establish new connections in order to solve specific problems. Those patients don't become more intelligent, sadly.
Having free access to information is not per se good or bad. Much of it depends on how the individual who is accessing the information is capable of making up his/her own mind; and on how the information is presented.
The reuters.com article is a good illustration of what can go wrong:
You get two contradictory statements here (loss of depth vs. Google finds my facts) and no one bothers to develop the contradiction. As if both positions were "equidistant": you say A and I say B and in the end we're all good and kind people so let's move on to the next article."The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking."
But Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said, "People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory.
"For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support and Google comes through for me," he said in the release."
What does average Joe make of such newsbits? That he can safely surf to his favorite gossip sites and that they'll make him smarter?
That's inanity, not intelligence. Sorry!
Free access to information could be good, or it could be bad. It's bad when it gives a false sense of empowering to its users. You then run the risk that they become dependent on the carriers that offer the information - while it should be exactly the contrary (readers who can judge the carriers, the way information is presented, and its content).
It's not information that will make people clever - it's the way they can do something clever with it. Everyone can see that apples fall from trees. Yet it took someone specific to think it through and place this bit of information in a specific comprehension of the world's strange mechanics; and everyone can hear the Doppler effect, yet it took some pretty clever scientists to link it to spacetime, and the universe, to construct the Big Bang hypothesis.
It's not the amount of information that matters, it's the computation inside the brain.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Perhaps I wouldn't find your response so condescending if this were a discussion about children and information, but are you actually comparing adults with free access to monitoring your children's diet? Because if so, that's incredible.
You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
It's an apt analogy. The point is that freedom to select from six different kinds of junk is a very poor kind of freedom to celebrate. The analogy to junk food also works because it is self-sustaining. The more you consume, the more you want to consume exactly the same stuff.
"Freedom of choice" and "individuality" are ideological constructions like any other. They way they actually work in the world is sometimes surprising. The main thrust of Jaron Lanier's fine book "You Are Not A Gadget" is precisely that Web 2.0, which ostensibly offers a wider range of choices and access to information, as well as ways to express one's individuality, is actually producing the opposite result. Infinite choice and total access take us toward a surprising conclusion. The Internet becomes an endless network of rootless differences in which the individual finds herself trapped and eventually destabilized. As Fredric Jameson writes in his new book on Hegel, "Difference, by gradually extending its dominion over everything, ultimately comes to liquidate identity as such, in a well-nigh suicidal meltdown in which it must itself also disappear (inasmuch as difference is necessarily predicated on identity in the first place)."
Last edited by Worm; July 26, 2010 at 10:15 PM.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Over at TheMillions.com a self-proclaimed under-30 writer suggested we could do without George Orwell because it required too much effort to recreate the historical context needed to understand his essays and novels.
The comments section is full of praise.
Last edited by Worm; July 26, 2010 at 10:14 PM.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
I take it you mean our public education system. The public education system stinks because the schools have been deliberately bled dry of money by a right-wing ideology which has been almost unanimously adopted by citizens on both sides of the spectrum. I would guess that the teachers who present Google as a substitute for real research have neither the time nor the materials to teach their pupils how to do proper research. Nor can the parents help by offering supplementary help at home because both of them are out working ten-hour days to pay off the mortgage, the car, the credit cards, and junior's hospital visit last spring.
But in this instance we also see the failure of what is usually thought of as a science-based, more liberal-leaning agenda: for decades parents have been told that fluency in computers is vital to succeeding in the global economy. Not only would many "sane" people have no problem with the way kids use Google, they would welcome it as a necessary skill in this "dynamic, ever-changing, exciting new world" of the twenty-first century. Little thought then, or now, is given to what technology actually does and what its drawbacks might be. If you have ever watched an 8-year old school a much older person on how to use a computer, you've surely noticed that the older person usually drops any attempt to understand and watches in awe as the kid does in fifteen seconds what the adult needs two hours to accomplish-- if at all. (Something tells me you have seen this more than once...) The same thing occurs on the macro level, too. I'll bet that many of us, confronted with a kid who used Google in the you describe, would express disappointment and yet, at the same time, probably assume that the kid was fluent in other computer-based skills unknown to us. We therefore tacitly excuse them from the obligation to meet our expectations. Isn't this what the hacker stereotype tells us, reinforced by a thousand movies and TV shows, including "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"? That it's okay for society to abdicate its educational responsibilities to the younger generation because most of us are already obsolete in ways we cannot even imagine?
In any case we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking these developments are not the result of deliberate choices. Educational systems, like toilets, break down for a reason.
Last edited by Worm; July 26, 2010 at 10:17 PM.
Re: Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured
It works for you because it's the dumbed-down version of a theory you've talked about many times about a lack of choice.
It's actually an apt analogy of the way she sees most other people. She has written many times "when you have children you'll see" or "when you get older you'll see" that what she is saying with mercifully blind self-assurance is the truth.
Moving on now, difference is bad because it liquidates identity? See, I didn't realize that. As much as I might see identity as a transient concept, I think that difference defines identity by contrast. Anyway, that's mumbo jumbo. Say I accept the sentence quoted as absolutely true. What do I do with that information? Become nigh-suicidal? hahaha It's intellectual masturbation.
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