Biggest Shift in History of Media Obscured

[Anaesthesine]

A wonderful article on the subject, well worth reading in its entirety (if you can make it all the way through):

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

"I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle...

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. 'The perfect recall of silicon memory,' Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, 'can be an enormous boon to thinking.' But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski...

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the 'shortcuts' would give harried readers a quick 'taste' of the day’s news, sparing them the 'less efficient' method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules..."

I'd like to thank Google for allowing me to find this so quickly.

 

[goinghome]

I've recommended the book a few times on this site. The chief value of Lanier's self-proclaimed 'manifesto' is that Lanier himself was a digital pioneer and for a long time was a true believer in the coming technology Utopia. He isn't an Ivy League academic with a longwinded theory about why Web 2.0 sucks. The guy is a Silicon Valley insider who pauses a few times in the book to apologize in advance to all the friends he's pissing off. He has every motivation possible to sing the praises of new technologies. The fact that he isn't might be of particular interest to us.

According to Lanier in the article, online culture is 'a culture of reaction without action', a hypersphere, and that 'we will only escape it when we kill the hive'.

I read Shteyngart's 'Absurdistan'; ok if a bit sideways. I prefered Michael Chabon's 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yiddish_Policemen's_Union - an allegory about a real-life hive ; )

What were our "old ways of learning"? When was media more ethical and when were people more well educated?

I do believe reporters weren't under the same pressure as they are now to come up with material no matter what no matter how.

Obesity and the rise of other cardiovascular risk factors are already linked strongly to excessive computer use. When computers are used in schools, electronic cheating is 'pandemic'. The machine is 'a distraction to the educational process'.

Crowther reports that: "Entrance exams administered by ACT Inc. establish that half the students now entering college in the USA lack the basic reading-comprehension skills to succeed in literature, history or sociology courses. Reading and writing skills among eighth-graders decline each year, as internet penetration rises. Only 3 per cent now read at the level scored 'advanced', and the state of Maine recently scrapped its eighth-grade writing test because 78 per cent of the participants failed. Half the teenagers tested by the advocacy group Common Core could not place the Civil War in the second half of the nineteehth century, a quarter drew a blank on Adolf Hitler, a fifth failed to identify America's enemies in World War II. A third of America's high-school students drop out - one every twenty-six seconds - and two-thirds prove incapable of higher education..."

This place and others like it are springing up to treat internet addiction - http://www.netaddictionrecovery.com/

Then there's the disturbing issue of mountains of poisonous E-waste, not to mention the murderous wars sourcing raw materials - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27kristof.html?_r=4&th&emc=th

 

[Worm]

Crowther reports that: "Entrance exams administered by ACT Inc. establish that half the students now entering college in the USA lack the basic reading-comprehension skills to succeed in literature, history or sociology courses. Reading and writing skills among eighth-graders decline each year, as internet penetration rises. Only 3 per cent now read at the level scored 'advanced', and the state of Maine recently scrapped its eighth-grade writing test because 78 per cent of the participants failed. Half the teenagers tested by the advocacy group Common Core could not place the Civil War in the second half of the nineteehth century, a quarter drew a blank on Adolf Hitler, a fifth failed to identify America's enemies in World War II. A third of America's high-school students drop out - one every twenty-six seconds - and two-thirds prove incapable of higher education..."

I'm sorry but I am offended by these statistics. They are obviously elitist.

 

[Worm]

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski...

Particularly alarming in the wake of the recent Wikileaks about Afghanistan, when reading in depth is more necessary than ever, no? How many documents were skimmed over regarding America's longest war? Think the mysterious title "Task Force 373" will bob up out of the ocean?

What am I saying? The "extrajudicial" soldiers in TF373 are probably folk heroes already.

 

[goinghome]

Fight back!

 

[Dave]

I'm sorry but I am offended by these statistics. They are obviously elitist.

That 'elitist' tag hit home then?

Regarding the other discussion about how people simply want to score points, this is a perfect example. You accept these statistics because they somehow bolster your position, which is ...?
You're online complaining about the Internet. Maybe you should print up some flyers, or if printing is bad, take to shouting on the street corner.

 

[Dave]

On the other hand, there's no evidence that intelligence is on the rise, either.

Two considerations.
1/In a given society, take the number of women with a university degree (I know, it's a gross oversimplification of an "intelligence criterion"). See how many children these women have when they are 35 years old. If you then see that in some countries (Germany, e.g.) up to 40% of the women with a university degree have no children when they're 35, then you see a potential reduction of intelligence in the overall gene pool. Dramatic? Unlikely.

You're drawing at least two conclusions there, as you acknowledge. I'll give you the first, that women with degrees are more intelligent, but then do women with degrees have more intelligent children? Not sure about that one.

2/ Our modern societies are on the one hand far too complex for what our genes were designed for (we can walk and run and throw stuff without problems, but flying an airplane requires a bit more training) and intelligence is still a property that favours survival (health benefits, for example, are commonly cited). On the other hand, intelligence as a survival benefit no longer seems to hold exclusively on the individual level - as modern societies are more and more interconnected. It could thus very well be that we shift from a model of "intelligence" as a characteristic of an individual, towards a communal model of intelligence via "sharing" - much like what happens in ant societies (as in "swarm intelligence"). In that sense, societies/groups that are well "connected" could find better solutions that those who are not.

Whatever this may mean (and it's far too early to be able to say much about it), it could be interesting to consider "education" as a way to set minimal (yet sufficiently high) standards for skills people should have (critical reading is one of them, but here the variation in profiles is endless), and promote a longer education life span than what is currently done ("real" "life-long learning") in order to make sure that sharing is a two-way process, and not just copy & paste.

I completely disagree with this. You're saying that we were designed? If we were then we can go back to the first part about the women, who were designed to have children but are not, and deduce that a university degree doesn't have much to do with intelligence at all? Not saying that. Just asking. You can't have it both ways.

Also, I found it offensive to be thought of as a child that needed my information predigested for me, but now I'm an ant?

If we really did follow your model though, the Internet is the colony?

 

[Dave]

You've missed a good article today that supports the position about the changing nature of education, and actually supports your ant colony model.

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.

Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

Sarah Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, N.J., said many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.

“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night.”

Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.

She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates. “Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.

Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

The notion that there might be a new model young person, who freely borrows from the vortex of information to mash up a new creative work, fueled a brief brouhaha earlier this year with Helene Hegemann, a German teenager whose best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from others.

Instead of offering an abject apology, Ms. Hegemann insisted, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” A few critics rose to her defense, and the book remained a finalist for a fiction prize (but did not win).

That theory does not wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who said that relaxing plagiarism standards “does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness.”

“You’re not coming up with new ideas if you’re grabbing and mixing and matching,” said Ms. Wilensky, who took aim at Ms. Hegemann in a column in her student newspaper headlined “Generation Plagiarism.”

“It may be increasingly accepted, but there are still plenty of creative people — authors and artists and scholars — who are doing original work,” Ms. Wilensky said in an interview. “It’s kind of an insult that that ideal is gone, and now we’re left only to make collages of the work of previous generations.”

In the view of Ms. Wilensky, whose writing skills earned her the role of informal editor of other students’ papers in her freshman dorm, plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories.

The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.

“If you’re taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you’re not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won’t do so unknowingly,” she said.

At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.

Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.

And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation’s evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.

 

[PregnantForTheLastTime]

It's now to the point at which college-level instructors will pass out handouts printed directly from Wikipedia. This really happened, at another college near me. The student who was expected to give a presentation in class saw the handout, and asked, "That's what I was going to read out for my presentation, so do I still have to give it?" Even in my university, I often see other students stand at a lectern and read off articles they pulled off the web. They don't even bother to read them in advance--they can't pronounce half of the words. (They don't get good grades for this, but still, it's a firmly entrenched practice.)

“If you’re taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you’re not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won’t do so unknowingly,” she said.

This is two problems in one. It's not just the surface problem of intellectual theft. It's the deeper process of synthesizing information that's at risk.

Do you see what I'm saying, now? There are aspects of the electronic presentation of information that foster intellectual laziness and shortcuts. And the problem is increasing exponentially. I'm going to take cold comfort in the fact that my one big talent, writing coherently, is, for once, going to increase in value over time.

 

[Worm]

It's now to the point at which college-level instructors will pass out handouts printed directly from Wikipedia. This really happened, at another college near me.

I saw a commercial the other night (during Adult Swim, which made me think it was a parody at first) in which a Hot Coed paraded about, half-nude, singing the praises of "going to college in your pajamas" at an online 'university'. According to the commercial, the primary benefit-- after the obvious allure of semi-naked coeds-- was the immense amount of money college graduates earn over a lifetime versus those who haven't taken degrees.

It's easy to make fun of such a commerical until you realize that this is really the barely-concealed fantasy underlying all colleges and universities in the United States (and, I presume, Western Europe). Do a minimum of work in the laziest mode possible, get laid, get your degree, and go make money.

All of which is my way of saying that the college near you is just revealing a truth about higher education, one that is probably several decades old.

writing coherently, is, for once, going to increase in value over time.

Oh? Writing coherently will increase in value as reading skills plummet?

 

[PregnantForTheLastTime]

I saw a commercial the other night (during Adult Swim, which made me think it was a parody at first) in which a Hot Coed paraded about, half-nude, singing the praises of "going to college in your pajamas" at an online 'university'. According to the commercial, the primary benefit-- after the obvious allure of semi-naked coeds-- was the immense amount of money college graduates earn over a lifetime versus those who haven't taken degrees.

Do not get me started on for-profit "colleges."

 

[Worm]

Do not get me started on for-profit "colleges."

They're all for profit. 'Tis the students who make them so.

 

[Dave]

Do you see what I'm saying, now? There are aspects of the electronic presentation of information that foster intellectual laziness and shortcuts. And the problem is increasing exponentially. I'm going to take cold comfort in the fact that my one big talent, writing coherently, is, for once, going to increase in value over time.

That's not what you said at all. You said that schools weren't teaching some still unnamed ...something because "we have the Internet." Good luck with your coherent writing, though. I hope it's value increases exponentially.

 

[Worm]

By the way, I ran across a small but telling piece of information in the latest New Yorker which relates to this thread. In George Packer's article on the pageant of stupidity, dirty tricks, and dysfunction that is today's United States Senate, Senator Dodd of Connecticut claims that when he first came to the Senate, in 1981, no fewer than eleven newspaper reporters from his home state were following him around, reporting back to his constituency. For the last several years there have been none. Packer reports that the Senate is now covered by a small but tenacious, tabloid-like pack of Internet 'reporters' who focus solely on Washington in-fighting at the expense of shedding light on real, substantive issues. Eleven trained journalists have been replaced by a handful of bloggers looking for strife and scandal to drive page hits. This is what "more information available to the average American thanks to the web" really means.

 

[MILVA]

You're drawing at least two conclusions there, as you acknowledge. I'll give you the first, that women with degrees are more intelligent, but then do women with degrees have more intelligent children? Not sure about that one.

I completely disagree with this. You're saying that we were designed? If we were then we can go back to the first part about the women, who were designed to have children but are not, and deduce that a university degree doesn't have much to do with intelligence at all? Not saying that. Just asking. You can't have it both ways.

Also, I found it offensive to be thought of as a child that needed my information predigested for me, but now I'm an ant?

If we really did follow your model though, the Internet is the colony?

Well, things are a bit more complicated. Women designed to have children? That's a bit fast. Women are designed to bear children - they have all the "tools". But since we don't do self-fertilization, for actually becoming pregnant and "having" that child, you need new genetic material (that's a male's cell then). But women are not designed to have children - they are designed to "bear" children but can of course chose not to have any (and yet don't lose the capacity to bear them).

A university degree is not necessarily a good indication of intelligence, that's what I said. It could mean (and it indeed does mean) that universities not necessarily select well and that "stupid" people can obtain a degree. It also means that intelligent people may find their way to university blocked by other social turnstiles. In both these cases the simple fact of having a university degree is not always a good evaluation metric for "intelligence". But it doesn't necessarily imply that it's completely pointless as well.

Do women with degrees have more intelligent children than women without degrees? Well, it's technically not about the degree, but the degree could be an indication of intelligence (with all caveats added). And indeed, women who are more intelligent than average have children who are more intelligent than average.

The internet as a colony? I don't think so. The internet is simply a tool to have very fast access to a large community - larger than it was in the past. And members of a specific community can exchange information and thus come up with new ideas and solutions, or at least with all different parts and pieces that contribute to new ideas. It's no longer the case that an individual researcher has a great overview of the whole of his domain - everyone's a specialist nowadays.

 

[Dave]

this was to wormy worm's post above.

Please. I don't think you even believe that. You're saying that the average American does not have access to more relevant information than ever before? That Internet journalism is completely tabloid-level?

You characterize unnamed journalists and their work in a very general way. You have one fact. In 1981 the media operated differently.

 

[Dave]

Well, things are a bit more complicated. Women designed to have children? That's a bit fast. Women are designed to bear children - they have all the "tools". But since we don't do self-fertilization, for actually becoming pregnant and "having" that child, you need new genetic material (that's a male's cell then). But women are not designed to have children - they are designed to "bear" children but can of course chose not to have any (and yet don't lose the capacity to bear them).

A university degree is not necessarily a good indication of intelligence, that's what I said. It could mean (and it indeed does mean) that universities not necessarily select well and that "stupid" people can obtain a degree. It also means that intelligent people may find their way to university blocked by other social turnstiles. In both these cases the simple fact of having a university degree is not always a good evaluation metric for "intelligence". But it doesn't necessarily imply that it's completely pointless as well.

Do women with degrees have more intelligent children than women without degrees? Well, it's technically not about the degree, but the degree could be an indication of intelligence (with all caveats added). And indeed, women who are more intelligent than average have children who are more intelligent than average.

The internet as a colony? I don't think so. The internet is simply a tool to have very fast access to a large community - larger than it was in the past. And members of a specific community can exchange information and thus come up with new ideas and solutions, or at least with all different parts and pieces that contribute to new ideas. It's no longer the case that an individual researcher has a great overview of the whole of his domain - everyone's a specialist nowadays.

You said that the world is more complicated than we were designed for. I was just looking hypothetically at the implications of stating something like that as a fact. I think that most of us could learn to pilot a plane, the example you gave. If I wanted to do that I would look to the Internet, where I'm sure much useful information would be freely available to anyone.

If an individual researcher came to a point in his research that some facts outside his specialty were needed, that researcher would probably look to the Internet.

 

[PregnantForTheLastTime]

That's not what you said at all. You said that schools weren't teaching some still unnamed ...something because "we have the Internet." Good luck with your coherent writing, though. I hope it's value increases exponentially.

You're a great case in point, Dave. Your writing (allowing plenty of lenience for the fact that these are merely internet message board posts) looks fine--sophisticated sentence structure, good vocabulary. But yet you're constantly having to sputter, "That's not what I meant! That's not what I said!" Meanwhile, you frequently misread posts that others have no problem with, and accuse others of backtracking or changing their minds. You seem quite literate, and yet...

I gave a very specific example of what schools are doing. They are falling back on teaching Google skills and passing out Wikipedia handouts, because they need every spare moment of instructional time that isn't hijacked by discipline issues to cram in "test-taking skills" so the kids will pass the state tests, so the schools will get funding, so these poor teachers (who never really get a chance to teach) will get to keep their jobs, so they can pay off their obscene student loans they took out thinking they would get to make a difference in this world. Meanwhile, they don't get to teach qualitative or quantitative reasoning, or writing--at all. And investment bankers get yearly bonuses (on top of their salaries) that are twice the salary of a teacher.

We're in deep trouble. And yes, while I'm not going to give you school district names or company names, these observations are based on facts I have observed firsthand. The internet is changing our society, and that is a worrisome thing.

 

[Dave]

I think what happens is that I often didn't "say that." I'm somewhat aware of what I mean to say and I'm capable of saying I was wrong, or even providing some information that is more useful to the opposing viewpoint.

A look back at what I wrote in the post I believe you are referring to will show that I did not say anything I am taking back or trying to recast. Maybe a little more of the critical reading skills that you claim to support would help. I don't take the blame for being misunderstood, simply because people want to jump to an easy conclusion that can be used to create a position against me.

As far as your writing about your writing, I'm sorry but it's like you've handed me a pin and then hung a big pretty balloon right in front of my face, temptingly labeled "POP ME!" I guess I just can't help it.

 

[PregnantForTheLastTime]

As far as your writing about your writing, I'm sorry but it's like you've handed me a pin and then hung a big pretty balloon right in front of my face, temptingly labeled "POP ME!" I guess I just can't help it.

Keep jabbing, Dave. I don't think you can do much damage with that little "prick" of yours.