HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?
Hey Avaloneans, just before closing the door behind me, here, I found an article in Edge, that caught my attenton. I've always had a hate/love relationship with internet, as communication online lacks body language, tone of voice, eye contact and the vibration of a physical presence.
In my view, the internet is technically just an electric way of storing and exhanging data, nothing more. The issue that fascinates me, which is mentioned in Daniel Hillis answer to the question, the title of this post, is the nature of accelerating data processors: computers, and the invisibility of it.
Think a moment, about the invisibility of money, in its electronic bank account flows, the calculations and prophecies in the stockmarket, the bank-ruptures and scandals in the handling of money, manipulations in stock trading to achieve money. More and more activities that include data processing, are computerised and the interaction of these grow sky high and immensely complex. This rises above our ability to grasp the impact of it on our way and quality of life, its possible degenerative nature, regarding our consciousness. I believe this is an important issue for discussion. I'm interested in your thoughts and points of view, here in this Forum.
In my not so humble opinion, our life with invisible data-processing and their role in farming and food processing, logistics, ground/sea-traffic, flight-schedules, Haarp, electronic safety measures and communication systems: phone, tv, internet, is something to be aware about, for your physical and spiritual health's sake. I believe we're in a tricky balance, with our autonomy in our brain and thoughts on one scale and our tranced mind states, by the use of internet and tv, on the other scale.
We're being bombarded with electronic signals, in our modern way of life.
Reading an ebook on a pc screen isn't the same as reading a book. An ebook is part of a vast system of signals, internet,connected with the screen before your eyes, where it's read. Concentrating on a pc screen is much harder as reading a book near the fire, in silence, in a comfortable chair. A book of paper with words of ink, is an object that is held in our hands. We can pause and think, feel emotions and take time for them. To enjoy or weep. While reading a book, our eyes move more, compared to the fixed staring of our eyes at the screen of our pc.
Our mind changes by being huge amounts of time online: the body isn't part of it, the only dimension that is alive is the etheric world, the virtual world that exists in our mind only. The question that is asked, annualy:
HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? brings forth a series of articles, with interesting comments and viewpoints, presented as a book, by Edge. These articles aren't published online, the book with the same question as title, is available at www.amazon.com for about $7 now.
Who of you is conscious of the fact that nowadays, most flight schemes are ruled by computers? In the best scenario there's always human attention involved, to guard the correct procedure and technical performance. Many programmers don't have a clue about most programs they use, as they handle vast programs of huge clusters of data, merging them for further efficiency and networking. More and more so. Are these systems still managable enough? I envision a future with all of these electronic systems closed down, replaced by the ability to communicate telepathically. So easy....so clean...so close at hand...so sovereign......
so beautiful and so silent :)Most of all: honest and transparant. Who would be able to lie, when we pick up each other's thoughts? Isn't this equal to looking into each other's heart and soul? Blessings for you all, Victoria Tintagel.
http://edge.org/annual-question/how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think
Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions ofEdge
Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?
Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?
Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".
Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, ponders if ideas themselves are the ultimate social software. Do they evolve via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them?
Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noticed that we are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. Are we turning into a new species — informavores? — he asks.
W. Daniel Hillis goes a step further by asking if the Internet will, in the long run, arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds? In other words, can we change the way the Internet thinks?
http://edge.org/memberbio/nicholas_g_carr
Nicholas G. Carr
Author, Does IT Matter?; The Big Switch
A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture.
His 2004 book Does IT Matter?, published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. In The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, he examines the rise of "cloud computing" and its implications for business, media and society. His most recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, picks up from his widely read article in The Atlantic,
"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
Carr writes regularly for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business and The Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, The Banker, and Advertising Age as well as on his blog Rough Type. He is a member of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors.
In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people in IT. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting.
Carr has been a speaker at MIT, Harvard, Wharton, the Kennedy School of Government, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as at many industry, corporate, and professional events throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.
I include this article too, for the fun of it :)
A THEORY OF ROUGHNESS [12.20.04]
A Talk with Benoit Mandelbrot
Introduction"A recent, important turn in my life occurred when I realized that something that I have long been stating in footnotes should be put on the marquee. I have engaged myself, without realizing it, in undertaking a theory of roughness. Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics. Chemistry is filled with acids, sugars, and alcohols — all are concepts derived from sensory perceptions. Roughness is just as important as all those other raw sensations, but was not studied for its own sake".
By John Brockman
During the 1980s Benoit Mandelbrot accepted my invitation to give a talk before The Reality Club. The evening was the toughest ticket in the 10-year history of live Reality Club events during that decade: it seemed like every artist in New York had heard about it and wanted to attend. It was an exciting, magical evening. I've stayed in touch with Mandelbrot and shared an occasional meal with him every few years, always interested in what he has to say. Recently, we got together prior to his 80th birthday.
Mandelbrot is best known as the founder of fractal geometry which impacts mathematics, diverse sciences, and arts, and is best appreciated as being the first broad attempt to investigate quantitatively the ubiquitous notion of roughness.
And he continues to push the envelope with his theory of roughness. "There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit," he says. "I find that perfectly acceptable. The hammer I crafted is the first effective tool for all kinds of roughness and nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere."
"My book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature," he says, reproduced Hokusai's print of the Great Wave, the famous picture with Mt. Fuji in the background, and also mentioned other unrecognized examples of fractality in art and engineering. Initially, I viewed them as amusing but not essential. But I soon changed my mind.
"Innumerable readers made me aware of something strange. They made me look around and recognize fractals in the works of artists since time immemorial. I now collect such works. An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in "inventing" something. It's an arrogance that some enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role had remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered."??
—JB