Tag Archives: internet

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The internet isn’t making you stupid. People are making you stupid.

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Westboro Baptist Church "protestor"One of the perennial themes that news sources both online and offline never seem to tire of is “the internet is making us stupid”. According to science historian Robert Proctor, that’s only half correct; it’s not the internet itself that encourages ignorance, but the way it is used by groups with a single point of interest:

[Proctor] has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”

As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he’s a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

What is an observable certainty is that the web has become an ideological battle-ground, with dozens of little sects crusading around in defence of their own worldview, ever ready to smother dissent in a barrage of obfuscation.

What is less certain is how new this phenomenon actually is; it strikes me that the web just lets us do the same things we’ve always done, just faster and more anonymously. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the nitrous-oxide cackling of postmodern theorists… perhaps “things fall apart; the center cannot hold“. [via TechDirt; image by Logan Cyrus]

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Archive drive: why we should be saving old websites for future generations

antique computerThe head of the British Library has warned that, unless measures are taken sooner rather than later, we stand to lose vital parts of our cultural heritage to the rapid technological and social evolution of the internet. But why should we care about old websites being replaced by new ones, never to be seen again?

… Brindley cites two examples of losses overseas. When Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George Bush disappeared from the White House website, including a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration, which is no longer accessible.

There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, she continues, but these, too, vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. “If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics – perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate that is killing companies – the memory of the nation disappears too,” Brindley writes. “Historians of the future, citizens of the future, will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.”

When you think about it like that, it makes a bit more sense. The National Archives are storing government emails, and encouraging us to store our own as well; the problem is that, contrary to popular belief, Google and their competitors do not store a copy of everything on the web.

The falling prices of storage media will help matters somewhat, but someone still has to make the effort to copy and file them all… still, at least a hard-drive full of old emails will take up less space than a few years’ worth of paper correspondence. [image by Nico Kaiser]

But here’s a thought – how much more editable is a digital history? After all, if you can store something as ones and zeroes, you can manipulate those ones and zeroes into a new pattern. The embarrassing photos of your twenty-something fashion disasters, those mawkish and desperate chatroom sessions and forum threads from your teens… all could be smoothed and tweaked into something more in keeping with how you’d like others to see you. A photoshopping of the past, if you will.

Makes you realise that a verifiable archive of governmental websites and communications might be something worth having after all, doesn’t it?

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Teh intarwub – still killing reading, apparently, despite the evidence otherwise

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rabbit reading emailO NOES!!!1 Teh webz be steelin ur brain-bukkitz! This doom-mongering about the internet and its insidious power to erode literacy just never seems to go out of fashion with opinion columns, but I’m surprised to find this one on The Guardian‘s technology blog, courtesy of one Naomi Alderman. Here’s a few choice snippets (because, y’know, I doubt you can be bothered to read the whole thing):

… reading on the internet isn’t the same as reading a book. Recent studies have indicated that online reading tends to break down in the face of “texts that require steady focus and linear attention”. University teacher friends have told me that some of their freshers have started to write in a similar fashion to the way we apparently read online. All the right keywords are in the right paragraphs, but the sentences don’t follow on coherently from each other. Their essays are meant to be skimmed, not read.

[snip]

My family is fortunate to have preserved some of the hundreds of letters my grandmother exchanged with her brothers, Alan and Henry, while they were fighting in the second world war. They didn’t write these letters to improve their skills in comprehension and composition; they did it because it was the only way to stay in touch. If they’d had mobile phones and been able to call each other every day, I’m sure they’d have done so.

Blah blah blah. TL; DR, complete with a reference to WW2 to shame us in the light of the sacrifices of our elders, who had the dignity to sit in muddy trenches writing letters while they waited to be shot to burger meat. But for the classic “everything was better in the old days” capstone quote:

But while I hate to side with the neophobes I can’t help feeling a little concerned; as the loss of the ancient Greek oral culture shows, ways of thinking and using our brains can disappear for good.

YA RLY; new ways of thinking are always bad news, aren’t they? Hey, if it hadn’t been for those damned Greeks and their progressive philosophies, we’d still be sat in little stone houses thinking that lightning storms were the gods playing war… how far we’ve fallen since then! [image by tm lv]

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Gaza web-war: Jihadist hackers leave toxic e-graffiti; Israeli botnet recruiting volunteers

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row of computersThe current conflict in Palestine is highlighting the potential of the web to become a battlefront in wars both large and small. Internet Evolution reports that Jihadist hacker groups have been cracking and defacing websites all over the world, and that a website called “Help Israel Win” is offering a software download that adds your machine into a pro-Israel botnet, presumably to be deployed against Hamas-related targets in DDoS attacks. [image by Kevin Zollman]

Leaving the politics and ideology of the conflict in question entirely aside for the moment (there are plenty of other sites and threads where you can go and have that argument if you really want to*), it’s fascinating to see someone deploying a voluntary botnet… and it’s a sign of things to come, as it won’t take long for small globally-distributed pressure groups of all kinds to realise that the power of a linked network of computers can give them leverage against their targets. Remember the anti-vivisection hackers who sent a virus to MIT?

But it’s also sad to see that the internet – touted back in the glory days of the late nineties as the global village that would bring us all closer together – has become just another place for us to fight one another. Who’d have thought the lord of the flies would upload himself behind us? [story via SlashDot and Spiraltwist of the Whitechapel Massive]

[ * Seriously, I’m going to delete comments that are partisan to either side of the Gaza conflict, so don’t bother. Regardless of history, religion or politics, innocent people are dying in the dirt. Neither side can justify that. ]

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The Internet will go interplanetary

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NASA finished first tests on a system that

could one day be used to automatically relay information between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts, without the need for humans to schedule transmissions at each point. …

For the test, dozens of images of Mars and its moon Phobos were transmitted back and forth between computers on Earth and NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. The craft, which sent an impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, has been renamed “Epoxi” now that it its mission has been extended to search for extrasolar planets.

Further tests will begin on the International Space Station next year.

[Story: New Scientist; picture: NASA/JPL]