Posts filed under ‘Gaming’
Visualizing Our Connected World [Infographic]
The saying “it’s a small world” has become more and more true every day, thanks to ubiquitous technology and the Internet. This Infographic by Column Five and Gigaom shows a visual representation of our connected planet, with numbers showing Internet users, broadband Subscribers, mobile-only phone access and smart phone speed.
[via Gigaom]
The Difference Engine: Rewiring the brain
By N.V.
IT’S a question that’s bothered cultural critics for decades: while we know more than ever, are we getting dumber as a result of the increasing amount of technology at our disposal? Reading historical debates, and hearing of the attention paid to them by a thoughtful populace, certainly makes one wonder. Speaking in the 1820s of the mechanical Difference Engine he had devised for computing polynomial functions, Charles Babbage, the father of the programmable computer and our web-log’s namesake, told the House of Commons:
On two occasions I have been asked [by Members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Incisive eloquence—in Latin and Greek as well as their mother tongue—was common fare among Georgians and Victorians lucky enough to have had at least a dozen years of schooling. One wonders how the founders of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube might respond to similarly banal queries tossed at them during congressional testimony.
The current debate about intelligence, sparked by Nicholas Carr’s recent and eminently readable “The Shallows”, asks what is the internet doing to our brains? Like Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason” and Adam Winer’s “How Dumb Are You?” earlier in the decade, Mr Carr taps into the sense of despair among American intellectuals about the country’s poor educational showing when compared with other countries.
In reading, mathematics and science, American 15-year-olds languish in the lower half of the OECD rankings for the 30 wealthiest countries. Other English-speaking nations such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and even Britain are all in the upper quartile. South Korea and Japan are in the top decile.
Such indisputable facts are rightly a concern for policy-makers and parents throughout the United States. But the reasons for the abject failure of American education—especially at middle- and high-school levels—are well understood, and the corrective measures widely accepted. Implementing them, however, remains as politically intractable as ever.
But it is not just the chagrin of seeing a nation’s youth so poorly served. Even more so, an unspoken nostalgia for an age when book-learning was the noblest of pursuits has invigorated the debate about the dumbing down of America. Tellingly, the most astringent critics are invariably middle-aged or older.
Among other things, Ms Jacoby blames a rising tide of anti-intellectualism. She notes that the reading of books, newspapers and magazines has declined across the board. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing whatsoever (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004—a period that oversaw the rise of personal computers, the internet and video games. She bemoans the way electronic media, with their demand for spectacle and brevity, have shortened our attention spans. Sound bites by presidential candidates, she points out, dropped from 42 seconds in 1968 to less than eight seconds by 2000.
But things are rarely as they seem. For one thing, e-books barely existed a decade ago, but have exploded in popularity since Amazon introduced its Kindle a few short years back, and a host of rivals rushed in with copycat versions. For many readers, the ability to interact with e-books digitally—searching them automatically, inserting digital bookmarks and annotations, zooming in on the small type—has rendered hardcovers and paperbacks obsolete. So much so, e-books are now outselling hardcovers. Perhaps we are witnessing not a decline in book reading but a renaissance. The irony is that had computers been invented before books, we would now be wringing our hands over the loss of multi-media, multi-tasking, computer-gaming skills as our children frittered away their time by burying their noses in single-topic paper tomes.
To the specific question that Mr Carr asks about what the internet is doing to our brains, the simple answer is that it is making us think and behave differently. Of that, there is no doubt. But that does not mean we are getting dumber in the process. What makes people intelligent is their ability to learn and reason—in short, to adapt and thrive within their environment. That fundamental capacity has not changed in thousands of years, and is unlikely to do so because some new technology comes along, whether television, mobile phones or the internet.
Adaptation to one’s changing surroundings is a different matter. Every new medium introduced since the invention of the printing press has molded our minds in different ways. It would be alarming if it didn’t. Today, confronted with the ubiquity of the internet, we need a whole new set of skills to navigate the information-laden environment we inhabit. In other words, each new set of skills we learn and memories we create builds on our existing mental capacities without changing them in any fundamental way.
Still, the Jeremiahs have a point. Their concern is that prolonged use of the internet—with its smorgasbord of tantalising titbits of information—is producing a generation of magpie minds, as users hop from one bright trinket to another, rarely focussing long enough on any one topic to comprehend it thoroughly. According to this view of the brain, the lack of “deep thinking” lies at the heart of the present generation’s inability to sweat the hard stuff. Google, with its instant access to factoids of dubious veracity, is singled out as a primary source of the malaise.
The problem, says Mr Carr, is that most of us with access to the web spend at least a couple of hours a day online—and sometimes much more. During that time, we tend to repeat the same or similar actions over and over again. As we go through these motions, the net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory and auditory cortices. “The net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing people from thinking either deeply or creatively.” There is evidence, the author affirms, that the internet is damaging people’s long-term memory consolidation that he singles out as the true basis of intelligence.
As plausible as it may sound, such an explanation is markedly different from anything your correspondent has experienced. Perhaps that’s because he, like so many other computer users, spends far less time online than social critics imagine. According to Nielsen, a media research company, Americans with access to the internet devote around 26 hours a month to online activity—in other words, just 5% of their waking hours. Even then, half that time is taken up with proactive, even creative, activities—social networking, playing games, e-mailing, visiting portals and instant messaging. Pecking at the despised low-hanging fruit found on Google and other search engines accounts for a minuscule 3.5% of the average user’s online time.
What seems to be forgotten in the rush to judgment about the internet making us dumber is that the brain’s basic architecture is created by genetic programs and biochemical interactions that do their job long before a child starts tapping away at a keyboard. “There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organisation in a way that affects one’s ability to focus,” say Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, psychologists at Union College, New York, and the University of Illinois, respectively.
The danger, if there is one, is that the easy, on-demand access to reams of information from the internet may delude us into mistaking the data we download for genuine wisdom worth acting upon. The internet is just another reference source, albeit one on steroids that sucks up content so fast that little of it ever gets peer reviewed. Only fools would venture into such a forest with anything less than their eyes wide open and their brains fully engaged. Fortunately, there are fewer fools around than some of the scaremongers like to think.
Digital Media Firms as Cultural Systems
By Adam Fish
Working with digital media producers for the past few years I’ve begun to confuse their language with my other professional nomenclature, that of an anthropologist. Is this indeed confusion or a result of finally doing my job of seeing broader cultural systems in those practices?
Here’s the deal. Digital media firms using experimental methods with emergent technologies in indeterminate market systems use words that can model the stuff anthropologists care about. I’ll compare terms platform to culture, application to subculture, beta to process, and privacy to power.
Is Platform to Culture as Application is to Subculture?
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple’s iPhone are platforms on which whole networks or galaxies of different social and economic systems flourish. These companies’ platforms are becoming the broadest cultural ecosystems within which all other digital social activity exists.
Like culture there is constraint and agency on the platform. The constraint comes from the terms of service, the affordances of the online architecture, and the rights given by the platform holder. Platforms are almost universally proprietary—privately owned. The overall platform itself cannot be adjusted except by holy command from the CEO. Giving a cut to the CEO, developers can make applications on platforms. The ability to development on the platform is the agency, as is the ability to surf, scam, and surveil on the platform. Developers have the capacity to transform the mechanics of a proximal space of the platform via application programming interfaces (APIs). People come into contact with the app–be it a game, a badge of identity, or a little tool–and their digital social lives are slightly adjusted.
Humble scholars desiring to say something about the platform:culture should begin by studying the practices occurring on apps:subcultures. Zynga—the makers of apps:subcultures Farmville and Mafia Wars, two games on Facebook with millions of gamers, is a more manageable research project with discrete parameters, practices, and ideology, than studying the platform:culture of Facebook or Google head on, which like culture is always in flux.
Culture is Permanently Beta
It isn’t news that culture is not static. Sociologists Neff and Stark studied New York City digital media firms during the Web 1.0 bubble, claiming these companies were in a state of “permanent beta”—never finished and therefore responsive to the chaos of the market and the unforeseen on the technological horizon.
Gmail is an outrageously successful application designed by Google for the Google platform. It has been around for years and it is still in beta. In What Would Google Do? journalist Jeff Jarvis makes the point that Google takes the risk of releasing their products in beta and achieves corporate transparency and greater social activity by letting the user in on the preliminary R&D experience. Is Google a bellwether for larger cultural processes of which platforms and beta releases are quintessential qualities of this emergent cultural system?
“Permanent beta” is an apt anthropological description of historically situated cultural activity. I don’t need to remind anthropologists or SM readers that beta is a description of culture itself that is always in process, historically variable, emergent, etc.
Is Culture Open or Private?
Several overlapping ideologies from the historical development of the internet highlight the importance of collaboration, openness, and transparency as preemptive measures to check the centralization of information power. In all cultural formations, those good things must be vigilantly monitored and fought for. I’d argue that collaboration and openness as corporate principles is new and may suggest that the technological affordances of digital technologies make less openness in social technology less profitable. If richly communicative social practices require open systems, and these digital firms are in the business of digital sociality, it behooves these CEOs to create decentralized and open systems. We see some of this openness and collaborative spirit in Google and Facebook as platforms and beta systems—despite their indifference to corporate transparency and their antagonism against what they see as provincial notions of personal privacy.
So how do the trends towards more personal transparency and less privacy fit into this theory of culture as a digital system? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really thinks the world will be more communicative and therefore more peaceful and mutually forgiving if only more people were less secretive and more honest about who they are. Protecting and respecting individuals’ private rituals, sentiments, and remarks is a primary objective of anthropological methods. Much important cultural work is done opaquely through symbols, in the depths of kivas, and behind closed doors. Does this sense of culture as a beta platform that is historically agitating towards greater openness and individual transparency give credence to Zuck’s algocratic design for world peace?
One problem with the theory that culture is like a digital system is that this platform:culture is corporately designed. The API may provide developers agency akin to social contracts. The digital firm may be motivated less by profit making and more by mission motives. But doesn’t the fact that the entire ecosystem is proprietary trouble the notion of platform:culture? Nobody owns the protocols—the total realm of possibility within cultural systems—like Zuck does Facebook or Jobs does Apple. Platforms may be like culture but unlike culture you can pull the plug on the platform should it cease to be profitable or fun for the shareholders. And yet, aren’t firms, platforms, and applications populated by people constrained and enabled by the same processes that exist outside of their digital systems?
