Jack Beaudoin on 2009-11-15
Doesn't this contradict the observation made elsewhere that the proliferation of publishers on the Intranet leads to the opposite: selection of self-confirming sources of information?
Group annotations on this page
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datruss on 2009-11-07thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that, of course, is the Internet and it's the cloud. Very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And the raises the question about the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.
This link has been bookmarked by 21 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Oct 2009, by Howard Rheingold.
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26 Nov 09
Ulrich KampffmeyerThe Age of the Informavore - A talk with Frank Schirrmacher | Comments and interview in English about Schirrmachers book "Payback" | The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavio
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17 Nov 09
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16 Nov 09
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15 Nov 09
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14 Nov 09
Jack BeaudoinInteresting video and discussion... "The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food"
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The editor of the Wall Street Journal is reported to have accused Google of "encouraging promiscuity", which, if true, is a serious charge. His complaint, however, refers not to any advocacy of lax sexual behaviour but to Google News, whose daily aggregate of enticing headlines from around the world discourages old-style loyalty among readers.
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12 Nov 09
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He is interested in George Dyson's comment "What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?" He is looking at how the modification of our cognitive structures is a process that eventually blends machines and humans in a deeper way, more than any human-computer interface could possibly achieve. He's also fascinated in an idea presented a decade ago by Danny Hillis: "In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds."
We discussed his notion that computer platforms can be seen as socio-biological systems which repeat three of the major concepts of the 19th century on an individual level: Taylorism (multitasking), Marxism (free content and copyright) and Darwinism (search algorithm and information foraging). "The Darwinian perspective is the most interesting," he says. "Information being an advantage for the informarvores and software that codes it with cues from foraging habits of the prehistoric man".
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10 Nov 09
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09 Nov 09
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[FRANK SCHIRRMACHER:] The question I am asking myself arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, was how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life. So I've profited a lot from Edge.
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08 Nov 09
Keisa Williams"(*The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food. )"
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07 Nov 09
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explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them
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Such innovations as the binary code, the bit, and the algorithm have been applied in ways that reach far beyond the programming of computers, and are being used to understand such mysteries as the origins of the universe, the operation of the human body, and the working of the mind
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effect of new information technologies on human knowledge, on how the Internet is modifying our cognitive structures, on how we can begin the understand the cultural changes happening in today's technology/knowledge interface
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George Dyson's comment "What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?"
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computer platforms can be seen as socio-biological systems which repeat three of the major concepts of the 19th century on an individual level: Taylorism (multitasking), Marxism (free content and copyright) and Darwinism (search algorithm and information foraging). "The Darwinian perspective is the most interesting," he says. "Information being an advantage for the informarvores and software that codes it with cues from foraging habits of the prehistoric man"
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Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of received dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values?
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we are constantly bombarded by 'primes' or implicit suggestions as to what to think, feel, and do — yet we manage usually to stably do one thing at a time
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It removes consciousness or free will as the bottleneck that exclusively generates choices and behavioral impulses, replacing it with the physical and social world itself as the source of these impulses.
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But the discovery that people are actually rather easy to influence and predict (once we know the triggering environmental cues or prompts) is fact is today being exploited as a research tool because we know now that we can activate and study complex human psychological systems with very easy priming manipulations
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cognitive dissonance theorists
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explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and wocial environment
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real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent's (or its owner's) agenda of purposes. (Of course this is already being done in a crude way through advertising, both commercial and political
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You'll be amazed at the number of things you remember that never happened, at the number of facts you were certain of that are plainly false. Everyday conversation, even among educated people, is largely grounded in urban legends and misremembered half-truths. It makes you wonder about the soundness of conventional wisdom and democratic decision-making — and whether the increasing availability of fact-checking on demand might improve them.
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tradition of other technologically driven moral panics
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The technophobe might conjecture that new technologies grow smarter while humans grow dumber
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computers and humans coevolve
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The first computer was a group of human beings: the large-scale division of labor, as evidenced in the English machine-tool factories and in the French government's manufacturing of logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the new decimal system in the 1790s.
Inspired by Adam Smith's praise of the division of labor, French engineer Prony organized the project in a hierarchy of tasks. At the top were a handful of first-rank mathematicians who devised the formulas; in the middle, seven or eight persons trained in analysis; and at the bottom, 70 or 80 unskilled persons who performed millions of additions and subtractions. Once it was shown that elaborate calculations could be carried out by an assemblage of unskilled workers rather than by a genius such as Gauss, each knowing very little about the larger computation, Charles Babbage was able to conceive of replacing these workers with machinery.
Babbage, an enthusiastic "factory tourist," explicitly referred to this division of mental labor as the inspiration for his mechanical computer, using terms from the textile industry, such as 'mill' and 'store' to describe its parts. Similarly, he borrowed the use of punched cards from the Jacquard loom, the programmable weaving machines that used removable cards to weave different patterns. Thus, initially there was a new social system of work, and the computer was created in its image.
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Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, regarded the mind as a society of dumb agents, collectively creating true intelligence
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This two-way model of consumption in the Internet age — we consume information, information consumes us
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If the Internet is a massive work of art, as I believe it is, it has modernist properties: it regularly promotes a feeling of unease and inadequacy (rather than jubilation, satisfaction, smugness, serenity, etc). As Schirrmacher's interview suggests, perhaps this is because the Internet user feels as though he is forever trying to eat or be eaten, and he's both undernourished and afraid.
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leave off apocalyptic thinking and generate and savor the other sensory-emotional effects of the Web.
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techno-libertarians celebrating the Darwinian wisdom of hive economics
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technomob
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humans are not informavores at all, but rather consumers of meaning
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Where does my body or hand really end? becomes "what are the boundaries of my cognition?"
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But while machines replaced and usurped the value of human labor, computers do more than usurp the value of human thought. They not only copy our intellectual processes — our repeatable programs — but they discourage our more complex processes — our higher order cognition, contemplation, innovation, and meaning making that should be the reward of "outsourcing" our arithmetics to silicon chips.
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We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to program one another
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Thoughts and ideas will need to be compressed if they're
to survive in the new environment. Ambiguity and complexity, expansiveness
of argument and narrative, will be winnowed out. -
The metaphor of brain-as-computer becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy: To keep up with our computers, we have
to think like our computers. -
If we're turning into informavores, it's probably because
we want to. -
communism of content
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pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show
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I am always on, always connected, always augmenting every single moment of my analog life and yet I am still capable of thinking or contemplating any number of existential questions.
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digital modernity
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If the message of modernity is "people don't exist, but computers do," then expect modernity to be rejected by most people. Those who currently like this formulation are the ones who think they will be the beneficiaries of it- the geeky, technical, educated elite. But they are kidding themselves.
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simultaneously nihilist and maniacal/egocentric
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Dave Truss
thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that, of course, is the Internet and it's the cloud. Very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And the raises the question about the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.
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06 Nov 09
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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. And
you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when
suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their
gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its
just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own
behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is
one comment on Edge which I love, which
is in Daniel Dennett's response to
the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion
of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them. -
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. And
you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when
suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their
gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its
just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own
behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is
one comment on Edge which I love, which
is in Daniel Dennett's response to
the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion
of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them. - 1 more annotations...
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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. And you encounter this
not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people
start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other
stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an
experience
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29 Oct 09
Howard Rheingold"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. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.
As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker."
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