Martin Nguyen's Profile

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

George Dyson's comment "What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?"

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"

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?

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

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.

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

cognitive dissonance theorists

explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and wocial environment

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

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. 

tradition of other technologically driven moral panics

The technophobe might conjecture that new technologies grow smarter while humans grow dumber

computers and humans coevolve

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.

Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, regarded the mind as a society of dumb agents, collectively creating true intelligence

This two-way model of consumption in the Internet age — we consume information, information consumes us

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.

leave off apocalyptic thinking and generate and savor the other sensory-emotional effects of the Web.

techno-libertarians celebrating the Darwinian wisdom of hive economics

technomob

humans are not informavores at all, but rather consumers of meaning

Where does my body or hand really end? becomes "what are the boundaries of my cognition?"

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.

We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to program one another

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

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

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.

digital modernity

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.

simultaneously nihilist and maniacal/egocentric