shifts - Will richardson on Diigo

Scrabulous Creators Strike Back! - TIME

Roll your own Scrabble Board...avoid trouble.

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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Great piece by Nick Carr in the Atlantic on how the Web is changing the way we read.

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(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
the Net is becoming a universal medium
They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.
we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”
Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.
The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

MediaShift . Microblogging Mania::Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News | PBS

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

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The FASTForward Blog » Obama’s Answer Center - CRM from RightNow on the Campaign Trail: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary

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Swift Kick Central: Teaching The Google Effect and Digital Identities

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NAIS - Publications - Independent School Magazine - The Hyperconnected Classroom

Article for NAIS journal.

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Tom Watson MP » Blog Archive » Power of Information: New taskforce and speech

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Does "Obama Girl" help Obama? - Machinist - Salon.com

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The News Business: Out of Print

The Death of the American Newspaper

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The United States of Google

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RSA - Our Projects - RSA Academy

A project to sponsor the creation of a new Academy with the RSA Opening Minds competences at the heart of the curriculum. Work has begun on designing the Academy which will be built to replace Willingsworth High School in Tipton, West Midlands.

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In Praise of Spikes

Richard Florida

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Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On - New York Times

Great article that asserts the publish then filter idea. "Social filtering"

Tags: media, politics, shifts, social on 2008-03-27 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address — almost five minutes of Mr. Obama’s talking directly to the camera — elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January.

But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.
But that is only the beginning of how they process information.
According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.
Add Sticky Note
- This is a great way of describing the shift, and releates directly to Shirky's publish then filter idea.
  posted by willrich on 2008-03-27 11:12:35
“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.”

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Long-Distance Wi-Fi

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Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out - New York Times

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But the excited momentum has sputtered to a standstill, tripped up by unrealistic ambitions and technological glitches. The conclusion that such ventures would not be profitable led to sudden withdrawals by service providers like EarthLink, the Internet company that had effectively cornered the market on the efforts by the larger cities.

Now, community organizations worry about their prospects for helping poor neighborhoods get online.
For Cesar DeLaRosa, 15, however, the concern is more specific. He said he was worried about his science project on global warming.

“If we don’t have Internet, that means I’ve got to take the bus to the public library after dark, and around here, that’s not always real safe,” Cesar said, seated in front of his family’s new computer in a gritty section of Hunting Park in North Philadelphia. His family is among the 1,000 or so low-income households that now have free or discounted Wi-Fi access through the city’s project, and many of them worry about losing access that they cannot otherwise afford.
Mr. Meinrath said that advocates wanted to see American cities catch up with places like Athens, Leipzig and Vienna, where free citywide Wi-Fi is already available.
Mr. Meinrath pointed to St. Cloud, Fla., which spent $3 million two years ago to build a free wireless network that is used by more than 70 percent of the households in the city.
Meraki, a wireless networking company based in Mountain View, Calif., has jumped into the void in San Francisco with a program it calls “Free the Net.” The company sells low-cost equipment that can be placed in a person’s home to broadcast a wireless signal. The company also sells inexpensive repeaters that can be placed on rooftops or outside walls to spread the original customer’s signal farther. The combination of the two types of equipment creates a mesh of free wireless in neighborhoods. The company says it has almost 70,000 users throughout San Francisco.
Back in Philadelphia, Cesar’s older sister, Tomasa DeLaRosa, said she had faith that city officials would find a way to finish the network and keep her Internet service going.

“Our whole house is totally different now,” said Ms. DeLaRosa, 19, who had never had Internet access at home until last December because she could not afford it.

After signing up for a job training program and completing its course work, Ms. DeLaRosa received a free laptop, training and a year’s worth of free wireless service from Esparanza, a community group.
“For us and a lot of people in this neighborhood,” Ms. DeLaRosa said, “the Internet is like a path out of here.”