Science and Technology

There Can Be Only One: Google+ Takes On Facebook

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

You are most likely not one of the favored few who have been invited to take Google’s new social networking platform out for a spin and neither am I,  but now we get a glimpse of what Google has been up to. When it does go live,  Google+ will open a new front in the battle against Facebook, and one that appears more promising than the ill-fated Google Buzz.

The Google+ experience is in large measure reminiscent of Facebook with at least one major exception:  Circles.   Facebook’s glaring weakness is its insistence that you indiscriminately present the same persona to every one of your “friends,” a list which may include your best friend from childhood, your ex-girlfriend, your boss, your co-workers, your grandmother, and that kid that lived down the street when you were growing up.  Amusingly, Zuckerberg turns moral philosopher on this point and declares that maintaining more than one online identity signals a lack of integrity.  Google+ more sensibly assumes that not all human relationships are created equal and that our social media experience ought to acknowledge that reality.  It allows you to create Circles into which you can drag and drop names from your contact list.  Whenever you post a picture or a link or a comment, you may designate which Circles will be able to see what you have posted. In other words, it lets you effectively manage the presentation of your self to your multifaceted social media audience.  Google+ appears to have thus solved Facebook’s George Costanza problem:  colliding worlds.

Facebook has gestured in this direction with Groups and Friend lists, but this remains an awkward experience, perhaps because it is at odds with the logic at the core of Facebook’s DNA.  Google+, having taken note of the rumblings of discontent with Facebook’s at times cavalier attitude toward privacy,  also allows users to permanently delete their information from Google’s servers and otherwise presents a more privacy-friendly front.

Even with these features aimed at exposing Facebook’s weaknesses and recent news about kinks in Facebook’s armor, Google+ is not expected to challenge Facebook’s social media supremacy.  Inertia is the main obstacle to the success of Google+.  Many users have committed an immense amount of data to their Facebook profiles and Facebook has worked hard to integrate itself into the whole online experience of its users.  Additionally, Facebook has more or less become a memory archive for many of its users and we don’t easily part with our memory.  Most significantly, perhaps, Google+ starts from a position of relative weakness as far as social media platforms are concerned — it has few users.  Most people will, for a long time to come, more readily find those they know on Facebook.

That said, Facebook’s early success against Myspace was predicated on a certain exclusivity.  It may be that an early disadvantage — relatively few members — may present itself as an important advantage in the eyes of enough people to generate momentum for Google+.  It is also hard to tell how many would-be social media users have been kept at bay by Facebook’s shortcoming and will now venture into social media waters given the refinements offered by Google+.  Casual Facebook users may also find it relatively painless to make a move.

Hard to tell from here, as is most of the future, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Google+ significantly eroded Facebook’s base. Despite, my Highlander-esque title, the most likely outcome may be that both platforms co-exist by appealing to different sets of sensibilities, priorities, and expectations.

E-books Go to School

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Article first published as E-books Go to School – What is the Plan for Implementation? on Blogcritics.

On Monday, text book publisher McGraw-Hill rolled out its first digital, cloud-based textbook.   While McGraw-Hill had previously sold digital supplements to print curriculum, this will be the first all-digital effort available to the K-12 market.  It comes as something of a surprise that it has taken so long, but the hardware limitations frequently faced by schools had until recently presented enough of an obstacle to discourage publishers.  According to Sarah Kessler at Mashable, the e-books will be part of a complete online curriculum for K-12 math and 7-12 science which will also allow students to “participate in Facebook-like conversations that stay with the text.”  Polly Stansell, of McGraw-Hill, explains, “We’re trying to meet students and teachers where they’re at digitally.”

A recent study, however, suggests that this may not necessarily be the wisest strategy, at least as far as educational effectiveness is concerned.  The University of California Libraries recently released the findings of a 2010 survey of e-book users which included graduate and undergraduate students as well as post-doctoral researchers and faculty members.  Surprisingly, the youngest participants registered the strongest preference for print.  Undergraduates reported the highest percentage of participants, 58%, preferring print textbooks over e-books.  Altogether, 44% of the participants said they preferred print, while only 35% said they preferred e-books.

Participants were also asked to explain their preference, and their responses were summarized by Nicholas Carr as follows, “The answers suggest that while students prefer e-books when they need to search through a book quickly to find a particular fact or passage, they prefer printed books for deep, attentive reading.”  One response in particular, also cited by Carr, was especially illuminating:

I answered that I prefer print books, generally. However, the better answer would be that print books are better in some situations, while e-books are better in others. Each have their role – e-books are great for assessing the book, relatively quick searches, like encyclopedias or fact checking, checking bibliography for citations, and reading selected chapters or the introduction. If I want to read the entire book, I prefer print. If I want to interact extensively with the text, I would buy the book to mark up with my annotations; if I want to read for background (not as intensively) I will check out a print book from the library if possible. All options have their place …”

Practical, sensible flexibility of this sort implies the freedom to fit a technology to the educational situation.  Unfortunately, it is more often the case that the educational situation must conform to the technology.  Education is often driven by a certain faddishness, and this seems to be especially true when it comes to technology.  There is long and undistinguished list of tools and devices that were all intended to revolutionize the field and deployed into classrooms precipitously and with little evidence of their value.

This drive to implement new technologies is often accompanied by the rhetoric of choice and freedom for students and teachers, but choice is often precisely what gets left behind.  An all online, cloud based curriculum certainly expands the materials available to students and teachers, but it would almost certainly eliminate the kind of flexibility enjoyed by the student cited in the University of California study.  When schools buy in to new technologies the financial investment yields a corresponding pressure to implement what has been purchased.  This pressure is typically a function of avoiding the appearance of wasted money rather than evidence that education would be made more effective.

The educational value of e-books will likely be uneven as is often the case with any technology, even print; only time will tell. Ideally, the implementation of e-books will be guided by a willingness to perceive the circumstances under which they offer a genuine advance over print and where print still retains the advantage. In part, this is a matter of bending the tool to the needs of the student, rather than bending the student to fit the demands of the tool. Buying into (literally and figuratively) the ideology of educational technology fed by industry marketing undermines the discernment necessary to make just those kinds of judgments.

Internet Pleasures

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Brain science is an endlessly fascinating field.  Each day, it seems,  a new neurological study is published revealing a link between this or that activity and this or that region of the brain, or that a certain neurotransmitter is related to the regulation of a certain behavior, and so on.  Yesterday’s encounter with the wonders of neurology came while listening to David Linden, professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, being interviewed on NPR.  Linden’s new book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, as the inelegant subtitle more than suggests, explores the role of the brain in the experience of pleasure.

Much of the interview focuses on a discussion of the neurology of addiction leading Linden to warn,

“Any one of us could be an addict at any time,” Linden says. “Addiction is not fundamentally a moral failing — it’s not a disease of weak-willed losers. When you look at the biology, the only model of addiction that makes sense is a disease-based model, and the only attitude towards addicts that makes sense is one of compassion.”

Initially, I was struck by two considerations after listening to the interview, both relating to the practical consequences of the science Linden discussed.  First, how oddly Aristotelian all the practical considerations come out sounding:  virtues and vices, habits, and moderation.   Secondly, how little difference this knowledge made for Linden in his own lived experience.  Here is the very last exchange from the interview:

NPR: Since you have studied pleasure and the pleasure circuitry of the brain, has that affected your own relationship with pleasure and the things that you seek or try not to get pleasure from?

Linden: Well, I try deeply not to let it do that.  I certainly — when I’m enjoying a glass of wine I don’t want to be thinking about dopamine levels and, for the most part, fortunately I have been able to avoid doing that. I’m blessed with not having a particularly addictive personality — although I’m a bit of a hedonist — so it hasn’t actually made t0o much of an impact on my own life.

This is a rather jarring note on which to wrap up the interview.  I’ve ordinarily been one to subscribe to A.E. Housman’s line, “All Human Knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.”  And mostly, I would still want to defend something like that claim.  Yet, there is something peculiar about our coming to know more about the biological and neurological base of human life, purportedly the real stuff on which all human life and action rests, only to find that for an ordinary, healthy adult steeped in this knowledge, it makes not much of a difference at all, and, in fact, that he consciously tries to disassociate his knowledge from his experience.  This bears more reflection, but there was one final thought, more directly related to the usual themes on this blog that I wanted to note.

Understanding the Internet’s personal and social consequences involves venturing into the territory mapped out by Linden and others in his field.  Pleasure of some sort — whether benign,  problematic, or illicit — is involved in our daily interactions with the Internet.  If there is a certain compulsiveness to our online experience, then it is because our internet experience shares in an economy of desire, pleasure, and cycles of stimulation and diminishing return that potentially lead  to addictive behavior.

We know that society tolerates certain addictive behaviors more than others, sometimes in seemingly arbitrary fashion.  Internet addiction may carry only a slight social stigma if any at all;  one is tempted rather to conclude that it carries a certain social cachet.  Whether socially acceptable or not, compulsive (or addictive, take your pick) Internet use does appear to have certifiably negative physical consequences in the brain.  A study just published in PLoS ONE suggests that heavy Internet use, particularly online gaming, leads to significant alterations in brain structure with detrimental consequences for cognitive function.  You can read more about the study here, here, and here.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the first of those three articles concludes its report with an appeal to the ancient Roman writer Petronius: “Moderation in all things, including moderation.”  I’m not sure if the writer meant to endorse Petronius’ playful, perhaps satirical tone; more likely it was intended as a straightforward prescription of moderation.

Marx, Freud, and … McLuhan

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Just wanted to pass along Jeet Heer’s piece, “Divine Inspiration” in The Walrus, on Marshall McLuhan, his legacy, and his Catholicism.  Excerpts below.  Click through for the whole piece which is not long at all.

  • It’s a measure of McLuhan’s ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this debate, [Norman] Mailer — a Charlie Sheen–style roughneck with a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns — comes across as the voice of sobriety and sweet reason. Mailer once observed that McLuhan “had the fastest brain of anyone I have ever met, and I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or garbage.”
  • Indeed, his faith made him a more ambitious and far-reaching thinker. Belonging to a Church that gloried in cathedrals and stained glass windows made him responsive to the visual environment, and liberated him from the textual prison inhabited by most intellectuals of his era. The global reach and ancient lineage of the Church encouraged him to frame his theories as broadly as possible, to encompass the whole of human history and the fate of the planet. The Church had suffered a grievous blow in the Gutenberg era, with the rise of printed Bibles leading to the Protestant Reformation. This perhaps explains McLuhan’s interest in technology as a shaper of history. More deeply, the security he felt in the promise of redemption allowed him to look unflinchingly at trends others were too timid to notice.
  • Like Marx and Freud, he was an intellectual agitator, a conceptual mind expander, the yeast in the dough. After Marx, we can no longer ignore the reality of class difference; after Freud, we can’t pretend that our mental life isn’t saturated with sexual impulses; after McLuhan, we can’t imagine that technology is just a neutral tool. Moreover, like Darwin and Marx, McLuhan is no longer just one man but rather a living and evolving body of thought.

A few months ago I posted a link to a YouTube clip of the Mailer/McLuhan debate here, and here is a piece on Chesterton’s influence on McLuhan.

Incidentally, while pairing McLuhan with the likes of Marx, Darwin, and Freud is in some respects incongruous, what they do have in common is an awareness, sometimes overplayed, of the external forces shaping and influencing human thought  and personality.  What may set McLuhan apart on this score is his unwillingness to slide into determinism:

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”  — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The Unsettledness at the Heart of our Experience

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

Unsettled — I’m beginning to think that is a helpful word to capture what it feels like to be alive at present.

[Okay, fair warning, what follows is more speculative and exploratory than what I usually feel comfortable writing on here.  Thoughts and criticism welcome.]

Unsettled is usually used in conversation to mean something like troubled or worried or disconcerted.  More literally it suggests being unanchored, untethered, without grounding, deracinated, adrift, without center.  To view it another way, it is to speak of alienation.

Is it legitimate to speak of alienation in the context of ubiquitous social networks and communication?  Might it be that our connectedness veils a deeper alienation that bubbles up to the surface of consciousness as a pervasive unsettledness?  This is my hypothesis for the moment.

We have known for a long time that as moderns we are no longer connected to place in any significant sense.  Mobility and the autonomy that it purchases come at a cost.  We hardly expect to die in the place we were born.  Most of us will move many times, from city to city, or state to state, or even country to country, before we finally move to Florida or Arizona.  Each move uproots us.  With each move we start over again to some degree.  Many of us are hard pressed to name our home in any traditional sense, so home is simply where we happen to be.  We are, then, spatially or geographically unsettled.

Is there a sense in which we are also temporally unsettled?  Is there an alienation at the heart of our experience of time as well as place?  Here I am thinking again of our mediated experience of the present.  Consider what we might call simply lived experience as a kind of baseline.  Life carried on with a certain immediacy, life lived as a subject interacting with the world beyond our skin.  Now consider what I’m going to call, perhaps problematically*, mediated experience.  This is life lived with a view to its own (re)presentation, life as conscious performance — for the camera, for Facebook, for our blog, etc.  At such times it seems we have inserted a layer of mediation between the present and our experience of it.  If so, might we then speak of a temporal alienation, a temporal unsettledness? Are we not only untethered from place, but also from time?

When we experience life with a view to its future presentation, with what Nathan Jurgenson has aptly called “documentary vision”, we are no longer in the moment as subject.  We are, so to speak, no longer acting in our own life, we are directing; we have become spectators of our own lives.  In a sense we have objectified ourselves; we are looking at our selves. In my memories of events, I often see only the image of pictures I am in.  The memory is not my own first person memory, it is an image that stands in for my own lived experience of the event in which I am an object and not the subject — perhaps because I was not, properly speaking, experiencing the event as a lived experience.

If there is, in fact, a vague unsettled quality to our experience, perhaps it is because we have managed to uproot ourselves not only from place and the stability it brings, but also from the flow of time, from the lived present, in such a way that there is something like an oddly disjointed quality to our sense of self — as if we were watching a film with a time lag between the image and the sound.

While not exactly what T. S. Eliot had in mind, we might say that this begins to answer his poetic query, “Where is the Life we have lost in living?”

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* I say “problematically” because at some level, in some sense all experience is mediated even if only by our own use of language in our minds.