Nico Luchsinger

trying to make sense out of stuff

Postmodernes Lesen?

Im Nachgang zu meiner Kritik von Nicholas Carr's neuem Buch auf NZZ Online hat mir Sandboxer Jonas von der Heyden eine Seminararbeit über "Literale Nichtlinearität" zugeschickt. Ein paar Auszüge:

"Bezogen auf das Lesen hieße [Nichtlinearität], dass sich die durch Autopoiesis aufrecht erhaltene Kommunikation zwischen Schrift und Leser beim nichtlinearen Lesen durch störende Umwelteinflüsse (Hyperlinks) ständig ändert, es jedoch Wege gefunden werden, um diese Änderungen als Fortsetzung derselben Kommunikation bezeichnen und beschreiben zu können. Anders als beim - wohl nur theoretisch existierendem - linearen Lesen wird hier auf Umweltstörungen produktiv reagiert - man lässt sich vom Hyperlink weiterleiten, sorgt aber dafür, dass der neue Inhalt neue Anschlussoperationen ermöglicht und die Informationen irgendwie im Kontext der bisherigen Kommunikation interpretiert werden können [...]."

"Das Lager der "postmodernen Digitalen" [...] propagiert nicht-lineares Denken, welches das Verknüpfen von Denkpunkten in den Vordergrund stellt, zur Selbstreflexion und Flexibilisierung des eigenen Standpunktes anregt und eine nicht an Hierarchien und Autoritäten geknüpfte Vorgehensweise priorisiert. Sie sind zumeist nicht im konservativen Wertekanon verankert und sehen das Internet als eine Bereicherung für die Informationsbeschaffung und -distribution."

"Durch nichtlineares Lesen wird den Anforderungen der nächsten Gesellschaft an die Informationsbewältigungskapazitäten Rechnung getragen, indem man sich bewusst oder unbewusst der prinzipiellen Kontextabhängigkeit jeder Information stellt. Es gibt keine hinreichend und temporal langfristig sicheren Informationen. Deshalb kommt es auch nicht darauf an, einen bestimmten Literaturkanon möglichst gut zu kennen, sondern eher flexibel zu bleiben und Mittel und Wege zu finden, wie man sich unter Berücksichtigung und im Austausch mit der Umwelt, also vielen Texten von heterogenen Quellen weiterentwickeln kann, dabei aber die Änderungen irgendwie als Fortsetzung desselben verkaufen kann. Der Sinnüberschuss, der nicht mehr durch Teleologie oder Überprüfung auf Funktionalität bewältigt werden kann, wird nun einfach akzeptiert und gerade dadurch gemeistert, weil man durch die Einsicht in die Überforderung zum Bemerken und zur Akzeptanz von Anschlussoperationen hin sensibilisiert wird."

Friday readings: Thinking and forgetting

As part of my new work habits, I try to spend Friday afternoon reading stuff I've come across during the week. Here are some of the things I read today.

 

Jeffrey Rosen has a great article about forgetting on the web in the NYT Magazine. As our formerly differentiated identities merge online, we need to think about new forms of digital forgetfulness and forgiveness.

On Edge, David Gelernter writes an interesting (if somewhat lengthy) text on the next level of artifical intelligence. He argues that a computer (or, rather, a network of computers) will never be conscious, but that it might, at some point, pretend to be. In other words: Computers will never possess human-like intelligence (because they are physically not human-like), but they might mimic human-like intelligence.

Paul Graham argues that you can't control when you have good ideas, but that you should control which ideas are on top of your mind. His lesson: "Be careful what you let become critical to you." (Maybe somehow linked to my learning that you should think hard about what you want to think about.)

Friday readings: Protectionism and startups, the death of the browser, and Russia's internal abroad

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As part of my new work habits, I try to spend Friday afternoon reading stuff I've come across during the week. Here are some of the things I read today.

"Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs", says Andy Grove, co-founder and former CEO of Intel. Grove attacks the idea, put forward among others by Thomas Friedman, that (tech) startups can be the cure to America's unemployment problem. It's not sufficient, he says, to keep the "knowledge jobs" in the U.S. and outsource all the manufacturing to Asia - manufacturing and scaling are essential for innovation. The solutions that Grove proposes, however, strike me as inadequate: He wants a tax on the product of offshore labor and even seems to advocate a resulting "trade war". I believe that Grove has a certain point in arguing that keeping (some) manufacturing in an economy is important - but protectionism is certainly the wrong way to reach that goal.

The era of the browser is coming to an end, argues Michael Hirschhorn in the current issue of The Atlantic, and with it dies the "ideology" that information wants to be free on the web. The "digital frontier" is now shifting to the smartphone, says Hirschhorn, where the (paid) app rules. We don't have a "Wild Digital West" anymore, a chaotic, unorganized place where we needed a search engine like Google to find our way - we now have Apple's neatly organized and monetarized store. - I am not yet convinced by the argument. It's true that there is a shift in attitude when it comes to monetizing online content, but I believe it's not from "free" to "paid", but rather from "ad-supported" to "freemium" and thereby less fundamental than often stated (I wrote about this in more detail in my review of Chris Anderson's book "Free" - sorry, German only). And I don't see browsers dying just yet - in fact, I could imagine that technologies like HTML5 might shift attention away from apps back to browsers (more on this here, and yes, you guessed it, that's German only too).

In a long essay in Foreign Affairs (full version only available with subscription), Charles King and Rajan Menon analyze Russia's growing problems in it's "internal abroad", the Caucasus. The rise in violence and unrest in the region is not caused by a single factor like Islamism or nationalism, argue the authors, but by a combination of them. And the problems can only be solved if Moscow offers the region a place in the Russian Federation, instead of handing over power to local authoritarian rulers who exploit for their own benefit. - Kings and Menons analysis is not very surprising if you have been following the news from the region just a bit, but the essay provides a good overview and the current state of the conflict.

Friday readings: The internet will save us all, and how to get into Harvard (hint: no big ears)

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As part of my new work habits, I try to spend Friday afternoon reading stuff I've come across during the week. Here are some of the things I read today.

Not only is the internet making you smarter - in fact, it is the only thing capable of saving our society. Thus argues David Eagleman in a speech given to the Long Now foundation in April (thanks to Sandboxer Eddie Harran for the link!). The internet can help the spread of diseases by enabling telepresence and telemedicine, prevent the loss of knowledge by digitizing everything, and allow more people to collectively work on a problem. I don't agree with all of Eagleman's ideas on how the internet is saving us - his case that the internet can prevent tyranny is especially weak - but the speech is very good food for thought, and I recommend reading through the whole PDF transcript, not just the short summary.

In a brilliant article that was published already 5 years ago, but that I have just discovered* and read, Malcolm Gladwell explores the logic of the admission processes at Ivy League universities. Contrary to other elite universities, Ivy League schools don't just select the best students from High Schools, but instead have a heavy emphasis on the "character" of applicants. Gladwell compares the Ivies - who had started to change their admissions policy in the 1920ies in order to prevent too many jews from entering - as smart managers of what essentially are luxury brands:

"The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in—that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. [...] Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience."

* As a side note: I have been trying to remember where I discovered the link to the Gladwell article, or who sent it to me. I have become pretty good in keeping track of stuff I want to read or have a closer look at later - but in this process of "bookmarking" (it involves several tools) usually removes the information on where I got it from in the first place. I feel like this loss of information is a problem, seeing as many of the articles / studies I read come to me through my "social graph". Not only would I like to attribute the finding to a source when I post it here (or somewhere else); linking the finding to a source would allow me to better assess the relevance of the source for myself (meaning: should I pay more attention to what the source is saying / posting?). How are other people dealing with this?

Everyone's getting smarter

Is the Internet making us stupid? This worry has been raised by several authors, most recently Nick Carr in his new book "The Shallows" (more on the book some other time). 

While humans fear to become more stupid, however, computers seem to get smarter: Clive Thompson presents "Watson" in a long NYT Magazine feature. Watson is a supercomputer developed by IBM; and he has been programmed to play, and often win, the TV game "Jeopardy". Interesting about Watson is the approach he takes, which apparently mimicks human brains: Instead of trying to compute one right answer to a question (which is what for example Wolfram Alpha is doing), Watson applies hundreds of different algorithms to come up with different possible answers within seconds - and then uses another set of algorithms to rank the answers for plausibility.

But it's not just computers; humans are also not getting dumber, as Carr argues, but indeed smarter, says Jamais Cascio in an article for The Atlantic. He proclaims the "Nöocene epoch", derived from the concept of the Nöosphere, the idea of a "collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds". The vastness of digital information combined with smart filters will allow us to overcome the "technology-induced ADD" that authors like Carr fear, and allow us to analyze complex problems in short time frames. Pharmacology is helping, too: Cascio claims that the sleep disorder drug Provigil has actually helped him think faster and more focused.