I've actually been reading more books since I started using the Web. There is no doubt in my mind that reading web content engages different kinds of reading skills and requires different kinds of reading discipline. Because so much information is hyper-linked in the web it is easy to get off the main thread of a subject and find yourself reading about a topic that had very little to do with the topic of origin. And that's where the special discipline comes into play, keeping the mind on track and knowing how deep you need to pursue links that will help you more completely grasp the original topic. In some printed non-fiction texts, footnotes allow you a similar ability to do this, though these are more often citations than clarifications. We don't need as much discipline to keep ourselves to the book, because the book itself doesn't offer the same convenient ability to hyperlink to the text referenced in the footnote that a web page does. In the world of books, we are forced to enrich our understanding of our text by following up with other books.
This does mean that it can be much easier to do research on the web, because of the immediacy of hyperlinks. However unless you are a careful reader, you may not actually do research. Casual reading of web content without the discipline amounts to just surfing. But surfing is not always bad, you might surf for a while and then find yourself doing research when you encounter a topic compelling enough to read more carefully.
It may also be that it's not just the coffee for some of us. I have a whole ritual early in the morning around making my coffee. I grind the beans, put on the water to boil. And I brew the coffee in my French press. After I've had a couple of cups of coffee at the beginning of the day, I feel really good and ready to start my day. The expectation and enjoyment of that cup of coffee should be factored in.
That is one reason why, when I tested my response to caffeine last fall and early winter, I used decaf coffee, regular coffee, and coffee with added caffeine (pills) to test for an effect. http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2010/01/drugs-and-their-no...
Like any other word or phrase, 'open' or 'open API' is going to have a meaning based on the context in which it is used. Open has a certain marketing cachet that generally says anyone can use it and they can use it just about everywhere (usually for free or at nominal cost). To give it meaning, you must further qualify it by what it does. That gives it context. Without context it's just hype.
Recording and writing music. I just recently upgraded from Garageband to Logic Pro and recently bought Reason. You can listen to my modest efforts at http://www.myspace.com/zendevice.
Or it could be that he just does not see how these new devices, which are today geared only to entertainment, could some day be used to further empower us. Perhaps, in the future we might see the iPad or other devices like it, be used in schools for delivering instructional, interactive content. They might serve as rich clipboards for carrying and streaming medical information in a hospital or other medical centers. As for Facebook and Twitter, while they are still mostly used for entertainment, they have also been useful for pushing up-to-minute status of things going on in places of political unrest or from the hospital rooms. When I was at the hospital with my daughter after her surgery, I used Facebook to provide continual updates to my friends and family about her condition.
So maybe Obama's comments simply lack imagination of how these devices could be more useful in the future. And I believe it's also true that some of the most significant technological innovations start out as toys.
This is the problem; who is starting/making this paradigm shift? And can they cause such a shift to remove the bias towards entertainment and information overload.
Sure, there are lots of examples (Iran for example) of the utility of modern media. But currently the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad - and getting worse.
Television (and movies, and telephones, and newspapers) _have_ brought education and culture to the masses. Really. Go back in time a couple of hundred years and talk to some regular folks. Salt 'o the Earth, industrious (maybe), and worldly even, but _not_ educated or culturally sensitive in great numbers. It's important to remember that the teeming masses didn't use all that time they spent not watching television reading Shakespeare and Newton...
No, but more of them are doing it now than in Shakespeare's time. (Okay, they were watching it on stage rather than on TV; the period's equivalent of soap operas and sitcoms...)
As a percentage and in absolute numbers there are more educated people, by nearly anyone's definition of education, than at any time in history up to now. And television, mass communication in general, plays a large part in that.
As hard as it is for many to imagine, a lot of what passes for junk culture and time wasting trivia these days will be considered high art in the future. Future pundits will decry how the youth of the country are wasting their time with the latest feelie dramas and grab-o-vision media instead of partaking of more uplifting fare like downloading _Maru, the box cat_ and staying up all night playing _Tomb Raider_...
See, you're changing the goalposts. I'm talking about TV, you're talking about mass media in general. I'm comparing, say, 1945 and 1965, you're comparing 1810 and 2010. (Or 1610 and 2010.) There are too many confounds and you can't just throw everything since then (wider college education, mass publication) in with television as if they're even remotely the same thing.
I know there are a handful of TV series that constitute legitimate art, and an even rarer handful of those which are even popular. But by and large, TV isn't an improvement to the average person's level of culture or education. It's not necessarily a setback, but it's not an improvement, either.
Go back and read your parent post. The discussion is clearly mass media, or at least the effect of new media on society.
As someone who grew up in the 50s and 60s I can tell you from first hand experience that TV was used massively for education, and that it had a profound effect. Was it used for other things? Things more visible? Sure. Is all TV educational? That's a harder question to answer; note my point about what is considered culture at any given time. Sturgeons Law applies to TV like everything else, so we can't only judge a form by its worse 90%...
As for broading the discussion, which I refute, it's impossible to discuss the effects of one mass communication medium without discussing it within its context. At least not very meaningfully. If you scan around the posts on this page you'll find a post from me making references to the history of reading, writing and printing.
You started the discussion by responding to me, not the other way around. And I was talking specifically about the example of television. I don't think every new media has the same effect on society. If you think otherwise, you need to actually argue that point instead of just handwave it away as an assumption.
You've taken my point ("television failed to fulfill its promise as a source of education and culture for the masses"), ignored it, and instead responded to a straw man ("the aggregate of changes in mass media since the Elizabethan era have not improved the level of education and culture in the general population"). And then when I call you out on it, you tell me "the discussion is clearly about more than television". My point was about television, you can respond to whatever straw men you like but don't pretend it's a response to my point.
No, I _entered_ the discussion by responding to you...
OP was about new media, communications tech, iPads, etc. The parent post was about more of the same. Your response implied that TV didn't have a positive effect on education; which you didn't state explicitly, but your comment could only make sense to someone who understood the larger context of the discussion. So my bringing in media other than TV would seem to be OK.
It's impossible to discuss the effects of media in isolation from history, precedence and context. Okay, that isn't true; but I would argue it's impossible to _usefully_ discuss the effects of media, especially a mass communication medium, like television, without looking at it in a broader context.
If anything, it seems to me that you've taken a useful discussion and tried to limit its scope to a single point of supposed failure and tried to extend that failure to the entire topic. And rather than to responding to any of my points directly, you are arguing about form and context. I hope you'll excuse me if I tried to drag the discussion back toward relevance...
Television has had a massive effect on education in many parts of the world. Some first world, some third world. I could list hundreds (thousands) of shows that have been considered a success and have affected mass audiences. Do you really need me to make such a list? Start with Sesame Street, the Bell Labs science series, oh, I don't know, nearly every PBS station's daytime instructional schedule for the last 40 years. In many third world countries broadcast television is the major source of daily schooling. I'm talking teacher and black board somewhere else and children in a remote area gathered around the village TV set hooked up to a satellite dish. (These days I suspect this scene is played out out with internet satellite based technology.) Someone is watching all that TV. And notice that I'm not even considering whether or not the explosion of Discovery/Learning/A&E/DIY/Indie type channels are of educational value (I vote yes.)
If you want to do some additional reading on the subject, I can recommend Arthur Clarke's excellent collection of essays on the subject of modern communications technology _How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village_.
No if you want to argue that the bulk of TV is junk, I wouldn't disagree with you, hence my reference to Sturgeons Law. If you wanted to argue that the infrastructure for TV, and most mass communication in general (opps!!! there I go again!!!) is funded and driven by things other than purely educational goals, many of them not so noble... Whelp, yep, you're right. But so what? That doesn't make the education benefits not there, and that doesn't mean that the technology is worthless (I would argue, as I did, that what you think is education and what other people might find of value in broadening and enlightening their world might be different.)
As someone who grew up when TV was (relatively) rare, and has lived to see such an explosion in instant, nearly frictionless mass communication, I find it incredible that someone could think that TV has had little positive effect on education. Color me puzzled...
I think we're talking past each other a little here, but you're probably right that TV has had a positive impact. I'm still dubious whether it's a net positive impact--television displaced books, after all--but my wider point is that by and large, the bulk of television programming falls closer to the worst case outcome than the best case outcome.
I'm actually more optimistic about the internet, because like books, the internet at least encourages literacy. At least so I thought, until bandwidth increased to the point where the internet became another TV. Now I'm dubious. I see the early internet and TV as going in completely opposite directions, though, hence my reluctance to conflate all advances in media as having the same effects.
A blackberry isn't a toy. I have at least three of the items mentioned on the list (which are toys), and I use none of them for actual productive work. Though I do have a telnet terminal app on the iPod. Still all of the devices he mentions were not designed for productive enterprises, but for diversions. And diversions have a way of being big time wasters if you're not balanced. Not today Halo 3!
What's the distinction between productive work and play? between a toy and a tool? Even if you think the distinction isn't purely subjective, you have to consider that every tool starts out as a toy, that a lot of tools are way more fun to play with than (what gets marketed as) toys, that playing can be extremely productive and that being productive can be really entertaining.
you have to consider that every tool starts out as a toy
Band saw. Pesticide. Tractor. Hunting rifle. Jackhammer.
By any meaningful definition of "toy" and "starts out", not every tool starts out as a toy. Alternatively, if you are using definitions of "toy" and "starts out" that are ridiculously overbroad: at a high enough level of abstraction, everything looks exactly the same as everything else. A worldview that is useful is preferable to one that is elegant.
I don't know the histories of the items you mention, but I imagine at some point in time somebody was screwing around (i.e., playing) with a predecessor technology when they "should" have been doing "productive work". I remember the days when microprocessors and personal computers were derided as toys. UNIX and Linux were once "toy" operating systems. RC planes and flight sims were the toys of hyper-nerdy outcasts in my high school; but nobody laughs at a predator drone strike.
Pesticides might not be toys, but I bet the chemists and biologists who develop them have spent a good deal of time screwing around with the underlying constituents. I recently rented a rotary hammer to perform a particular task, but spent a good amount of time afterward playing with it to see what I could jackhammer into oblivion. At what point did it stop being a tool and become a toy? I learned a good deal about the operation of the hammer and improved my technique, does that mean I wasn't playing but was getting educated? Maybe our preconceptions about work, play, and education aren't really clear or useful?
What's the useful distinction between "toy" and "tool"? Is there a bright line between toolness and toyness? Or a continuum that depends on attitude, context, and use? I'd argue the latter is a more useful and meaningful perspective for those of us who do not directly depend on our "tools" for day-to-day survival. I'd guess that most hunters are not subsistence hunters and employ their hunting rifles recreationally, during leisure time, doesn't this make them more "toy-like" than "tool-like"? Recreational ornamental horticulturalists produce nothing of "value" (in the narrow sense of receiving remuneration); does this make their use of pesticides toy-like? Is a Schrebergarten a toy garden in the same way a Tonka is a toy truck? If you eat vegetables from the Schrebergarten or use the Tonka to dolly a load, are they still toys?
The original commenter distinguished between toys (e.g., iPad) and non-toys (e.g., Blackberry). I don't see that as a useful distinction: one man's tool is another man's toy (even tractors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhKfTFdtmCk). The President claims a distinction between information as distraction, diversion, or entertainment vs. empowerment. I don't see that clear line: one man's marathon Tecmo Super Bowl session is another's all nighter studying B.F. Skinner. Who is to say which is a distraction which is a better use of that time? Were people who watched hundreds of hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer distracted, diverted or empowered? If they got tenure from it does that change the answer?
I think this study is skewed simply by the fact that these people knew they were being observed and that what happened in their lives mattered to enough to be studied. How much does that weigh into one's happiness?
And how hard would it be for those code translators to remove these footprints or even offer the user the option of leaving them out? Doesn't this edict invite code translators to work harder at leaving no trace that the code was generated or translated? The bigger question too is, isn't this just another stupid rule that developers can find a workaround for anyway?
In the company I work for they use "direct report" to identify someone who reports directly to a manager or supervisor. But like it or not, "subordinate" is not so much a slam as it is a way to describe one's position in a hierarchical command structure.
Any achievement has scope and context.
What one achieves in any activity may or may not transcend that activity. The meaningfulness of the activity itself may not carry beyond the individual or beyond a select group. So I think, ultimately that the achiever has to make the final judgement as whether achieving the goal really matters to the achiever and whether it matters that the achievement is important to others.
Also, treadmills are not entirely useless, even in the metaphorical sense. I may not visibly being going anywhere, but my mind may be active and going through a process of re-wiring and preparation for other challenges.
This does mean that it can be much easier to do research on the web, because of the immediacy of hyperlinks. However unless you are a careful reader, you may not actually do research. Casual reading of web content without the discipline amounts to just surfing. But surfing is not always bad, you might surf for a while and then find yourself doing research when you encounter a topic compelling enough to read more carefully.