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Does the World Wide Web Dumb us Down too Much to Read

Byrichard
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Does the World Wide Web dumb is down to much to read is an article exploring the idea that we have too many distractions and that as a result we are unable to focus. Yesterday I wrote about blogging rather than writing twitter threads and this article goes some way to exploring the same theme.

The first thing I would look at is the quality of writing and the quality of information. Are we reading articles that are clickbait, that have little content of substance and being little of value? Are we reading a guardian long read article that has been researched over days, weeks or months? Are we in the living room with family around providing us with distractions or are we in bed reading a book before sleep?

When I was at a conference there were four clusters of people. One group were outside talking, another were in the common room and then two of us were walking around and talking about nothing and everything at once. I bring it up because on the top bunk in one room I saw someone reading a book as we talked on the bottom bunk.

I also saw him reading in the lunch room and at least one other people. Rather than join in and enjoy the distractions of being at a conference he was in his own world reading a book.

I am in my own world as I write this blog post. I am sitting in my living room with the balcony door open so that fresh air can come in. I am writing this on my phone because the computer was updating its OS.

Reading and writing take courage. For a period of time you need to decide that you don’t want to read the constant streams from twitter and Facebook. You decide that you’re content in the moment. There are no external inputs.

When I lived in Weymouth I knew everyone that worked in bars, shops etc. I would spend hours a day out in the center trying to find people to spend time with. Paradoxically I also read a lot. I think this is when I read all but one of Kundera’s books. I also read quite a few thick books of fiction, including Lord Of The Rings.

For me the distraction of the World Wide Web has always been to find new technology and innovations but it has also been about finding friendships because, as an introvert socialising in person can be lonelier than solitude. The extroverts speak and we go into passive listening mode.

This is relevant because if we speak about the dumbing down of society we must also look at what we want to get from our distractions. In my case I want to meet new people and establish new friendships that would make a road, train or plane trip worthwhile. For years now I haven’t found this to work via social media so the “always distracted” occurrence is gone. It frees up time to work on projects such as this blog, to walk, to hike, to watch television series, to look for work, to volunteer at events and live in the moment and finally to watch YouTube content and tv series online.

We could say that we are becoming too stupid for the long form but look at the state of films. Back in the early 2000s I went to see a film every few days. After nine months of this I knew the film formulas so well that I lost interest. When I am alone I never watch films. When I am with female company I almost never finish the film.

It is not that I can’t focus for an hour and a half. It’s that the content is so mediocre. The films have no story and we feel no empathy for the characters so the allure of watching these films is gone.

We should also think about marketing when discussing the increasing idiocy of people. Marketing wants us to be gullible. Advertisers and public relations professionals want us to be interested in something only long enough to purchase the product. They don’t care about the environmental impact and social cost. For the first two years twitter and Facebook were excellent for networking and establishing new friendships. That’s why they were such compelling distractions back then.

We say that people are less focused than ever and that they are being dumbed down but then look at PVRs, Netflix, Amazon prime and more. We got so angry with all the adverts that we stopped watching over the air television because we no longer wanted to waste time being forced to see the same five to ten adverts every ten minutes. We are the ones reducing the distractions.

Related to this I would also look at binge watching culture. If you watch one or two episodes a night you’re going to be more focused than if you spend a day watching an entire season. When it’s television we call it bingeing. If we had a book we would call it “engrossing”. It wouldn’t be vilified.

The point is that if you’re reading a book you can’t check for tweets or scroll through Instagram because to stop looking at the page is to break the stream of consciousness. With TV series you can tweet, check e-mails and more. It’s vidzac or some other silly marketing term. It’s playing in the foreground until we get distracted and then it’s background noise.

We shouldn’t discount the lowest common denominator when speaking about intelligence and attention. Tenk.fr and curiositystream are documentary video networks. YouTube has plenty of intellectual content for those that are looking for it. The content with the most views is the content that algorithms are pushing on us but this does not mean that is the content that people wanted to view. The trap of the lowest common denominator is that it over-represents distractions whilst making intelligent content invisible.

If we went back to chronological timelines twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social networks would paint a different image of the society we live in. Emotion would be replaced by intellect and with this intellect conviviality and intelligent discourse would re-emerge. We would see that intelligence is not declining.

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Socialising and Networking

Byrichard

After university, I estimated that I got to know of at least 600 people. I was on campus every day and I was out almost all the time. Whether it was in the edit suites, the library or the bar. I used to sit indoors with the bags as a non-smoker but within weeks I dressed for the English winter and started to stand outside, warmly dressed.


I went from being a solitary person looking after a table and belongings to short ten to fifteen-minute conversations with several dozen people a night. Such a process is a good way of getting to know people and to learn of projects that you want to work on.


That’s why you go to the edit suites, radio studios and other places. You have the opportunity to chat with people and to learn more about their projects and about technologies that you may not play with for your profession. That’s also when people asked me for help with editing. “How do I do this?”, “How do you do that?”, “Can we work together on that project”.


In post-university life it’s much harder to meet people and socialise like this. On the one hand, the pool of people is much larger. You’re dealing with thousands of people, rather than hundreds. You also need to find places where there are groups to connect with.


For a while, social media filled this role. So does work where you’re in the real world rather than the virtual. I see office life as virtual because when you’re working in an office you’re not meeting people in person. You don’t have the same opportunities for friendships.


Recently I’ve been volunteering at Geneva-based events to meet new people and see interesting projects. It’s a series of events where we’re needed for three or four hours every few days. It’s great if you want free access to an event but I find that it lowers the chance to meet people.


The best events to volunteer for or participate in are those where people are present for the entire time of the event. You meet them at the stands, you meet them at the drinks and other events, and you meet them in the evening. It’s a way of becoming a close group, even if just for a week. It did result in follow up projects.


Growing your network: Finding rockstars from Building Professional Relationships by Skyler Logsdon


I would love to work where I’m in the real world, meeting people and collaborating with a number of teams in person rather than by e-mail or over the phone. In a recent contract, an entire unit came to my end of contract drinks. That doesn’t happen every time.

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From One Culture To Another Through Podcasting

Byrichard

At the moment I’m listening to a lot of podcasts. Probably 5-10 a day on average. I go through one collection of podcasts and once that one is finished I move onto another. As a result of this, the culture of those I am listening to is sinking through.

Yesterday I listened to four or five of NBC’s meet the press and I found them interesting. I wasn’t always paying attention to what they were saying but it did make a change. I recently listened to the whole of the Net@night series and the previous series on the RSS feed as well. As a result, I’ve learned quite a bit about new technology. It’s been fun. It’s about web 2.0 and how everything is “innovative” although ten years ago people were doing the same it was called differently. It’s all O’reilly’s(sp?) fault.

Today I listened to something quite interesting. It’s the Mac break weekly recorded in Dolby headphone surround or some similar tech. It’s interesting because it does paint an auditory landscape. Leo Laporte was in front whilst the girls on that podcast, Justine and Kendra were to the right, and the guests, whilst two others were to the left.

Walking to the shops with that sound was a little disorienting at first but I grew used to it and it’s more fun. I want to hear more podcasts recorded with that technology.

I am going through a phase of cultural assimilation. I watch and listen to all these podcasts that are coming from the US and as a result, I’m starting to absorb the culture. I’m telling myself that I should move to SFO where municipal wifi is a reality rather than a dream. We’ll see what I do once university is finished and I have the rest of my life in front of me.

We may find that the work experience module teaches me to think more creatively about getting a job. If it does then it’s truly worth writing up tomorrow when I get up.

I’m rambling so I’ll leave you to wait for the next post.

Ciao ciao

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The Selfie Stick cutter

Byrichard

In some cities you see a strange set of creatures and the selfie stick cutter is there to resolve this issue. People carry long poles at the end of which they stick their camera. They look at the phone held at a safe distance and smile, do victory symbols and other such gestures. These sticks would be really interesting if they were used to provide people with interesting images. Instead they are used to take pictures in interesting places with ordinary people in front. As a camera operator I photograph landscapes or monuments. It is an old fashioned habit.

The selfie stick is so endemic to some parts of the world by now that pranksters run around and cut people’s selfie sticks with the phone still attached. You can watch as dozens of phones fall to the ground in this video. Mobile phone repair shops must really enjoy watching this video. Look at all the work they will soon have.

I think that this video is meant to be seen as a joke but can you imagine how much anger such an action would generate. Can you imagine how fast you would have to run away from some of these people. You see these people look surprised and in some cases betrayed.

They have a quarter of a million views so far and it will grow from tomorrow onwards, as people in offices share the video with their friends and colleagues. Maybe by next week it will have more than a million views. Selfie sticks are popular and so are pranks. With the money they could make from monetising this video they could compensate the people whose screens they broke.

Selfie sticks do have one practical purpose. You can fix 360 cameras to them and take pictures without the giant index finger getting in the way. That is how I use one. You can get them for cheap from certain types of shops. You do not need to spend 29 euros.

Reaction to Social media and the loss of identity

Byrichard

My answer to:

Social media and the loss of identity

From 1996–2007 I saw the World Wide Web, discussion forums and other places as opportunities to socialise with like minded people. Over the years we went from one platform to another using nicknames rather than our real identity. in 2006–2007 there was a shift. When Twitter came about I would post about my dissertation progress and eventually converse with more and more people. Eventually the @ symbol started to be used for answers and then we discussed meeting in person.

The online conversation moved from being about ideas and a virtual self to meeting in person. Twitter changed us from anonymous web users to friends in meat space as it was called at the time. At the same time as this occurred we also had Facebook and here the opposite took place. We took friends whom we drank, studied and collaborated with and added them to an online network. In effect social media extended our real life and our real life extended our online life. Social media became a lounge.

This was short lived. Within a year social media experts, marketers, celebrities and other characters took social media from being a conversation medium to being an observer/follower medium. The things that you worry about in your post are a consequence of the loss of engagement. We went from social networks where the more time you devoted to a network the more connections you had to a social environment where the more famous you had the more followers you had. Those followers don’t know you as a person. They know you as a projection. You become an illusion, an ideal. You lose your identity.

In a sense those of us that are still relatively unknown can be genuine. We follow those we know and they follow us. We also have mutual friends.

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Le meur, Seesmic and some images

Byrichard

Whilst everyone that was present at the Paris Seesmeetup has gone home to their day to day lives the images taken are still doing the rounds. I noticed that two of my images were included in Loic Le meur’s blog. Normally all the Francofous should be able to name every shown. Can you?

Looking forward to many more seesmeetups to come.

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Suunto are filling the gap that mobile phone manufacturers are leaving open.

Byrichard

For a period of time I would buy new mobile phones every six months. This was to test new hardware, new operating systems and new versions. Recently mobile phone development has hit a development wall. http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/31/white-nexus-4-available/ of a phone is excellent, if that’s the reason you chose one phone or another. That’s not how I select my phones. Battery life is. For the last two years I have looked at mobile phones and battery life and it has not improved. I like to use my phones as GPS during via ferrata trips, walks and other outdoor activities. Within an hour you are usually down to half a battery or less and by the time you arrive home the phone is dead, unless you get an external battery to recharge the device. The fashion to develop phones that are thinner and thinner with bigger screens is only making things worse. I’d love to see manufacturers once again double phone size and triple battery capacity. I’d like something thick that I could use for a day in the mountains.

Suunto have provided an alternative:

This is a device that you wear as an ordinary watch on your wrist. It has an integrated GPS, pressure sensor and a rechargeable battery. In day to day use the battery loses around 1% of battery charge per day when in normal mode and around 3% per hour of exercise. It takes just a few seconds to get the watch in to activity tracking mode, to pause, tracking, or to stop tracking all together. The data it collects is synced with a computer very easily. If you spend a little extra money you can buy accessories for cycling, for heart rate monitoring, for cadence and more.

Satellite acquisition is fast. Every time you sync the watch and charge it Geo-stationary satellite information is downloaded and synchronised with the watch. This speeds up the time it takes to have an accurate location. It takes around 4 seconds when near the location of synching and less than 30 seconds when 1-200 kilometers away. It’s fast.

The beauty of such devices is that they encourage physical activity. Online you can share your tracks with friends and you can tailor apps to the types of sports you do or goals you set. There are apps for 10k runs, marathons and many more similar activities. Part of the purpose of this watch is to be a fitness trainer and app developers have made a variety of apps for interval training, distance etc.

This watch has replaced my need for a mobile phone app to track the activities I do when outdoors. I can preserve battery life on the mobile phone until I am back on the home cellphone network or using the phone for in car navigation.

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