My time for reading books loses out to the Internet and its many distractions.
"The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore." - Rumi
Saturday, November 30, 2019
"The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore." - Rumi
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING GOOGLE
The Importance of Being Google
by G. Kim Blank (September 2009)
“I hope this world evolves so that there exists a time where somebody sitting at a terminal can access all the world’s information.”
–Tom Clancey, Engineering Director, Google Book Search
Caught in headlights of the present, it may be difficult to imagine that there was a time before poststructuralism, postmodernism and—heaven help us—postcoloniality. And a time before we uttered with utter banality, “Google it.”
How easefully we have come to embrace that seemingly innocuous, pixilated portal to all things arcane and ordinary. Google killed the encyclopedia business and probably wounded the reference librarian; and, as it raised its ambitions, it has certainly bruised the book industry and busied its copyright lawyers. It may also have changed not just how we find things, but how we know them.
Google’s search engine was something impossible that we seemed, nonetheless, to be waiting for, as if it were our pod-given right. And now? It’s just always there—like the air. Well, air composed of infinite ones and zeroes, air that you capture and turn into copy-and-paste information almost as fast as your hands can type and your cursor can click and drag. That a “googol” is, as a mathematical term, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, makes the point: it’s a number impossible to imagine, like the power of the search engine that, only ten years ago, had its creators ingeniously misspell the term and go on to emphatically win and continue to dominate the lucrative search engine war.
This potential for huge profits has solicited very recent challengers to the market. Wolfram|Alpha, an ingenious “computational knowledge engine,” and Yahoo! Search (a new alliance of Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo!), with its “decision engine” and “concierge experience,” claim to be in the running. But the bite they take out of Google’s $140 billion domination will likely, at best, be a moderate mouthful.
That small rectangle lurking in the corner of your computer’s browser is, arguably, the most revolutionary and powerful bit of real estate in the history of knowledge. Its physical proportions are frighteningly out of proportion not only to its information-rendering prowess, but also to its power over us. Google, as the dominant access point to all things on the impossibly massive matrix called the World Wide Web, which sits “on top” of the Internet, is the ever-expanding Index to All. What it has done, though, is turn the Tower of Babel into information drive-thru.
The issue is no longer what’s there, but what’s not there. The answer? Not much. Every day the Web gets bigger without, remarkably, ever piling up. And that may be one of the keys to what it means “to google”—the corporately disputed but now genericized term for web searching and, according to the American Dialectic Society, one of “most useful new words” of the last decade. We don’t need to know or be overwhelmed by how much is out there, let alone how it works. We just need some sense of what we’re looking for. We don’t even need to spell it correctly. If we’re close, Google, like a gently corrective friend, will happily send us in the right direction so that we can find what we are looking for. Google, you complete us.
In our wi-fied, lap-topped, gigahertzed world, Google is usually where we turn in those oddly ever-increasingly moments when we feel the need to conveniently resolve uncertainty or find information—“odd” because we don’t really need to check out everything questionable that passes through our frontal lobes, and “ever-increasing” because it is so darn easy to find both forgettable minutiae of cookie recipes as well as the grand strokes of intellectual history. What is especially stunning, then, is Google’s powerful, democratizing simplicity; we are all equal Masters of the Information Universe. Want to know the name of Virginia Woolf’s spaniel? Crimes rates in Johannesburg? Where potatoes originated? Watch a video of Seamus Heaney reading? Find out who said, “technology is rather easy”? A quick and dirty intro to Hegel’s theory of the dialectic? What kitchen utensil Mary Lamb embedded in her father’s head (after killing her mother with a different utensil)?
Who’s Mary Lamb? Google her name. Now google it (boolean style, of course) with “fork.”
The pervasive and seemingly facile activity of googling confirms that much mulled-over shift from a knowledge culture to an information culture. What remains, though, is some parsing of this transformation via the search engine’s role in it—that is, the importance and character of googling. There is a more engaging way to say this: the ordinariness of googling may have radically changed the culture of knowing. It may have changed us.
So why have we embraced the search engine? First, and most obviously, it’s easy. Second, it’s fast; ever-increasing access speed provides instant gratification and subtle self-congratulation (“ah, found it”). Third, googling provides disposability without waste (“now I can leave it behind, since it will be there if I need it again”).
These characteristics make the on-line search a largely assumptive experience. Why learn something—connect with it, grapple with it, internalize it, or even make hand-written notes—when you can easily find it again? The activity is just glib enough to feed into our collective postmodern attention deficit, which is also fed by a webpandemic of other micro-blogging, twittering behaviors that equally compromise the need for Pause or Deep Thought. In short, we don’t need, at best, to follow through, and, at worst, to know or remember anything. We just have to be able to find it again. Fourth, and finally, Google is portable: inexpensive, ever-shrinking, increasingly diverse and wireless devices through which you have Internet access allow—in fact encourage—you to search and share anywhere and all the time.The search engine is not just a departure from previous ways of locating, holding, and using information—the managers of culture have always been working on that one—but may it well be a new, understated and startling way we shape and represent how we know our world. Google dependency might, then, be functionally central to a new culture of how, as social scientists might say, we “do” knowledge. The persistent Enlightenment impulse to know the world through experience, reason, explanation, and critique may be getting whittled down to do something more like trivial pursuit. Even at a most basic level, we don’t even need to read through something to find those key words or phrases; the search function will short-cut us straight to them, and colorfully highlight the items without any need to grapple with context or any incidental, potentially profitable, or essential framework. It is the equivalent of a sound bite, what instead we might call a knowledge byte.
Besides the twenty-five billion or so indexable pages on the Web, the millions of searchable books scanned under the auspices of “Google books” further invite this style of knowledge window-shopping. Google’s declared corporate mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” translates as “build it and they will come—and maybe pay a bit.” The result will be, as Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine puts it, a “universal library” that amounts to “one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.”
This un-differentiated ubertext, while conceptually exhilarating, also flattens the world of knowledge: It is all there and going in all directions, but who can read it all? Where do you start and where do you end if there is no start or end? Who can follow every intertextual hyperlink or read every tag, not to mention that you may even add some yourself? Again, to avoid endless skipping over and around, our only hope will be to get in and get out as quickly as possible. Such convenience, then, can overwhelm by encouraging under achievement. Alice Prochaska, the University Librarian at Yale University, notes something like this in her concern that researchers are likely to use searchable online books in a “fragmentary way.”So despite embodying the Enlightenment ideal of the public sphere, like nothing else in the history of knowledge, googling and Google books in their democratizing guises are not just information shapers, the latest tools for finding, gathering, and holding culture, but habit shapers that mold our conception of what it means and what it takes to know—and where to find it. Does it constitute a paradigm shift? Perhaps. The fear, though, is that it is, at the same time, a commercial shift, an oligopoly with knowledge as the product (a term like “googopoly” could be useful here). Earlier this year, book historian and Harvard Library director Robert Darnton articulated such concern: commercialization of libraries might “turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere.” He’s right. Knowledge may represent Foucauldian power, but it is also, as Google has figured out, Friedmanian big bucks. That three of the most visibly powerful tech companies—Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft—are joining forces with the Open Book Alliance to counter Google’s virtual domination of the knowledge industry dramatically points to what is at stake: the rapidly changing face of knowledge and the knowledge business.
* * *
As we google away, we may think we are digging for something hidden. More ambitiously, we may see ourselves as doggedly piecing together and compiling discrete clues that lead us to some overwhelming question and answer; or we may conceive of the Web as a well in which some deep truth lurks at the bottom, so that if we look hard and steadily, what we seek will come to us. Such romancing of the Web’s depth and mystery-revealing power is fine—old metaphors die hard—but more properly the search engine works along a speed-oriented, seemingly infinite, interconnected surface, what it sometimes called “the topography of the Web.” Kelly, I think, is mistaken when, in referring to the hyperlinked structure of Google books, he calls it “a deep structuring of knowledge.” The depth model may be an illusion, and this is apparent in the cavalier way we use it. Reading has become raiding.
Then there’s the way the search engine uses us. Marshall McLuhan forty years ago spoke of “global networks” in an “electric age.” He proposed that all the things we make—“technologies” he sometimes called them—are necessarily “extensions” of the body and senses. Thus a bowl is an extension of our cupped hands; clothes, our skin; a car, our legs; a flashlight, our eyes; e-mail our mouths and ears (and those stupid winking and smiling emoticons, our bodies and feelings).
But wait, there’s more. Those technologies we create often come, unknowingly, to create us. In the process we become, McLuhan claims, “benumbed” and “anesthetized.” In the 1969 March edition of Playboy, he puts it most clearly: when these technologies are pervasive, they change and shape (“transmogrify”) our behaviours, values, and beliefs—our “sensory balance.” The effect, he claims, is that these “extensions of man . . . cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.”
Questions lurk. Are we, or could we become, anesthetized by its easy but boggling power? What does it mean that we can know so much so quickly and so easily? What does it mean not to go deep into the material we plan to use? To bypass context? What does it mean when things are connected by links outside of us rather than by our own work or thinking? Do those links, then, as it were, move inside us, neurally wire how we put things together? Could googling “cause deep and lasting changes” in us that transform our world or mold our behavior? To frame it as a less Orwellian question: Does the google habit shape us?
Returning to what is often considered the most important technological innovation in the history of knowledge is helpful: Gutenberg’s press, developed mid fifteenth century. It is, doubtlessly, singular in its significance. But often overlooked are the ways it became used, or what was developed from it in order to make use of the innovation of moveable type. For example, around the beginning of the 16th century, Aldus Manutius’ ingenious application to create small, portable, and relatively inexpensive books marked the beginning of a change to not just what was to be known, but how, when, and where it could be known, what you could do with it, and, most radically, who could own it. This “freeing” of knowledge left increasing numbers of book owners and readers to determine the value of knowledge, to determine, in fact, the size and shape of culture. This was the true revolution.
Elizabeth Eisenstein in her 1979 seminal The Printing Press as an Agent of Change points to the result of the Gutenberg Revolution: this newly created “library without walls” corresponds to and reflects the paradigmatic “shift from a ‘closed world’ to the infinite universe of the new cosmology.” Today, with the Internet Revolution, the final shift from to a new cosmology is manifest in all that ever-increasing bandwidth and endless streaming, in all those infinitely looping, expanding hyperlinks that zip along on exabytes of collective internet traffic—and most of it managed so nicely by Google at the click of everyone’s cursor. That is, the late twentieth-century’s parallel technological breakthrough with Gutenberg’s press resides not so much in how the microprocessor took shape to become the now ubiquitous personal computer, but in how we have come to use the computer.
Perhaps we are suffering a little from what McLuhan calls the unaware state of “Narcissus narcosis.” We need to look what was developed to harness, use, and shape that otherwise dormant hardware called a computer—operating systems, the internet, web browsers, “killer” applications—in short, the software. We have to ask questions about what, for example, word-processing has done to writing, organizing, and thinking. What the spreadsheet has done to alter market behavior and economic practice? What e-mailing, texting, and micro-blogging have done to communication habits, styles of thought, identity, relationship, and socialization? And we have to wonder if the search engine will change, or has changed already, the practice of knowing and knowledge building. Who or what to controls all that information demands some vigilance.
In this light, googling needs its day of cultural and behavioral cross-examination. It may seem to complete us, but with its simplicity, speed, and mysterious ease in finding just about everything without us having to move, contextualize, choose connections, or even take notes, that sense of completion may be the final stage in transforming knowledge into information. In the same way it is often easy to mistake depth for surface, we may be confusing Google’s goals and its algorithmic powers with our own thinking powers.
Then there’s the more spooky question that sounds like it originates in The Matrix: If all we need to know is at the tip of our cursors, then what need have we of the world beyond those infinitely streaming zeroes and ones?
G. Kim Blank is a writer, media consultant, and professor of English at the University of Victoria. He has published on a wide range of subjects, including English Romanticism, conflict theory, and popular culture.
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Sunday, October 20, 2019
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Checklist for social media:
Accuracy and accountability checklist for social media:
Way back in the early fall, when the Online News Association conference was goin
g on here in D.C., Craig Silverman of Regret the Error did a greataccuracy workshop in conjunction with TBD. He created an accuracy checklist aimed at helping reporters avoid common errors. My boss, Steve Buttry,expanded on Silverman’s list at his own blog a couple of weeks ago. This checklist approach inspired me to think of ways to avoid accuracy and reporting errors in my own little corner of the journalism world.
In the rapid-fire world of social media, it’s easy for a journalist or news organization to make mistakes. Sometimes, these things happen in the heat of the moment, but more often than not the errors seem to stem from a widespread belief amongst journalists that Twitter carries less need for accuracy and accountability than the full-story medium. Recent events have told us otherwise.
I believe there is an ever-increasing need for accuracy and accountability in how we as journalists use social media. This inspired me to start my own accuracy checklist for the TBD staff, but I thought it may be better to share with a larger audience. Feel free to add your notes and additions in the comments. I consider this a work in progress.
Accuracy Checklist for Social Media
Before tweeting:
- How do I know this information?
- Is this information independently confirmed? Should it be first?
- Do I know the location of the news event? Check a map.
When tweeting:
- Will this require follow-up tweets to better explain? Do I know this story well enough to follow-up?
- Are proper names spelled correctly?
- Does the link go to the right place? Is it shortened properly?
- Are any Twitter handles included? Do they go to the right accounts?
- Does this tweet have/need attribution for reported facts?
- Does this tweet need a hat tip for another Twitter account/news outlet who first alerted you to the info?
- Is a location included/necessary?
- Is this tweet short enough to be easily re-tweeted?
- Check to see if auto-correct changed the text intended.
When re-tweeting:
- Check your shorthand and contractions to make sure they make sense.
- Is it clear why I want to share this tweet, or does it need context?
- Is this tweet reporting heretofore unknown information?
- If so, is this source reliable enough to throw your name behind?
- Is the original tweet written clearly enough to be passed on from me?
When sharing on Facebook:
- Do I know this account? Research them to verify it.
- Is the image that shows up in my link preview actually connected to the story?
- Is the post text and headline reflective of the content of the story?
What’s missing here? Let me know. eventually, I’ll make this look spiffy and get it online as a lovely printable document.
- Are any tagged users in images/posts the correct people?
http://zombiejournalism.com/2011/01/accuracy-and-accountability-checklist-for-social-media/trackback/
http://zombiejournalism.com/2011/01/accuracy-and-accountability-checklist-for-social-media/
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Journalists that Never Go Out of Style
40 Time-tested Tips for Journalists that Never Go Out of Style
By Jezzamine Andaquig on October 10, 2017
1. Always get the name of the dog.
2. Better to get it right than get it first.
3. Trust is our most important asset.
4. Endure the awkward silences in interviews.
5. Avoid clichés.
6. Pick up the damn phone.
7. And get out of the damn office.
8. Only quote when paraphrasing doesn’t do a better job.
9. With multimedia: complement, don’t repeat.
10. Know your equipment before you hit the field.
11. Give credit and thanks for user submissions.
12. Follow the money.
13. Ask open-ended questions.
14. Keep asking yourself: what is the story REALLY about?
15. Get good natural sound.
16. Experiment and take risks.
17. Capture more b-roll than you think you need.
18. When the eye and the ear compete, the eye wins.
19. Better to coach writers than fix broken stories.
20. Reports are about information; stories are about experience.
21. Arrive early, stay late.
22. Don’t let the powerful answer in the passive voice: “Mistakes were made.”
23. The best quote often comes after the reporter closes the notebook.
24. Journalism is a discipline of verification, not assertion.
25. Good writing is not magic, it’s a process.
26. Great journalism comes at the intersection of craft and opportunity.
27. Take responsibility for what readers know and understand.
28. Each reader brings an autobiography with them to a story.
29. In a nut graph, it’s not the graph that’s important, but the nut.
30. Place the emphatic word in a sentence at the end.
31. The antidote to procrastination is rehearsal.
32. Show AND tell.
33. Get a good quote high in the story.
34. Express your most important idea in the shortest sentence.
35. The most powerful form of punctuation is white space.
36. Write early to learn what you still need to learn.
37. Tell the audience what you know—and how you know it.
38. Don’t just interview the boss, talk to the mechanic.
39. To find stories, take a different route home.
40. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Source: https://www.poynter.org/40-time-tested-tips-journalists-never-go-out-style
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
What Is Life?
What is Life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the Sunset."
Crowfoot....April 1890, on his deathbed
Information Overload is the Bane of my Life
My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet.
What can and should be ignored?
Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment?
Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge?
What do I hope to accomplish?
“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."
- Yuval Noah Harari
And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― The Marriage of Heaven and HellWednesday, February 22, 2017
Hallucinogenic drug helped problem drinkers
Nature
|
News
Retrospective analysis shows hallucinogenic drug helped problem drinkers.
DEA/Science Faction/Corbis
An analysis of old studies suggests LSD may have a role to play in treating alcoholism.
The study1, by neuroscientist Teri Krebs and clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, is the first-ever quantitative meta-analysis of LSD–alcoholism clinical trials. The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo.
Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who received a placebo.
“We were surprised that the effect was so clear and consistent,” says Krebs. She says that the problem with most studies done at that time was that there were too few participants, which limited statistical power. “But when you combine the data in a meta-analysis, we have more than 500 patients and there is definitely an effect,” she says.
In general, the reported benefits lasted three to six months. Their findings are published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Psychedelics were promoted by psychiatrists in the 1950s as having a range of medical uses — to treat conditions such as schizophrenia, for example — before political pressures in the United States and elsewhere largely ended the work.
“Alcoholism was considered one of the most promising clinical applications for LSD,” says Johansen.
Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson is said to have espoused the benefits of LSD
in the book Pass It On: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the AA Message Reached the World.
In the last decade or so, however, a new generation of researchers have been interested in harnessing the therapeutic benefits of illicit drugs — such as (MDMA or ecstasy) 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder, ayahuasca for drug and alcohol dependency, and psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, for smoking cessation.
The snow globe of perception?
How psychedelics exert such effects, especially after a single dose, remains unclear. LSD and its chemical cousins share structural similarities with the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is linked to many aspects of mood, memory and pleasure. These psychedelics also bind the same receptor sites in the brain as serotonin, but there the similarity may end — studies have shown that the hallucinogens elicit chemical cascades different from other compounds that bind at the same receptor2. To complicate matters further, LSD also acts at other receptors3.For the moment, studying human behavioural responses rather than brain chemistry may be more helpful in understanding how the drugs work.
Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychopharmacologist at Imperial College London who has researched how psilocybin could treat depression, says that psychedelics must work at both biological and psychological levels. “Psychedelics probably work in addiction by making the brain function more chaotically for a period — a bit like shaking up a snow globe — weakening reinforced brain connections and dynamics,” he says.
Roland Griffiths, a behavioural biologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, is investigating the influence of psilocybin on smoking cessation, and says that psychedelics sometimes give rise to distinctive, insightful experiences that can produce enduring positive changes in attitude, mood and behaviour.
“This is impressive and important work,” says Matthew Johnson, a psychiatrist also at Johns Hopkins University who is now running a small trial looking at the effectiveness of psilocybin to treat nicotine addiction.
“Although this meta-analysis does not replace the need to test the approach in new, well-designed and rigorous clinical trials, it puts some more muscle behind the interpretation that the older literature shows hints that psychedelic therapy might really help addiction.”
However, Ken Checinski, a consultant addiction psychiatrist and independent researcher based in London, says that although the results are exciting, no pharmacological treatment should be seen as a magic bullet and that modern therapeutic techniques have improved.
“The included LSD trials pre-date the use of psychological techniques such as motivational interviewing and cognitive behaviour therapy,” he says.
- Nature
- doi:10.1038/nature.2012.10200
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