Slashdot Mirror
The Social Life Of Information
The Scenario
Hemos keeps handing me these books about how information technology is shaping our lives, how the digital is leaving an indelible stamp on the analog. What Brown and Duguid have done is write a refreshing reminder that no matter how it seems, it's the analog that shapes the digital, and social systems that are steering the way we use computers. I know, it sounds like talking-head crap, but the authors are from PARC, which is not really a place where people go to sit on their hands or be flighty.
Here are some of the pithy issues raised in The Social Life of Information:
- Agents -- the technology for artifical intelligence agents keeps improving, but the social structure for them is staying put. Who controls these agents? Do we really expect Amazon to have our best interests at heart? There are already agents that go through and reap information on you for nefarious purposes; who is going to develop protection agents?
- Telecommuting -- why hasn't telecommuting taken off like we thought it would? Where are the hordes of people working happily at home? Despite the myth of the lone hacker working away, we all know that our best tricks are usually gleaned from some keyboarding compatriot who shows us a thing or two. This is true in almost every other field as well. Even given two people of equal skill, their output is usually more than the sum of their efforts. There is something to be said for working in meatspace.
- Process vs. practice -- why is it that when we try encapsulate something in documentation, it always falls short? We've all had someone hand us a manual outlining some practice that ends up propping up an uneven table. It's also common wisdom that the best way to learn how to code is to actually start writing some code. Do you think this is unique to the computer profession?
- Newspaper -- why is it that newspaper still persists when there are a host of other, more interactive ways we can absorb the news? Newspaper has resisted the attacks of televison news, but will it be able to do the same with news provided by computer? This is a great example of how social systems colliding with technological systems at the point where information is disseminated. Newspaper is a great technology in many ways (yes, newspaper is a technology), but there is a constant pressure to come up with an alternative to it.
- Education -- why does the university continue to exist? Will information technology put the final nail in the coffin of the ol' university? Not damned likely. I get my share of ribbing from the Slashdot crew about being an academic, and I think there is rightfully some skepticism in the tech sector about the value of higher education. The university system has been around for more than a thousand years, and the authors of this book put their fingers right on why it is still a successful organism, one that is growing rather than dying out. Here's the secret: You don't go to a place of higher education for the courses, you go in order to hang out with like-minded people. That is hard to replicate on the Web, and "community" has become the buzzword that "portal" was 15 minutes ago. Who cares what classes I take as a graduate student? What's important is working with people who are interested in the same questions.
The central theme of this book, never overtly spelled out by the authors, for better or worse, is that Human interaction revolves around issues of trust, and trust in the anonymous computer realm is hard (but not impossible) to come by. Reputation systems are an important components of that, but in reality we judge the trustworthiness of a person on a million different factors, and it is hard to code that many different variables. A firm handshake, a shared joke, social capital, and a legion more of these nearly imperceptible cues allows us to work together. We're an overblown troop of monkeys in some ways, and would be foolish to deny that we're hardwired for these kinds of judgments.
What Duguid and Brown point out is that we ignore our monkey-ness when designing systems that are intended to replace face to face, human interaction. As my Uncle Bob once told me, "Embrace that monkey!" Keep in mind when designing your systems what invisible threads you are missing.
What's Bad?Like in most books of this kind, I really had hoped for more hard statistics. Sometimes the authors make some statement about the shape of the universe that seems plausible enough, but I wonder would it hold up to the cold light of descriptive statistics. Still, it's not really the job of this book to provide information like this, and I'm just being a cranky pseudo-scientist. The only other thing that rubbed me the sandpaper way was a little repetition of the theme. A couple of chapters could have been reduced into one.
What's Good?
Technically speaking, the writing is efficient and readable, with lots of fine examples and an easy progression that makes this a quick and enjoyable read. This is something that would go very quickly as a free time read, and since the chapters are fairly autonomous, you can make it one of those books you just crank a few pages through before you fall asleep and absorb the meaning.
On the content side, this book is fantastic. I would like to buy a few dozen copies and pass them out in airports while I wear saffron robes. Or leave them in hotel rooms Gideon style. It's a vindication for a small, yet vocal, community of people who have addressed these issues is the past, while not blaming or talking down to the people who have refused to include the human in their design. It also gives some practical advice for people who would like to examine information from a more holistic point of view, including how to introduce a new technology into an already existing social system (Alexander Graham Bell did this). The Social Life of Information is one of those rare books that informs without preaching, advocates without subjecting, and entertains without pandering. It is a smart attempt at stepping away from the technological roller coaster (without getting out of line) and seeing how the social systems enveloping the technology batter it about. This is an important read for any person involved in information technology to read.
So What's In It For Me?
Hopefull, some humility. It is one thing to create brilliant technological systems, it is another to get people to use them. Despite the crap we usually give marketing guys, they instinctively understand some of these points. It also has a message for the Open Source movement. Often, an open source project fails because it does not adequately account for the social factors surrounding it. What are the social bits and pieces that surround a project that is trying to produce open source software?
I'm a little giddy from my tech high these days. Think of this book as intellectual and creative caffeine. A hundred ideas for projects must be outlined in my margin notes on this book. This book at the same time will reaffirm what you do, and debunk it. If you can take the cold dash of reflection, you'll be better off for it.
Other important links ...
Buy this fine text at ThinkGeek. Also, check out the Web site dedicated to this book. There's always a site for a book like this these days. You may also want to read an earlier John Seeley Brown deal called The Social Life of a Document.
Hemos better be off for a while on his honeymoon, so you don't have to worry about him giving you any more books containing weak memes that induce "Oops! Brain Panic!"
And if he isn't: Shame on you! Working when you should be rolling in the sand on some carribean island! For shame!
.sig: Now legally binding!
And learn to get your own food, do your laundry,
find a companion, and be about 80%-100% responsible for yourself.
Actually, the first colleges were just ways to get you to RTFM. Yup, just to read the books and writings.
...
Then they found out that talking about the ideas in a group helped people learn. Kind of like hanging out with friends and going over the material.
The main thing is to get you to focus and to think about it, as well as hear other viewpoints on it.
Plus, if you get free bheer, you might have free code
Will in Seattle
I have to disagree - to understand your own position, you should only speak to like-minded people, collectively branding anyone who disagrees with you an idiot and a heretic.
The great thing about this is that while your philosophy demands that you try to see my point of view, my philisophy makes no such demands, leaving me free to give you the finger. And while you're standing with your face screwed up trying to work out the recursive paradoxical implications of opposing your own opinion, I can steal your wallet.
Never let your schooling interfere with your education!!!!
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Credit is possibly the worst way you could possibly "survive". Just live within your means, and you will be much happier. Even if you can't get that forest green Explorer like 10 of the neighbors have.
"the things you own, end up owning you..." -quote from the Pro-Fascism hit of the year; Fight Club. Pretty awkward and kludgy movie, pretty damn hypocrytical too, what with Brad Pitt being the voice of anarchy, rebellion, anti-pop culture and anti-commercialism. Good quote fodder though.
These, of course, must have obviously been rich gringo kids, in the good old U. S. of A., where undergrad education is bafflingly bad, yet even more bafflingly expensive. It is easy to say crap like this when you don't have to work for a living, 40 hours a week in 2 crappy part-time jobs while doing 16 units a semester, all the while accumulating debt and, worse, having to stand a few jackass rich frat boys having a 4-year paid vacation, courtesy of Poppy CEO.
I'm genuinely sorry for the couple of guys who posted that they are in debt for going to college. Nobody should have to be in that situation to study.
In most industrialized nations, college education is either very cheap or free, and the education is actually better for undergrad degrees. (Grad degrees are a different matter; here the US is better, but then at an even higher price.)
Even in many 3rd world countries (Mexico comes to mind), the state universities have a mandate to keep study costs low, so people from the whole social spectrum can go to college.
Are you adequate?
You should read Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion , an excellent book which discusses consciousness and social interaction in terms of information theory. Norretranders argues that the bandwidth of consciousness is several orders of magnitude lower than the bandwidth of sensory experience, so when we take the subconscious elements away from a conversation (for example, when we have the same conversation on IRC instead of on the telephone, or face to face) we leave the brain starved of information and unable to feel empathy for the person we are conversing with.
So now I feel compelled to get this book and read it over the summer... Thanks, /.
Hope you learn something.
Transhumanism: Sitting around waiting for AI and technology to magically come to life to solve everyone's problems.
Luddite: Sitting around bitching that AI and technology hasn't solved everyone's problems.
I hate to rain on the exremists' parade, but tech is a tool and can be controlled by legislation. The problem as usual is the wants of the powerless compared to the wants of the powerful.
I still haven't found a keyboard that can clean up after my neighbor's puppy the way stale news can, or can be used in the worm bin, or can be shredded to make cool balloon-headed fish to hang from the ceiling.
Information doesn't just want to be free.
Information wants to be free to serve.
Jouni
--
Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
Not everyone probably condones drinking, but it's a fact: getting drunk out of your minds with others creates social bonds (not to mention the off-chance of getting laid.) If you put a bunch of drunk physicists together, they'll ramble about physics. It's actually a great way to produce off-the-walls ideas.
My favorite drunken memory was arguing vehemently about whether or not addition was metaphysically inductive or deductive, while being hit on by a beauty from the Liberal Arts dept.
Plus, seeing one of the rising stars of mathematical physics so drunk he was playing Spiderman on the wall makes for vivid memories and a welcomed dose of humility.
it means about as much as `information wants to be free`.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Leaving aside the question of the actual definition of "information" (which has technical meaning, btw), let's look at "meaning".
Why does "meaning" require observation and analysis? For instance, consider genetics. In particular, let's think about a strand of DNA that encodes for, say blue hair. It can be translated (in fact, it IS translated in the making of the blue hair), it can be interpreted (again, it IS interpreted), etc--all without any observer or analyst. The DNA strand means "blue hair". The strand has "meaning".
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
This sig is worse than my last.
While I support technology, I have come to the conclusion that oppressive technology and information (credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc) must be destroyed, blocked, or circumvented in order for any real social progress to occur.
O-kay. Not to dump on specifically you or anything, but anytime anyone starts talking about "bettering humanity", "making social progress", or "reviving the moral majority" or other vague garbage just gets my dander up.
Mao thought the Cultural Revolution was social progress; he'd definitely agree with your anti-technology stand.
Ted Kaczynski sound familiar to anyone? Please tell me you're not working on a Manifesto...
I could go on with other examples, but they all share a common trait: they all got to a self-righteous point where "progress" called for extreme measures.
Or as Kissinger succinctly put it, It's not the selfish people in the world that scare me, it's the righteous ones.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
As for the DNA strand "meaning" blue hair - sorry, but DNA is just a bunch of nucleic acids on a base. The DNA strand "becomes" blue hair because the messenger RNA creates a negative template and then creates the protein which signals the body to turn on the mechanism for making hair blue.
That mnakes 3 observers, by my count. The reader, the protein processor, and the blue hair generator.
=SOME= information is dependent on context, and DNA is one such piece of information. Other pieces are truly independent. The Mandelbrot Set, for example, does not depend on who looks at it, to be a fractal. THAT information is truly independent.
What, then, is the difference? IMHO, if it's implementation-specific, the chances are that there is a part of the implementation which involves an "observer". If it's NOT, then an observer is not required.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IMHO, this book is saying that our artificial systems are currently limited in their ability to mimic real systems. Apart from a chemical bias, as in "carbon is better than silicon", the other explanation is we haven't reached the technological endpoint (nor can we even see it yet.) Bell didn't seem to believe that the telephone would replace face to face communication only supplement it and possibly enhance it's possibilities. I never would have courted (by visiting and talking to ) my ex-wife if I hadn't talked to her on the phone first (okay bad example). I can now correspond with many more people via email than even a few years ago. I think all this technology is great. Have we reached the end yet, no. Can we still revel in getting there, you bet!!!
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Some of these ideas and thoughts are really great, but it's really quite simple how and why societies adopt methods of doing things.
The point was raised about telecommuting. Telecommuting is not extremely popular for several reasons.
1 - It's new.
2 - Companies can't keep an eye on their employees to make sure they're actually working
3 - Many niggling things crop up. Even as a network engineer and system administrator, doing my job would have been more difficult from home. Sometimes you have to be at a machine physically if there's a problem. Sometimes hard copies go around that you need to see - and who wants to scan or fax everything to you when they can just hand it to the rest of the employees? Plus there are the legal aspects -- can I claim my PC and 1/3rd of my home and bills as work expenses?
These things contribute to the fact that telecommuting is in most implementations, at the very least, a hassle. But what really counts is perception. If your Boss perceives that telecommuting is a viable solution, you will be able to telecommute. The more people perceive telecommuting as a viable solution, the more people actually implement it. Seeing other companies implement telecommuting is one way to spread the perception of its viability
Newspapers. There are many reasons people still read them.
1. It's old, it's been done, it works (contrary to New things; see above). People perceive it as a proven technology and as a proven business model.
2. Screens suck for comfortable reading. If you work at a computer all day, you probably get sore eyes. Even with my 21" monitor and the brains to put my monitor at the correct angle, right refresh, etc etc., my eyes still get fatigued by staring at a computer screen for extended lengths of time. Newspapers are easy on the eyes.
3. Portability. Can't beat a newspaper.
4. Cheap. Disposable. 1001 uses for a dead newspaper; lining the birdcage, wrapping stuff for shipping, art projects, etc etc.
Newspapers are a part of most people's life because they grew up with them, and they're comfortable getting that newspaper.
As more people 'defect' to online news sources, or to television, the perception of newspapers will change. As online news sources become more reliable and accurate, more visible, and perceived as 'trustworthy', a shift will occur. Newspapers may never die totally, but the cost of producing them as subscribers decline will severely hamper them. You maintain a complete staff to put out x pages of quality newsprint, regardless of how many copies you print.
The internet is still in its infancy. When 99% of the U.S. is broadband-connected and have a PC at home for every person, really radical changes will occur.
Until then, word of mouth and eyewitness testimony contribute mostly to what people 'perceive' as what they think is normal and comfortable. Why do most people in the States eat with silverware? Because they perceive it's correct and normal. Many things are deep-rooted in our social conscious, and we bank on precedent because it's comfortable.
Comfort -- with what we want and what we perceive as 'normal' based on what other people do. New things come about because some people are willing to go through the discomfort of being first adopters.
Everything we do is about and for people. Whether it's ourselves, our neighbors, or our descendants. Information without people is just a pattern without an observer. Whatever changes happen to our society because we digest, process, and produce information more quickly -- just because we use a different machine to do it -- will happen at its own pace and in its own way because of the early adopters who suffer and champion, and the secondary adopters who proselytize and spread the perception to others.
While I support technology, I have come to the conclusion that oppressive technology and information (credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc) must be destroyed, blocked, or circumvented in order for any real social progress to occur.
OK, maybe I'm reading this too simplistically, but what I get from this sentence is that you think consequences for a person's actions are the real culprit here.
Tracking information? OK, I'll give you that one. I'm not too fond of having my web history (not that it'd be all that interesting... you could sum it up with slashdot.org, espn.com, cnn.com and hokiecentral.com) passed around like a left-over newspaper on the morning train.
But destroying "oppressive information" like credit-card debt, prison histories, etc.? That's simply a record of consequences for an individual's actions. If you were dumb enough to spend yourself into a hole (and I have plenty of friends who are), you need to either pay it off or accept the consequences of a bankruptcy filing. Prison history? Commit a crime, do the time, and then an employer still should be able to know before s/he hires a shoplifter as cashier at a store.
Banning "oppressive information" is just calling for mandated happytalk, not anarchy. If you think anarchy would be a good thing, then you ought to be fighting against rules like this.
And banning consequences for people's actions? Guarantee of societal decay. Plain and simple. It's a peculiar commonality between anarchists and old-time Communists: their vision that people would act for the common good if allowed to do so, rather than their own personal good. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way in the real world.
uh cellphone screens are TINY. What we really need is compact, portable web pads. If I could actually access the web while on the bus from my web pad, I would have no need for a newspaper. But until then, a newspaper provides the most convient source of news when im on the go.
Ha! I didn't get laid until I was nearly 29, didn't drink that much in college, and paid for it with grants and student loans, which I now have to pay back.
You obviously went to the wrong school!
I was in the college of engineering at the University of Illinois (in Champaign-Urbana), not an environment that one would think of as "sex, drugs, rock and roll and no consiquences for four years." Nevertheless, I and many people I know had far more than our share of those, and many other, pleasurable vices.
It is a lifestyle I miss sorely now that I'm in the real world, despite enjoying a lifestyle I could never have afforded on a college budget.
Of course, I too paid for school with grants and student loans which I am still paying back.
:-)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
ISTR Richard Feynman on the BBC interview he did many years ago telling a story about his father, Melvil (sp?)
Basically, Melvil couldn't swim. But one day he read a book on swimming, and then went down to the sea and swam about 20 yards. The point, which was not lost on his children, was that you could learn to do stuff by reading a book.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I'm with you on this one. The poster I responded to was calling for the "destruction" of "oppressive information" like CC debt. My point was that if you do the deed, you've gotta pay the piper. Don't credit-card yourself into oblivion and then say "oh, we've got to destroy oppressive information like credit-card debt." That's just abdicating personal responsibility for your own actions.
Depends on what subject you take. If you're just doing a degree to say "I've got a degree, so I'm obviously at a certain level of intelligence", as required to be a lawyer/accountant, etc., then your degree has no value. So long as you scrape through the exams, it doesn't matter if none of it sunk in and you spent all your time pissing up the wall.
But if you went to college/uni to study engineering/science, where you have to _learn_ stuff so that you can use it later on - if you got rid of them then you'd be in a world of hurt. You think you'd have your PCs without the skill of the designers? And d'you think chip and mobo designers "just happen"? They've spent years at uni doing courses in electronics to learn how to design this gear. Mind you, it's only the start - you can never stop learning - but it's a prerequisite to work in the industry. If you didn't have that, each company would have to train its employees from scratch, and if you're doing that then where do you stop? Do you have to start by teaching them to read?! Sci/tech degrees ensure that folks working in the industry have certain key skills.
The software community under the blissful illusion that anyone can do it without any training, and to a certain extent that's right. But this is only true for the 'easy' area of PC applications, user interfaces, etc. When you get into embedded systems where one mistake could mean someone dying, you'd better hope to god that the guys involved know what they're doing. An enthusiastic amateur is fine if all you're doing is a file system - if the shit hits the fan, you can always release a patch. But if it's a life-support system, the last think you want is J. Random Hacker working on it - if it goes wrong, PEOPLE DIE, and you can't release a patch for that!
So if anyone says that colleges could be done away with, I'd agree with them for a lot of courses like art, philosophy, literature, history, women's studies, sport, etc, etc. But when it comes to engineering, I'd say they've got their head up their arse.
Grab.
I tend to believe that the only reason that it is so much simpler to go up and talk to someone is because most people are more used to it.
I don't agree; I think it's a latency issue. It's more difficult to have a telephone conversation with an antipodean than with your next-door neighbour. You can't exchange sentences as you normally do because the same pauses in conversation occur at different times for each of you. You compensate for this, and the exchange becomes laboured. With email, you compensate even more (grouping points of discussion together in a batch).
You wouldn't paint a picture by closing your eyes, painting a few strokes, opening your eyes and examining what you've done, closing them again and making a few more strokes, etc. Why would you want to brainstorm this way?
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I agree. I'm much more comfortable spilling McDonald's Sweet & Sour Sauce all over the front page of a newspaper than on the keyboard of my Vaio. Also, I've had concepts that I simply could not grasp after reading hours of documentation, explained to me in literally two sentences.
It's nice to read this kind of article. It isn't written from any doomsday perspective, doesn't hate technology, and manages to show us pretty convincingly that we're still the masters of our technology, rather than the other way around.
In conclusion, although we're certain to devolve into some hideous borg-like species whose survival is intrinsicly tied with its technology, that hasn't happened yet, except to Signal 11.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I put the Extropian Principles and the Unabomber's Manifesto right here.
You didn't mention alcohole :-)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The DNA does not mean blue hair.
The DNA infers blue hair
DNA -> Blue Hair
not
DNA = Blue Hair
Meaning: noun, Recursive Quantifier; See Meaning
Leaving aside the question of the actual definition of "information" (which has technical meaning, btw), let's look at "meaning".
Let's not leave info behind just yet. Information has been defined variously by cybernetics, communications theory, and philosophy. One of the explanations I like best is Brenda Dervin's; she looks at info as what human beings use to overcome gaps in their perception and knowledge of the world. She calls this "sense making". One of the reasons I like this approach is it edges away from hard-etched definitions, math- and sci-derived definitions, which can tend to confuse the issue. I think sometimes we expect the term information to encompass too much, from census data to DNA to the contents of a library; by reserving the term for human beings' perceptual and social activities, we might be able to understand it a bit better.
That said, there is also the issue of information versus knowledge. Which would you rather have?
Back to the original question. Meaning is what you or I grant to the information. That's how I understand Brown and Duguid's title, anyway: meaning is the social context of info. The DNA "means" blue hair to you; on its own, it's just a bunch of proteins.
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this is not my beautiful wife. TH
John Seely Brown is the chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation, and until recently was the Director (head honcho) of PARC. (The Director is now Michael Paige). The other author is not a PARC researcher.
/ index.html
Duguid was a PARC consultant at the time that he and Brown started working together. There are author's notes on their preliminary essay at: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue1/documents
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this is not my beautiful wife. TH
That's short-sighted thinking. The technical degrees teach a lot of information that is based on recent developments. But philosophy students still study Plato*. What this means is that the skills taught in humanities are timeless. Therefore they should be better at adapting to massive paradigm shifts that send all the engineers back to school.
Also, law schools don't just want the undergraduate degrees to weed their applicant pool -- they could do that to a more satisfying degree in a single year of school. They require their applicants (and they must demonstrate this on the LSAT) to have some minimum level of critical thinking skills. The theory is that this is taught by every undergraduate course, no matter what subject you're critically thinking about.
And before you flame, I might note I'm currently pursuing a Computer Science & Philosophy joint-BSc. I urge everyone to do something similar whether fitting them both into an undergraduate degree, getting a college diploma, or just doing some in-depth reading on their own. I'm pretty confident that I could teach myself the content of my programming courses, but the mathematics and philosophy is what I'm in school for.
* Mind you, I'd love to study Babbage, but I'm forced to do it on my own time. :(
Now I'm a big fan of the "university experience" myself; so much so that I went to a school (Trent) that was modeled on the Cambridge and Oxford system. But lots of students arrive every year that simply don't belong there. Perhaps everyone should be entitled to a post-secondary education, but that shouldn't be limited to the university atmosphere.
Colleges are always complaining that guidance counselors try and send everyone to university. Some of these people would get more satisfaction out of a concrete diploma rather than an abstract degree (while saving money, of course). High schools should be teaching critical thinking so that people shouldn't have to spend 4 specialised years getting it. On the other hand, there's many positions that would benefit from people with more abstract skills.
As much fun as the drinking and sex is, the actual lectures can be pretty damn interesting, from time to time.
I dunno, maybe it's jsut me...
Working for the (other) man
A string of Os and 1s, no matter how carefully
modulated, means nothing unless it is eventually channeled, observed and understood by a recipient
</QUOTE>
So if a stream fails in the forest and no one hears, there is no sound. Wow, I've been wondering about that for some time now I know.
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Here's the secret: You don't go to a place of higher education for the courses, you go in order to hang out with like-minded people.
And to drink beer with them.
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But us geeks, especially the old timers who started with 110buad, then to 300, then 1200, up to 56k have higher reading speeds from keeping up with increasing modem speed. We can read at over 1k words/minute, but most people speak
Fight Spammers!
Also funny to look back on everything they all get wrong.....
I'm gonna check this out.
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Of course the analog shapes the digital! The silly talk occasionally bandied about concerning the death of universities in favor of some digital alternative illustrates this perfectly.
How so? I learned as a youngster that universities will always be with us. Growing up in an age of (to paraphrase Austin Powers) sex, drugs, and a consequence-free environment gives me a more basic view of the social role of college. And there's no way that role can be supplanted by anything online.
Let me make the point another way. When I was a senior in high school, there was a drama teacher who would counsel students who were sharp enough for college but considering not going because they seemed to have some sort of short-term employment opportunities that were drawing them. If the guidance counselor failed to persuade them to go to college, this drama teacher would call them aside for "the talk." "The talk" went, roughly: "Look, dumbass, college is four years of unlimited sex and alcohol paid for by your parents. Are you really stupid enough to NOT go?"
Every single student he counseled, IIRC, decided to go to college.
Now, show me the online university that can match that sales pitch!
I reiterate: The analog shapes, controls, and provides the sole justification for the existence of the digital.
The book sounds worth reading. I'll have to look for it.
Telecommuting -- why hasn't telecommuting taken off like we thought it would? Where are the hordes of people working happily at home? Despite the myth of the lone hacker working away, we all know that our best tricks are usually gleaned from some keyboarding compatriot who shows us a thing or two.
Mainly because one of the biggest challenges on any team is communication: making sure everyone understands what they are supposed to do. Communication is somewhat easier in person that over the phone or through email, and it has a more dynamic quality: I can wander by someone's desk, glance at what's going on and either say "wow, show me how you did that!" or "wait a minute, are you sure that's a good idea?" When people work off site, you tend to get less frequent interactions: they go off and work for a long while then send something in.
I think the author fails to see that the reason computers and the Internet have become what they are is the ease with which they facilitate human interaction. It's similar to chicken and egg: the internet evolved and now we need to look at the human interaction with it, or was it that human need to interact facilitated the Internet. The author needs to look at the human drive to be social.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
but last I checked, we human's tend to use 0's and 1's, instead of O's and 1's to represent binary. :-)
Go on, moderate me down. It's pretty bad, though, when I can't read one paragraph in SlashDot without finding several quite careless mistakes. If you think this is no big deal, try using Netscape, and see if the programmers found some bugs to be "no big deal" as well!
Alright, I'm offtopic now. Go on, take the karma...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
You'd also think that most readers were enlightened enough to offer contrary viewpoints WITHOUT feeling a need to put down the views of others.
Lastly, you'd also think that readers could dispense with the absolutes. Absolutes generally aren't, and there are more exceptions than rules.
As for information existing in a vaccuum, some does and some doesn't. If you want to claim that ALL information exists in a vaccuum, you might want to tell me how long the coastline of America is. Absolutely. If you can, you'll have disproved Mandelbrot's claim that it depends on the observer's ruler, and have falsified the entire basis of fractals and chaos theory.
You might also want to tell me the speed and direction of a sub-atomic particle of your choice. Again, if information exists in a vaccuum, and is in no way affected by an observer, this should be easy.
But these kinds of information AREN'T easy to seperate from observers, are they? It's easy to make absolute statements, as though everything in the Universe would obey them as Divine Laws.
Unfortunately, for human egos, the Universe has a tendancy to give the Agincourt Salute to such pretensions of grandeour, and exist in whatever mishmash of ways it damn well feels like.
Last, but not least, is your computer a solid object? To you, sure! But to the billions of neutrinos, that blithely ignore the repulsion of the electron shell, maybe not.
On another level, matter is energy. It's not merely equal to it (E=MC^2), but is a condensed form. What, then, distinguishes an observer from the observed? They're just different configurations of energy, after all.
Before you tell someone their view is wrong, stop to ask if there -is- any validity to what they are saying. After all, if there isn't, flamers and trolls would never have the incentive to behave as they do. Trolls are, because they're too cowardly to accept that others might have something right.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"However, quantum physics (up to this point) would seem to differ."
Only if you subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation--which I don't. In fact, this is one of the reasons.
"That mnakes 3 observers, by my count. The reader, the protein processor, and the blue hair generator."
OK, yes. "Observers" in the sense of "entities that have data input into them". But I was refuting someone who was claiming that sentient observers were necessary--of which there are none in your list.
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Why are we so intent on replacing newspapers when they are the most effective medium for news?
I disconcurr that they are the most effective medium. Here's my rant: Like all media, newspapers need to be profitable. No surprise, this is accomplished by having more revenue than expenditures. For newspapers this formula causes a variety of problems:
1. Percent of non-content expenditure is high. Every day my newspaper spends x dollars... and x is a very big number indeed. Most of that x goes to paying for non-content stuff. If you add up how much is spent on journalists (plus their support expenses) and wire service and photographers and then compare that to how much is spent on production personnnel, consumables (ink, paper, film etc), sales and support staff, distribution (moving 250,000 newspapers in vans!), promo, marketing, exec yatta yatta... you find out that less than 10% of expenditures is spent on developing content! This is not an effective way to get the news out.
2. Revenue requirements demand a mass market. Any newspaper with less than 100,000 sales is doomed. There just won't be enough readers to support ad revenue. So how does a newspaper maintain readership levels? By stampedeing to the Lowest Common Denominator. The content is kept easy (grade 8 reading level), short (those gen X-ers hate to read more than 200 words... witness the fact you've given up on this post already) and only cover topics perceived as having the widest appeal. That, my friend, is low-quality content.
3. It's plain just not efficient. Our paper runs three Sun E300s, a 220R and a small boatload of sparc 10s as servers. We have 250ish clients (65 of which are yosemite-or-better macs. Not cheap). More than enough computing power to put up a hefty news www site. If that were done, we would eliminate the cost of production and distro (there are more people designing ads than writing news, btw) allowing for either a) more news or b) more profit.
With one glance at the Washington Post while I'm buying coffee at 7-11
7-11 coffee? DC is a tough town! It's true that consumer convenience is the primary reason for the continuance of the newspaper... a point succinctly made by our former publisher "If we weren't a tabloid, we'd be out of business"... in reference to being easy to read on the bus. The biggest thing keeping papers around is that it is portable, cheap and universally accessible. A computer weighs 10kg, costs $1000+ and sits on your desk. But with the recent "day-trade-on-your-cellphone" tech front opening up, it's only a matter of time before the electronic media catch up in that dept.... and a cellphone is even easier to read on the bus than a tabloid!
2 1337 4 u!
Technology often doesn't work the way it is expected to because the technologists often make fatally flawed assumptions about the end user or about the way end users will interact with the technology. This is even true of most of the software that, at least in the advertising hype, is designed with the user in mind. A lot of sweet technology is sweet, but of little or no interest or use to non-techies. We can all name any number of heavily hyped, truly cool tech products that failed because they were cool but not much use or sometimes were just useless to anyone but techies.
Perhaps the key point in the book is that people working together is a fundamentally social activity and that technology must be designed with that in mind. Technology that seeks to limit or control the social aspects of work will fail or prove to be counter-productive. This insight runs counter to almost all 20th century management guru thinking, especially the sort found on the best seller list. A second point that the book drives home again, and we (or certainly the media) do seem to need constant reminding of, hype isn't reality and anything that everyone agrees is the next thing, probably itsn't and even if it is, it probably won't turn out to be all its cracked up to be.
Closing thought: one of the things that makes the internet generally different from many commerical tech system implementations is that it actually promotes or facilitates communication in a very open and robust way. It does so because of design decisions made in the earliest days of arpanet, many of which run directly counter to the closed/proprietary models of most technology vendors. (A point I don't recall Brown and Selig making.)
Just a quickie - I don't agree with the Copenhagen interpretation, I go in for the transactional interpretation instead, and I wasn't talking about sentient observers, although I suppose it could be taken that way. Gotta go home now though.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Despite my quibbles, I actually do agree that information is a social construct and requires observers. Without us to classify things, they just are.
Now, where we get our ability to assign meaning is one of the Big Questions. Maybe we are just part of the whole mess, but even then I suspect that we are missing a big piece of the picture. Issues like causality and the current moment are intimately caught up with who and what we are, and physics has done little with them except assume them as axioms. One might even argue that the experimental method depends on them, so to attack them some other epistomology is required.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
This feature of the universe "information" is one of the things that is still puzzling physics folk about black holes.
> The Mandelbrot Set just is.
Indeed, and so is any odd hydrogen atom until it falls across an event horizon. Then it is not, and that is the problem. According to current theory, the information about what fell in is lost. IF we watch a BH from its creation onward we can say X atoms of hydrogen, Y atoms of helium, etc. fell in - sooooo this BH is made up of those items. OTOH, if we watch one evaporate, we cannot determine what fell in. The features, composition, all the information about the matter and energy that was, no longer is.
All that is conserved by a BH is mass, charge, and angular momentum. Wouldn't it be odd if those "informational" items are all that really "matter"?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
This is a Good Book (TM), and well worth reading, and timothy 's writeup is solid. However, I was turned off initially by what I still consider to be an inexcusable failing of the book.
Per my standard practice, after cracking the spine, I went to first the ToC, then the back of the book -- the index. Entries for Microsoft, Apple, Xerox, PARC, IBM, Intel, Sun, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc., etc., etc.
Entries for: Linux, Free Software Foundation, GNU, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Open Source, Apache -- nil. Ponder this: how many pages are printed worldwide by Xerox copiers in a week? How many pages are served worldwide by Apache webservers in an hour? "The document company" is completely dissing the Internet -- the largest, most accessible, and most efficient document distribution system ever invented?
The fact that a book could be published in the year 2000 with no references to the largest sea-change to sweep computing and IT in two decades, well into its mainstream adoption curve, is mind boggling. I'm not sure whether it's a failing of the indexers (though I don't recall specific mentions of any free software technologies, though the 'Web is referenced once or twice), the authors, or simply an example of failed vision at PARC. I remain simply stunned.
That said, where the book does go, it's good. By and large, it's an argument for many of the dynamics which make free software work. FS is a social invention as much as a technical one, and as much as our interfacing occurs over the web, email, and (sometimes) phone, I've also met some good friends FTF at local LUGs, regional meetings, and on occasions when paths crossed, even when oceans were bounded in the process.
Read this book, but read it critically.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Another excellent analysis of this issue (why documentation can't begin to teach as well as hands-on instruction) can be found in Virginia Postrel's book The Future and Its Enemies. A great deal of the most relevant knowledge (about anything involving people, at least) is local and extremely difficult to discover and express (for example, knowing an org. chart will never tell you that the department head's cranky in the morning, so you'll do much better by going through her administrative assistant before that first cuppa joe). Manuals can't cover everything, and are usually only a first approximation of the most explicit and static information about the process or system or what-have-you at hand.
Hands-on information exchange provides feedback and the opportunity for discovery of those essential but not relevant-seeming details that are part of the practice of life. The application to universities (and the real-life tendency for researchers to have to visit labs that're trying to replicate their results) are obvious.
BTW, the book's a lively read.
_________________
Oh, INTERCOURSE the penguin! (Python tribute, not Linux knock)
Why are we so intent on replacing newspapers when they are the most effective medium for news?
Because newspapers aren't a medium for news. They're a medium for a lot of other things, and in the small amount of their square-footage they give to current events, they're normally a medium for distortion and propaganda.
And they're filtered down until so much information is removed that the "common man" can understand what's left - whether it's true or not, whether or not selective ommission amounts to a subtle lie. This makes them totally useless to the "uncommon man" - a tag which, on one subject or another, can be applied to nearly anyone.
Newspapers are being replaced by internet-based reporting because the internet lowers the barriers to entry. This means that current events reportage can be made with a variety of slants, not solely from those that appeal to the people with the money to own and operate the monopoly that is a chain of big-city newspapers, or a piece of the oligopoly that is the set of broadcast networks.
Though each reporter may use different colored filters as he views current events, combining enough colored images can give a clear picture.
And you can't enforce selective ommission when anybody can play - because SOMEBODY will find "the other side" interesting enough to report.
News reporting has been in decline for about a half century, as a combination of economic forces, government intervention, and social activism has limited both the number of viewpoints and the amount of coverage. The internet has now changed the game.
Newspapers can drastically remake themselves - along the line of their claimed ideals - to stay in the game. Or they can survive by filling some other need than delivering news.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Of course these information facilities can be grossly abused, but I don't think it's necessarily that great a solution to simply abolish them. Am I misunderstanding your point of view here? Please explain.
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I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
The nature of data, or information I will attempt to describe from my POV -
Localisation of the probability of a particular state within a dimension or dimensions.
The "meaning" of things to us homo sapiens is just the localising of probability within billions of neurons. However I do not yet know any way of describing the localisation in a way that is helpful in analysing such systems so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Anyone who has taken any kind of creative writing class knows that the only way you get better at writing is to write. The only way you get better at running is to run, the only way you get good at X is to do X, it's a universal truth. Yeah, you can read all the books you want on something, but you are just a layman until you get out and write that first line of code, or that first line of verse, or run that first race.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
This shouldn't be marked "funny", it should be marked "insightful". I was going to post nearly the same thing (although not so succintly).
/. of all places, we could dispense with the "there is no objective reality except what culture teaches us" type crap.
Information can and DOES exist "in a vacuum". Yes, it has a social impact. That doesn't mean it is a purely social phenomenon. You'd think that, on
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I urge everybody out there (especially those of you who are transhumanists) to read the criticisms of technology and society put forth by John Zerzan, especially "Future Primitive and Other Essays".
His books will definitely make you think (sometimes at a price, a good chunk of his work has a tendency to really piss me off), and make you question the role of technology in current society.
I began reading his work because I am writing a series of essays on technology and it's role in revolutionary movements, specificially left anarchist and anti-authoritarian ones. I felt that if I were to understand my own position, I should understand the other side of the coin (kind of like reading Marx and Rand when you consider yourself an Anarchist, or the Bible when you consider yourself to be an atheist).
I can't say he made a convert of me (at least not yet), but I can say that he's brought up some very interesting points about technology and how it is used to control society. It's because of these viewpoints that my own viewpoints have been further radicalized. While I support technology, I have come to the conclusion that oppressive technology and information (credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc) must be destroyed, blocked, or circumvented in order for any real social progress to occur.
I'll elaborate more in the next few months, but I have to reiterate that Zerzan's writings, while sometimes infuriating, and not always perfectly coherent, are definitely worth reading.
Yes, you can get them at Amazon.com, but I would recommend that you, instead, support your local bookstore or anarchist infoshop.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
Even given two people of equal skill, their output is usually more than the sum of their efforts. There is something to be said for working in meatspace.
This is the exception, not the rule. In my experience, their output is usually much less than each of them working more-or-less individually, with a solid set of rules and guidelines.
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blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
The original poster said nothing about the observer being "sentient". You're just looking for an opportunity to act like a snot.
If a troll flames on slashdot, and no one reads it, is his post information or noise?
Think about this though.
You are on a team that has been assigned a rather complex project to be coded in C. Would you rather have someone on your team that knows C really well and has written some nifty utilities, or someone who has never even used C (or any language except MIX on a virtual machine :) but has studied design patterns and algorithm analysis.
Personally, I'd rather have the academic, because the guys who just know C really well are a dime a dozen.
Well, actually they are a lot more expensive than that, but they are common :)
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
A string of Os and 1s, no matter how carefully modulated, means nothing unless it is eventually channeled, observed and understood by a recipient
This is true, but...what does it mean?
Get your own Red Swingline Stapler
"To find the IQ of a committee, take the IQ of the lowest member and divide by the number of members."
Or to quote Dilbert (Alice to stupid co-worker): "*We* aren't better off when *you* work late."
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Data can exist in a vacuum, information is meaningful data and without some kind of observation and analysis it remains as data.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Process vs. practice: It's also common wisdom that the best way to learn how to code is to actually start writing some code. Do you think this is unique to the computer profession?
This question is borderline silly. Sheesh, where to begin? Well, first off, do you learn anything by simply reading? Let me guess, you drove to work today. And you didn't learn to drive by sitting around reading Driving for Dummies or Teach Yourself Automobiles. You got in the car in the parking lot and used the machine. Same goes for cooking: a cookbook does you no good if you can't have a kitchen in which to experiment. But, sure, the book will help. And would Strunk and White's Elements of Style be useful, unless you planned on actually implementing them, and trying to write on your own? Of course not.
So now I feel compelled to get this book and read it over the summer... Thanks, /.
Why are we so intent on replacing newspapers when they are the most effective medium for news? With one glance at the Washington Post while I'm buying coffee at 7-11 and see 6 headlines and comprehend them with a speed and accuracy I could never get with radio, TV, and 'push' content. Newspapers are a perfect example of top-down design: I can then descend into the first paragraph of each article, getting the gist, then down into the nitty-gritty details. This is also ignoring the reprehensible quality of television 'news'....
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.