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Obama Calls Today's Ubiquitous Gadgets and Information "a Distraction"
zaphod was one of several readers unhappy with the sentiment expressed in President Obama's graduation address to the students of Virginia's Hampton University, writing: "According to Obama, 'information becomes a distraction' when it comes to iPads, the Xbox, etc. (All items he admits not knowing how to use.) He's basically saying we are getting too much information too quickly, and from 'unreliable sources.' Of course, he's referring to talk radio, blogs and other mediums that tend to disagree with his political views."
CNET has a slightly different, less critical reaction, focusing on the differences among the actual devices named; they note that the Xbox is not an iPad.
Perhaps if his administration had the transparency he promised on the campaign trail, it would be easy to get the information people are seeking from credible, reliable sources.
Whether the President and his administration like it, this form of information sharing is very likely here to stay. Perhaps the best reaction would be to embrace it and use it as a positive differentiator from other administrations.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
'information becomes a distraction'
I think it's more accurately stated that 'information can be a distraction' but, you know, it can also be a very useful tool both in learning and communicating. Everyone can have a Facebook account and everyone can read blogs but the programmer that spends much of his time reading reading blogs about programming and uses Facebook only to keep up with his friends periodically is going to outpace the programmer that spends 90% of his time on Facebook and 5% of his time reading movie reviews on blogs.
So, by and large, it comes down to -- surprise surprise -- responsible time management. Yes, too much information via the internet and mobile devices is a double edged sword. I cannot keep up with the papers on arxiv but if I learn to manage my time and quickly recognize which papers are worth my time then it is very valuable to an academic. Or I could spend my time playing Farmville. Both occupy my time and can be distractions.
Information is a very powerful tool, no matter how much you want to blame the method and frequency of delivery it's ultimately up to you what you do with it. I read transcript and honestly I thought it was closer to this dualism than the summary lets on.
Of course, he's referring to talk radio, blogs and other mediums that tend to disagree with his political views.
I don't think so. He actually encourages reading both sides:
This development can be both good and bad for democracy. For if we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we will become more polarized and set in our ways. And that will only reinforce and even deepen the political divides in this country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.
For once the Slashdot summary seemed to be even more politically charged and biased than the actual politician. The correct message is to manage your time well and exercise caution. Sound advice actually.
My work here is dung.
He meant that as information becomes decentralized, the government cannot control its distribution. The Users become the Producers and Creators, and also their own Network. Dissent can become viral, and that buffoon Robert Gibbs can barely stamp out a cockroach let alone an Internet meme. The best education also entertains, and the most effective dissent begins with satire.
"It's OK to enjoy your Bread and Circuses, Americans," Obama concluded his speech. "Just be sure that they are government issue. Thank You and Good Night."
"What Jefferson recognized... that in the long run, their improbable experiment -- called America -- wouldn't work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn't have the best interests of all the people at heart."
Right on, and that is precisely the problem we have right now: most of the citizens do not care. People are not just unaware of the issues facing America and what their government is doing; they seem not to care about any of it at all.
Palm trees and 8
Obama wasn't calling out particular devices. 5 years ago it would gave been "laptops on wifi, iPods, MP3 players, Cellphones with net connections, Playstation and Nintendo mobile" Yes both iPods and mp3 players :) adds that presidential touch.
In any case he's warning an at risk group of university students to focus on their education rather than being distracted by always on media and Media.
These speeches aren't always 100% addressing the greatr society. Sometimes they specifically address the physical audience.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This was a graduation address, not a state of the union speech. He's not laying down policy here. He's speaking to a very specific audience (graduating students) about a very specific topic (transitioning from school to the workforce). This was not the preamble to new legislation, nor should it be misconstrued as such.
IMHO, Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness was a far more intrusive condemnation of how we spent our leisure time than this.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
I just find it funny, seeing as he was the one who wouldn't give up his Blackberry...
Careful. You're liable to get modded down by someone.
While there's some truth to what Obama says about being having so much information that it becomes a distraction (similar comments have been made about disclosure overload: everyone writes incredibly long, boring, impossible-to-parse "terms of service", "EULA", and other bits attached to products...), the original article does have a point about most people's definition of an "unreliable source" being "a source I don't agree with."
Obama's political opponents flourish in certain media. So it's in his best interest (while being rather divorced from honesty and reality) for him to call them names and tar them as "unreliable." Likewise, the media sections that do love Obama - such as the alphabet-soup media - are more than happy to not cover certain stories. And this follows from all walks of life, just not Obama. For instance, let's take the Israeli/Palestinian bit.
Did you know that within a week of signing the Oslo Accords, Yassir Arafat was back on Palestinian radio, comparing the Oslo Agreement to the Truce of Medina (whereby Mohammed the "prophet" entered into a 10-year truce, then broke it two years later because he figured his army was now big enough to win), calling Oslo "the great deception"? No? Why not? Probably because the alphabet-soup media was, at the time, invested in Oslo.
Did you know that the Waqf, the Palestinian "authority" on the squatter's mosque at "Al Aqsa", have been deliberately excavating and destroying irreplaceable archaeological artifacts from beneath the site? And why not? Again, the story's been buried.
Take the recent terrorist attack at Times Square. At 5pm that day, I was listening to ABC News, when they announced the search was on for a "40 year old white male" at the urging of the Obama administration. Whoops! You can find plenty of coverage of media spokesboobs talking about how they "didn't want" it to be what it clearly is: another taliban-type attack.
Information can indeed be distraction, but just as important is realizing that bias expresses itself in many forms. You can tag certain things with certain words - I freely admit I consider the Waqf to be illegitimate, from studying the history of the squatter's mosque, but others can freely feel differently. You can write tilted stories that blatantly misuse or misrepresent statistics. You can write "statistics" that have almost no connection to reality, due to bad sampling or tilted questions, and then quote them in a seemingly "neutral" piece "covering" the survey results. Or you can just bury a story entirely. Anyone who trusts one side's media or the other, exclusively, is setting themselves up for trouble.
the Truth becomes a distraction.
No longer can government officials just hide behind friends in the press (print/broadcast). Very much how blogs turned up the heat on big media in 2004 it was a signal that many in government failed to see, that is, we the people can watch you, we can report on you, and we will.
Hence the little "trial balloons" floated about going after blogs and their commercial associations (reviewing products, people, etc). Anything to get some leverage on the new free voice. Can't wait for the changes to election laws going after blogs.
Nah, the blogs are grassroots and grassroots are the one thing DC is having a problem with. Trying to counter with their SEIU fake gatherings to offset Tea Partiers got exposed by blogs, not the news media. Face it DC, you can lie through the press but the press won't be our main source going forward.
It also works well for the leaders of other countries, namely Iran. Technology may for the short time give the regular person the upper hand until it can regulated into oblivion
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I know that most governments are corrupt and all that, but did Obama really say anything wrong this time? He was addressing a group of students when he said that information overload and quickly accessible information can be distracting. You know what? He's right. I'm a student. I find video games, TV shows, Slashdot, overclocking forums, Linux forums, email, telephone, new software, Facebook notifications, to be hugely distracting. I would go so far as to say that I am mildly addicted to new, bite-sized pieces of information. It doesn't help that I already have ADHD - but the Internet and other computer-based media go a long way in keeping me off-track.
...Wow, did half of the posters here even read the article? Obama's not pro-censorship, he's not arguing that x-box's, twitter and facebook should be taken away:
"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,"
"some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction," in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets.
What Obama is saying, is that in this day and age of massive media coverage you shouldn't always believe what you read. He's encouraging the students to find alternate sources of information, to actually investigate something before spouting off and further propagating the Chinese Whisper... You know, basically what most of the people replying to this article did.
I agree with you that we have allowed the internet and entertainment media to distract us from our daily lives, but I believe that this is only half the problem posed by entertainment & informational technology.
The other half of the problem, as Obama perhaps tried to allude to but didn't quite fully specify, is that when we permit ourselves to be overloaded with information, but lack the expertise to evaluate its validity and worth, we are easily manipulated by lies, half-truths, and biased points-of-view. That's why we need news and media experts to help sort, highlight, and evaluate the information that we lack the expertise to do ourselves; they help identify for us what is important.
Think of it like Antique Road Show without the experts. Information is like the stuff that we collect in our attics. We need content experts to help us understand and recognize the value of what we possess, as well as convince us to throw away the things that aren't worth anything. Without the experts, we become informational pack rats; we possess everything, but know the value of nothing.
And when ignoramuses start to throw around information that they don't understand, we aren't empowered; we're misled.
I find it pretty hilarious that the responses to this topic basically prove him right. People didn't read the article, nor the speech, they just responded with their own political bent, conspiracy theories or a knee jerk reaction that all the distraction is good.
Can you imagine any kind of protest on a college campus these days that would push for real reform? No, everyone's checking the facebook or watching videos.
What's that over there? Something shiny?
Maybe he's talking about Information Overload which is indeed a problem.
Think about those managers that are completelly Blackberry driven (those that almost always give the highest priority to their BB, even in meetings) and now consider the quality of their decision making: for people that get so many e-mails and are so on top of things, they usually are surprisingly uninformed and unthinking in their decisions.
Maybe Obama's statements should be read as:
- President of the USA says that nowadays people have too many things pulling their attention and receive too much low-value information
and that has negative consequences with regards to their knowledge and wisdom.
instead of:
- Well know Democrat politician tells people what they're doing wrong.
You know, even though he's the lider of a political party in a highly politically polarised nation, he's still the fucking president of the US of A and he didn't got there by being stupid. Maybe he's capable of an informed opinion ...
<RANT>
It pisses me off to no end that me, an European, have to be then one pointing out the he's a man that has succeeded in getting elected to a highly coveted position, which few can achieve and that maybe his non-political opinions, at least once in a while, should be heard instead of dismissed outright because of his political affiliation
</RANT>
People know when they're wasting time playing too many games and browsing too many blogs. Obama is just encouraging the graduates to do something with their lives instead of frittering them away. For some crazy reason a lot of people in here find that threatening, can't imagine why.
There are certain people for whom much of what THEY say YOU should do, does not apply to THEM. He is one of THOSE people.
Frankly, he is welcome to his opinion, and may even be right, on this issue. In a sane world I would just say, So what?
Unfortunately he is in a position to "do something" about it.
And if being a "distraction" isn't enough, soon you'll hear "all those electronic devices aren't good for the environment"...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
He really exposed himself with "Taliban-type attack." He probably meant Al-Qaida, but they're all brown, so what's it matter?
Considering that the latest information links the Times Square bomber with the Taliban, and that the Taliban has been doing car bomb attacks against forces in Afghanistan, I think that you are the one being exposed as not informed.
Additionally, he was giving examples of things not generally reported (or even sometimes mis-reported) by the alphabet news. It is clear if you get past your own biases that he was using those examples because his interests lead him to be more informed than average on those types of stories, not because he believed that there aren't other types of stories (which might not support his political opinions) that the alphabet news doesn't report (or misreports) as well. His point appears to be that most media report with a political bias and if you don't sample from those which have opposing political biases you will be misinformed.
But your response is typical, "I disagree with your politics, so you must have nothing worthwhile to say."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Couldn't agree more. It's impossible to find unbiased news on TV anymore. Whatever happened to accurate coverage, and when did Mainstream media decide to only cover stories that favor their side?
Unbiased news never existed. It's only recently that we have opposing views in media that expose the bias. When all the media is saying the same thing, bias is harder to spot. It gets accepted as truth by default. Since we now have differing views on different channels, we can compare them and the bias becomes obvious.
Getting the same story from different views is a good thing. I've learned that the other side is not evil. They want the same thing I do. They just have a different idea as to how to get there.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Yes, exactly.
As Mark Twain put it, a lie could be half-way around the world before the truth could put its boots on--and that was before the internet. Now we have internet echo chambers where the ignorant can stay ignorant with the help of other fools, some of whom make a living at being fools, and where, if you just stay within the limits of the circle-jerk, you need never encounter an idea or piece of evidence that challenges your views.
From the article:
OK... let's see what he's said about the Cambridge police: "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played," yet he claimed the police "acted stupidly." Let's also look at how he saw the Arizona immigration law: "Now, suddenly, if you don't have your papers, and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you're going to get harassed -- that's something that could potentially happen". Well, the immigration law specifically PROHIBITS stopping anyone based on skin color. I don't think the Arizona law is the way to go either-- but that's because border enforcement is the Federal government's right according to the Constitution, so we need to use legal means of getting them to stop shirking their responsibility.
In short, I think the President should have that knee-jerking problem looked at by a doctor-- I hear he has a great health plan.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.