GNST500:

Brave New Media World?

In light of our in-class discussion of January 26 on the possible impacts of advanced multimedia technology on our cognitive abilities, to what extent do you think New Media might be bringing about a kind of Brave New World scenario if, instead of or in addition to helping enlighten us, the technology is actually making us less functional in certain ways?

Beyond a wholesale (catastrophic) change in our access to and use of this technology, is a slower, “saner” pace world even possible?

For a good primer on this, watch a few segments of the PBS Front Line doc called Digital Nation: Driven to Distraction

(You could/should now watch this documentary).

2010-01-28 @ 5:50 PM:

As much I think there might be something unprecedented going on right now in terms of cognitive evolution, I think a lot of it can actually be attributed to this: The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

That link is to a great article that essentially outlines how correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. Also check out the comments; though they are plentiful, and some are just plain wrong, a lot of them are exactly right—even to the point of proving the original article wrong in some senses.

In any case, if our rampant technology is in fact outgrowing our physiological ability to keep pace, then I see that as some pretty suggestive proof that we humans (and perhaps all life) are eventually destined to overcome our material bodies in favour of some more ‘direct’ form of existence. The example I always like to bring up is how our communicative technologies have consistently evolved in a direction that makes it easier to read the minds of others, which is to say, ease communication away from physical or linguistic intermediaries and into some form of just (better) ‘knowing’ what another is willing to tell you. Present day technology and mechanization certainly seems to be facilitating this, issues of authenticity aside.

But like I hinted at in class, I think the next generation(s) of communicators will come to see our current model of ‘authenticity’ as archaic and ill-suited to their world of rapid-fire interchange and meta-derivative/derived culture. In other words, that ‘authenticity’, that sense of presence and ‘truth’ that we see as being lacking in technologized media, is really ever-present—it just ‘looks’ different. Chances are we’ll have to learn to accept it rather than the other way around…

2010-01-29 @ 1:30 AM:

…and now that I’ve watched the film, I feel even more naïve for pretty much simply pointing out what was already said.

All the same, by about half-way through the video, I was about ready to concede that technology is indeed corrupting our intellect to an irreversible extent—and I still don’t feel the hapless optimism of the last half fully offsets the fairly grave implications of never being able to pursue an idea ‘deeply’. For instance, the reason I decided to watch the video when I did was because I’d just finished writing a paragraph for a paper and felt I needed to (read: deserved to) pause for a break. Quite seriously, the characterization of the ‘small-portion writer’ depicted in the video is exactly me. I sincerely felt both embarrassed and foolish seeing myself exposed so fully, so convincingly.

But I still can’t help but dodge this feeling that such a shift toward the fleeting isn’t just inevitable, it’s entirely natural. Take, say, the most damning evidence of cognitive ‘de-evolution’ in that piece—the aforementioned inability to think ‘deeply’ or to think critically through a complex idea or problem. I would posit that while we might indeed be losing the ability to do so individually, we are making up for it in spades with our ability to collect and collaborate with others (or even merely other sources of information); so we’re evolving to a new kind of ‘deep’ thinking, one that derives its gravitas from a whole network or system [of information] rather than a point or piece in isolation.¹ Of course dependencies become an issue here, but such is always the case when dealing with complex structures; the minute becomes magnified given how all the parts are so finely nuanced and interrelated. (Chaos theory and computer programming come to mind here.)

Somewhat tangentially, we’d also be naïve to think traditional ‘deep’ thinkers can’t/won’t also thrive in this new era, given how their ostensibly better (or, given the context, preserved) cognitive abilities would be all the more called upon to garner valuable insight from these global wells of information just waiting to be understood/organized/communicated. And given how these wells seem to be at the core of today’s most cutting-edge business models, it seems only too likely that this ‘dying’ skill set will itself see a substantial growth (i.e. even deeper thinkers)—albeit in a relatively sparse population. No, wait, those are called computers. Shit!

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1. I would even go so far as to predict that those increased ‘red zones’ on the brain activity map correspond to areas of the brain that deal with functions like comparison and reduction, that is to say, that translate plentiful specificity into fundamental linkages

N.B.: don’t forget to check out the aforementioned documentary.

In October 2010, I drafted this post. Why I didn’t post it sooner? Face palm. Had I not procrastinated, Google would likely have implemented these fixes by now… :@

A while back—actually, the moment I officially committed to switching from hotmail to gmail—I began complaining about Gmail’s so-called Conversation View. I literally joined the club.

Luckily, a few months later Google activated an option allowing us dissenters to turn off the ‘feature’. I promptly did so.

[Un?]fortunately, I was by then used to the new way of emailing, and actually found the reversion to single threaded organization a major annoyance. I soon switched back.

The point is this: Gmail isn’t perfect (yet). Here’s why:

• While the option to group email conversations is a major advantage in that it keeps relevant info together in an easily accessible way, the simplicity of its grouping remains frustrating.
  • Currently, emails are grouped essentially by Subject line. This is a start, of course, but what if I want to change the subject line to add or subtract a couple words? New thread; lost my grouping.
  • Even more likely, what if someone emails me back from a fresh window rather than replying directly to my email? New thread; lost my grouping.
  • What I’m saying, then, is that I want a way to take two emails and merge their Conversation threads.
  • Similarly, if the topic being discussed should suddenly change within a Conversation, I want to be able to split that thread into two distinct Conversations.
  • The solution to both seems fairly trivial to me: Gmail already has the ability to delete any single message from a Conversation thread, or to ‘Mark Unread from here’ down, so presumably similar functionality for message grouping could be implemented without insurmountable redesign? (just a simple hash/id in the db, no?)
• Gmail’s underlying organizational philosophy is search-engine based, not chronology-centric. This makes perfect sense, given …Google. However, us humans are more often than not forced to sort things in chronological order in order to order and organize them in an orderly manner.
  • I want at least some rudimentary sorting options (like by date sent, date received, and date read). Conversations are handy for finding the threads I think have the info I want in them—and having the ability to group messages as I please would certainly alleviate much of this burden in the first place—but sometimes I need to find an email based on when I should have sent/received it more than what words I remember being used in it.
  • Even if I know the sender, if it’s someone who I sent a whole lot of emails too, scrolling through Conversations 20-a-page at a time is a blatantly needless hassle. (exacerbated by the fact that I don’t seem to be able change how many results fill a page of search results!)
  • Distilled: Conversation view is a welcome revolution in how emails are dealt with, but sometimes I need to be able to fall back to the old way, too.
• Another derivative of Conversation view is the fact that multiple email addresses can and will appear within a single thread. This poses the problem of what to do with the names of all these participants. Currently, Gmail solves this by listing the first and last names separated by an ellipsis to indicate more people are inside—e.g. Person1 .. Person100 (232).
  • This is, again, a start, but it’s also severely lacking in that sometimes the name of the person most crucial to that Conversation is buried within the dots, and I want to be able to see every person included in a Conversation.
  • This could be primitively fixed by having the list of names appear whenever one mouse-overs the ellipsis itself (but this would still require the client to work for this basic functionality, rather than simply have it offered to them ‘at-a-glance’).
  • Ideally, every name would just be listed. If this were, say, a Google Labs option, I would certainly be in favour of it making the message take up more than one line, if necessary; the time it would save me opening and scrolling through an email would be worth the occasional three-line message in my inbox..

Please, Google? Pretty please?