Thinking Out Loud, aka The Broad Gaze
Thoughts on the social impacts of communication policy and educational technology.
It has been far too long since I’ve blogged…
Online social networking and blogs have emerged as one of the heroes from the Virginia Tech shootings. The degree to which individuals and journalists turned to the Internet for up-to-the-minute personal information might be unprecedented. Otherwise, these articles speak for themselves.
People with WiFi spend more time online (Ars Technica)
A recent Pew report finds that home WiFi users surf the Internet more and also differently. This shouldn’t come as a suprise — especially to any self-reflective Internet user who has gone through the broadband to WiFi progression themselves. The report finds that wireless users check e-mail more (72% vs 63%) and news more (46% vs 38%) than typical broadband users.
This scratches the surface of what I have suspected for some time: as your Internet access capability changes, your whole conception of “being online” changes too. To be specific–I would argue that this goes far beyond just being “online more.” Instead, I would argue that the Internet becomes more tightly integrated with countless aspects of life. The ease in which one can search for information on Wikipedia, find a recipe, or now even watch an interesting video transforms the online experience into something far more intimate than a walk to the computer room to check e-mail and news.
Naturally, these are only my own speculations. Hopefully future Pew reports will delve deeper into how individuals experience being online. Perhaps getting beyond type and quantity of use is something that’s ill-fit to survey analysis.
Here’s a link to the full report.
‘Ulysses’ Without Guilt – New York Times (Subscription Required)
Stacy Schiff, a guest columnist at the Times writes today about Pierre Bayard’s “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” which seems like a great invite to talk about a book that I haven’t read. From what I understand, Bayard’s basic argument is that exposing oneself to a breadth of material is just as good as knowing something deeply. Schiff writes:
Say what you will about Professor Bayard, he forces us to confront a paradox of our age. By one estimate, 27 novels are published every day in America. A new blog is created every second. We would appear to be in the midst of a full-blown epidemic of graphomania. Surely we have never read, or written, so many words a day. Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d’oeuvres of education. We read not in continuous narratives but by linkage, the movable type of the 21st century. Our appetites are gargantuan, our attention spans anorectic.
She then goes on to posit that technologies like search, “arguably the very definition of reading has changed.”
These are phenomena that the process of studying for preliminary exams made me deeply aware of. As information grows over time, the amount of material one must read becomes increasingly dense. I once knew a professor who, when she was studying for prems, was instructed to read everything about her (broad) subject. I don’t think that is remotely possible anymore–but technolgies like search and news aggreation might offer ways to get at what we’re interested in. Hopefully it doesn’t come at the cost of well crafted prose.
Xerox Seeks Erasable Form of Paper for Copiers – New York Times
Xerox is attempting to create a product which would allow one to use the same sheet a number of times when making photocopies. Essentially, one could make a copy and then somehow erase the copy to later use the same sheet. The realization driving this advance was very interesting: that paper is becoming a display medium, as opposed to an archival medium. I think this succinctly expresses something the underlying reason why so many people gravitate towards reading on the printed page as opposed to on screen.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound as though the product will be able to use plain paper. This has been a hindrance to many copying technologies in the past. For example, the “Diffusion-Transfer-Removal,” or DTR, method of copying (which was quite popular prior to Xerox’s becoming popular) required a chemically coated paper to make a copy. It’s possible that this could become popular on it’s own, but I’m sure if Xerox knows their history, they’ll look more closely at toner technology as opposed to paper.