I’ve just had a chance to read the essay Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives by Marc Prensky (hat-tip: Granny Rose). The idea is that those born into the digital ages are ‘natives’ who think in a different way to those who have had to learn the new digital language. The immigrants have an ‘accent’ (printing out e-mails, or showing someone a website rather than e-mailing it), while the natives prefer to speak the new language (“‘www.hungry.com’ said a kindergarten student recently at lunchtime”). The conclusion is that it is the digital immigrants who will have to change they way they think, and crucially, teach… because the natives certainly aren’t going to bother with any kind of ‘backwards compatibility’.
I can hardly brand myself as a Digital Founding Father, but I am certainly a founding citizen, present at the birth of the revolution. I remember the old ways of rotary telephones, hand-written essays, blue airmail envelopes, and car doors that had to be opened with a key. But we also had a Sinclair Spectrum, and I remember playing maths games on a BBC Micro when I was only six. I think there was a window of opportunity, of those born in the mid-to-late seventies, to surf the digital wave. Each new development has been available to use at just the right time, and we’ve never had to learn anything from scratch. Pity the poor immigrants, who have to learn myriad concepts and conventions just to send a text message. And pity the poor natives, ignorant of fountain pens. They do not appreciate how far we have sailed.
Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 35 of 39)
Funny how the same words, in a different order, mean vastly different things. Last month I blogged about the Free Alaa campaign, an online drive to raise awareness of the detention of Egyptian blogger and democracy activist Alaa Abd El-Fatah. I heard about his detention via blogging, and by the same methods (via Adloyada) I now hear he has been released.
Part of the campaign was a GoogleBomb, whereby bloggers attempted to fool Google into returning pages from the Free Alaa campaign site, whenever the word ‘Egypt’ was searched for. As Adloyada suggests, this particular tactic may have had minimal effect, but the wider use of the internet as a medium for campaigning is what interests me here.
We are updated regularly on the ‘explosion’ of blogging, with about a billion new blogs created daily. Many of these – arguably the more interesting ones – are likely to spring up in places where democracy and human rights are not guaranteed. I worry that examples of bloggers being detained, already a regular occurence in Iran, will increase with the popularity of blogging in general. Perhaps we will begin to see a form of campaign fatigue, whereby it is difficult to keep track of which bloggers have been detained, and where!
This is where Web 2.0 innovations such as wikis and RSS feeds can come into their own, ensuring we can keep updated and active over a lengthy period of time. Metaphorical ideas of momentum and critical mass are crucial factors in political movements. It will be interesting to see whether technology will lead to more sustained and effective campaigns, or just higher-profile, yet ultimately damp, squibs. Looks like the former in the case of Alaa, thank goodness.
I read that William Hazlitt warned of the danger, with the advent of the popular press, that:
“every one, high and low, rich and poor, should turn author”
(I think this is from ‘The Influence of Books’ New Monthly Magazine, 1828).
For the many who concern themselves with the rise of Internet publishing, a constant worry is the possibility of good and informed writing being diluted by the virtual reams of chatter and crap. When Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, unveiled his plans for an online “revamp”, the cry from many quarters was that the corporation site would degenerate into a glorified MySpace, with each page winning a readership of only one or two.
I’m not worried, however. Many others have written on the importance of dedicated journalists and analysts providing news and comment for the rest of us to consume. I take the term ‘citizen journalist’ to mean someone who has other commitments – a day-job, perhaps (if not, then they’re simply an unemployed freelancer). The ‘professional’, on the other hand, can make the time to do their reading and research which leads (we hope) to better articles.
One of the reasons why I love the BBC is the sheer breadth of information it provides. For example, the quantity of obscure, conference-league football matches that are covered by the corporation is to be applauded. Part of the point of public service broadcasting is to provide information that the market will not. I’m not sure the commercial stations could or would provide the same level of coverage.
It is in this realm that the ‘citizen journalist’ becomes useful. These people can provide the information that the professionals cannot – local and niche news. Why stop at conference-league football results for example? Why declare 1000 fans as the cut-off point for relevant sports news? Why not 100? Or one? To labour the example: There are thousands of other football matches played every day – sub-conference regional leagues, pub leagues, university leagues, schools leagues, and youth football for every year-age group from under 8. Citizen journalists can provide the information, and the BBC provides a public service by creating an ordered place for that information to be filed, and then found. Sure, only one person may be interested in the Crookham Rovers vs Hadley Town U13 bottom-of-the-league mud-fest… But if that one person is a grandpa, under arthritic house-arrest, who reads (and even sees digital images) about grandson Bobby’s goal-mouth scramble… then I would say the public has been served.
Remember, we are concerned with online news here, where the marginal cost of providing this data is near-zero. For ‘football matches’ you can read any other sport; or local produce prices; support-groups and voluntary organisations; amateur arts; or street- and tenement-level local politics.
The operative word in ‘citizen journalism’ is not the latter, but the former. It is not about the army of Hazlitt wannabes, talking to themselves. It is not about reaching the global, but the local instead. It is an integral part of what Michelle Kasprzak calls the ‘Smallweb’. It is about the stregthening of civil society, catalysing those unseen and unreported interactions between people, forging and reinforcing bonds, those that the ‘professional’ journalists keep telling us we have lost.
I was a couple of hours ahead of Jay Rosen’s post at the highly informative PressThink. He ask in what ways citizen journalism could be better regular journalism, and how the media can tap into that unique knowledge.
My statistics programme tells me that someone from North Carolina visited my website yesterday, after typing the following into a search engine:
Robert Sharp for Congress
Nothing provokes as much introspection as your own personal homonym achieving something. Somewhere in America, some guy, some two-bit yahoo has manoevered himself enough, so that a place in the US House of Representatives is now a realistic proposition! We do not know each other, and yet he jeers at me from accross the Atlantic.
I have been top of the Google rankings for my own name for a while. There was a time, a year ago, when a State Supreme Court judge, one Robert Sharp Bean of Oregon, challenged for the top spot. He is dead though, and mentionings of him online seem to have tailed off somewhat. Thanks to WordPress, I remain comfortably top the billing, every time I check. Now, however, I need to watch out for this new kid-on-the-block, this Robert Sharp for Congress fellow, to ensure he makes no play for my crown. Who does he think he is?
Fact: You, dear reader, have searched for your own name in Google.
Of course, you will deny it. I will not believe you.
So tell all. How did knowledge of your homonyms, your name-alikeys, make you feel? Superior, or inadequate?
I confess, Robert Sharp intimidates me. He’s all ‘project management’ and user testing. I take comfort from the fact that he develops Windows Longhorn, and thus totally off my Venn diagramme of Possible Worlds. I wouldn’t want Rob Sharp‘s job although he’s clearly done well for himself. I would like Robert Sharp‘s job, though most of his portfolio is rather parochial. Robert Sharp, on the other hand, just gets on my nerves, and needs a better website.
I would love to have met Dr Robert Sharp, who was pretty cool in a geeky way. But he’s dead too. Most of the other Robert Sharps yeilded by Google are mainly priests and scientists – earnest fellows. I feel we might have something in common. Besides our name, that is.
No Sharps at Gatwick Airport. Photo by yrstrly
Update
Don’t forget Rob Sharp, features writer at the Independent. Irritatingly, no-one has asked if we are one and the same person yet, so I can’t claim credit for his output. One day…
I do enjoy trawling through someone else del.icio.us tags. First, bookmark a web page. Instantly find out who else has linked to it, and in turn what they have linked to. The act of bookmarking a site is a different thing from posting on a blog. A blog is a public diary, whereas a linklog is more a private scrap-book. Rumaging around in it feels slightly illicit. The act becomes a guilty pleasure, even if the whole point of del.icio.us is openness and sharing.
It was via del.icio.us that I sumbled accross Aharef (Subtitle: The Link Salt in the Web Soup). A page innocently named “Websites as graphs” caught my imagination with a very simple tool, which allowed me to generate the image below.
[photopress:sitemap.jpg,thumb,alignright]This intruiging pattern is not an organic chemical or a subway map, but a graphical representation of this site’s homepage (you can click it to enlarge). Each node represents an HTML tag such as DIV or SPAN. Begining with the black HTML tag/node which begins pretty much every page on every website, each line represents one tag ‘nested’ within another. The grey clump is the header information; the orange mess is the block of recent posts (uneven in length and content); and the regular protrusions that look like dandelions comprise my blogroll.
The page at Aharef gives some sample maps from popular websites, like Google and Boing-Boing. What I enjoy is how the more aesthetically pleasing patterns belong to those sites with a better site structure. A sparse pattern with plenty of red dots implies a complex site designed with tables. A cleaner, simpler site will have fewer but more concentrated nodes. They illustrate how a site with a clear structure will allow more people to read the information more efficiently.
Thinking about the philosophical ideas of mapping and representation, I wonder which is the ‘true’ representation of the document: the web-page or the diagramme? Both are valid ways of interpreting the same information. I wondered if a page could be created in which a greater meaning to the content could be found within its source code. My first, rudimentary attempt is called “I Had A Little Nut Tree”. You can also watch the visual representation spawn via Aharef. The poem is a friviolity in itself, but given a twist by its unique code structure.
I am reminded of other ways in which the same information can give rise to different things, depending on the medium you read it in; I am reminded of how the written word can take on a different meaning when read out loud; or how two people can interpret the same book as having different meanings; I am reminded of the post-Borgesian play Hear No, See No, Speak No; of the ‘graphic’ function in Apple iTunes that creates screen-savers from my MP3 collection; and how DNA code can be rendered not only into living things, but also into chromatographs so accurate that we can point at a bizarre pattern of dots, and give it a person’s name.