DH1620, 9 mars 2011
Daniel Pargman
Lektor, KTH/Medieteknik
Är Google
fördummande?
”Is Google making us stupid?” (2008)
•  Frågan är inte min
utan David Carrs (och
flera andra kritikers)
•  Google = Internet,
sociala medier,
hypertext etc.
•  En essä i tidskriften
Atlantic Monthly blev
till en bok 2010
• 1
1 Me
2 Technological and social change
3 Does the Internet make us capable?
Or studid?
4 What if the Internet is unsustainable
anyway?
Me
• 2
Daniel Pargman
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), School of Computer
Science and Communication, Media Technology
• Senior Lecturer 2002-
Microsoft Research, Redmond, Community Technologies
Group
• Visiting reseacher 2007
University of Skövde, School of Humanities and
Informatics, Media/Computer game development
•  Senior Lecturer 2005-2006
Strange dot.com job + HCI consultant
•  Citikey (2001) + Carstedt Research & Technology (2001-2002)
Department of Communication studies, Linköping
university
•  Ph.D. thesis: ”Code begets community” (2000)
Socio-technical systems
Computer sciences
Human-Computer
Interaction
Interaction design
Systems
development
Open source
...
Social sciences
CMC
CSCW
Communities
Online games
Social media
Technology
Sociology
Anthropology
Psychology
...
Society
• 3
A window into a virtual world…
• 4
A window into a virtual world…
WORLD
OF
WARCRAF
• 5
Postman, ”Informing ourselves to death” (1990)
Technological
and social
change
Postman, ”Informing ourselves to death” (1990)
• 6
Computers as a communications medium
•  Computers can be many different things. In this lecture
they are primarily a medium of communication (like the
telegraph, newspapers, books, tv, radio etc.)
•  ”When we change the way we communicate, we change
society”
•  Present unrest and revolutions in arab societies as
(at least partly) an effect of satellite television and
Internet/social media use
•  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Marocco, Algeria, Yemen,
Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordania, Bahrain
Computers as a communications medium
•  ”When we change the way we communicate, we change
society”
•  Homer Simpson on social media (S15E22):
•  “Instead of one bigshot controlling all the media,
now there’s 1000 freaks xeroxing their worthless
opinions”
• 7
Computers as a communications medium
•  ”When we change the way we communicate, we change
society”
•  From oral culture to literacy to print
–  Cultural memory of oral culture shaped by recitation,
mnemonics, rythm, alliteration, reduncancy,
repetition
•  What is worth knowing must be repeated to be remebered.
•  Oral cultures are conservative, no intellectual experiments
encouraged!
–  Print loosened the power of church
•
•
•
•
Independent (non-church controlled) printers
Emergence of modern capitalism
Emergence of vernacular languages
Rise of nationalism (“imagined communities”)
Computers as a communications medium
•  ”When we change the way we communicate, we change
society”
•  From oral culture to literacy to print
–  Cultural memory of oral culture shaped by recitation,
mnemonics, rythm, alliteration, reduncancy,
repetition
–  Print loosened the power of church
–  What are the effects of Internet, Google and
Social Media?
• 8
• 9
Technological change
•  Postman has a broad perspective on implications of
technological change
•  New technologies bring advantages and disadvantages
–  Some (many?) technologies have larger advantages that
disadvantages, others not
•  Advantages where, advantages for whom?
–  Technology favors some groups and harm or discriminate other
groups.
•  Technological change has its winners and losers
–  Computers have (before) favored large-scale organizations
•  Technology has unforseen consequences; who becomes
winners and losers (and what they win or lose) is not
easy to predict
Informing ourselves to death
•  New technologies bring advantages and disadvantages
–  What do computers (internet/social media) bring, what do they
take away?
–  Which groups are favored by social media and which groups are
harmed?
–  Who are the winners and who are the losers of Internet/social
media?
•  “almost nothing happens to the losers that they need, which is why
they are losers”
•  Sverigedemokraterna som ett missnöjesparti, de som röstar på SD
som förlorare i globaliseringsprocessen?
• 10
Information overload
•  Losers of the information revolution
–  Religion, authority, “common sense”, coherent and
integrated worldview, sense of community.
–  University professors?
–  Information was scarce, but what was available was
useful, had a relationship or was a solutions to
concrete problems
–  Information is abundant, difficult to evaluate,
doesn’t make sense
•  We have a hard time to evaluate what information is
important, relevant, useful and what is irrelevant. We as a
society can’t agree on what is important and why.
•  So are we better off?
Information overload
•  Losers of the information revolution
–  University professors?
–  From my students exam in Social Media Technologies
(DM2578)
4) Some students fired me at a seminar because there will be no
role for university teachers in the future (when you can find
everything on the Internet)! Or will there…? Will university
teachers be even more important in a world of super-abundant
information? (2+1 points)
With support from the course literature, please either argue why:
a) I will be out of my job as a university teacher 10 years from now,
or
b) Why my job as a university teacher will be more important than
ever 10 years from now.
• 11
Information overload
•  The computer brings us more information faster
–  Perhaps we are getting too much?
–  …and what if what causes misery and pain on an individual,
social and societal level is not the result of a lack of
information and can not be solved by more information?
•  Computers help us “get there” faster, but they don’t tell
us if it’s worth going “there” in the first place
–  Computers are a means, not a goal
–  Instantaneous global communication is not the same thing as
mutual understanding
–  “If we really understood each other there would be more wars”
What’s the purpose of computers?
•  What is the relationship between computers (Internet,
Google) and knowledge?
•  What is (for example) the purpose of using computers in
an educational setting?
–  Is the purpose for us to become more competent
when we use computers?
–  Person + computer > person without computer, person with
other tools (encyclopedias etc.)
–  Or is the purpose for us to become more competent
after we have turned off the computer?
• 12
Carr, ”Is Google making us stupid?” (2008)
Internet makes
us capable?
Or stupid?
”Is Google making us stupid?” (2008)
•  Frågan är inte min
utan David Carrs (och
flera andra kritikers)
•  Google = Internet,
sociala medier,
hypertext etc.
•  En essä i tidskriften
Atlantic Monthly blev
till en bok 2010
• 13
Is the Internet making us stupid? (Carr)
•  The computer brings us more information faster
–  Perhaps we are getting too much?
–  How would you know if you got too much information? How
would it be manifested?
•  “My mind is changing. I’m not thinking the way I used
to think. My concentration starts to drift, deep reading
has become a struggle. The Net seems to be chipping
away my capacity for concentration and
contemplation”
•  Anyone recognize themselves in this description?
•  What if “excessive” use of the Internet/social media is
changing the way we think!? (and not for the better)
Is the Internet making us stupid? (Carr)
•  We might read more than ever before
•  …but it’s a different kind of reading.
–  We scan and skitter and rush from one text to the next
–  Our attention is scattered, our concentraion diffuse
•
•
•
•
Different kind of reading = different kind of thinking?
Deep reading = deep thinking
More shallow kind of reading = ??? kind of thinking?
Brin (Google): “if you had all the world’s information
directly attached to your brain […] you’d be better off”
–  Would you? Would you be a better person? Would you be
happier?
• 14
Surfing on lectures
•  "In [an] experiment, a pair of Cornell researchers divided a class of
students into two groups. One group was allowed to surf the Web
while listening to a lecture. A log of their activity showed that they
looked at sites related to the lectures content but also visited
unrelated sites, checked their e-mail, went shopping, watched
videos, and did all the other things that people do online. The
second group hear the identical lecture but had to keep their
laptops shut. Immediately afterward, both groups took a test
measuring how well they could recall the information from the
lecture. The surfers, the researchers report, "performed
significantly poorer on immediate measures of memory for the tobe-learned content." It didn't matter, moreover, whether they
surfed information related to the lecture or completely unrelated
content - they all performed poorly. When the researchers
repeated the experiment with another class, the results were the
same.
Technologies of writing (Swigert 1990)
•  Charles Dickens (inkpot, quills, finished papers with dry ink in a
pile)
–  “The relatively slow movement of the hand leaves mental time for
longer, more intricately constructed and elaborately rhetorical
sentences”
•  My handwriting is atrocious. I can’t read what I’ve written
•  I wrote my first novel on a typewriter
–  Single-space, no margins, 600 words/page. One page was a chapter.
100 pages made a book. Three pages per day and one month to write
the book
•  My first computer - a chapter was 12 kilobytes long because that
was the longest file I could save on a disk (Apple II, Easywriter 1.0)
–  Typewritten text was solid but with the computer words, sentences
and paragraphs became liquid. Editing became a continous, not a
discrete process
–  Paper became an interface, not storage. Viewed and discarded, not
filed
• 15
What if the Internet
is unsustainable
anyway?
Two conflicting views of the future (Bardi)
•  Things are really taking off now (getting better and
better all the time)
–  Pace of technological innovation increasing, soon to reach the
singularity
•  We are at the peak now (things will get tougher and
tougher from here on)
–  Global warming, resource depletion
–  Peak gold, peak oil, peak water, peak phosphorous (= peak
food)
• 16
A world of limitations
•  No lack of threats (to business-as-usual):
•  Climate change
•  Ecological crisis, species extinction
•  Pollution
•  Overpopulation
•  Limitations on food production, scarcity of phosphates
•  Water scarcity
•  Overfishing
•  Economic depression, recession without end, jobless growth
•  Unemployment, social instability
•  Peak oil
Two contrasting perspectives of the future
A world of
  A world of
possibilites
•  A few % economic growth
limitations
•  We are at or near “the top” and the
every year (everything will
direction will change to downhill
be better and better for
soon (things will be tougher and
everyone in the future)
tougher from now on)
–  The pace of technical
innovation will increase
–  Triple crisis (ecology, economy,
energy)
• 17
Two contrasting perspectives of the future
• A world of
 
possibilites
•  A few % economic growth
every year (everything will
be better and better for
everyone in the future)
–  The pace of technical
innovation will increase
• 18
• Vilken typ av framtidsbilder…?
Peak oil
•  Oil is our most versatile and useful energy source
•  40% of worldwide energy use is oil
•  Worldwide oil production has been on a plateau
–  Most oil-producing countries have peaked (USA 1970, Iran
1974, Mexico 2004)
•  Ex. 40% of Mexico’s budget comes from oil exports
–  We are running out of “good, cheap oil”
–  We replace this with expensive oil
•  Oil prices are at an all-time high
–  Today, during a recession oil costs 120 USD/barrel, 10 years
ago < 20 USD/barrel
•  There is still oil left, but less will be pumped each year
and costs will go up each year
–  We have picked the “low-hanging fruit”
• 19
No more low-hanging fruit
• 40 of 54 of all oil-producing countries have peaked
•  Norway reached
maximum
production 2001
(-28% since then)
•  Denmark reached
maximum
production 2004
(-26% since then)
•  Source:
• BP Statistical Review
of World Energy
(2008)
• 20
The end of cheap energy?
Problems and predicaments
•  There is still oil left to pump (or “extract”), but less will
be made available and costs will go up each year
–  We have picked the “low-hanging fruit”
•  This is a “predicament”, not a “problem”
–  Problems have solutions that will eliminate them
–  Predicaments have no solutions (no strategies will avoid the
threat), only responses (some rational, some irrational - denial)
–  Ex. Death is a (personal) predicament - we are all going to
die no matter what
–  Some challenges can’t be “solved” - depletion of a nonrenewable resource is a predicament, not a problem
•  Are ecological and resource crises (societal) predicaments?
• 21
Problems and predicaments
•  Problems have
solutions
•  Predicaments
have no
solutions
Problem or predicament?
• 22
Probable consequences of expensive oil
•  More expensive energy (not just oil)
•  More expensive transportation
•  More expensive heating (living)
•  Less/more expensive water (irrigation)
•  More expensive food (industrial agriculture = energy intensive)
•
Basic necessities more expensive, less money for other
consumption, less production, less employment, recession etc.
•  More expensive resources (mining)
•  More expensive products (manufacturing, transportation)
•  Relationship between work and energy (production) changes
•  People (labor) will become less expensive in relation to energy,
production, products
Good times
• 23
Good times
Will good times come to an end?
•  Is it a coincidence that computers, internet has
come about in the age of cheap energy?
•  Are computers, internet built on the premise of
cheap energy?
•  What happens if energy will no longer be cheap?
• 24
Will good times come to an end?
•  Is it a coincidence that computers, internet has
come about in the age of cheap energy?
•  Are computers, internet built on the premise of
cheap energy?
•  What happens if energy will no longer be cheap?
Contact:
Daniel Pargman
pargman@kth.se
+46 8 790 82 80
medieteknik-exjobb.blogspot.com
• 25