I’m still feeling out what belongs on this blog and what doesn’t — but one of my strategies for offlining has been to try to identify free book length works online that I can download to my Sony Reader, and then to spend time out on my patio with them. Yeah, I know you can do that with a physical book too, and that one could of course break down and *buy* an ebook.
But I still like the rejection of consumer culture that the net can bring about, the world of free and revived works, the ability of out-of-print works like these to find a second life on the net.
I just want to enjoy them without be tempted to check my mail.
So today I’m happy to have found that the BBC is republishing the old Virgin Publishing Doctor Who ebooks for free. The PDF’d books are here. But even better, a company called FeedBooks have taken some of them and put them in Palm and e-reader friendly formats here.
If anyone knows about FeedBooks, comment below. I’ll investigate them in the next couple of days.
Incidentally, I’m putting together an offlining wiki, temporarily here in Google Sites. I’ll probably add a Resources section which will include free books available for your e-reader (or for printing out if you are so inclined).
Why Google Sites and not MediaWiki? A story for another post…but basically my college is looking into Google Sites for a project, and I need to play around with it…
So last month we had an embarrassment of riches with intelligent articles on the perils of multitasking and the online rabbit hole.
This month, please welcome blowhardization, the inevitable second round of the public multitasking debate where bloviators are given extra time on the mike, and the more intelligent voices are gonged off stage.
Exhibit A: the recent Chicago Tribune article: “So how dumb are we?“. After drifting over Carr’s excellent essay, and giving a nod to another book, the writer decides to spend nine of her twenty paragraphs on this guy:
The question is hotly debated in academic circles, where Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein further turned up the temperature with his recent book, “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” Its subtitle: “Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.”
Academics may quibble over the hiring process, but voter registration shows that liberal orthodoxy now has a professional import. Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses, conservative opinion doesn’t qualify as respectable inquiry. You won’t often find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued in American studies. Historically, the boundaries of scholarly fields were created by the objects studied and by norms of research and peer review. Today, a political variable has been added, whereby conservative assumptions expel their holders from the academic market. A wall insulates the academic left from ideas and writings on the right.
His influence in the Tribune article extends well beyond the eight paragraphs that quote him. In fact the Tribune author’s lede:
NEW YORK—Who hasn’t snickered at “Jaywalking,” a “Tonight Show” segment in which host Jay Leno flummoxes unsuspecting young people on the street with such tricky questions as: In what country is Paris located?
Everybody likes the “Jaywalking” segment on The Tonight Show. With mike in hand and camera ready, host Jay Leno leaves the studio and hits the sidewalks of L.A., grabbing pedestrians for a quick test of their factual knowledge.
So it’s not a surprise when Bauerlein shows up six paragraphs later to answer all the hard questions that less stellar lights such as Nick Carr have posed. This may look like a newspaper article, but in reality it’s a genre that astute readers are familiar with — it’s a book promotion piece plus extras. It’s not a book review — nothing in the article actually examines the premises of Bauerlein’s work in any systemic way. It’s an article written based on a book, or on a press release for a book, fueled by a promotional push.
Nick Carr doesn’t have a book out, or at any rate one on this subject that will sell, so he’s a footnote.
So if you ask why blowhardization always has to happen, there’s why. Because Bauerlein, Keen, and others write books that make people feel good about what they never learned, and argue their points without any disturbing ambiguity. That sells books, which generates press, and by the time this game of telephone ends people receive a debate that has all the nuance of an Andy Rooney rant.
I’m fully prepared to believe that Google may be making us stupid. But they remain rank amateurs compared to the press.
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study. [Emphasis mine]
I like that distinction, as long as we can agree that in most of our professional lives there are both things to stay on top of, and things we want to get to the bottom of [grammarians, I thumb my nose at dangling preposition use, thusly]. And that both those tasks are equally noble. Today, there are a thousand emails going back and forth about the late minutae of the recent FISA amendment — many of the people punching those messages into Blackberrys are people to whom Knuth owes a lot. Without their vigilance in this matter the FISA bill would have sailed by unexamined.
[Heck, even four-hour work-weeker Tim Ferriss stepped into the fray for this issue.]
The question I’ve been asking myself lately is what parts of my life involve the need for daily responses, decisions, and updates and what parts of my life should be a longer cycle. In other words what parts of my life involve staying on top of things, and what parts involve getting to the bottom of things.
I don’t think I’m a “top-of-things” or “bottom-of-things” guy. I just think I’ve crammed a lot of stuff in my life into the wrong channel.
It seems every year for the past several years there’s been a couple of weeks where there is a flurry of intelligent articles about the dangers of multitasking and the hivemind. Then the inevitable blowhardization of the subject sets in, the intelligent voices fade and the Grandpa Simpsons come out of the woodwork. And we wait another year for the subject to get back on track, hoping next year will be the year that we can sustain a rational discussion about these core issues without falling into techno-utopianism or decline of civilization hyperbole.
I’m not sure that year is upon us yet, but the latest crop of articles out has made for one of the more enjoyable weekends of reading I’ve had in some time.
Nick Carr, my favorite IT contrarian, writes one of the best summaries of the issues of the hivemind I’ve seen, and offers some new insights to boot.
Get past the title (for some reason Carr is addicted to titles that undercut the nuance of his articles). The article is actually strongest when it is not focussing on Google, and in fact the discussion of Google’s particular influence is the one place where the article almost comes off the rails. In particular, I’m not completely sure the argument that the CPM/CPC structure of web financing exhibits a uniquely pernicious influence on the structure of the web is correct. Haven’t print media in general, and magazines in particular, been using similar models for a century now? I’m willing to buy the argument in a smaller dose, I suppose — I have to guess that the advent of the magazine (as replacing the journal) had some deletorious effects on attention, and began the reward system for page flipping that we now see in spades on the Internet.
But as for the rest of the article, it’s very good, and models precisely the sort of end-to-end depth of argument that the web may be eroding. Get past the title and read it, it’s the sort of article you’ll love even if you disagree with it (and I do disagree with quite a bit of it).
Christine Rosen’s essay is more pedestrian fare, but as an example of the argument that seems to emerge once a year on multitasking it’s a wonderfully compact iteration. There’s a good layperson level overview of some of the recent science, some discussion of the cost to business, and of course, some talk about the effect on our personal lives.
And among other things, it contains this little nugget:
In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”
It’s always tempting to riff off of science nuggets like this in inappropriate ways. But that skills vs. knowledge distinction in evaluating multitasking seems fertile ground, even apart from what the fMRIs may say.
It’s worth noting The New Atlantis is tied to the conservative think-tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center — worth noting because although Rosen’s article is pretty clean of conservative baggage, these things very quickly fall into specific political ruts. There is a larger frame that some would like to advance — that if we just go back to reading what we’re told, maybe the Great Books front to back, everything’s going to come up roses. That is, the question of multitasking ultimately plugs into some people’s lack of comfortability with the hoi polloi being in the driver’s seat, and an uncomfortability with hierarchical lines disappearing in general.
I’m not sure why that has to be, but it’s inevitable that the Sean Hannity’s of the world will be gloating in the coming month over the Myth of Multitasking, as if this is some victory for God, guns, and Reagan. I’d like to figure out why — if we could peel that part of the debate off, we’d get a lot further with this…
Sony Reader (yeah, I know, should have waited for the Kindle)
T-Mobile Dash
I needed to read some of the latest articles on the perils of multitasking (we seem to be in our yearly cycle here). Figured this was as good a chance as any to try offlining.
Method:
Searched via Google for recent news articles and blogs on multitasking, pasted them into one huge OpenOffice document, kept going until I had just short of 50 single spaced pages. Saved to smartcard which I then popped into my Sony Reader and took out to the patio. Used my phone’s email to punch some quick notes in while reading.
Results:
Overall, a wonderful experience, though I’m not sure it would work this well every time.
Some concerns while I was doing it were whether I was actually taking more time to copy and paste the material and get it into the Reader than it would take to read the material. This was aggravated by the fact my Linux laptop doesn’t write to the SD card writer, so I had to move doc to my wife’s computer and save it to the card from there.
All in all, though, it took me about 20 minutes to assemble the monster text file, and I am halfway through reading it, having spent an hour so far — so it looks like the time spent to assemble it is not completely out of order, although I’d love to get a better ratio (here’s where kindle-lust kicks in).
The experience of reading it was wonderful, but I won’t clutter up the notes here with observations on that. I was lucky that I got three substantial articles in the mix — the Christine Rosen piece on The Myth of Multi-tasking, the Nick Carr piece on how the web is changing how we read and think, and a summary of the Payne, Duggan, and Neth research on task-switching.
I’ll summarize my thoughts on those articles in a later post, but the process of reading them on the Reader was wonderful. There were some issues with the formatting, and at least one article didn’t make much sense with out the associated graphs, but the ability to really focus on these articles, which were worth the attention, was pretty fulfilling.
Of course, had they been worse articles, who knows. As George Siemens points out, part of the reason why we fall into continous partial attention is an awful lot of stuff out there doesn’t merit full attention. Had there been more fluff articles in the mix, I suppose I would have been cursing my inability to teleport out via hyperlink to greener pastures….
The idea for this site comes from a post I wrote a year or so ago. Post follows:
I get a wave of nostalgia when I read a John LeCarre novel. Not for the simplicity of Cold War politics or for spy novels written with a real sense of literary style, but for the physicality of the world George Smiley inhabits. Trying to figure out a particular thorny problem, he grabs a notebook, brings the rotary telephone over to the table, and between making a couple of phone calls, thinking a lot and writing a bit he comes to some conclusion.
I miss the quiet of years gone by, the unconnectedness, and when I read small passages like that a strange bit of longing for that world sweeps over me.
And while there is a certain nostalgia here, I can’t help but think there is something bigger too, that we have lost something important to society, something beyond the aethestic of a clean table, and scratchpad, and a rotary phone.
I remember one particular month in 1992, for example, that I was struggling with some difficult articles on linguistic style. I’d pound my head against some of the text, armed only with a few reference works on the table at Dunkin’ Donuts, and get as far as I could by positing possible interpretations and checking them against the text. And then I’d mark out what things I didn’t understand, pick out relevant articles in the endnotes, and make a note to photocopy them next time I was at the library.
Here’s the dated bit: by the time I got articles commenting on the original, I’d often find I disagreed with their analysis. I had had time to solidify my opinion before joining the conversation.
Business has had its related losses, some very early on. My father, an old DEC guy, once noted to me the difference that Excel had brought to the enterprise in the late 1980s. Before spreadsheets, he said, you’d spend a lot of time hashing out assumptions. You’d get them nailed down, and then you’d do the math. After Excel, he said, the temptation to play with assumptions until you got the result you wanted was too great.
I mean, if we bump this figure up by 0.12, and this one down by half a percent, we’re golden, right?
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that all these things are connected, and we’re still trying to deal with them. No George Smiley, the CIA collects all internet traffic in America, and tries to data mine it, without so much as positing an assumption first. A kid reads Roman Jakobson, and is immediately exposed to other people’s summaries of the article he has just read, before he has fully parsed it himself — before he has a chance to disagree. An accountant fudges Excel inputs just enough that a projection becomes a positive indicator.
They are all tied together, and together they represent one of the problems of our age. When conversation or computing power is readily available we tend to jump to it very fast. But for those conversations and computations to be meaningful, we have to enter into them with a contribution of our own.
And that requires us to wait a bit.
What worries me about the modern world is not that amateurs are taking over. It’s that the amateurs might be so soaked in the conventional wisdom of a discipline from a very early point that they won’t bring those needed misreadings to the table that have always fueled progress in the past. That without the silence in between, the conversation will become less varied and meaningful.
Which turns, oddly, into an ode on blogs. For today I sit on my porch, unwired, typing on an AlphaSmart Neo and reading some documents I downloaded onto my Sony Reader. And while I’m sure I haven’t pulled together the most cogent argument (or linked as much as I might), it feels damn good.
So I wonder if it’s possible to move back after all, to think in wider and longer swaths again, but to still keep the connectivity. And I can’t help but think that the lowly blog, with it’s talent for doing conversation as a series of longer cross referenced articles is the perfect channel we currently have for such discourse.
Regardless, I think it’s worth it to continue talking about what a healthy community of discourse looks like, rather than to assume that future professional communities must borrow thier idiom from current teen or gadget-geek culture.
That is, perhaps we should have the discussion that Andrew Keen and Michael Gorman would start if they were not so interested in being inflammatory. One that notes that Marc Andreesen is trying to get offline more, and that Lessig declared email bankruptcy over three years ago.
There’s a real hunger right now for a work that pulls these New Primitive impulses developing among the older techies and reconciles it with the beauty of the data finds data world Jon Udell recently discussed on his blog.
In short, how do we structure our lives so that we get both the benefits of mass conversation and the restorative power of the silences in between?
