TORONTO, ONTARIO - In the revolution that ultimately ended the Soviet Union in 1991, much was made of the impact by technology in preventing the success of the attempted coup against then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Fax machines played a large role for Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to organize opposition to the coup--the coup leaders couldn't keep information to themselves or adequately monitor the opposition, and thus the coup ultimately failed.
In the past few days, similar lauding of technology has surrounded the video of Susan Boyle singing on the "Britain's Got Talent" show. The audience had been unkind to Boyle, in part due to her non-traditional appearance for a singer, until she started to sing. Through YouTube, Susan Boyle is now known around the world. Technologists are pointing to this as a triumph of meritocracy through the Internet.
There's an issue with that interpretation, though. The Boyle appearance took place in February. Not until it actually aired on television on 11-April did the YouTube video start to take off. So, while YouTube certainly introduced Boyle to a broader worldwide audience, pretending that the Internet was some sort of meritocracy that discovered Boyle is a fallacy. The television gatekeepers did that--had they chosen not to air Boyle, nobody would be writing about her now. Technology may have been an intensifier, but it didn't fundamentally change this situation.
For better or for worse, this applies to most lauding of technology. We'll never know for certain, but I suspect that even the fax machines in the Soviet Union in 1991 were not actually necessary. They may have made the process easier or faster, but the dynamics against the success of that coup would have played out, and the coup would have been undermined at some point--much of the military, for example, reportedly felt more loyalty to Yeltsin than any other leader. That feeling was the key.
The single image that stands out most strongly to me from my entire life is the photograph taken by Jeff Widener of the man staring down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, China, during the June 1989 standoff. That was all about the power of the human condition--that man wasn't using technology at all, just his own courage and body. When crises occur, those will always be the most important elements, no matter how much technology might help. No amount of technology will change that.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Culture: Is the Real Opiate Digital?
TORONTO, ONTARIO - Karl Marx is widely quoted as saying that "religion is the opiate of the masses." A number of people, notably Wes Moore, have tried to make the case that television is the opiate of our times. I'm afraid we've moved well beyond that--the new opiate of the 21st century is the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and other portable digital devices.
The use of digital devices by "Generation Y" can be a sight to behold. They text and instant message their friends frequently. They use Twitter and announce what they are doing or discovering to a potentially wide set of followers (or perhaps just a few friends), or update their Facebook status. When not typing, they're actually speaking to someone on their cell phone, or listening to music on their iPod or other portable music player. In the process, they achieve an average level of multi-tasking unknown to previous generations.
While much has been made of the potential of this technology to spread useful information rapidly (imagine how different 11-September-2001, less than eight years ago, could have been if Twitter had already been widespread), like most technologies with great potential, it is usually used for much more mundane uses that have little societal value. I don't just say that as an older technophobe--ask most people who are constantly texting how important their messages are, even to them, and they'll usually say that most of them aren't--but the sense of connection and the rare texts that are socially valuable make the lifestyle worth it.
People of my generation have accused me over the years of being a freak for always keeping occupied and not getting bored--even dump me on a sandy beach without a book or a radio and I'll derive the law of cosines in the sand. People of generation Y don't make that accusation, since they are always occupied with their digital life themselves (though they think I'm a freak for other reasons, like not having a Facebook account).
The constant activity makes it all the more likely the Generation Y will miss something important going on in the world around them. Even if a hyper-connected person notices, their messages about it may simply become noise in the sea of banal exchanges. Yet, the very sense of connection that leads this generation to engage in this behavior keeps them satisfied anyway--and hence the Marx line about it being an opiate, something that provides a false sense of happiness, seems applicable.
There could be some good news in the proliferation of digital devies among the young. Many young people over the centuries have cited "boredom" as the reason for committing crimes, from vandalism to robberies. If a digital device keeps them from getting bored, maybe that will keep them away from crime. Somehow, I'm not holding my breath to see a judge sentence a young offender to mandatory use of a publicly-provided PDA.
The use of digital devices by "Generation Y" can be a sight to behold. They text and instant message their friends frequently. They use Twitter and announce what they are doing or discovering to a potentially wide set of followers (or perhaps just a few friends), or update their Facebook status. When not typing, they're actually speaking to someone on their cell phone, or listening to music on their iPod or other portable music player. In the process, they achieve an average level of multi-tasking unknown to previous generations.
While much has been made of the potential of this technology to spread useful information rapidly (imagine how different 11-September-2001, less than eight years ago, could have been if Twitter had already been widespread), like most technologies with great potential, it is usually used for much more mundane uses that have little societal value. I don't just say that as an older technophobe--ask most people who are constantly texting how important their messages are, even to them, and they'll usually say that most of them aren't--but the sense of connection and the rare texts that are socially valuable make the lifestyle worth it.
People of my generation have accused me over the years of being a freak for always keeping occupied and not getting bored--even dump me on a sandy beach without a book or a radio and I'll derive the law of cosines in the sand. People of generation Y don't make that accusation, since they are always occupied with their digital life themselves (though they think I'm a freak for other reasons, like not having a Facebook account).
The constant activity makes it all the more likely the Generation Y will miss something important going on in the world around them. Even if a hyper-connected person notices, their messages about it may simply become noise in the sea of banal exchanges. Yet, the very sense of connection that leads this generation to engage in this behavior keeps them satisfied anyway--and hence the Marx line about it being an opiate, something that provides a false sense of happiness, seems applicable.
There could be some good news in the proliferation of digital devies among the young. Many young people over the centuries have cited "boredom" as the reason for committing crimes, from vandalism to robberies. If a digital device keeps them from getting bored, maybe that will keep them away from crime. Somehow, I'm not holding my breath to see a judge sentence a young offender to mandatory use of a publicly-provided PDA.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Media: Why I Don't Twitter (Much)
TORONTO, ONTARIO - A friend once told me that he didn't think podcasting was such a big deal, because if you could download the files, then subscribing to a podcast was just a different interface to do something that was already possible. That was largely true for engineers like my friend and me, since we did download MP3's and other sound files of programs before podcasting had been invented. However, my answer to him was that the new interfaces available in iTunes and other programs designed for receiving podcasts were so easy that people who previously didn't know how to download files could have them automatically delivered to their computers. Indeed, podcasting has now allowed millions of people that previously would not have listened to all kinds of programming to listen at their leisure. The phenomenon even prompted me to write on this blog about people effectively becoming their own radio program directors using podcasts.
Twitter is a similar kind of advance. It was already possible to set up a mailing list to reach a group of people via e-mail (in fact, it's been possible almost since the inception of the Internet), and if those recipients had a "smart" phone, they could receive those messages on their mobile device rather than just via e-mail. (Similarly, properly equipped individuals could send to their lists from a mobile device.) Twitter just makes it orders of magnitude easier, especially from a subscriber's point of view. Managing whether one wants to "follow" the "tweets" or messages from a given person is almost trivial using the Twitter interface. The ease of use of the interface is why Twitter has become the hottest thing in technology in 2009, with even National Public Radio's 92-year old Daniel Schorr sending "tweets" (albeit reportedly with help).
Besides the interface, the other distinguishing characteristic of Twitter is that messages are limited to 140 characters. Some people consider it a challenge to write something meaningful in 140 characters, but in general I consider it hopeless. Most of the time, I probably don't provide enough context and explanation for my ideas in this blog--trying to express such ideas in 140 characters is essentially impossible. Markos Moulitsas tried about a week ago, tweeting "Geithner is starting to look like Obama's Rumsfeld." If there was every anything that needed a full essay expanding an idea, it was that one. As talk show host Dave Ross pointed out, his next tweet three hours later was "At park, my 2yo is beating up on 5yos. She doesn't take crap from anyone. My 5yo, on the other hand, gets beat up"--which clearly didn't need more explanation, but nobody outside of his family really needed to hear about.
I see the point of Twitter in following a breaking event--getting the perspective of someone watching a sporting event, for example. Tweeting that you are okay after a major earthquake might be an efficient way to avoid having to call all your friends and relatives. If following a steam train to take pictures of it, following someone tweeting the location of the train would be useful. My life simply doesn't have those kinds of events going on very often, so this blog makes much more sense as a forum to share with the world.
So, technically, I'm on Twitter. But, unless there's some sort of real-time event going on, don't expect me to be sending tweets--or following anyone. And, remember, you can subscribe to this blog using a RSS feed, if you are so inclined--that will provide far more information than following me on Twitter.
Twitter is a similar kind of advance. It was already possible to set up a mailing list to reach a group of people via e-mail (in fact, it's been possible almost since the inception of the Internet), and if those recipients had a "smart" phone, they could receive those messages on their mobile device rather than just via e-mail. (Similarly, properly equipped individuals could send to their lists from a mobile device.) Twitter just makes it orders of magnitude easier, especially from a subscriber's point of view. Managing whether one wants to "follow" the "tweets" or messages from a given person is almost trivial using the Twitter interface. The ease of use of the interface is why Twitter has become the hottest thing in technology in 2009, with even National Public Radio's 92-year old Daniel Schorr sending "tweets" (albeit reportedly with help).
Besides the interface, the other distinguishing characteristic of Twitter is that messages are limited to 140 characters. Some people consider it a challenge to write something meaningful in 140 characters, but in general I consider it hopeless. Most of the time, I probably don't provide enough context and explanation for my ideas in this blog--trying to express such ideas in 140 characters is essentially impossible. Markos Moulitsas tried about a week ago, tweeting "Geithner is starting to look like Obama's Rumsfeld." If there was every anything that needed a full essay expanding an idea, it was that one. As talk show host Dave Ross pointed out, his next tweet three hours later was "At park, my 2yo is beating up on 5yos. She doesn't take crap from anyone. My 5yo, on the other hand, gets beat up"--which clearly didn't need more explanation, but nobody outside of his family really needed to hear about.
I see the point of Twitter in following a breaking event--getting the perspective of someone watching a sporting event, for example. Tweeting that you are okay after a major earthquake might be an efficient way to avoid having to call all your friends and relatives. If following a steam train to take pictures of it, following someone tweeting the location of the train would be useful. My life simply doesn't have those kinds of events going on very often, so this blog makes much more sense as a forum to share with the world.
So, technically, I'm on Twitter. But, unless there's some sort of real-time event going on, don't expect me to be sending tweets--or following anyone. And, remember, you can subscribe to this blog using a RSS feed, if you are so inclined--that will provide far more information than following me on Twitter.
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