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DIE TAGESPOST
April 16, 2010

SOCIAL NETWORKS DO NOT NEED TO DEMOCRATIZE (Google Translation)
(SOZIALE NETZWERKE DEMOKRATISIEREN NICHT NOTWENDIG)

By Alexander Riebel

America leads a discussion about Internet services, which are often overestimated in its effect by the media

... there is a debate in America about the power of social networks and their relationship to state power. The policy researcher Evgeny Morozov strongly in America represents the view that social networks do not help to more democracy. This opinion he had taken in an extensive interview with Clay Shirky, which has the website www.edge.org published with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (11.4.) titled "Digital Power and It's Discontents." This is about the debate between utopians and realists in terms of social networks, namely the question of whether the Internet is more a medium for human emancipation and revolution, or a tool to control and repression. Morozov calls it ridiculous if someone takes from the American Foreign Ministry, the CEO of Google or Twitter with a business trip. The fact that Google with the American intelligence agency "National Security Agency working together, is a dangerous proximity between politics and business. Because no citizen could be so happy if the e-mail traffic will be handled by a company that works closely with the national safety. The problems concerning the control of people including democratic governments.

Morozov provides the power of social networks like Twitter or Facebook rather skeptical. Even millions of cell phone cameras directed at the soldiers would not deter the Iranian government to resolve the violent demonstrations. The protests were lost in the sand column and the country further. Morozov sees the use of networks rather the possibility that the Iranian authorities have early information on anti-government groups and provide the intelligence agencies with this information. The coordination of the Internet users and the coordination in the reality gapes however far apart for the Belarus-born scientists. He had protested doubts that many demonstrators had left because of the information on Facebook or Twitter to the streets and coordinated. The demonstrations are more likely with "lava" as compared with planned events.

The media often reports on the role of networks for protest movements. Other and equally important issues are neglected. About whether the Internet can not promote a hedonistic colored ideology, which discourages people from more political commitment. Nongovernmental forces can gain power in the Internet, such as nationalistic, but also the very same state. For many countries, says Morozov, no protest waves, as is the case in China. In the interview, is also the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard on language, had complained before more than 150 years that in the then emerging era of newspapers, cafes and formed a public sphere where opinions were more in circulation and no longer a matter feel obliged. There is no more, what people would die. This is what also Morozov and many similar Internet critics the "indiscriminate nature of the digital activism: it recognizes our commitment to political and social issues that are really important and require permanent victim down. This is also the American computer scientist Jaron Larnier that the Internet destroys the individual creativity and speaks of "Digital Maoism", the more appealing to the swarm intelligence of the people, because Internet like Wikipedia disseminated not truth, but the average opinion of the anonymous mass. That sounds judged hard, but true when it comes to questions about ultimate things too far. For the representation of knowledge calls for Larnier and personal responsibility. In this direction also argues Morozov, the blogger does not hold for large icons critical of the government campaigns: "The people must be led by people who are willing to courageously stand up for their cause, to sacrifice to go to jail and the next Havel, Sakharov's Solzhenitsyn, or to be ... My fear is that it will not be a Twitter-age Solzhenitsyn more. "He would probably disappear just because the networks much earlier in the prison. The Chinese government has long since developed new strategies, methods of propaganda, in order to supposedly 'netizens' meet. She had admitted to investigators of a network 15 rounds in a police station, in which a young man who died mysteriously, and the "investigators reported" then the net, there is nothing remarkable. Later came out then that there were former employees of state media.

David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, compares the Internet with a school, but not with artificial intelligence. One could learn a lot on the internet like in school, but would if it mutates into an institution like the school, it would be a disaster.

The debate on edge.org expands the view of the Internet as crucial aspects. By highlighting the positive effects of the network, there is no doubt, it is not enough. The force is easy to overestimate the social networks and overestimated the Internet with regard to the crucial problems of man.

[continue ... German original ... Google translation]

SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
FREITAG, 16. APRIL 2010

WIE PRÄGT DIE SPRACHE UNSER DENKEN?
Der Streit um die Frage ist alt, doch nur selten wurde sie bei den Menschen selbst untersucht — ein Forschungsbericht / Von Lera Boroditsky

Der Text ist dem Band Die Zukunftsmacher – Die Nobelpreisträger von morgen verraten, worüber sie forschen etnnommen, der von Max Brockman herausgegeben wurde (S. Fischer, Frankfurt, 2010. 272 Seiten, 19,95 Euro).

S. FISCHER GERMANY HARPER PERRENNIAL US QUERCUS UK IL SAGGIATORE ITALY

First published on Edge: How Does Our Language Shape The Way We think?" By Lera Boroditsky [6.12.09]; From "What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science", Edited by Max Brockman

DER SPIEGEL ONLINE
Samstag, 17. April 2010

TODAY IN THE FEUILLETONS (ARTS PAGES)

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16.04.2010

(Google Translation) A long excerpt from the book The Future Makers - The Nobel Prize winners of tomorrow reveal what they are researching," in which Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky, a researcher on how language shapes our thinking, summarizes: "What we have learned from our research is that people who speak different languages, really different, and who use special features of grammar, sometimes have their view of the world impacted in far-reaching ways."

ECONOMIST
Mar 12th 2010, by BG | WASHINGTON

AND THEN THE GEEKS GREW UP

"HEY geek," says my bureau chief. He says it with affection, an honorific won from my ability to make his phone read his e-mail. A geek is not a nerd or, God forbid, a dweeb; nerds are smart and dweebs are socially incapable. A geek is obsessed and pulls things apart. Whether he puts them back together is immaterial, as is whether everyone else has left the room. "Hey geek" used to be a life sentence; to hear it was to know that your passion was a burden, that you would type out your days accompanied by nothing but a can of Coke and the sound of your own hair thinning.

But then a funny thing happened. The geeks grew up, and it wasn't so bad. The internet was a geek-hungry machine; it plucked the geek from in front of his ham radio and deposited him among sales and marketing staff, and sometimes even near girls. Several geeks became billionaires. Perhaps a geek even became the president of the United States. It became possible to be a geek and something else, too. Maybe a journalist.

John Brockman, in a brief essay on Edge, calls these geeks who went on to do something else the algorithmic culture, dedicated to learning something about the world by understanding the actual code behind the internet. The data packed into the black boxes of our phones and web browsers reveal things about us, trails of where we have been and what we have desired. And we, the algorithmic interpreters of The Economist, aim with this blog to approach black boxes with tiny screwdrivers, to let in the light and to completely ruin them on the way to finally, blissfully understanding them.

We request that you stay in the room. If you're going to step out for a bit, maybe grab us a Coke.

WIRED
April 12, 2010

BEYOND THE BEYOND

Digital Power and Its Discontents
By Bruce Sterling

Great to see Shirky and Morozov having a civilized and productive discussion here.

* I take John Brockman’s point that it would be great to see these important matters tackle by a host of accredited thinkers — but I don’t know what the academy would say before these phenomena vaporize. By the time you can figure out whether Twitter is "good for" Kazakhstan or not, there may be no Kazakhstan and/or no Twitter.

* Also, watching people jump all over hippie utopian tracts that John Perry Barlow wrote ten years ago — that forces me to recognize how important John Perry Barlow was, and still is. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, boys.

BELIEFNET
April 13, 2010

DIGITAL POWER IN THE POSTMODERN AGE
Rod Dreher

A great Edge exchange between Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky about how the Internet and digital technology works to affect power relations within polities. Morozov says he thinks techno-utopians in the press are taking a too-narrow view of how the Internet conditions and subverts power relationships in society:

One of the reasons I've been so unhappy with how the media have been covering the role of the Internet in Iran — and this I guess also has to do with them reading certain things into your book that you did not intend to say there — is the almost exclusive focus on analyzing what the Internet has done to protest movements, at the expense of thinking about its impact on everything else. But if we focus only on how people coordinate themselves with the help of social media before, during, or after the elections, we miss many other effects that the Internet is having in public, social, and political life in authoritarian states, especially in the long term.

Shouldn't we also be asking whether it's making people more receptive to nationalism? Or whether it might be promoting a certain (hedonism-based) ideology that may actually push them further away from any meaningful engagement in politics? Does it actually empower certain non-state forces within authoritarian states that may not necessarily be conductive to democracy and freedom? Those are all big questions which we cannot answer if we just focus on who gets empowered during the protests, the state or the protesters, because some countries, well, don't have that many protests. Or elections. China doesn't have national elections. ...

...

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE
FAZ.NET
April 11, 2010
Front Page

Internet DAS UNBEHAGEN AN DER DIGITALEN MACHT (Google Translation: "The discomfort with the digital power") The dreams of network utopians and the realists. Is the Internet is a medium of emancipation and of revolution — or a tool of control and repression? Did Twitter and Facebook have stoke the flames of rebellion in Iran, or did they help the authorities unmask the rebels? A skeptical dialogue. With Clay Shirky und Evgeny Morozov > >F.A.Z.-Spezial: Jahresfrage auf Edge.org >Internet-Debatte: Wenn Literatur Sich Im Netz Verfängt >FAZ.NET-Spezial: Digitales Denken

>F.A.Z.-Spezial: Jahresfrage auf Edge.org
WIE HAT DAS INTERNET IHR DENKEN VERÄNDERT? (Google Translation: Annual edition on edge.org)
Von Frank Schirrmacher

08th January 2010 — This Friday the American literary agent John Brockman published the 2010 question: How has the Internet and networked computers changed the way we think? At the core of the debate lies the question of the science historian George Dyson, "Is the price of machines that think, people who can no longer think?
"

Some of the most important present-day scientists and authors are in Brockman's circle, and present their vision on Edge.org with one hundred twenty-one answers. We are printing the most interesting ones in this feature. Unlike in Germany where the debate about the information age is still always marked a palaver about media interest, Edge aims at a deep debate.

>Internet-Debatte: Wenn Literatur Sich Im Netz Verfängt (Google Tranlsation: "If literature is entangled in the net")
Von Thomas Hettche
Literature is not from books, either in a cardboard or from digital. Literature consists of novels, sonnets, stories, short stories, odes, in short, of works, completed, followed by specific aesthetic and thematic aspects organized structures, their own laws, are understood only by itself and can also be reduced to nothing else. To their particular shape, these distinctive physiognomy, which arises from a specific language and from what language does this, it is to do any real writer. This special physiognomy is different from all the literary journals and film templates that are otherwise staring them between two covers and Roman names.

>FAZ.NET-Spezial: Digitales Denken Google Translation: Digitial Thinking at FAZ
A Rerprise of recent articles

FFWEB MAGAZINE
5 aprile 2010
LA STORIA

Un libro di scienziati che invitano ad avere fiducia nel futuro

153 BUONI MOTIVI PER ESSERE OTTIMISTI
di Cecilia Moretti

Si immagini di poter porre la domanda che arrovella i momenti pensosi a una cerchia di sapienti lì apposta per darvi risposta. Non è detto che se ne venga a capo, ma un avanzamento di prospettiva è assicurato.

L’ha pensata bene John Brockman, di professione impresario culturale. Lui, agente letterario specializzatosi nel fiutare i talenti scientifici, ha creato Edge, una sorta di fondazione virtuale, con sede in Internet (www.edge.org), dove menti eccelse sollecitate da domande comuni promuovono la discussione su temi culturali importanti e le loro implicazioni a largo raggio."Orlo","bordo", significa letteralmente: «Gli scienziati del gruppo Edge – spiega Piero Bianucci sulla Stampa, descrivendo il progetto – stanno sul bordo, sulla frontiera tra ciò che si sa e ciò che si vorrebbe sapere, tra presente e futuro, forse tra genio e follia».

[continue ... Italian original ... Google translation]

PESSIMISM OF REASON
THERE IS OPTIMISM OF SCIENCE (Google Translation)

153 good reasons not to despair: a book exposing the physicists, biologists and philosophers who bet on the future of research

Piero Bianucci

The good news: there are 153 good scientific reasons to be optimistic. The bad: In some cases, because optimism is translated into deeds, to wait centuries. And now history.

John Brockman is a literary agent. In his diary, but novelists are not scientists. Some already have the medal on the chest of the Nobel Prize, other studies to conquer. Everyone has a great desire to communicate between themselves and the world. Brockman brought them together in a kind of virtual club that called Edge-based Internet ( www.edge.org ). Edge means hem edge. But the verb related to that word also means "prick." Scientists of the Edge are on board, on the border between what we know and what you would like to know, present and future, perhaps between genius and madness. It sharpens the wits to cross the border without a passport. So Edge is an open space where scientists club bring bold ideas into play, lowering their level of inhibition, as required creative thinking.

Brockman has the sense of Auditel. Having invented the 'third culture', which incorporates humanistic values of science, once a year to members of the club put a question to which all are invited to respond on the website. Play smart in a few days a literary agent Brockman has a book in her hands. The latest, just released in Italy, is just called 153 reasons to be optimistic heading the betting big research (Il Saggiatore, 430 pages, 21 euros). The theme was: "Science always presents us with new questions, questions more focused and better articulated. What are you optimistic about and why? Surprise. ...

[continue ... Italian original ... Google translation]

CORRIERE DELLA SERA
27 marzo 2010
CULTURA

DENOUNCED «TECHNOLOGICAL COLLECTIVISM» AND THE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH ABNORMAL ACTIVITIES OF THE BRAIN

BEWARE OF INTERNET, WE LOSE CONCENTRATION AND MEMORY [Italian Original — Google Translation]

Nicholas Carr sounds the alarm against the dictatorship of the Net in the essay that divides America

Massimo Gaggi

«"Just take the Internet and digital technologies in blindly. They offer vast opportunities for access to new information, but have too high a social and cultural cost: reading online transforms the way we analyze things, the mechanisms of learning. Turning from the paper to the screen we lose the ability to concentrate, we develop a more superficial way of thinking, we become pancake people, as noted by the playwright Richard Foreman, wide and thin as a pancake because thanks to the next link we are constantly jumping from one piece of information to another. We get wherever we want, but at the same time we lose depth because we no longer time to reflect, contemplate. Pausing to develop a thorough analysis is becoming an unnatural.".

Nicholas Carr is the bete noire of the Internet Fan Network 'without ifs and buts' and the digital technologies industry. Two years ago, his essay, published by the magazine "The Atlantic" with the provocative title "Is Google making us stupid?" Was the first stone thrown into the lake of the Internet culture. Carr, a scholar who has worked in business consulting and has been the editorial director of Harvard Business Review, has been branded by web afficianados as an enemy of technology.

"In fact - he says today from his home in Colorado, where he retired to write books-since the eighties have been a consumer of digital technology febrile starting with Mac Plus, my first personal computer. 've Always been an inner geek, not a technophobia. But my enthusiasm has gradually diminished with the discovery that in addition to benefits that are there for everyone, the Web also brings disadvantages far less obvious and for this reason more dangerous. Also because the effects will be profound and permanent. "

Jaron Lanier, the virtual reality visionary that in a recent book-manifesto has warned against "collectivism" of the Internet that kills individual creativity, the Net has been branded a traitor. It will be more difficult to handle in the same way The Shallows ( 'surface: what the Internet is doing to our minds) his new book that already does argue when there are still more than two months of its publication in the U.S.. This explains why the same Carr: "What on 'Atlantic' was an essay written on the basis of my personal experience, a reflection on how the digital culture has changed my behavior. Over the past two years I have tried to go beyond the personal, examining the scientific evidence and social as well as Internet-earlier revolutions like that of the alphabet - have changed the intellectual history of mankind. And how new technologies influence the structure of our brain even at the cellular level. "

In the debate sponsored by the Edge Foundation on these issues, he cited the case of the Cushing Academy, an elite school in Massachusetts since the Civil War, where all the books in the library have been replaced by computers. What role are schools playing in this revolution? ...

[continue ... Italian original ... Google translation]

[Further Reading on Edge:]
ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID" By Nicholas Carr
DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
THE PANCAKE PEOPLE, OR, "THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD" By Richard Foreman

IS TIME AN ILLUSION? (Russian — English)
By Leonardo Vintiñi

"Time is a moving image of eternity." —Plato

We tend to believe that destiny is not fixed and that all time past fades into oblivion, but can the movement be a mere illusion? A renowned British physicist explains that in a special dimension, time simply doesn’t exist.

“If you try to get your hands on time, it’s always slipping through your fingers," said Julian Barbour, British physicist and author of "The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics," in an interview with the Edge Foundation. While this poetic statement still resonates in the room, Barbour and the journalist probably do not have any connection with their own selves a second ago.

Barbour believes that people cannot capture time because it does not exist. While this is not a new theory, it has never had the popularity that Einstein’s theory of relativity or the string theory has had. ...

Fliegen wie Superman (German original — Google English translation)

Kriemhilde Klippstätter

To counter any plagiarism allegation from the outset - not least because the topic is hochgekocht by the threat of awards to a Mexican salamander at the Leipzig Book Fair, now in the media - we direct our resources equally open: The following observations are based mainly on the results of a survey conducted by the Edge Foundation, a kind of think tank on the web.

To turn of intellectuals, scientists and artists were asked how the Internet has changed their way of thinking ("How The Internet Has Changed The Way You Think?"). One of the commonalities that many respondents attributed to the new medium seems to be a sort of background noise. Where once peace was required to think and respected, to adjourn digital troublemakers contemplation and provide endless amusement. ...

...As for the biological changes caused by Internet use, the scientists still somewhat groping in the dark. According to Small, however, one could say that the brain activity of a Web-novice match on first use in about where you read. Clever users develop twice as much brain activity. Repeats in the form of a computer game not working out complex tasks can be beneficial but, as shown by example in the memory exercises for seniors. However, employment appears on the Web after the deciphering of emotions hinder - real - faces.

That may be because verbal communication in the network is carried out mainly as detects the sound artist Brian Eno: "Words and language are the currency of the Internet". He mourns the fax machine, with the manuscripts and drawings, but also could be transported.

Therefore, the artist, he now draw its lessons from more sources than before, and corresponded with more people - less deep and intense. The affects it also to be read, because he then skim books, as he scan the Web: "I bookmark it."

Has also changed the understanding of what constitutes an expert. Previously the one who had access to specialized knowledge, was now the one who is better interpreted. "The assessment has replaced the access," Eno and also has recognized that the concept of community has changed. Previously they characterized physically and geographically connected people today determine a common interest community. And everyone can be part of quite different communities. This propensity to belong to a community, it could be exaggerating, and to a life of fictional communities like Second Life, run, go to the expense of real life.

"New technologies create new perceptions.'s Reality is a process created by human activity," says Edge co-founder John Brockman his credo. As in the 17 Century mechanics gained in importance, has been identified as the heart pump. As the mid-20th Century, the self-regulating systems have been identified, compared to the brain with a computer: "We create tools and adapt to that image," believes Brockman.

Now, a code for a collective consciousness was invented, which requires a new way of thinking: "The collective consciousness is paged with the consciousness, as all share." ...

EDGE: "Europe, Where the Idea of Competition in the Internet Space Appears to Focus on Litigation, Legislation, Regulation, and Criminalization"

Does Europe especially need to reconsider their approach to the Internet? EDGE would say yes: ...

WHAT THE INTERNET WILL MEAN FOR JOURNALISM AND JOURNALISTS: INSIGHTS FROM THE EDGE
by Olivia Scheck

I am embarrassed to say that before this weekend I had never visited Edge.org.

I was first directed to the site on Friday by a post on 3QD, and I have remained there ever since, devouring responses to the 2010 Edge Annual Question,"How is the internet changing the way you think?"

There are many wonderful ideas to glean from this incredible collection of essays, but I was especially interested in what the replies suggested for the future of journalism and – perhaps a separate issue – the future of journalists. ...

THE STRAITS TIMES (Singapore)
Sunday, March 14, 201

Ex-Libris

Each week, we publish an extract from a book that is topical or of general interest.

This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape The Future Edited by John Brockman Harper Perennial (2010)

What would your reply be to this question about change: 'What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?'

John Brockman, publisher and editor of an online scientific website, Edge, puts forward this hypothetical question to a group of scientists, thinkers, intellectuals and artists. The result? A collection of short essays where imagination, ideas and propositions know no bounds.

WIRED
March 5, 2010

BEYOND THE BEYOND

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge313.html

Algorithmic Culture
By Bruce Sterling

Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Here at Edge, we are not immune to such considerations. We have to ask if we're kidding ourselves by publishing 10,000+ word pieces to be read by people who are limiting themselves to 3" ideas, i.e. the width of the screen of their iPhones and Blackberries.(((And if they're kidding THEMSELVES, what do you suppose they're doing to all those guys with the handsets?)))

Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know. Book publishers, confronted by the innovation of technology companies, are in a state of panic. Instead of embracing the new digital reading devices as an exciting opportunity, the default response is to disadvantage authors. Television and cable networks are dumbfounded by the move of younger people to watch TV on their computers or cell-phones. Newspapers and magazine publishers continue to see their advertising model crumble and have no response other than buyouts.

Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head. What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common? All are software engineers or scientists.

(((So… if we can just round up and liquidate these EDGE conspirators, then us authors are out of the woods, right? I mean, that would seem to be a clear implication.)))

So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture.

(((Even if we rounded 'em up, I guess we'd still have to fret about those ALGORITHMS they built. Did you ever meet an algorithm with a single spark of common sense or humane mercy? I for one welcome our algorithmic overlords.))) ...

THE OIL DRUM: AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND
March 12, 2010

From Counterculture To Cyberculture: The Life And Times Of Stewart Brand

[ED. NOTE: A serious reprise of the work and influence of Stewart Brand over the past 40-odd years...JB]

This post was prompted by my reading Fred Turner's book "From Counterculture To Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism", which looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area. ... Turner has some great excerpts from his book at "EDGE" magazine — STEWART BRAND MEETS THE CYBERNETIC COUNTERCULTURE. ...

...Brand maintained that given access to the information we need, humanity can make the world a better place. The Whole Earth Catalog magazine he founded was promoted as a "compendium of tools, texts and information" which sought to "catalyze the emergence of a realm of personal power" by making technology available to people eager to create sustainable communities. Brand eventually achieved his goal of persuading NASA to release the first photo of the Earth from space (wandering around for some time wearing a badge saying "Why Haven't We Seen A Picture of the Whole Earth?") and the photo became the cover for the Catalog. ...

...Whole Earth (and later Wired) editor Kevin Kelly has noted that style of the Whole Earth Catalog preceded the modern internet / blogosphere, and was eventually made redundant by it. ...

...Brand discusses "Whole Earth Discipline" in this talk at EDGE....

About 40 years ago I wore a button that said, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" Then we finally saw the pictures. What did it do for us?

The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it.

Further Reading on Edge: STEWART BRAND MEETS THE CYBERNETIC COUNTERCULTURE;
WE ARE AS GODS AND HAVE TO GET GOOD AT IT: Stewart Brand Talks About His Ecopragmatist Manifesto

SABAH (Turkey)
March 12, 2010

Discussion of the meaning of dangerous ideas: Turkey is changing!
Emre Akoz

Starting from a book the other day, our readers "What is your most dangerous idea," he asked.
Danger here of course mean, "kill the man, let's bomb bay" is not as murderous ideas.
Objective existing (economic, political, social, moral) order and radical, surprising, memorization will lead to disruptive changes to the ideas put forth. ...

"most dangerous" What is your opinion?

...I've had an interesting collection in a bookstore Mumbai: "What is Your Dangerous Idea?" Almost got it.
Because the name was very attractive; and Helen Fisher, Jared Diamond, Ray Kurzweil, Sherry Turkle, such as Douglas Rushkoff I read with interest the short article I had the idea of people.

American writers and thinkers from many different areas in the book that was prepared by John Brockman's thinking people, who have put their own dangerous ideas.

According to what I am when I returned to Turkey in! In fact in 2009 the book "What's Your Dangerous Idea?" (Pegasus Press) translated to our language, even with the title.

Where the "dangerous ideas" and implied "murder, massacres, rape, robbery, such as" criminal actions in almost every period, and their planning is not sure.

There is talk of a threat by intellectuals in the book: So, the question that a certain moral, social, political or cultural order will change our basic assumptions about life that will shake the ideas ...

It's dangerous idea which is not wrong of course. Quite the contrary: if one day occur?

Let's say that as a result of scientific research who, what age would die to know we've become ... This knowledge was really nice to be in our resolve?

In this regard puzzle scientists who study would want to continue? Or as soon as possible discontinuation of funding for research would deal? ...

BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Rebel in Cyberspace, Fighting Collectivism

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 14, 2010

In 2006, the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier published an incisive, groundbreaking and highly controversial essay about "digital Maoism" — about the downside of online collectivism, and the enshrinement by Web 2.0 enthusiasts of the "wisdom of the crowd." In that manifesto Mr. Lanier argued that design (or ratification) by committee often does not result in the best product, and that the new collectivist ethos — embodied by everything from Wikipedia to "American Idol" to Google searches — diminishes the importance and uniqueness of the individual voice, and that the "hive mind" can easily lead to mob rule.

Now, in his impassioned new book "You Are Not a Gadget," Mr. Lanier expands this thesis further, looking at the implications that digital Maoism or "cybernetic totalism" have for our society at large. Although some of his suggestions for addressing these problems wander into technical thickets the lay reader will find difficult to follow, the bulk of the book is lucid, powerful and persuasive. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in how the Web and the software we use every day are reshaping culture and the marketplace.

Mr. Lanier, a pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a Silicon Valley veteran, is hardly a Luddite, as some of his critics have suggested. Rather he is a digital-world insider who wants to make the case for"a new digital humanism" before software engineers’ design decisions, which he says fundamentally shape users’ behavior, become"frozen into place by a process known as lock-in." Just as decisions about the dimensions of railroad tracks determined the size and velocity of trains for decades to come, he argues, so choices made about software design now may yield"defining, unchangeable rules" for generations to come. ...

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INTERNAZIONALE
28 GENNAIO

ON THE COVER
INTERNET ERGO SUM
The network has changed our
way of thinking? Meet artists, intellectuals and
Scientists around the world. From Kevin Kelly to Brian Eno, from
Richard Dawkins, to Clay Shirky, to Nicholas Carr

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THE TIMES
January 28, 2010

In 1953, when the internet was not even a technological twinkle in the eye, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into two categories: the hedgehog and the fox: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Hedgehog writers, argued Berlin, see the world through the prism of a single overriding idea, whereas foxes dart hither and thither, gathering inspiration from the widest variety of experiences and sources. Marx, Nietzsche and Plato were hedgehogs; Aristotle, Shakespeare and Berlin himself were foxes.

Today, feasting on the anarchic, ubiquitous, limitless and uncontrolled information cornucopia that is the web, we are all foxes. We browse and scavenge thoughts and influences, picking up what we want, discarding the rest, collecting, linking, hunting and gathering our information, social life and entertainment. The new Apple iPad is merely the latest step in the fusion of the human mind and the internet. This way of thinking is a direct threat to ideology. Indeed, perhaps the ultimate expression of hedgehog-thinking is totalitarian and fundamentalist, which explains why the regimes in China and Iran are so terrified of the internet. The hedgehogs rightly fear the foxes.

Edge (www.edge.org), a website dedicated to ideas and technology, recently asked scores of philosophers, scientists and scholars a simple but fundamental question: "How is the internet changing the way you think?" The responses were astonishingly varied, yet most agreed that the web had profoundly affected the way we gather our thoughts, if not the way we deploy that information.

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January 19, 2010
The Age of External Knowledge

Today’s idea: Filtering, not remembering, is the most important mental skill in the digital age, an essay says.
But this discipline will prove no mean feat, since mental focus must take place amid the unlimited
distractions of the Internet.

Internet | Edge, the high-minded ideas and tech site, has posed its annual question for 2010 — "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" — and gotten some interesting responses from a slew of smart people. They range from the technology analyst Nicholas Carr, who wonders if the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing; to Clay Shirky, social software guru, who sees the Web poised uncertainly between immature "Invisible High School" and more laudable "Invisible College." David Dalrymple, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks human memory will no longer be the key repository of knowledge, and focus will supersede erudition. Quote:

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.

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ATLANTIC WIRE
January 14, 2010

Deep Thinkers Debate: 'How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
By Heather Horn

Edge is an organization of deep, visionary thinkers on science and culture. Each year the group poses a question, this year collecting 168 essay responses to the question, "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"

In answer, academics, scientists and philosophers responded with musings on the Internet enabling telecommunication, or functioning as a sort of prosthesis, or robbing us of our old, linear" mode of thinking. Actor Alan Alda described the Web as "speed plus mobs." Responses alternate between the quirky and the profound ("In this future, knowledge will be fully outside the individual, focus will be fully inside, and everybody's selves will truly be spread everywhere.")

Since it takes a while to read the entire collection--and the Atlantic Wire should know, as we tried--here are some of the more piquant answers. Visit the Edge website for the full experience. For a smart, funny answer in video form, see here.

• We Haven't Changed, declares Harvard physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Our brains "likely evolved ... in response to the demands of social (rather than environmental) complexity," and would likely only continue to evolve as our social framework changes. Our social framework has not changed: from our family units to our military units, he points out, our social structures remain fairly similar to what they were over 1000 years ago. "The Internet itself is not changing the fundamental reality of my thinking any more than it is changing our fundamental proclivity to violence or our innate capacity for love."
  
  
• Bordering on Mental Illness Barry C. Smith of the University of London writes of the new importance of "well-packaged information." He says he is personally "exhilarated by the dizzying effort to make connections and integrate information. Learning is faster. Though the tendency to forge connecting themes can feel dangerously close to the search for patterns that overtakes the mentally ill."

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RSI.CH RADIO
January 24, 2010

Tecno-scienza tra immaginazione e realtà: dall'homo sapiens all'homo digitalis

a cura di Clara Caverzasio Tanzi e Gaetano Prisciantelli

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NPR - ALL TECH CONSIDERED
January 27, 2010

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TIMES ONLINE
January 8, 2010

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LA STAMPA
January 20, 2010

[click for pdf]

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ILGIORNALE
January 20, 2010

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IL SOLE 24 ORE — NOVA
January 21, 2010

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Il Secolo XIX (Italy)
January 18, 2010

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O Estado De Sao Paulo (Brazil)
January 17, 2010

Pagina 12 (Argentina)
January 17, 2010

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Washington Times
January 15, 2010

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Die Welt (Germany)
January 12, 2010

Schirrmacher-Debatte
Macht das Internet nun schlau oder dumm?
Von Alan Posener

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THE HUFFINGTON POST
January 11, 2010

FRONT PAGE

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NEWSWEEK
January 8, 2010

Sharon Begley
YOUR BRAIN ONLINE
Does the Web change how we think?

Shortened attention span. Less interest in reflection and introspection. Inability to engage in in-depth thought. Fragmented, distracted thinking.

The ways the Internet supposedly affects thought are as apocalyptic as they are speculative, since all the above are supported by anecdote, not empirical data. So it is refreshing to hear how 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars answered, "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" That is the "annual question" at the online salon edge.org, where every year science impresario, author, and literary agent John Brockman poses a puzzler for his flock of scientists and other thinkers. ...

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