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The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking
This definitive work on the perils and promise of the social-media revolution collects writings by today's best thinkers and cultural commentators, with an all-new introduction by Bauerlein.
Twitter, Facebook, e-publishing, blogs, distance-learning and other social media raise some of the most divisive cultural questions of our time. Some see the technological breakthroughs we live with as hopeful and democratic new steps in education, information gathering, and human progress. But others are deeply concerned by the eroding of civility online, declining reading habits, withering attention spans, and the treacherous effects of 24/7 peer pressure on our young.
With The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein emerged as the foremost voice against the development of an overwhelming digital social culture. But The Digital Divide doesn't take sides. Framing the discussion so that leading voices from across the spectrum, supporters and detractors alike, have the opportunity to weigh in on the profound issues raised by the new media - from questions of reading skills and attention span, to cyber-bullying and the digital playground - Bauerlein's new book takes the debate to a higher ground.
The book includes essays by Steven Johnson, Nicholas Carr, Don Tapscott, Douglas Rushkoff, Maggie Jackson, Clay Shirky, Todd Gitlin, and many more. Though these pieces have been previously published, the organization of The Digital Divide gives them freshness and new relevancy, making them part of a single document readers can use to truly get a handle on online privacy, the perils of a plugged-in childhood, and other technology-related hot topics.
Rather than dividing the book into "pro" and "con" sections, the essays are arranged by subject - "The Brain, the Senses," "Learning in and out of the Classroom," "Social and Personal Life," "The Millennials," "The Fate of Culture," and "The Human (and Political) Impact." Bauerlein incorporates a short headnote and a capsule bio about each contributor, as well as relevant contextual information about the source of the selection.
Bauerlein also provides a new introduction that traces the development of the debate, from the initial Digital Age zeal, to a wave of skepticism, and to a third stage of reflection that wavers between criticism and endorsement.
Enthusiasm for the Digital Age has cooled with the passage of time and the piling up of real-life examples that prove the risks of an online-focused culture. However, there is still much debate, comprising thousands of commentaries and hundreds of books, about how these technologies are rewriting our futures. Now, with this timely and definitive volume, readers can finally cut through the clamor, read the the very best writings from each side of The Digital Divide, and make more informed decisions about the presence and place of technology in their lives.
Twitter, Facebook, e-publishing, blogs, distance-learning and other social media raise some of the most divisive cultural questions of our time. Some see the technological breakthroughs we live with as hopeful and democratic new steps in education, information gathering, and human progress. But others are deeply concerned by the eroding of civility online, declining reading habits, withering attention spans, and the treacherous effects of 24/7 peer pressure on our young.
With The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein emerged as the foremost voice against the development of an overwhelming digital social culture. But The Digital Divide doesn't take sides. Framing the discussion so that leading voices from across the spectrum, supporters and detractors alike, have the opportunity to weigh in on the profound issues raised by the new media - from questions of reading skills and attention span, to cyber-bullying and the digital playground - Bauerlein's new book takes the debate to a higher ground.
The book includes essays by Steven Johnson, Nicholas Carr, Don Tapscott, Douglas Rushkoff, Maggie Jackson, Clay Shirky, Todd Gitlin, and many more. Though these pieces have been previously published, the organization of The Digital Divide gives them freshness and new relevancy, making them part of a single document readers can use to truly get a handle on online privacy, the perils of a plugged-in childhood, and other technology-related hot topics.
Rather than dividing the book into "pro" and "con" sections, the essays are arranged by subject - "The Brain, the Senses," "Learning in and out of the Classroom," "Social and Personal Life," "The Millennials," "The Fate of Culture," and "The Human (and Political) Impact." Bauerlein incorporates a short headnote and a capsule bio about each contributor, as well as relevant contextual information about the source of the selection.
Bauerlein also provides a new introduction that traces the development of the debate, from the initial Digital Age zeal, to a wave of skepticism, and to a third stage of reflection that wavers between criticism and endorsement.
Enthusiasm for the Digital Age has cooled with the passage of time and the piling up of real-life examples that prove the risks of an online-focused culture. However, there is still much debate, comprising thousands of commentaries and hundreds of books, about how these technologies are rewriting our futures. Now, with this timely and definitive volume, readers can finally cut through the clamor, read the the very best writings from each side of The Digital Divide, and make more informed decisions about the presence and place of technology in their lives.
368 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2011
50 people are currently reading
665 people want to read
About the author
Mark Bauerlein
34 books31 followersMark Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts. Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 (www.dumbestgeneration.com), was published in May 2008.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
January 27, 2015
I'm giving it 4 stars because when it came out it was definitely worth it. Now many of the articles are somewhat dated. That made a couple pretty boring, although some of that could just be me. I do read this sort of thing for work & most of these articles are from 2000 - 2008, old for the digital age.
Some were interesting due to their historic value. The discussion on MySpace vs Facebook, how each exemplified Web 2.0 & what they appealed to wasn't as laughable as you might think. MySpace allowed the glitzy home page while Facebook pushed communication. Although the author of the article didn't know it at the time, his point that communication was king won out.
Starting off with a great introduction, the first article is about the divide in education. Students now are cyber natives while they're being taught with old school methods by cyber immigrants. Think of immigrants from another country & the language they speak. Some never pick up the native language, but the kids do quickly. They think & learn differently. Our educational system isn't addressing it well or fast enough. Some are. Example given is a new CADD program, but it had a steep learning curve. Most users were 20 - 30 year old males. The answer was a video game tutorial, a first person shooter.
http://www.games2train.com/site/html/...
It worked very well.
This parallels my own experience with learning to touch type. I never could until I found "Word Invaders", a "Space Invaders" knock off. It taught keys for a while & then ran tests of a flying saucer bombing a city with the letters. I had to type them to stop them. I learned to touch type in a very short amount of time.
A lot of good points about how the Internet is changing the way we think. For instance, more immediacy, payoff, & choices which means we don't reflect nor stick to our choices nearly as much. Why read an entire article when a handful of synopsis are available? Have a problem with a vendor's website? Go to a competitor. Research, google the top few hits without significantly changing the search parameters, thus getting only one aspect.
Other research has shown that people that read alphabetic languages use different parts of their brains than do those who read pictographs like the Chinese languages. How we read online is changing how we read entirely. Can you still read an entire article? Many find they have trouble focusing. One even said while they had read War and Peace a decade earlier, they couldn't today, even though they had a degree in English Lit. Their concentration wasn't what it used to be. They read & think differently than they used to.
The takes on Wikipedia were great. Who would have thought that it could be so accurate? Since these articles, more studies have been done & found that it is indeed as accurate as the old encyclopedias & is even better in many ways, although there are caveats, but this doesn't make me sneer at the opinions of the nay-sayers. They have a point about the democratization of news sources - more isn't always better. Vigilante journalism isn't held to any standards nor is it easily kept under control. That can be a very bad thing when it smears innocents as well as a great thing when it outs tyrants.
It was long & might be best done in snippets or even read. Here's the
Table of Contents:
Introduction by Mark Bauerlein
The brain, the senses
Digital natives, digital immigrants / Marc Prensky
The internet / Steven Johnson
Learning to think in a digital world / Maryanne Wolf
Learning theory, video games, and popular culture / James Gee
Usability of websites for teenagers / Jakob Nielsen
Is google making us stupid? / Nicholas Carr
Your brain is evolving right now / Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan
Social life, personal life, school
Identity crisis / Sherry Turkle
They call me cyberboy / Douglas Rushkoff
The eight net gen norms / Don Tapscott
Love online / Henry Jenkins
We can't ignore the influence of digital technologies / Cathy Davidson
Virtual friendship and the new narcissism / Christine Rosen
Activists / John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
The fate of culture
Nomadicity / Todd Gitlin
What is web 2.0? / Tim O'Reilly
Web squared : web 2.0 five years on / Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle
Web 2.0 / Andrew Keen
Wikipedia and beyond / Katherine Mangu-Ward
Judgment : of Molly's gaze and Taylor's watch : why more is less in a split-screen
World / Maggie Jackson
A dream come true / Lee Siegel
The end of solitude / William Deresiewicz
Means / Clay Shirky.
Well worth reading.
Some were interesting due to their historic value. The discussion on MySpace vs Facebook, how each exemplified Web 2.0 & what they appealed to wasn't as laughable as you might think. MySpace allowed the glitzy home page while Facebook pushed communication. Although the author of the article didn't know it at the time, his point that communication was king won out.
Starting off with a great introduction, the first article is about the divide in education. Students now are cyber natives while they're being taught with old school methods by cyber immigrants. Think of immigrants from another country & the language they speak. Some never pick up the native language, but the kids do quickly. They think & learn differently. Our educational system isn't addressing it well or fast enough. Some are. Example given is a new CADD program, but it had a steep learning curve. Most users were 20 - 30 year old males. The answer was a video game tutorial, a first person shooter.
http://www.games2train.com/site/html/...
It worked very well.
This parallels my own experience with learning to touch type. I never could until I found "Word Invaders", a "Space Invaders" knock off. It taught keys for a while & then ran tests of a flying saucer bombing a city with the letters. I had to type them to stop them. I learned to touch type in a very short amount of time.
A lot of good points about how the Internet is changing the way we think. For instance, more immediacy, payoff, & choices which means we don't reflect nor stick to our choices nearly as much. Why read an entire article when a handful of synopsis are available? Have a problem with a vendor's website? Go to a competitor. Research, google the top few hits without significantly changing the search parameters, thus getting only one aspect.
Other research has shown that people that read alphabetic languages use different parts of their brains than do those who read pictographs like the Chinese languages. How we read online is changing how we read entirely. Can you still read an entire article? Many find they have trouble focusing. One even said while they had read War and Peace a decade earlier, they couldn't today, even though they had a degree in English Lit. Their concentration wasn't what it used to be. They read & think differently than they used to.
The takes on Wikipedia were great. Who would have thought that it could be so accurate? Since these articles, more studies have been done & found that it is indeed as accurate as the old encyclopedias & is even better in many ways, although there are caveats, but this doesn't make me sneer at the opinions of the nay-sayers. They have a point about the democratization of news sources - more isn't always better. Vigilante journalism isn't held to any standards nor is it easily kept under control. That can be a very bad thing when it smears innocents as well as a great thing when it outs tyrants.
It was long & might be best done in snippets or even read. Here's the
Table of Contents:
Introduction by Mark Bauerlein
The brain, the senses
Digital natives, digital immigrants / Marc Prensky
The internet / Steven Johnson
Learning to think in a digital world / Maryanne Wolf
Learning theory, video games, and popular culture / James Gee
Usability of websites for teenagers / Jakob Nielsen
Is google making us stupid? / Nicholas Carr
Your brain is evolving right now / Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan
Social life, personal life, school
Identity crisis / Sherry Turkle
They call me cyberboy / Douglas Rushkoff
The eight net gen norms / Don Tapscott
Love online / Henry Jenkins
We can't ignore the influence of digital technologies / Cathy Davidson
Virtual friendship and the new narcissism / Christine Rosen
Activists / John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
The fate of culture
Nomadicity / Todd Gitlin
What is web 2.0? / Tim O'Reilly
Web squared : web 2.0 five years on / Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle
Web 2.0 / Andrew Keen
Wikipedia and beyond / Katherine Mangu-Ward
Judgment : of Molly's gaze and Taylor's watch : why more is less in a split-screen
World / Maggie Jackson
A dream come true / Lee Siegel
The end of solitude / William Deresiewicz
Means / Clay Shirky.
Well worth reading.
May 4, 2019
A culture of divided attention fuels more than perpetual searching for lost threads and loose ends.
It stokes a culture of forgetting, the marker of a dark age. It fuels a mental shift of which we're not even aware. p289
This is not a new book by any standard, and in the jigged up world of the internet, it could be already seen as hopelessly outdated. We know all this stuff by now. Yet to me, quasi-luddite that I remain, it seems a valuable collection semi--prophetic in its scope, confirming many of my fears but also boosting my insight and increasing my vocabulary.
MB has collected many of the pivotal essays about the advantages and the inherent dangers of internet. Among the various opinions, there seems to emerge a surprising consensus:
Tech is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. p368
Marc Paretsky's concern, in his essay on Digital Natives is that the internet affects the way that we think, to the extent that it's rewiring the brains of those born to the technolgy. We have yet to see how this is going to turn out. Is the internet breeding a new life form?
The system has always siphoned off popular culture. The internet allows the unwary and the lazy to accept the exceedingly invasive organization of the users time. Let us organize your life for you!
It's hard to argue about the positive potential of harnessing collective intelligence with the pathetic example of the people running America. " The nets intellectual ethic remains obscure." states Nicholas Carr on p 70 in this reproduction of his great article Is Google Making Us Stupid? Can you anticipate the answer?
In the name of efficiency, we are diluting some of the essential qualities that make us human. p282
It stokes a culture of forgetting, the marker of a dark age. It fuels a mental shift of which we're not even aware. p289
This is not a new book by any standard, and in the jigged up world of the internet, it could be already seen as hopelessly outdated. We know all this stuff by now. Yet to me, quasi-luddite that I remain, it seems a valuable collection semi--prophetic in its scope, confirming many of my fears but also boosting my insight and increasing my vocabulary.
MB has collected many of the pivotal essays about the advantages and the inherent dangers of internet. Among the various opinions, there seems to emerge a surprising consensus:
Tech is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. p368
Marc Paretsky's concern, in his essay on Digital Natives is that the internet affects the way that we think, to the extent that it's rewiring the brains of those born to the technolgy. We have yet to see how this is going to turn out. Is the internet breeding a new life form?
The system has always siphoned off popular culture. The internet allows the unwary and the lazy to accept the exceedingly invasive organization of the users time. Let us organize your life for you!
It's hard to argue about the positive potential of harnessing collective intelligence with the pathetic example of the people running America. " The nets intellectual ethic remains obscure." states Nicholas Carr on p 70 in this reproduction of his great article Is Google Making Us Stupid? Can you anticipate the answer?
In the name of efficiency, we are diluting some of the essential qualities that make us human. p282
March 7, 2012
An interesting collection of essays on digital and social media. As I was reading, I had the sense that this book was written by people a bit older than me, primarily for the benefit of people a bit older than them, arguing that people a bit younger than me will change the world for the better.
Despite the title, the book is weighted heavily toward the "pro" side, and these essays also tend to be more convincing; Lee Siegel's "con" article, toward the end of the book, is extraordinarily condescending, with Siegel willfully misreading both the language and substance of his opponents' viewpoints in a cranky misfire of a hit piece. There are other problems, though; some of the essays and excerpts are more than ten years old, which is a problem when considering the present and future of a rapidly-evolving system. More than a few reference Friendster as an ongoing concern. Nevertheless, there are some fascinating insights from several able writers, notably Douglas Rushkoff and Tim O'Reilly. The final two essays in the collection, by William Deresiewicz (which includes a measure of pro and con) and Clay Shirky are thoroughly intriguing and allow the volume to wrap up on a few very thought-provoking notes.
Despite the title, the book is weighted heavily toward the "pro" side, and these essays also tend to be more convincing; Lee Siegel's "con" article, toward the end of the book, is extraordinarily condescending, with Siegel willfully misreading both the language and substance of his opponents' viewpoints in a cranky misfire of a hit piece. There are other problems, though; some of the essays and excerpts are more than ten years old, which is a problem when considering the present and future of a rapidly-evolving system. More than a few reference Friendster as an ongoing concern. Nevertheless, there are some fascinating insights from several able writers, notably Douglas Rushkoff and Tim O'Reilly. The final two essays in the collection, by William Deresiewicz (which includes a measure of pro and con) and Clay Shirky are thoroughly intriguing and allow the volume to wrap up on a few very thought-provoking notes.
April 22, 2013
While the arguments for and against our increasingly digital lives aren't new, having them in the same compendium provokes some reflection. As a collection - essays, chapters, excerpts, columns - there is also the benefit of different authors writing at different times. My favorite is the claim in one piece that people will not use their cell phones to buy content. Hah!
January 2, 2019
The book in quite impressive, I have read the book on my way to the airport and while waiting in the airport for many hours. The book is a collection of articles from accomplished author and researcher most of them have written multiple books about the subject and the author/editor has done their best to pick the best works of the authors.
The articles are extremely well written, I was quite impressed with the depth and breadth with which these articles are written. The book has definitely added value, i.e. I have learned some mind blowing stuff that will definitely change the way I look at the world and operate in it. For example, I learned from one of the articles that the tools you use actually shape your thoughts. With a better tool at your disposal you start thinking according to the tool! Some of the articles are amazing, but others seemed quite obvious, since I am digital native and knew most of the the contents. Thus some articles seemd really boring. One of the articles talks about politics and the interent. The fist section of the book added the most value for me followed by the third and then by the second parts, respectively. I loved the article which talks about socrates' fear, about the written word, that some who could decode the word might consider themselves as pocessing the knowlege, i.e. confused equating decoding knowledge as the ability to use that knowledge. This had a phenomenal impact upon me, actionable knowledge as opposed to conversion from text in the book into text in your mind. The same has been done for thousands of years for the Indian Text of knowledge, the Vedas, the Epics, the puranas etc... which were passed on thorugh the word of mouth, and writing was considered inferior. The same was true for Sanskrit, which was considered the language of the gods as opposed to normal local dialects. I was amazed at the knowledge that is passed on through this book. Some of which is not useful to me but others are extremely impactful. The first article talks about the necessity to make eduation and learning more sticky rather than making it dull.
The talk about wikipedia and its authors thoughts was also a huge booster. There are many areas of the book that will act as eye openers. This belongs to a specific genre of Internet Sociology, I wasn't aware of that when I have begun.
Here is a list of books that have been mentioned in this text (I might have missed a few)
Everything bad is good for you Steven Johnson
The ghost map
Mind wide open
Proust and the squid
Social linguistics and literacies
What what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy
Designing web usability
Eye tracking web usability
Nicholas Carr's - the shallows - what the internet is doing to our brains
The big switch rewiring the world from Edison to Google
Techniques and civilization
Computer power and human reason
The principles of scientific management - Taylor
The memory Bible
I brain
The longevity Bible
The naked lady who stood on her head
The memory prescription
Sherry Terkel
The second self
Life on the screen
Alone together
Douglas rushkoff
Media virus
Coercion
Macro wikinomics
Wikinomics
Growing up digital
Grown up digital
Henry jenkins
Convergence culture
Fans bloggers and gamers
Revolution and the world
The future of think
Preaching Eugenics
My Fundamentalist Education
Access denied - the practice and politics of internet filtering
Born digital
Tod gitlin
The chosen people's
The intellectuals and the flag
Media unlimited
60s years of hope days of rage
The search - how Google and it's rivals....
The cult of the amateur
Digital vertigo
Distracted the erosion of attention and the coming dark age
Maggie jackson
Seagull
Falling upwards - essays in the defence of imagination
Not remotely controlled
Against the machine
Here comes everybody
Cognitive surplus
The beauty myth
The articles are extremely well written, I was quite impressed with the depth and breadth with which these articles are written. The book has definitely added value, i.e. I have learned some mind blowing stuff that will definitely change the way I look at the world and operate in it. For example, I learned from one of the articles that the tools you use actually shape your thoughts. With a better tool at your disposal you start thinking according to the tool! Some of the articles are amazing, but others seemed quite obvious, since I am digital native and knew most of the the contents. Thus some articles seemd really boring. One of the articles talks about politics and the interent. The fist section of the book added the most value for me followed by the third and then by the second parts, respectively. I loved the article which talks about socrates' fear, about the written word, that some who could decode the word might consider themselves as pocessing the knowlege, i.e. confused equating decoding knowledge as the ability to use that knowledge. This had a phenomenal impact upon me, actionable knowledge as opposed to conversion from text in the book into text in your mind. The same has been done for thousands of years for the Indian Text of knowledge, the Vedas, the Epics, the puranas etc... which were passed on thorugh the word of mouth, and writing was considered inferior. The same was true for Sanskrit, which was considered the language of the gods as opposed to normal local dialects. I was amazed at the knowledge that is passed on through this book. Some of which is not useful to me but others are extremely impactful. The first article talks about the necessity to make eduation and learning more sticky rather than making it dull.
The talk about wikipedia and its authors thoughts was also a huge booster. There are many areas of the book that will act as eye openers. This belongs to a specific genre of Internet Sociology, I wasn't aware of that when I have begun.
Here is a list of books that have been mentioned in this text (I might have missed a few)
Everything bad is good for you Steven Johnson
The ghost map
Mind wide open
Proust and the squid
Social linguistics and literacies
What what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy
Designing web usability
Eye tracking web usability
Nicholas Carr's - the shallows - what the internet is doing to our brains
The big switch rewiring the world from Edison to Google
Techniques and civilization
Computer power and human reason
The principles of scientific management - Taylor
The memory Bible
I brain
The longevity Bible
The naked lady who stood on her head
The memory prescription
Sherry Terkel
The second self
Life on the screen
Alone together
Douglas rushkoff
Media virus
Coercion
Macro wikinomics
Wikinomics
Growing up digital
Grown up digital
Henry jenkins
Convergence culture
Fans bloggers and gamers
Revolution and the world
The future of think
Preaching Eugenics
My Fundamentalist Education
Access denied - the practice and politics of internet filtering
Born digital
Tod gitlin
The chosen people's
The intellectuals and the flag
Media unlimited
60s years of hope days of rage
The search - how Google and it's rivals....
The cult of the amateur
Digital vertigo
Distracted the erosion of attention and the coming dark age
Maggie jackson
Seagull
Falling upwards - essays in the defence of imagination
Not remotely controlled
Against the machine
Here comes everybody
Cognitive surplus
The beauty myth
November 24, 2012
A historical overview of thought on how the internet, social media, and texting have changed society. While I believed the title refered to haves and have-nots of social media, it actually relates to the generations prior to the internet and the newest generations born in the digital realm. This theme doesn't really carry over throughout the book -- it is much more an overview of the internet age. This is a collection of articles from various book and magazine sources over the past 15 years, mostly between 2004-9. Given the subject of the book, you'd hope that a lot of ink would be used to discuss Facebook, but the bulk of articles pre-date the rise of Facebook, rendering a lot of the content quaint. If you're a reader of Wired or Fast Company, books like "Subliminal" or "The Power of Habit", or if you follow the TED Talk videos, this is quite repetitive. I can see the value for digital-age students who do not have knowledge of the recent past in this regard -- the book appears to be put together for the author's college class. Unfortunately, I found no new ideas or "business value" in this book.
keep-in-mind
January 24, 2015Added 1/24/15.
A good book to skim (through the parts which interest me), even if I haven't got the stamina to read the whole thing. Better yet, perhaps an audio version would help as well.
See Jim's review at: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
A good book to skim (through the parts which interest me), even if I haven't got the stamina to read the whole thing. Better yet, perhaps an audio version would help as well.
See Jim's review at: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Read
June 22, 2020This month, I picked up a copy of The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. The book, edited by Mark Bauerlein, collects a series of essays written over the last two decades about the relationship between people and technology in the United States.
While I went into the book expecting a kind of crash course on the digital divide as a social issue, what I found was a kind of haphazard narrative about how wildly uncertain we are about the function, value, and effect digital technologies are having on our lives. The subjects of the articles vary, from the psychological impact of screen time to off-the-cuff histories of the radical early days of the Internet. Everyone is talking about computing, sure, and nearly everybody engages “the Internet,” but the understanding of those systems and their relative fluidity are not always complementary. Articles such as the excellent “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” question whether we are benefitting from all of the new tools that have appeared in our lives, while pieces such as Marc Prensky’s “Do They Really Think Differently?” sidestep value and argue that our brains have already fundamentally changed in the face of (multitask heavy, rapidly changing) digital stimuli.
One of the more powerful perspectives in the collection, for me, comes from those who were architects and enthusiasts of the early Internet and saw, within it, empowering and radical possibilities for connection, identity, and community. I greatly enjoyed Sherry Turkle’s examination of MUDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD) and her contention that digital technologies encourage people to adopt and play with multiple identities. It’s interesting to think of this reading of the mid-90s Internet today, when people are expected to represent a stable identity via social networking sites (even though, as we all know, this is a kind of exaggerated and self-curated Self) and web sites increasingly facilitate partnerships (“log in to Facebook to comment”) that link all text and media production to that one presumably stable identity. Where has the play gone? And more importantly, what kind of radical possibilities are we losing by encouraging certain kinds of digital tools and usage over others?
I think that we have to think critically about the relationship between now-normative social networking tools and empowerment/possibility. That is, we are all operating on the assumption that connecting people to digital resources is good. I wholeheartedly share this conviction. However, I’m not sure if all forms of connection are equally good, or that by, say, me teaching a classroom of students how Facebook works will ultimately help those students share social capital and explore new possibilities. What kind of world does Facebook connectivity create? What does the logic of disenfranchisement (“if you don’t’ get online, you won’t have a voice”) say about our understanding of vocality, community, and participation? Are there other tools – here I give my love for wiki and open source, but maybe it’s more than that – that can help reconfigure those understandings?
It’s genuinely kind of crazy that so much has happened in two decades, stuff that can change the fundamental architecture of our brains and societies and economies, and yet nobody is ultimately too sure where it’s all going. I think, given that, that there’s tremendous value in stopping every so often to reflect on the fact that something new is being created, that we’re playing a role in hooking people up to that new kind of connection, and that we can push for the kind of reality we find to be valuable and good -- and that does justice to the people who are being connected.
This book makes me rant about things. It’s good, you all should check it out!
While I went into the book expecting a kind of crash course on the digital divide as a social issue, what I found was a kind of haphazard narrative about how wildly uncertain we are about the function, value, and effect digital technologies are having on our lives. The subjects of the articles vary, from the psychological impact of screen time to off-the-cuff histories of the radical early days of the Internet. Everyone is talking about computing, sure, and nearly everybody engages “the Internet,” but the understanding of those systems and their relative fluidity are not always complementary. Articles such as the excellent “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” question whether we are benefitting from all of the new tools that have appeared in our lives, while pieces such as Marc Prensky’s “Do They Really Think Differently?” sidestep value and argue that our brains have already fundamentally changed in the face of (multitask heavy, rapidly changing) digital stimuli.
One of the more powerful perspectives in the collection, for me, comes from those who were architects and enthusiasts of the early Internet and saw, within it, empowering and radical possibilities for connection, identity, and community. I greatly enjoyed Sherry Turkle’s examination of MUDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD) and her contention that digital technologies encourage people to adopt and play with multiple identities. It’s interesting to think of this reading of the mid-90s Internet today, when people are expected to represent a stable identity via social networking sites (even though, as we all know, this is a kind of exaggerated and self-curated Self) and web sites increasingly facilitate partnerships (“log in to Facebook to comment”) that link all text and media production to that one presumably stable identity. Where has the play gone? And more importantly, what kind of radical possibilities are we losing by encouraging certain kinds of digital tools and usage over others?
I think that we have to think critically about the relationship between now-normative social networking tools and empowerment/possibility. That is, we are all operating on the assumption that connecting people to digital resources is good. I wholeheartedly share this conviction. However, I’m not sure if all forms of connection are equally good, or that by, say, me teaching a classroom of students how Facebook works will ultimately help those students share social capital and explore new possibilities. What kind of world does Facebook connectivity create? What does the logic of disenfranchisement (“if you don’t’ get online, you won’t have a voice”) say about our understanding of vocality, community, and participation? Are there other tools – here I give my love for wiki and open source, but maybe it’s more than that – that can help reconfigure those understandings?
It’s genuinely kind of crazy that so much has happened in two decades, stuff that can change the fundamental architecture of our brains and societies and economies, and yet nobody is ultimately too sure where it’s all going. I think, given that, that there’s tremendous value in stopping every so often to reflect on the fact that something new is being created, that we’re playing a role in hooking people up to that new kind of connection, and that we can push for the kind of reality we find to be valuable and good -- and that does justice to the people who are being connected.
This book makes me rant about things. It’s good, you all should check it out!
December 7, 2020
The term “digital divide” refers to two concepts of inequity in enjoying the benefits of modern information technology. One is inequity in access, which may result from lack of means to buy digital devices or lack of access to high-speed Internet service. Another is inequity in the knowledge to make use of digital resources, such as being aware of privacy laws or proper/safe ways of accessing and using the Internet. Both divides are intimately related to income and wealth gaps.
I picked up this book in order to learn more about the two kinds of divides outlined in the preceding paragraph. Unfortunately, the book does not offer much about the first divide and only a couple of chapters on the second divide. I particularly enjoyed the chapter by Marc Prensky entitled “Digital natives, digital immigrants,” which describes the divide between older people who migrate to the digital world vs. younger people, who are born into the digital world.
Even though the book did not meet my expectations, I still found it quite informative and learned a great deal from it, as it nicely covers the attributes of the on-line world and how going digital is affecting our personal and professional lives. It tackles questions of how our culture is being shaped by everything becoming digital and whether we are becoming stupid as a result.
Following an introductory chapter, the book unfolds in three sections, each with 8-9 essays. Some of the essays are already dated, but the structure and list of topics is still of much value. The essays are excerpted or reprinted from various sources. Let me end my review by listing the books table-of-contents, because the essay titles are quite descriptive of the book’s contents.
Section One—The Brain, the Senses
Digital natives, digital immigrants / Marc Prensky
Do they really think differently? / Mark Prensky
The internet / Steven Johnson
Learning to think in a digital world / Maryanne Wolf
Learning theory, video games, and popular culture / James Gee
Usability of websites for teenagers / Jakob Nielsen
User skills improving, but only slightly / Jakob Nielsen
Is google making us stupid? / Nicholas Carr
Your brain is evolving right now / Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan
Section Two—Social Life, Personal Life, School
Identity crisis / Sherry Turkle
They call me cyberboy / Douglas Rushkoff
The people’s net / Douglas Rushkoff
Social currency / Douglas Rushkoff
The eight net gen norms / Don Tapscott
Love online / Henry Jenkins
We can't ignore the influence of digital technologies / Cathy Davidson
Virtual friendship and the new narcissism / Christine Rosen
Activists / John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
Section Three—The Fate of Culture
Nomadicity / Todd Gitlin
What is web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software / Tim O'Reilly
Web squared: Web 2.0 five years on / Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle
Web 2.0: The second generation of the Internet has arrived and it’s worse than you think / Andrew Keen
Wikipedia and beyond: Jimmy Wales’s sprawling vision / Katherine Mangu-Ward
Judgment: Of Molly's gaze and Taylor's watch: Why more is less in a split-screen world / Maggie Jackson
A dream come true / Lee Siegel
The end of solitude / William Deresiewicz
Means / Clay Shirky
I picked up this book in order to learn more about the two kinds of divides outlined in the preceding paragraph. Unfortunately, the book does not offer much about the first divide and only a couple of chapters on the second divide. I particularly enjoyed the chapter by Marc Prensky entitled “Digital natives, digital immigrants,” which describes the divide between older people who migrate to the digital world vs. younger people, who are born into the digital world.
Even though the book did not meet my expectations, I still found it quite informative and learned a great deal from it, as it nicely covers the attributes of the on-line world and how going digital is affecting our personal and professional lives. It tackles questions of how our culture is being shaped by everything becoming digital and whether we are becoming stupid as a result.
Following an introductory chapter, the book unfolds in three sections, each with 8-9 essays. Some of the essays are already dated, but the structure and list of topics is still of much value. The essays are excerpted or reprinted from various sources. Let me end my review by listing the books table-of-contents, because the essay titles are quite descriptive of the book’s contents.
Section One—The Brain, the Senses
Digital natives, digital immigrants / Marc Prensky
Do they really think differently? / Mark Prensky
The internet / Steven Johnson
Learning to think in a digital world / Maryanne Wolf
Learning theory, video games, and popular culture / James Gee
Usability of websites for teenagers / Jakob Nielsen
User skills improving, but only slightly / Jakob Nielsen
Is google making us stupid? / Nicholas Carr
Your brain is evolving right now / Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan
Section Two—Social Life, Personal Life, School
Identity crisis / Sherry Turkle
They call me cyberboy / Douglas Rushkoff
The people’s net / Douglas Rushkoff
Social currency / Douglas Rushkoff
The eight net gen norms / Don Tapscott
Love online / Henry Jenkins
We can't ignore the influence of digital technologies / Cathy Davidson
Virtual friendship and the new narcissism / Christine Rosen
Activists / John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
Section Three—The Fate of Culture
Nomadicity / Todd Gitlin
What is web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software / Tim O'Reilly
Web squared: Web 2.0 five years on / Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle
Web 2.0: The second generation of the Internet has arrived and it’s worse than you think / Andrew Keen
Wikipedia and beyond: Jimmy Wales’s sprawling vision / Katherine Mangu-Ward
Judgment: Of Molly's gaze and Taylor's watch: Why more is less in a split-screen world / Maggie Jackson
A dream come true / Lee Siegel
The end of solitude / William Deresiewicz
Means / Clay Shirky
July 25, 2013
The Digital Divide is a fascinating collection of essays that analyze, celebrate, and lament the digital world in the dawn of Web 2.0. Even though some of the essays were written over ten years ago and talk about entities that are no longer relevant (Friendster, for example), it is the themes in the essays that resonate and make them timeless.
Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants
The book starts off with an introduction of the terms "digital natives" versus "digital immigrants." Folks like me who were born after 1980 are considered the digital natives because were born into and grew up surrounded by electronics (video games and computers) at home and at school. Everyone else born before that are the digital immigrants.” Even those who have adapted still have the "accent"-- which you can see when they print out emails instead of reading them on the computer, or have to call someone on the actual phone.
Marc Prensky says, "Kids born into any new culture learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don't know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time complaining about how good things were in their old country.” Just as it is in geographical immigration, digital immigration has its issues and varieties of immigrants, some more pleasant and adaptable than others. It reminded me of how I’ve heard many older folk complain about the way we do things—we text instead of call, we email instead of visit, we prefer IMing amongst colleagues instead of walking all the way to the person’s office. Parents blame gadgets as they complain that kids don’t communicate with them often, all while forgetting that gadgets actually allow kids to stay in touch more often. For instance, in decades past married kids wouldn’t visit or call their parents more than once a month, and today we are in constant touch thanks to cell phone application and social media.
Whether it’s texting, video games Good Reads, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the world of technology just keeps expanding in its digital imperialism. One of the themes in this book is that the digital age is changing how we learn and interact with others. Since the dawn of civilization, these changes have taken place with every new discovery—fire, the hammer, the clock, the printing press, television, the computer, the Internet—and humans have adapted every time. “The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating ‘like clockwork.’ Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating ‘like computers,’” observes Nicholas Carr. This reminds me of the popular “brain in a vat” metaphor frequently recurring in cyberpunk fiction. “But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brains plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level,” explains Carr.
The Eight Net Gen Norms
One of my favorite essays in the collection is “The Eight Net Gen Norms” by Don Tapscott, in which he analyzes digital trends and workplace preferences of our generation, which he refers to as “Net Gen.”
"When my generation first graduated from college, we were grateful for that first job. We hung on to it like a life preserver. But times have changed. Kids see no reason to commit, at least not to the first job. High performers are on their fifth job by the time they are twenty-seven and their average tenure at a job is 2.6. years. They revel in the freedom…
"…The Internet has given them the freedom to choose what to buy, where to work, when to do things like buy a book or talk to friends, and even who they want to be….
“…They prefer flexible hours and compensation that is based on their performance and market value—not based on face time in the office. And they’re not afraid to leave a great job if they find another one that offers more money, more challenging work, the chance to travel, or just a change.
“Typical Net Gen shoppers know what they are going to buy before they leave the house. They’re already checked out all the choices online, and they are well informed and confident in their decisions—83 percent say they usually know what they want before they go to buy a product. With the proliferation of media, sales channels, product types, and brands, Net Geners use digital technologies to cut through the clutter and find the product that suits their needs.
“The search for freedom is transforming education as well. At their fingertips they have access to much of the world’s knowledge. Learning for them should take place where and when they want it. So attending a lecture at a specific time and place, given by a mediocre professor in a room where they are passive recipients, seems oddly old-fashioned, if not completely inappropriate. The same is true for politics. They have grown up with a choice.”
I thought this was a most eloquent and accurate description of my generation, at least as it applies to me, my tastes and experiences.
Skepticism
Not all essays in The Digital Divide are odes to the Internet and technology. There are quite a few which range from skeptical to outright denunciation. The most outspoken critic is Lee Siegel who disapproves of the way that anyone with anything (or nothing) to say can now say it thanks to the ubiquity and convenience of the “publish” button. Clay Shirky explores the meaning of this by giving readers a short history of the printing press—from the pre-Gutenburg days when it cost excruciating labor and lots of money to hire a scribe to write something by hand, to today when all a writer needs to do is click “publish” to publicize his or her thoughts to millions. Though publishers and the printing press are still in business, “they no longer form the barrier between private and public writing.” Shirky examines that the reason many people are skeptical of mass self-publishing is because of the old idea that publishing is a serious business. The truth is, the only reason people took it so seriously was because it used to be costly and risky. Without risk and cost quality might suffer, but on the other hand, it opens doors to experimentation and new forms of art.
Never Alone
Which brings me to William Deresiewicz and his essay titled “The End Of Solitude.” His work is an eloquent historical analysis of what solitude and friendship have meant in different time periods. “The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility….That is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected. It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us; this is how become real to ourselves—by being seen by others.” He argues that though we are never alone more than 10 minutes at a time anymore because we are constantly connected through our gadgets via a myriad social networks. However, he questions the meaning of modern friendship—after all, what does friendship mean to a person with 500 “friends” on Facebook?
Conclusion
I give The Digital Divide five stars because it presents some of the best opinions from each side of debate. Whether you are on one side, or the other, or on a bit of both, this book will give you insight and help you to make more informed decisions about the place of technology in your life.
Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants
The book starts off with an introduction of the terms "digital natives" versus "digital immigrants." Folks like me who were born after 1980 are considered the digital natives because were born into and grew up surrounded by electronics (video games and computers) at home and at school. Everyone else born before that are the digital immigrants.” Even those who have adapted still have the "accent"-- which you can see when they print out emails instead of reading them on the computer, or have to call someone on the actual phone.
Marc Prensky says, "Kids born into any new culture learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don't know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time complaining about how good things were in their old country.” Just as it is in geographical immigration, digital immigration has its issues and varieties of immigrants, some more pleasant and adaptable than others. It reminded me of how I’ve heard many older folk complain about the way we do things—we text instead of call, we email instead of visit, we prefer IMing amongst colleagues instead of walking all the way to the person’s office. Parents blame gadgets as they complain that kids don’t communicate with them often, all while forgetting that gadgets actually allow kids to stay in touch more often. For instance, in decades past married kids wouldn’t visit or call their parents more than once a month, and today we are in constant touch thanks to cell phone application and social media.
Whether it’s texting, video games Good Reads, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the world of technology just keeps expanding in its digital imperialism. One of the themes in this book is that the digital age is changing how we learn and interact with others. Since the dawn of civilization, these changes have taken place with every new discovery—fire, the hammer, the clock, the printing press, television, the computer, the Internet—and humans have adapted every time. “The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating ‘like clockwork.’ Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating ‘like computers,’” observes Nicholas Carr. This reminds me of the popular “brain in a vat” metaphor frequently recurring in cyberpunk fiction. “But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brains plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level,” explains Carr.
The Eight Net Gen Norms
One of my favorite essays in the collection is “The Eight Net Gen Norms” by Don Tapscott, in which he analyzes digital trends and workplace preferences of our generation, which he refers to as “Net Gen.”
"When my generation first graduated from college, we were grateful for that first job. We hung on to it like a life preserver. But times have changed. Kids see no reason to commit, at least not to the first job. High performers are on their fifth job by the time they are twenty-seven and their average tenure at a job is 2.6. years. They revel in the freedom…
"…The Internet has given them the freedom to choose what to buy, where to work, when to do things like buy a book or talk to friends, and even who they want to be….
“…They prefer flexible hours and compensation that is based on their performance and market value—not based on face time in the office. And they’re not afraid to leave a great job if they find another one that offers more money, more challenging work, the chance to travel, or just a change.
“Typical Net Gen shoppers know what they are going to buy before they leave the house. They’re already checked out all the choices online, and they are well informed and confident in their decisions—83 percent say they usually know what they want before they go to buy a product. With the proliferation of media, sales channels, product types, and brands, Net Geners use digital technologies to cut through the clutter and find the product that suits their needs.
“The search for freedom is transforming education as well. At their fingertips they have access to much of the world’s knowledge. Learning for them should take place where and when they want it. So attending a lecture at a specific time and place, given by a mediocre professor in a room where they are passive recipients, seems oddly old-fashioned, if not completely inappropriate. The same is true for politics. They have grown up with a choice.”
I thought this was a most eloquent and accurate description of my generation, at least as it applies to me, my tastes and experiences.
Skepticism
Not all essays in The Digital Divide are odes to the Internet and technology. There are quite a few which range from skeptical to outright denunciation. The most outspoken critic is Lee Siegel who disapproves of the way that anyone with anything (or nothing) to say can now say it thanks to the ubiquity and convenience of the “publish” button. Clay Shirky explores the meaning of this by giving readers a short history of the printing press—from the pre-Gutenburg days when it cost excruciating labor and lots of money to hire a scribe to write something by hand, to today when all a writer needs to do is click “publish” to publicize his or her thoughts to millions. Though publishers and the printing press are still in business, “they no longer form the barrier between private and public writing.” Shirky examines that the reason many people are skeptical of mass self-publishing is because of the old idea that publishing is a serious business. The truth is, the only reason people took it so seriously was because it used to be costly and risky. Without risk and cost quality might suffer, but on the other hand, it opens doors to experimentation and new forms of art.
Never Alone
Which brings me to William Deresiewicz and his essay titled “The End Of Solitude.” His work is an eloquent historical analysis of what solitude and friendship have meant in different time periods. “The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility….That is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected. It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us; this is how become real to ourselves—by being seen by others.” He argues that though we are never alone more than 10 minutes at a time anymore because we are constantly connected through our gadgets via a myriad social networks. However, he questions the meaning of modern friendship—after all, what does friendship mean to a person with 500 “friends” on Facebook?
Conclusion
I give The Digital Divide five stars because it presents some of the best opinions from each side of debate. Whether you are on one side, or the other, or on a bit of both, this book will give you insight and help you to make more informed decisions about the place of technology in your life.
February 5, 2017
For those who often think about the way the internet has transformed every aspect of our society -- our daily social interactions, the ways we shop and work, etc -- The Digital Divide presents an anthology of writing on that very subject ranging from the 1990s until 2011. These pieces include excerpts from books (Digital Natives or The Cult of the Amateur, for instance) as well as previously published articles. Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" appears in that category. The material curated here is chosen to represent different aspects of the argument about digital technology and society. A piece on how our immersion in the world of digital device multitasking rewires our brain to make us more efficient is followed by an article commenting on the negative aspects of a brain in perpetual overdrive: chronic, low-grade stress and general inefficiency from the constant breaks in attention. Many parts of the book are dated, but remain valuable nonetheless. For instance, articles penned in the 1990s lamenting how the invasion of the Internet by the common market had made it much more sterile and boring are interesting in the picture they paint of the young network, then a plaything of researchers and techies. (The author of that piece, Douglas Rushkoff, remains a "It's popular and now it sucks" kind of fellow, snarling about the growth of e-commerce while simultaneously praising Yahoo and Blogger for allowing people to produce content and communicate with one another. This is especially amusing when he maintains -- in the same article - -that the internet can't be institutionalized...it has its own mind and people, like, do what they want with it, man. (Things like...buying and selling?) Other points are more enduring, like the the plasticity of the brain. By far the most interesting article in the book for me was a piece on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, originally published in Reason magazine; in that interview, Wales reveals how inspired he was by the writings of F.A. Hayek, particularly on emergent order.
March 3, 2022
Really solid read. Not 5 stars necessarily and I don’t know if I necessarily learned anything super new, but just sort of your classic insightful read about tech and how it’s changing the world which is pretty interesting to read about. I also do think it was good the way it was written, as a collection of different essays, as this actually made it easier to read because every topic and opinion was fresh versus the usual way any book that’s all written by one author can sometimes drag even when good. There were also some psychological plugs about the ways people behave in the digital age which always intrigued me.
February 18, 2019
The stories were interesting, but I'm not sure it has aged well. I only got about halfway because I noticed all the commentary leading up was very dated. I just kept wondering what new research says. If a newer edition were to be released, I would be definitely interested to see how the story has evolved in the last 30 years.
March 10, 2021
Excellent work on the perils and promise of the social_l media revolution with a collection of writings from today's great thinkers and cultural analysts. It was a 10 year old publication, sitting on my end table, but still worth reading.
September 12, 2017
Many of.the essays in this book seem to come from the perspective of an older person puzzling over "kids these days". I find myself arguing with the authors in my mind. Why is it obvious that we should use new educational technologies to better teach the same curriculum as before? Why is it clear that offline ways of interacting are superior and "better for you"? Or conversely, that online communication methods are inherently better? Most of this book is made up of age stereotypes, with a few dubious studies thrown in (which grossly overreach in their conclusions). It's not very interesting and doesn't really help us answer the important questions. A troubling lack of imagination applied to an interesting topic.
April 2, 2020
It had some really great thoughts, but for the most part it was severely outdated.
March 13, 2017
This book is not the newest piece of writing on the subject-matter, but the collection of essays proved to be extremely fascinating. Highly relevant in this day and age, as well. Highly recommended. A good variety of tech savvy luminaries.
December 29, 2016
Chi non ha un profilo su un social network? Chi usa lo smartphone solo come telefono cellulare ?Chi accende il personal computer, fisso, portatile o tablet che sia, solo per motivi professionali o di studio? Se avessi un pubblico davanti a me, nessuno alzerebbe un dito per rispondere positivamente al mio quesito e anch’io farei altrettanto! Tutti siamo armati di un mezzo che ci catapulta in un mondo che da reale è diventato virtuale, anzi no, un universo che è tanto sociale che spesso si tramuta in qualcosa di patologico.
Basta guardarsi attorno in qualsiasi ambito, locali pubblici, mezzi di trasporto e per strada per realizzare che la gente ha perso l’abitudine di parlare, tutti intenti ad armeggiare con lo smartphone.
Pare che non si possa vivere senza un costante contatto con il mondo virtuale, qualsiasi esso sia e sempre a discapito delle buone chiacchierate tra amici e dei rapporti personali, con il rischio di cadere vittima della sindrome di Hikikomori, termine giapponese dalle parole hiku "tirare" e komoru “ritirarsi" e la cui traduzione letterale è “stare in disparte, isolarsi” recentemente associato anche all’abuso di internet.
Ma questa patologia del Sol Levante non è l’unica, c’è anche il FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), ovvero la paura di essere emarginati ed al quale sono legati molti utenti dei social network che non vogliono perdersi nulla dei profili dei propri amici, veri o virtuali che siano e temono di essere tagliati fuori da tutto quanto fa tendenza. Purtroppo c’è anche spazio, tanto cyber spazio per chi vuol farsi veramente male, il Dark Net, una grossa fetta di mondo virtuale, dagli esperti stimata 500 volte più grande rispetto al web, dove è possibile muoversi liberamente nell’illecito, dove pedofili e terroristi trovano un ambiente fertile, che si tramuta in una sorta di mercato nero per trafficanti d’armi e di droga.
Ma come è possibile tutto questo? Uno dei modi più seguiti è quello di accedere alla Dark Net per mezzo di Tor, un software che fa rimbalzare il traffico dati tramite vari sistemi crittografici e che garantisce l’anonimato degli utenti rendendo invisibile l’indirizzo IP del computer.
Sicuramente è inquietante sapere che nel ventunesimo secolo sia possibile muoversi così liberamente in siti altamente pericolosi soprattutto per i giovani, senza che si possa bloccarne il traffico da parte degli organi competenti. Il mondo della tripla W ha aperto un universo sconfinato, che comunque bisogna saper dosare con saggezza ed intelligenza per non correre il rischio di cadere nelle maglie di quella che si presenta come una nuova dipendenza e che può avere forti ripercussioni sull’autostima di utenti di qualsiasi età.
Scorrete i file degli scaffali dei libri su GoodReads alla voce "social networking" e vi renderete conto di quanti libri in tutte le lingue si occupano di questo argomento. Il mondo è diventato davvero un "social network" in tutti i suoi aspetti umani, sociali, politici, culturali, religiosi ... Puoi sapere tutto di tutti in maniera immediata se non addirittura prima che gli eventi accadano. In effetti le chat, gli sms, i tweet, le connessioni creano i fatti anticipandoli in "bits & bytes", in una vera e propria ragnatela nella quale chi segue resta imbrigliato senza comprendere bene cosa stia accadendo.
Nel giro di poche ore sono assicurati mutamenti e contraddizioni. La verità non verrà mai acquisita, la post-verità prenderà il suo posto, diventando un "post", la fotografia di un momento destinato ad allungarsi e diluirsi senza fine nel tempo e nello spazio. Ho letto questo libro uscito solo qualche anno fa e mi sono reso conto che molte delle cose che dice sono già obsolete. Tutto è destinato a cambiare perchè ogni cosa è "social", vale a dire mutabile, volatile, liquida. Se e quando tutto questo cambierà non è facile a dirsi. Sopratutto difficile dire come questa "socialità" evolverà ... Chi vivrà, vedrà ...
Basta guardarsi attorno in qualsiasi ambito, locali pubblici, mezzi di trasporto e per strada per realizzare che la gente ha perso l’abitudine di parlare, tutti intenti ad armeggiare con lo smartphone.
Pare che non si possa vivere senza un costante contatto con il mondo virtuale, qualsiasi esso sia e sempre a discapito delle buone chiacchierate tra amici e dei rapporti personali, con il rischio di cadere vittima della sindrome di Hikikomori, termine giapponese dalle parole hiku "tirare" e komoru “ritirarsi" e la cui traduzione letterale è “stare in disparte, isolarsi” recentemente associato anche all’abuso di internet.
Ma questa patologia del Sol Levante non è l’unica, c’è anche il FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), ovvero la paura di essere emarginati ed al quale sono legati molti utenti dei social network che non vogliono perdersi nulla dei profili dei propri amici, veri o virtuali che siano e temono di essere tagliati fuori da tutto quanto fa tendenza. Purtroppo c’è anche spazio, tanto cyber spazio per chi vuol farsi veramente male, il Dark Net, una grossa fetta di mondo virtuale, dagli esperti stimata 500 volte più grande rispetto al web, dove è possibile muoversi liberamente nell’illecito, dove pedofili e terroristi trovano un ambiente fertile, che si tramuta in una sorta di mercato nero per trafficanti d’armi e di droga.
Ma come è possibile tutto questo? Uno dei modi più seguiti è quello di accedere alla Dark Net per mezzo di Tor, un software che fa rimbalzare il traffico dati tramite vari sistemi crittografici e che garantisce l’anonimato degli utenti rendendo invisibile l’indirizzo IP del computer.
Sicuramente è inquietante sapere che nel ventunesimo secolo sia possibile muoversi così liberamente in siti altamente pericolosi soprattutto per i giovani, senza che si possa bloccarne il traffico da parte degli organi competenti. Il mondo della tripla W ha aperto un universo sconfinato, che comunque bisogna saper dosare con saggezza ed intelligenza per non correre il rischio di cadere nelle maglie di quella che si presenta come una nuova dipendenza e che può avere forti ripercussioni sull’autostima di utenti di qualsiasi età.
Scorrete i file degli scaffali dei libri su GoodReads alla voce "social networking" e vi renderete conto di quanti libri in tutte le lingue si occupano di questo argomento. Il mondo è diventato davvero un "social network" in tutti i suoi aspetti umani, sociali, politici, culturali, religiosi ... Puoi sapere tutto di tutti in maniera immediata se non addirittura prima che gli eventi accadano. In effetti le chat, gli sms, i tweet, le connessioni creano i fatti anticipandoli in "bits & bytes", in una vera e propria ragnatela nella quale chi segue resta imbrigliato senza comprendere bene cosa stia accadendo.
Nel giro di poche ore sono assicurati mutamenti e contraddizioni. La verità non verrà mai acquisita, la post-verità prenderà il suo posto, diventando un "post", la fotografia di un momento destinato ad allungarsi e diluirsi senza fine nel tempo e nello spazio. Ho letto questo libro uscito solo qualche anno fa e mi sono reso conto che molte delle cose che dice sono già obsolete. Tutto è destinato a cambiare perchè ogni cosa è "social", vale a dire mutabile, volatile, liquida. Se e quando tutto questo cambierà non è facile a dirsi. Sopratutto difficile dire come questa "socialità" evolverà ... Chi vivrà, vedrà ...
June 26, 2016
Some good essays, many obvious or boring ones, some are heavily drenched in the slime jargon of marketing.
Good essays include:
Introduction
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
They Call Me Cyberboy
Wikipedia and Beyond
Web 2.0
The End of Solitude
Means
Quotes:
Others have questioned what readers think when they encounter 4,383 comments to a news story and believe that post 4,384 really matters. Is this democratic participation or fruitless vanity?
In the month of April 2003, Americans spent zero minutes on Facebook. In April 2009, they logged 13,872,640,000 minutes.
In Sept 2008, 13-17yrolds with a cellphone averaged 1,742 texts per month. A few months later: 2,272. Mid 2009: passed the 2,500 marker. Oct 2010: 3,339
When the 2009 US National Texting Championship goes to a 15yrold Iowan who honed her craft by averaging 14,000 texts per month, one might laugh or nod in dismay.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an AI, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains [first instance of universal access to a "god"?]
Brin: Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to yr brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off. Page: Google is really trying to build AI and to do it on a large scale.
The last thing companies want to encourage is leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Socrates was so intent on protecting citizens from the seductive opinions of artists and writers that he outlawed them from his imaginary republic.
If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility [and in posthumanism it is immortality, multimortality, mutliplicity, multi-virtual-personality interface]
A teen sends 3,000 texts in a month. 100 a day, one every ten waking minutes. She's never alone for more than 10 minutes. Which means she's never alone.
Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a profit of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of the self--a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.
It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.
The internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom.
Good essays include:
Introduction
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
They Call Me Cyberboy
Wikipedia and Beyond
Web 2.0
The End of Solitude
Means
Quotes:
Others have questioned what readers think when they encounter 4,383 comments to a news story and believe that post 4,384 really matters. Is this democratic participation or fruitless vanity?
In the month of April 2003, Americans spent zero minutes on Facebook. In April 2009, they logged 13,872,640,000 minutes.
In Sept 2008, 13-17yrolds with a cellphone averaged 1,742 texts per month. A few months later: 2,272. Mid 2009: passed the 2,500 marker. Oct 2010: 3,339
When the 2009 US National Texting Championship goes to a 15yrold Iowan who honed her craft by averaging 14,000 texts per month, one might laugh or nod in dismay.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an AI, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains [first instance of universal access to a "god"?]
Brin: Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to yr brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off. Page: Google is really trying to build AI and to do it on a large scale.
The last thing companies want to encourage is leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Socrates was so intent on protecting citizens from the seductive opinions of artists and writers that he outlawed them from his imaginary republic.
If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility [and in posthumanism it is immortality, multimortality, mutliplicity, multi-virtual-personality interface]
A teen sends 3,000 texts in a month. 100 a day, one every ten waking minutes. She's never alone for more than 10 minutes. Which means she's never alone.
Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a profit of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of the self--a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.
It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.
The internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom.
August 6, 2013
The Digital Divide is a concise introduction to a few of the major debates concerning the role that technology plays in shaping various aspects of our lives including everything from how we communicate to the biological structure of our brains. If you are interested in a more in depth review of specific arguments then you might want to look elsewhere. My main problem with the collection is that it is trying to do way too much. Each chapter is a selection from a different author's work and at times the whole thing feels more like a series of short advertisements for each one. For a more well researched (but still highly accessible) book on technology in society, check out The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.
March 18, 2014
It's hard for me to review this book because I came at it expecting something different than what I got. I should know better than to judge based on title, but I was expecting a book dealing with economic disparity and our media culture. Instead, I got a fairly basic (to me as someone with a masters in this subject) collection of older literature focused on the different effects of media on the brain and culture. It is not uninteresting and those without much knowledge of the subject may get a lot out of it, but it wasn't for me. Also I think a great deal of it must be taken as historical context at this point. It's sad to consider things written in 2006 outdated, but that's how things are on a field like this.
July 30, 2012
A fantastically uneven collection of essays, some of which are outdated at this point. In general, any essay that goes to extremes in this book gets it incredibly wrong. (The internet is not increasing the speed of human evolution, I can't even believe an academic wrote that.) But there are some bright points of reasonable analysis. The essays based on usability studies are a valuable counter point to the idea of "digital natives." The article on Jimmy Wales is illuminating, and paints a reasonable picture of the ideals of some of the internet's innovators with out falling into hero worship.
December 6, 2012
Not being very knowledgeable (deplorably so), about the cyber world, this book was hugely enlightening for me. A collection of articles about the effects of our wired world, shed some interesting light on the technology I use on a daily basis without really understanding much about it. It's difficult for me to review this, because I have very little to compare it too. For me it was certainly helpful, would that be the case for someone more familiar with the subject, I'm not sure. What matters is that it piqued my interest to learn more, and so I'm in search of other books that also deal with digital reality.
January 6, 2013
While different view points on the social networking are presented, they are presented by previously published articles or selections from books. The term of continuous partial attention is presented and really says a lot about what we see in our world. This is having a propensity to be doing everything while maintaining a focus on nothing. The early days of the Internet are aligned to the Wild West. It is suggested that the contact available on the Internet and through online applications is much more powerful than the content.
December 6, 2011
The contents of this book are a great primer for digital culture. Featuring work by some of the top scholars on issues related to contemporary life, the book presents an amazing array of ideas that covers a lot of ground. What I really quibble with here are claims of these issues' importance having cooled, or that there is proof in this text of the risks/ dangers of life lived online. To claim the book is pro/ con, but then to assert the book proves the cons seems delusional.
September 5, 2012
Good book, but it is amost outdated already. The book doesn't address th how the downturn in the economy is affecting the "Net Natives". I don't see how businesses can cater to the fragile nature of the Gen Y and Net Natives. They want flex schedules and other benefits, I see companies cutting employee benefits and other concessions in order to save money and jobs. I don't know how they are going to handle a stricter work place.
February 27, 2013
It's an interesting book to introduce you to a number of authors and ideas that may typically not be in the same place.
The pro Web 2.0 articles by O'Reilly and the negative articles by Siegel all a few pages apart provided good perspective And balance of the digital divide.
My favourite essay was the one about digital natives and immigrants. A close second was the one about the end of solitude. Both deal with the generational divide.
The pro Web 2.0 articles by O'Reilly and the negative articles by Siegel all a few pages apart provided good perspective And balance of the digital divide.
My favourite essay was the one about digital natives and immigrants. A close second was the one about the end of solitude. Both deal with the generational divide.
February 20, 2013
This book was sent to my by the publisher for potential course adoption. It is a series of interesting essays by noted academics and pundits. I commend the editor for picking some excellent pieces for this collection of musings on digital communication technology. As with most commentary of this sort, the content will become dated, however many of authors have written pieces that contain timeless themes and ideas. I plan to use a lot of this book in my class, Living Life Online!
April 3, 2015
Overall, I am content with this read. I thought that Baurelein had some very persuasive essays to stress the different of prior generations, and the generations today. However, there were a few essays which I found lengthy and a little boring. The book wasn't exactly what I expected to be; I thought it would be more of teens using technology, and not, but instead, went more in depth. This book however, is going to be a lot of help for my research paper.
November 13, 2011
This collection of articles and book chapters chronicle the change that technology has had (both positive and negative) over the past few decades. Some sections were much more interesting that others (as can be expected), but all throw the fact that the we are certainly not living in our parents world directly into our face. It gives a person a lot to think about...
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