I continue to be fascinated by the smart city movement. The multiplexed metropolis is a very interesting look by The Economist at the pros and cons of connecting cities through open access to all kinds of information:

But clever cities will not necessarily be better ones. Rather than becoming paragons of democracy, they could turn into electronic panopticons in which everybody is constantly watched. They could be paralysed by hackers, or by bugs in labyrinthine software. They could furnish new ways to exclude the poor. They might even put at risk the serendipity that makes cities such creative places, argues Richard Sennett, a sociologist at the LSE, making them “stupefying” instead.

I have to admit that I had to look up the word “panopticon” — and it’s such a great analogy. From Wikipedia:

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without their being able to tell whether they are being watched or not.

Let’s hope we can avoid this…

In The ‘Mood Graph’: How Our Emotions Are Taking Over the Web Evan Selinger writes about the rise if emoji and other emotional signals in social media:

But there are costs to a mood graph too. The more we rely on finishing ideas with the same limited words (feeling happy) and images (smiley face) available to everyone on a platform, the more those pre-fabricated symbols structure and limit the ideas we express. Such general symbols can also lead to even more confusion or misunderstanding due to cultural, generational, and other differences.

And finally, drop-down expression makes us one-dimensional, living caricatures of G-mail’s canned responses — a style of speech better suited to emotionless computers than flesh-and-blood humans.

It’s a great article well worth reading all the way through. This trend is a continuation of something I’ve discussed quite often here over the years: our move towards a post-literate society:

What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

I find myself here in full agreement with Guy English from his post Learn to X:

But, let’s not kid ourselves, literacy is the new literacy. The ability to read, comprehend, digest and come to rational conclusions — that’s what we need more of.

Emoji are fine, and I’m as much a fan of the animated gif as anyone. But I do feel like we’re trying to create all these shortcuts to express our emotions because it’s hard to do it in words. The thing is, though, it should be hard to express our emotions. That’s how we understand them and work through them. So let’s go easy on the giphy.com searches every once in a while, and try to find the right words instead.

John Tierney writes about the benefits of reminiscing in What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows:

Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer. […]

Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function,” Dr. [Clay Routledge of North Dakota State University] says. “It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives. Some of our research shows that people who regularly engage in nostalgia are better at coping with concerns about death.”

Of course, there’s a fine line between reminiscing about great moments, and allowing those memories to make you feel depressed. In the words of Stephen Stills:

Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now.

Bundled Out is a great post by Charles Miller on how every problem Microsoft is experiencing today was written into its DNA in the 1980s. You really should read the whole post, so I’m just going to quote a short teaser:

Software isn’t an industry where the monster company selling the last generation’s product gets to stay being the monster for the next generation. It’s the industry where a thousand hungry small companies are waiting for a shift in the market that will allow them to slay the monster, carve them up and eat them for breakfast.

Geoff Livingston wrote a great essay called Is Existing Online a Quest of Loneliness or Giving? It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt that stuck out for me:

We exist in a time where anyone can determine and create unique lives online, accountable to no one, yet visible to and dependent upon all. Digital existentialism extends the sense of modernistic distress. There are so many red herrings and lost pursuits that distract. You can drug yourself digitally with almost any pursuit, and at the end find yourself nano-famous and alone.

That last line is so spot on. I thought about it again when I saw Shimi Cohen’s excellent video The Innovation of Loneliness, which is making the rounds this week:

Later in his post Geoff says this:

We exist in the moment. Every effort spent, every tap on the keyboard provides a chance to impact an individual, contribute to the world, and add light to the picture.

Sure, efforts can lead towards darkness. Sometimes when we awaken to our outcomes, we realize the fruitlessness, or worse the destructiveness of our actions. What are you going to do, condemn yourself to the desert for a long march of hermitage? Or get up?

This is another good point. We’re all going to make mistakes. We might look at that video and feel like helpless victims. But that’s not true. We do have the power get up, to connect with people in a way that doesn’t just ignore the bad bits (I tried to do that here, and it worked out ok).

Related to this, I really enjoyed Chris Bowler’s Congestion, in which he discusses some ideas on how we might deal with this new reality of overload and over-connection:

To create is better than to consume.

But create for the few, not for the many.

Create for those you can see face to face.

Consume, but remember that the dose makes the poison.

When you consume something that is good, great, transcendent, consume it over and over … meditate on it, then act on it, be changed by it.

So much has been written about this topic, but I really like the common theme that runs through these posts and video: we are not victims of technology. We have a choice.

Quentin Hardy has some interesting thoughts on what happens in a world of perfect recollection in his essay What’s Lost When Everything Is Recorded:

There is much to be gained from storage, of course. Who would not thrill to hear Lincoln at Gettysburg, or Shakespeare playing even a lesser role at the Globe? But Shakespeare’s plays were also reconstructions from the memories of diverse actors, some years after a performance. Our greatest literature was generated by an imperfect collective recollection, as much as it was written by one person.

I wrote about this issue before in The unnecessary fear of digital perfection.

Clayton Cubitt starts his fascinating article on how photography is changing with a definition of what French photographer (and the father of modern photojournalism) Henri Cartier-Bresson called “The Decisive Moment”:

Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter. The Decisive Moment is Gestalt psychology married to reflexive performance art in the blink of a mechanical eye.

It is the creation of art through the curation of time.

Cubitt goes on to point out that we now live in the Constant Moment, where it’s possible to take endless photos of everything, and edit (“curate”) later. Yet, notably, he doesn’t believe that’s a bad thing:

The Constant Moment doesn’t end [what characterizes the Decisive Moment]. All it does is capture the billion missed Decisive Moments that previously slipped through our fingers, by expanding the available window of temporal curation from “here and now” to “anywhere and anytime.” The Constant Moment eliminates dumb luck from photography. It minimizes, as much as anything ever can, the Hawthorne Effect caused by a lifeless camera between our interactions. It continues the photographic tradition of artistic democratization by flattening limits of time, of geography, of access.

It’s very interesting to follow Cubitt’s article by reading Dave Pell’s excellent This is You on Smiles, which essentially argues that the Constant Moment is changing how we experience life and create memories:

During a presentation on happiness at the Ted Conference, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman makes a distinction between the experiencing self and the remembering self. Digital photography gives additional dominance to the remembering self. […]

The digital age gives a new (and almost opposite) meaning to having a photographic memory. The experience of the moment has become the experience of the photo. […]

Snapping and sharing photos from meaningful events is nothing new. But the frequency with which we take pictures and the immediacy with which we view them will clearly have a deep impact on the way we remember. And with cameras being inserted into more devices, our collective shutterspeed will only increase.

Both pieces are worth reading this weekend.

Ethan Zuckerman in Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World:

Because Reddit connects strangers, it has certain advantages over Facebook, which connects friends. Ideas may spread more widely from Reddit than from Facebook despite a smaller pool of users. An idea shared between Facebook friends may peter out quickly as social networks reach saturation: an idea spread through friends who went to the same college may lose momentum when all alumni have heard about it.

Reddit users are connected to many different communities, and an idea spread on Reddit’s front page may go on to spread in thousands of different groups of friends on Facebook. This power to disseminate ideas to many different social subnets may explain why Reddit memes often go viral and why Reddit has emerged as a key node in online activism.

In social network theory terms, Reddit has figured out how to tap into “the strength of weak ties”1, whereas information on Facebook tends to keep getting recycled among people who already share strong ties offline.

Luke Kingma also touches on this strength in his interesting post The Next Great Social Network Will Not Put Relationships First:

The vast majority of us are not fortunate enough to have an incredibly diverse and interesting network of friends, family, and colleagues. Reddit works because the measure of a user is the content he shares, not the company he keeps. Moreover, visibility on Reddit is directly proportional to one’s utility in a given conversation. As a result, we are exposed to more interesting people, ideas, and perspectives.

This access to experts on any topic imaginable is what makes Reddit so powerful. The principle of content > relationships is probably also why Medium doesn’t have a follower model for its authors, but instead organizes content in topic collections. But Medium is a different topic altogether — I’ll post some thoughts on that platform soon.

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1. See my article How to increase the value you get out of social media for an extensive discussion of social network theory and weak ties. ↩

By now most people have read Paul Miller’s I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. The article is certainly deserving of all the attention it received back in May. I’m not sure what I expected — perhaps a gloating, holier-than-thou account of the virtues of going on an internet sabbatical to “find yourself”. But that’s not what this is. It’s a raw, often sad, always authentic account of a year that didn’t go at all as expected.

There is much to discuss and analyze in Paul’s experience, but I’d like to focus on this particular paragraph:

What I do know is that I can’t blame the internet, or any circumstance, for my problems. I have many of the same priorities I had before I left the internet: family, friends, work, learning. And I have no guarantee I’ll stick with them when I get back on the internet — I probably won’t, to be honest. But at least I’ll know that it’s not the internet’s fault. I’ll know who’s responsible, and who can fix it.

Paul touches on a really important point here. Over the past few years we’ve increasingly started to blame the internet or technology whenever we feel like we’re failing at being human beings. It all started with Nicholas Carr’s famous 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, a theme that is carried through in Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants.

These (and other) authors make great arguments, and I don’t doubt the validity of their assertions. But I do think the pendulum has swung too far away from the importance of personal responsibility. It has just become too easy to play the victim and blame technology for our own inability to resist it. Some people feel so powerless against the relentless pull of technology that they pay hundreds of dollars to go to what is essentially rehab for technology addicts. NPR tells the story in the article At Tech-Free Camps, People Pay Hundreds To Unplug:

Digital Detox co-founder Levi Felix attributes the high demand for tech-free retreats to a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of technology in our everyday lives. “People are feeling like something’s not right here,” he says.

With no iPhones or computers to distract them, campers at Camp Grounded participated in “playshops,” featuring yoga, laughing contests and writing sessions.

What the hell? “Laughing contests”? Isn’t that just called “going out to dinner with friends”? Sure, many of us find it hard to unplug, and we end up spending a lot of our time alone together1, but we can’t throw our hands in the air and blame inanimate objects for our woes. We have to take responsibility for our actions and realize that we have nothing to fear: our devices won’t become self-aware and attack us if we turn them off every once in a while.

I think Theodore Rooseveldt said it best:

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Image source: Jean Jullien

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1. This is a great book. Well worth your time. ↩

Mark McGurl wrote a fascinating essay on the recent Zombie Renaissance in literature:

We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever was) commanded by individuals making rational decisions. Instead we are witnessing a slow, compulsive, collective movement toward Malthusian self-destruction. Of course all monsters are projections of human fears, but only zombies make this fundamentally social and self-accusatory charge: we the people are the problem we cannot solve. We outnumber ourselves.

It really is a very thought-provoking piece. I just finished reading Justin Cronin’s The Passage and I kid you not — it is the best book I’ve read in a long time. Cronin is a literary author who takes on the zombie/post-apocalyptic genre in such a compelling and beautifully-written way. And as I read those words in McGurl’s article — “we the people are the problem we cannot solve” — I realised that’s exactly what makes The Passage so hard to put down. It is a story about surviving ourselves. If you’re looking for something to read this summer/winter, I highly recommend it.