I’ve just finished reading a few books about the digital era. The first, by Nick Bilton, was called I Live in the Future & Here’s How it Works.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t think much of the new Clay Shirky book (Cognitive Surplus) either. However, I did really like The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (more of that another time).
Some observations about I Live in the Future…
1. He seems to equate deep reading with article length. I disagree.
2. He says that Digital Natives have solved the information overload problem by using social networks to create boundaries to filter information.I think there’s something in this, but the bigger problem is surely social networks creating mindless junk.
2. He cites research saying that there is little or no difference in the experience of watching a movie on a large TV screen versus a mobile phone screen. In fact the small screens can actually be better due to headphones shutting the outside world out and the fact that you have control by holding the device in your hand. Define “experience”? To me such experience is partly to do with screen size, but much more to do with communal experience. Like many futurists and technologists he seems to be missing the social aspects of technology.
A few thoughts on Cognitive Surplus…
The argument of this books seems to be that instead of wasting our lives watching television we are now getting together online to put our surplus leisure time to good use by linking brains to create meaningful collaborative works. Well people are certainly getting together to co-create things but I’m not quite sure about the value. Wikipedia is cited as an example, and it’s a good one, but he seems to run out of other examples pretty quickly. The subtitle of this book is Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age but I didn’t notice too many examples of real creativity or of generosity for that matter.
Off the top of my head: Wikipedia, all the various sites where people share how-to information on a myriad of subjects, the entire ecosystem of open source software including Linux, collective information gathering like in LibraryThing and FreeBase, collective mapping and traffic information sharing like Waze…
Don’t get me wrong, I love wikipedia. However, the demographic of the people contributing is very narrow (male, single, under 30 from memory). Anyway, that’s not my beef. This is a good example of what people are doing, so too is Ushahidi which he uses as an example. But his list goes on to include things that are hardly hardly creating “civic value” (his words). Sure these sites are popular (a few) but where is the great leap forwrad in humankind?
Some other thoughts:
1. I wonder about his basic premise that people have more leisure time. Perhaps we need to define leisure. Is this a western-centric view?
2. “The TV has absorbed the lion’s share of free time.” Really?
3. It is easy to create our own content these days but where is the audience? What, for example, is the average audience for a clip on Youtube? How many followers does the average Twitter user have?
We have the opportunity but how many of us really take advanatge of it?
4. “People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited too.” Evidence ???
5. Media in the 20th C was run as a single event: consumpition.” Glib.
6. Most of the world’s adults now use digital networks.” Western-centric and probably untrue depending on definitions of network.
But I agree with some parts…
1. “The old view of online as a separate space, cyberspace, apart from the world worl, was an accident of history….the whole notion of cyberspace is fading.” Agreed.
2. “What matters most now is our immaginations.” Precisely, although I’d argue that digital distractions are slowly eroding it.