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I liked the beginning:

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

A tale of the dystopian technological future? No, just autobiography. The Device is, of course, the printed book and I’ve been its willing victim all my life.

via Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Will the digital revolution really change us? – By Alison Gopnik – Slate Magazine.

I just really like these two paragraphs, but then added some more ramblings below…

Firstly, all “greatest danger to our civilization ever” writings remind me a discussion before the “Device” was even invented. From “Phaedrus“:

“…you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

At some point I really have to wonder – so what if these things, devices and technologies, change us? Is not change the constant and stability an aberration? Seeking to preserve what we are only grasping to understand – incompletely and painfully naively as the past state of our existence seems doomed to failure – and for what? Is the seeking to preserve, catalog, keep from disappearing just a knee-jerk reaction for a people who are lost in their own world, and are afraid to lose what little grasp of reality they (I?) hold? I think at this point few people hold to any kind of optimistic promise of technology – to make our lives better, easier; yet we reap its benefits all the time. Technology has fulfilled much of its promises, but what people earn for has never been technology or its abilities. I think “experts” are confused too – conflating ease of accepting today’s technology as a given with transformation or change of some abstract human nature.

I happen to think that, by and large, human nature is immutable, or at least extremely slowly d/evolving. If it were not – we would not be able to relate to Gilgamesh or Noah, care about D’Artagnan and Luke Skywalker, and have any reaction whatsoever to Scarlett O’Hara and Snooky. And if so – then being able to call out Facebook or Skype for ruining the civilization is a little simplistic and pessimistic not about technology, but humans themselves.

I, of course, am extremely partial to this version of Skywalker – who might invent the next “Device”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

Related articles

• Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Will the digital revolution really change us? (slate.com)
• Keen On… MIT Professor Says Robotic Moment Has Arrived, And We Are Toast (TCTV) (techcrunch.com)
• Review of Alone Together by Sherry Turkle (fredbortz.scienceblog.com)
• Stephen Colbert Asks Sherry Turkle: What Is There To Live For Without Latest iPhone?! (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

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What’s the rush for an ipo for a well-capitalized company? Fear that the market isn’t going to be there…

- from a Colleague’s conference abstract

With all the talk about customer/user experience, businesses sometimes forget that ALL interactions matter, and that friction built in any phase of the transaction will slow down the momentum. Having 1-click shopping experience is great, but not when there is no way to reset a password and complete a sale in the time already mentally allotted for it.

Recently, for example, I was about to buy shoes from Zappoes.com, since I figured it would be easiest for me for to just reorder the last pair of shoes I bought there. With as many account we have nowadays, and different security requirements, I could not remember the password and had to request a reset. A common enough occurrence, I suppose. I find it strange that Zappoes can get shoes to me, if I could order them, faster than they got the password reset email to my Inbox. Like many consumers, I am willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes for such an email, but when it does not arrive – I am forced (forced, I tell you!) to go to Plan B. In this case Amazon won the day. It took me a few extra clicks to locate my desired pair of shoes – but at least I could get in and buy.

So a kind reminder to online merchants – I suspect you lose a sale for every 10 minutes password reset is not done. And every such lost sale is totally unnecessary. If you are not sure how long your site takes to reset a password – go and test it now, do not put it off till tomorrow when more of your sales are going to Amazon, which is one site users do remember their passwords.

Sent to a [SYNTHETIC-WORLDS] mailing list:

A main goal of the synthetic worlds initiative at Indiana University is to develop large games as research environments. To test some ideas, we have prepared a browser-based game of kingdoms, trade, diplomacy, and warfare in the stone age. The world is called Greenland and it enters open beta today. We invite those interested in such things to help us by testing the environment and contributing reactions and criticism to the forums.

To enter Greenland, go to http://greenlandgame.com/ and choose the Mercator server (the other two servers are closed for internal testing).You will need a code to register for the server; it is GLOPENACCESS.

If you have questions or problems, please contact our community manager Matt Falk at mfalk@umail.iu.edu.

Thank you.

--
Edward Castronova
Associate Professor of Telecommunications
Indiana University

Suddenly, New York looks pretty good.

In case you just want to go straight into the visualization, click here – http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/house-prices-to-income-ratio

I am trying to figure out how best to use the “deals” feature, and it would be really great if I could surface emails/notes from people involved in the deal without having to make 10 clicks. It was not even obvious to me that I could assign these to deals until I tried to change the email… At the very least, I should be able to drag an email/note to the “deal” that is already shown on the right side of the screen. Ideally, I would like to be able to add notes/emails from inside the deals – also with drag-n-drop…

Offtopic: Interestingly (for me) – I have immediately begun to expect that companies follow twitter and therefore will just pick up the resultant twit and comment on the blog. It’s all the fault of the GetSatisfaction.com team.

It’s gotten to the point that if I can’t interact with content, I don’t want to consume it. When I read books, I underline certain passages so I can blog about them later. If I were reading on a connected device, I’d simply reblog on tumblr and be done. I don’t think I’m unusual in this regard but I do think I’m in the leading edge of behavior and that more and more people will feel this way.A VC, Dec 2008

Ditto. Take a look at books left over from old (100+ years) writers, scientists, people. They are full of notes on the margins. This type of interaction with text only stopped recently, perhaps because a lot of content consumption went one-way — magazines, newspapers, TV. An old notebook of my grandmother’s I recently found has pages written out from books she borrowed and found insightful but did not own to write directly in. My big hope is that next version of Kindle would provide some kind of a solution. It is possible that other readers already provide these capabilities and I am just unaware of them…

I see a lot of people also blogging as they read through a book – something this type of functionality would facilitate. Does the world really need people to post half-formed thoughts the moment they get an urge to share them? Probably not, but we already do (reading this post qualifies), so making this sharing easier is not going to make things worse, but perhaps encourage those for whom current means are too convoluted or complicated to participate in the discussion.

No. I wanted to think through, by typing, what it was that has kept me from blogging for a better part of 4 years. It was not lack of source material – certainly these times have an overabundance of that. There is an issue of time, of course. It is pretty obvious that to build a readership, posts need to come with regularity that is well-known to journalists, but not easy to maintain on IT guys’ schedule. It is also recommended to stick to a particular topic or set of topics in which one has expertise or strong convictions. That approach was lacking as well. I like to think by typing, and I am certainly not going to be maintaining 5 different blogs for a carefully segmented presentation of my world views.

What I realized, is that the few people whose blogs I actually read with any regularity where “reasonably smart guys” who put out whatever it was that they wanted to share. That’s it. Some of them I knew personally, some I did not, some I even mostly disagreed with. In all cases; however, it was something for me to think about, to talk to someone else about – and perhaps that’s what matters to me. So, I will make the fool out of myself – writing about things I know little about, as well as risking my professional growth by writing about thing I *should* know about, but perhaps do not.

I might even, seriously now, write a bit about my biggest development challenges – my kids. I am still not sure how far to go there. They will inevitably find this blog in a couple of years and I do not want them to be scarred/horrified/overly pleased.

Anyway, I probably have to write here, since my family and co-workers cannot take any more of my soliloquies.