I’ve looked through the MIT Technology Review once or twice; I’m not sure why I don’t read it regularly. (I’m going to now.) Maybe because I buy all my magazines at the grocery store checkout. I guess shoppers just aren’t as in to nanostuff and biowhatnot as they used to be.
Anyways, it’s available online at http://www.technologyreview.com/ (with a free registration) and I recommend it.
There’s a good article in the November/December issue called “The Blow Up,” about “quants” — or quantitative finance analysts — and their role in the recent credit crunch and financial market mess. It gives a good introductory look at the technical inside of current (and perhaps future) market behaviour. (Compare with my more general comments on the relationship between finance, technology, and knowledge.)
Something closer to my own project is this blog post by neuroengineering assistant professor Ed Boynton: How to Think: Managing brain resources in an age of complexity. The list is good, but don’t skip the last two “practical notes.” Especially interesting (for all kinds of reasons) is Boynton’s description of his practice of making “conversation summaries”:
“I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago–at a touch, on my laptop.”
Now try telling me that technology isn’t radically changing the way people think, work, learn, and relate! And he’s just touching on the social possibilities (by giving the original paper away): what happens in a few years (or months) when someone makes an OpenSocial application that organizes his conversations and automatically searches the globe for like-minded people or relevant insights and information that he might oherwise have never found?
Moving into even more speculative and philosophical territory, I’m working on an essay about “the uses and abuses of history.” This gives me an opportunity to demonstrate how history may be “used or abused.”
Ten years ago it might have seemed to some that the internet was “just a fad.” Of course, it wasn’t (or isn’t) just a fad, and I’m sure only a few of the rarest and most misguided of individuals still believe that it is. One reason we know the web isn’t just a fad is that we can use history to look back and see that people made the same mistake regarding the automobile (or “horseless carriage”) and television.
So we can infer from history that the web isn’t a fad, but if we rested on that knowledge, we might rightly be accused abusing history. Just because the web is like the automobile and television in the non-fad aspect, doesn’t mean it’s like those past technologies in every (or even any) other cultural way.
People who think a little more about the web’s emergence might arrive at the conclusion that the web is a “paradigm shift” for the ways we work and communicate. But that still isn’t enough.
The kind of change is itself something new. The innovations the web is bringing about are far more democratic than those of the past.
With the automobile and television, it was mainly just a few technologists, entrepreneurs, and organizations that were responsible for appropriating, accomodating, and accustomizing the technology to human needs and desires; but with the web, all of us are much more directly responsible for its evolution — its “appropriation, accomodation, and accustomization” — in such ways as finding new uses for digital cameras and filing systems (as in the example of Ed Boynton), or even just writing (and reading) this blog.
People who merely use the new digital tools in conventional, inhereted, and uninformed ways aren’t adopting the real innovation of the web: the innovation to the whole process of innovation. It would be somewhat like adopting the “horseless carriage” but refusing to drive it any faster than horses could gallop; it would be somewhat like adopting the television but watching the same of variety shows that were broadcast over the radio.
Even those analogies don’t go far enough (not even close). “Web 2.0″ has already advanced us past the horse-gallop and variety show phase, but we still can’t appreciate what we might become capable of learning and creating through the web.
Whatever happens in the future, I think it’s safe to speculate that events will favour people who are more actively engaged and informed, people who are more personally responsible for what they know (and what they don’t know), people who challenge themselves to create or discover something new every day, people who aren’t afraid of being embarassed by failures and mistakes — because failures and mistakes are the most important part of the process.
In other words, the Information Age will favour people who actually become informed.
