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Brian Small's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/pingrin
Bio:   I'd like to win social change, realized that from reading Noam Chomsky books, finding Znet and plowing through Michael Albert's appeals for the last ten years or so. I had never really thoug... (More)

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Net Attention

By Brian Small at Dec 17, 2010

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I've been becoming more aware of my on-line and attention-spending habits since Michael Albert's Facebook Vs Civilization and Internet Worries blog posts. I think the essential TomDispatch site sending me to the cursor.org aggregator with a several hyperlinks per sentence may have started my downfall . Actually, I imagine it's more a problem of just setting limits, you can't follow the deluge 3 active mailing lists and Znet and Counterpunch and cursor.org and then expect to have time to organize your thoughts and write some quality material. I guess we have to find ways to control the addiction, like alcohol or some other new drug coming into a culture for the first time, or setting limits on hours spent watching TV in a conscientious family...

I'm wondering if coming upon a hyperlink in text really distracts from the flow? How different is it from coming upon [1] citation and then going to the footnote or end note? Of course you can't just click on the book title in the notes and spriral out of control with 30 tabs open in your browser while reading a book. Does this mean you can force yourself to process on-line information by taking notes (is it sacrilegious to remove your hands from the keyboard??) and refusing to leave a page until you've finished with Norman Mailer's Narrative on that particular issue?

 Adbusters has a Digital Detox campaign, Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has Screen-free week. I think I'm going to designate a screen-free day each week (hard to avoid that cell phone if only for short date-and-place-confirming for meetings) .. I'm looking forward to getting back to the book basics and scaling down screen time. Some quiet deep-processing time with Douglas Rushkoff's _Program or Be Programmed_ and _Open Source Democracy_ should synegrize nicely with some _Economic Justice and Democracy_ and _Participatory Economics_ work. I can feel a Economy 4.0 Redesign epiphany coming along just from the titles and snippets. Now it's just balancing the reading with quality face and body time while fending off the screens.

All this newly strengthened self awareness and technology consciousness brought to mind old misgivings voiced by Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk that seemed outlandish, even elitist, to me at the time. I can't find the entire piece by Robert Fisk where he says e-mail is trash, he'll only read stuff that requires the effort to stamp and send by snail-mail. There are allusions to his attitude in pages about 'Fisking' but  I can't remember where I read his whole tirade (probably on the old Znet) but this part of it is available from the search engines I tried.

"I have to be honest: I don't use the Internet. I've never seen a blog in my life. I don't even use email, I don't waste my time with this."

Chomky's concerns in this 1995 interview with RosieX and Chris Mountford come off a bit more balanced but just as worrisome. E-mail deluge was forerunner to the physically impossible pace of Trivia interrupted by Tweats (Junk interrupted by Junk, as Normon Solomon ran with the Mailer anti-commercial article in Parade Magazine)

 " Incidentally the public nets where everyone is talking to one another have, in my opinion, the same degraded character as the individual e-mail messages; people are just too casual in what comes across...the effect is you often get good things, but buried...the quality of what people are doing is actually declining because of their intense involvement in these e-mail interactions which are have such an overwhelming character when you get involved in them. And it's kind of seductive, not personally for me, but I know people get seduced by the computer and sitting there banging around at it. It has a negative potential and a certain positive potential, but I think it's a double edged sword "
 
Also, I think the Chomsky's observation that the fight over the internet has a lot of similarities with radio in the 20s. "Incidentally the whole thing is simply reliving things that have gone on with earlier communication technologies and it's well worth having a look at what happened. Some very clever left type academics and media people have charted the course of radio in US since the 20s. In the US things took quite a different course from the rest of the world in the 1920s, the United States is a very business run society with a very high class business community." is synching with Albert's recognition of Carr's concerns with google, quoted in Internet Worries(link below) mirroring 'left' analysis... Could Media Literacy, a Freire type Conscientization (conscientização) or critical consciousness towards the new media, that there's no reason you can direct the programming of your world, lead to Open Source Economics and Democracy tendencies???

Back in this 1995 interview it almost seems like Chomsky was reading the Wall Street Journal or someplace where they were foreseeing multitasking TVs with links and instant shopping.. Have people started voting on Superbowl plays yet? " Of course the ideal was to have every human being spend every spare moment alone in front of the tube and now it's interactive!"

   This Tech interview is brilliant, it even mentions the same kind of revelations that Umberto Eco points out with wikileaks! Noam Chomsky says in 1995 " I know this system pretty well, and the one thing I've discovered over the years is to be complet ely public. The intelligence systems are so ideologically fanatic that they can not understand public opposition." Umberto Eco says in 2010 "The informant is lazy. So is the head of the secret service... he only regards as true what he recognises....those given to the occult only believe what they already know and what corroborates what they’ve already heard. That happens to be Dan Brown’s success formula."

  As far at the battle over the Internet, what ever happened to Freenet that Michael Albert was discussing years ago? Does it have anything to do with the 'pinging' that Douglas Rushkoff is talking about as he discusses the limits of the internet exposed by the crackdown on Wikileaks?

Links in the Post above
Michael Albert Facebook Vs. Civilization
                        Internet Worries
Tomdispatch (I love this site, more than making up for sending me to Cursor.org and 30 open tab hell it got me to read Mike Davis' _Victorian Holocausts_ tome after _Planet of Slums_ and _Monster at Our Door_. TomDispatch offerings are definitely NOT snippets, he's used to publishing, and writing, entire books.)
Cursor.org
Norman Mailer on Narrative
Normon Solomon on Mailer - Junk interrupted by Junk
Douglas Rushkoff Program or Be Programmed
                              Open Source Democracy (I've only read this blurb but the wording is fascinating, making me think of Parecon as a Economy Redesign, and I'm impressed with the first couple chapters of his Life Inc. book)
Noam Chomsky on e-mails and quality decline
             it used to be available on Znet but the Chomsky.info link is dead.
Umberto Eco on Wikileaks, Not Such Wicked Leaks.
FreeNet
Douglas Rushkoff on Centralized Nature of the Internet and Wikileaks.

Comment On This Blog Post  See All Comments (1)

Pc050013

Does the screen threaten to suck us in?

By Johnson, Theodore at Dec 20, 2010 04:51 AM
The web is a powerful tool, with the potential for positives but also for negative outcomes.  While I agree with the gist of the Chomsky state to the effect that the web is following the path of previous communication technologies, its possible implications are more far reaching than any before, perhaps on orders of magnitude.  While all pervious communication technologies are being streamlined on the web (radio, TV, etc.), the web still to this point provides the user with a choice in what content is being consumed.  While the choice of content is certainly not infinite, it is far broader than anything that has come before, and it allows for the user to directly upload content that she/he creates. 

So, while the techology follows fimilar pathways, it also has the potential for a horizontial, democratizing process to unfold, empowering individuals to connect, communicate, diseminate, and learn in new ways.  While this possibile outcome is far from certain, and indeed is under direct threat due to the commdification of the web, private corporations restricting access to information ( think wikileaks), creating a two tier web, or perhaps most dangerously of all, the point brought up by Mike Albert and others about the dominant forms of technology and web use driving our collective attention spans to zero and the alienating affect that accompanies, the possibly for positive use does remain (ZNet being but one example). 

Does the web theaten to dominate our time, does the screen threaten to 'suck us in' and drown us in a never-ending deluge of bits of info and endless reading, not to speak of other time consuming, mindnumbing digital stimuli? Yes, it does indeed threaten this.  The solution lays within each of us though.  Self induced moderation has to be imposed if we are to do anythign meaningful with the vast array of information available at our finger tips.  But it is in principle really no different than any thing else.  I for one love to read books, but I would be hopelessly swamped in them if I attempted to read everything I came across that interested me.  I am forced to make decisions about what I am going to read, and a big part of this is priortizing based on how relevant a particualr book is, what I think I can get out of it, and weighing against other books I would like to read.  The same must be done with the internet.  One must read and process information with a filter of some sort, or else it all becomes a blur or one just becomes a vast storehouse of information for no other purpose except the act of acumulating it. 

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Re: Does the screen threaten to suck us in?

By Small, Brian at Dec 20, 2010 12:27 PM
Hi Theodore, Like you I think the antidote is setting time limits on screen time, and making room for a variety of other pleasant activities. I enjoy reading books, ended up accumulating a lot of them but hardly ever read them anymore. I don't think I was as aware of how much time I was spending on-line, and that there might be something addictive about flitting over snippets and thinking in fb status updates until the debate on Alberts intentionally extreme blog post. I've been getting a lot out of Nicholas Carr's roughtype blog ever since.

I was more intent on kids being immersed in screens, not just the boob tubes but the little screens like the DS, and my iPhone.. I heard and elementary school teacher say that while some parents think the games are good mental stimulation, might even help with hand eye coordination so they grow up to be a surgeon or something, research shows that the games only stimulate the reptile brain or something. I never followed up on that but lent the Japanese version of  Shor's _Born To Buy_ and some reviews to another teacher and they ended up taking up the topic in their study group.. I talk with parents that are thinking through how to limit time playing DS games. Of course if we all worked fewer hours it would be a lot easier to take the kids to parks and run around enjoying ourselves so we forget about the need to be looking at a screen. They can't take their DS into the ocean waves with them.

   I find myself drawn to the infinite information and threads of interest whenever I'm around a computer. It makes it more difficult to keep a tidy place.. In order to start working on books and organizing a clearer progression of thought I'm thinking it might be necessary to set aside library days or something..

I'm hoping to get a hold of Program or Be Programmed, and follow Rushkoff and Carr, and maybe the Freenet people Michael Alber mentioned years ago, to see if the battle(cyberwar? apparently Stewart and Colbert were ridiculing Fox over the term but what do they care about the 'amatuers' that might rely on equal access to the internet?) over the web turns out better than the battle over radio did in the 20s...

I'm beyond my screen time allocation today, thanks for the exchange!

Links related to the content above, pasted in below.

Here's the Rushkoff on CNN about how controllable the internet is with centralized Name Servers.
His pinging idea reminded me of the Freenet people.
I think Nicholas Carr's Roughtype blog is like the equivalent of on-line digital media literacy, like FAIR Magazine for the Web. Web Revolutionaries.
I'm wondering if our Net experience is starting to be designed like Shopping Malls, to effect a "Gruen Transfer"(from Life Inc.), rob you of purpose and make you an impulse buyer. What would a  more wholesome design look and feel like? I'd like to sit down with some Freire and other Critical Pedagogy books and think about how to encourage a consciousness of on-line media, and how we can take control of it. Should we all play around with HTML structuring our thoughts, present it with some CSS, then goof with some JavaScript Programming. All the quirky langauges (Perl!) are fascinating but it's hard to beat the convenience of stuff you can do with any browser... Could some kind of empowering conscientization experience lead to an urge to play at redesigning shopping malls, stores and community layouts - work from the up close and personal to a whole economy? maybe we can move into thinking on the redesign of other areas too - I'm hoping these are the implications of Rushkoff's Life Inc.
  Where are all these anti-corporate Web professionals headed? Dave Winer, called in The Guardian  "one of the blogosphere's elder statesmen" writes "It's also going to get ugly because we're fed up with corporations."

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