Adler’s idea that we can — and should — defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge is typical of pioneering self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of self-actualization, even as its methods are startlingly different. Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.

Personal data tracking originally appeared on Portable Learner on April 30th, 2010

Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cultivating a page of “hot links” to interesting discoveries on the Web. You find an article about a Columbia journalism lecture and you link to it on your page. The information value you have created is useful exclusively to two groups: people interested in journalism who happen to visit your page, and the people maintaining the Columbia page, who benefit from the increased traffic. Fast forward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lecture tonight, and tweet a link to a description of the talk. What happens to that information? For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twitter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embedded in the link alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts advertisers interested in your location or the topic of journalism itself. Because that tiny little snippet of information is free to make new connections, by checking in here you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight; you’re helping the Journalism school in promoting this venue; you’re helping the bar across Broadway attract more customers, you’re helping Google organize the web; you’re helping people searching google for information about journalism; you’re helping journalism schools advertising on Google to attract new students. Not bad for 140 characters.

Textual productivity originally appeared on Portable Learner on April 26th, 2010

The Rules of Big Ideas originally appeared on Portable Learner on April 26th, 2010

If the public is balkanized, and if different groups design their own preferred communications packages, the consequence will be further balkanization, as group members move one another toward more extreme points in line with their initial tendencies. At the same time, different deliberating groups, each consisting of like-minded people, will be driven increasingly far apart, simply because most of their discussions are with one another.

Yet, nearly ten years later, David Brooks points to new research suggesting that news consumption online is far from perfectly segregated. Using methodologies similar to those used to identify racial segregation, researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro tracked how people of different political views move around the Web. Their main finding is that internet users do not stay within their communities; rather they spend their time on a few giant sites that serve politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News. Furthermore, they found that the internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned face-to-face interactions in our workplace and neighbourhoods. If democracy is being threatened — and it is — it seems that the internet is probably not the culprit.

The internet is not an echo chamber originally appeared on Portable Learner on April 20th, 2010

Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

Introducing the mesofact originally appeared on Portable Learner on March 2nd, 2010

Learning styles: Reports of demise exaggerated originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 19th, 2010

We used to think that we could publish speculative research which advanced interesting new ideas which may be wrong, but which were important to provoke debate and discussion. We don’t think that now. We don’t seem able to have a rational conversation in the public space about difficult controversial issues without people drawing a conclusion which could be very averse.…The 19th-century days where you could sit in the salon at the Royal Society and have a private conversation amongst your fellows just doesn’t exist anymore. So I think yeah, too much information in this particular case is a bad thing, which seems to go against every kind of democratic principle that we believe in. But in the case of science, it seems to be true.

But it is not. I can’t help but wonder if we had had this conversation, in public, ten years ago when the study was still “speculative research” we may well have averted the flawed decision to publish it in the first place. We need more information, not less, and more inclusive conversations, not narrowly confined to the medical community. The public may well have to engage the medical community in the public space “difficult conversations without drawing a conclusion that could be very averse…”

Vaccines, The Lancet retraction and open scientific debate originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 9th, 2010

Real body language originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 1st, 2010

Surprising gaps in your self-knowledge originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 31st, 2010

Atoms to bits originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 29th, 2010