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

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

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

I think what is really very important to recognize is that, when we look at the history of the world, we’re not looking at the history of different civilizations truncated and separated from each other. They’ve a huge amount of contact with each other, there is a kind of inter-connectedness. So I’ve always felt, not to think of the history of the world as a history of civilizations, but as a history of world civilizations evolving in often similar, often diverse ways, always interacting with each other. And this is a very different view from the clash of civilizations to which we were exposed some years ago, as a way to understand enmity in the world. Enmity has not been the general condition of the relationship between people across the world in history.

The programme is fully socially mediated, both online and offline with regional museum programs; it will be interesting to see if the stories sustain the momentum generated in these first episodes.

Telling a history of the world with objects originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 26th, 2010

…who we are on the web is simply a reflection of who we already are offline. We project hierarchical systems into the virtual world. We extend our interests and make them happen using the tools the web provides. We seek out things that make us feel good about ourselves. The web is a mirror, and we have to face it in confidence, warts and all.

Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 24th, 2010

Teasing (in the right way, which is what most people do) … is a way to play and express affection. It is a way of negotiating conflicts at work and in the family. Teasing exchanges teach children how to use their voices in innumerable ways—such an important medium of communication. In teasing, children learn boundaries between harm and play. And children learn empathy in teasing, and how to appreciate others’ feelings (for example, in going too far). And in teasing we have fun. All of this benefit is accomplished in this remarkable modality of play.

On Teasing and Playful Provocation originally appeared on Portable Learner on March 14th, 2009

Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants … leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture .… One can hardly help but admire the intelligence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intelligence of a very particular kind. Nothing in the brain of a worker ant represents a blueprint of the social order,Holldobler and Wilson tell us, and there is no overseer or brain caste that carries such a master plan in its head. Instead, the ants have discovered how to create strength from weakness, by pooling their individually limited capacities into a collective decision-making system that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own democratic processes.

In the Ants’ Footsteps originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 22nd, 2009

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger question than I can answer here (not that I’m capable anyway), but it probably has to do with the heuristics — the shortcut guesses — our brains use to solve problems, and the fact that these heuristics rely on the information already stored in our memories.
And what gets stored away? Anomalies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dramatic, so unpredictable, and perhaps world-changing, that they imprint themselves on our memories and con us into thinking of them as typical, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extraordinarily rare.

The Cost of Fearing Strangers originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 14th, 2009

“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [law professor Tim] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

Google’s Gatekeepers originally appeared on Portable Learner on December 14th, 2008

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

Social Networks and Happiness originally appeared on Portable Learner on December 9th, 2008