Kate Ray's semantic web mini-documentary

Kate Ray's Web 3.0 mini-doc explores the potential for the semantic web.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

This documentary offers some interesting insights into how difficult it is to both develop and predict the next iteration of the Web. I can't help but feel, however, that human cognition is missing from the discussion; in my mind, the next iteration of the web has to be further conceptualized as a part of the exosomatic brain. Anything we can do to better streamline the process of accessing and processing information will be a step in this direction. Put another way, how can we blur the divide and reduce the friction that currently separates the human mind from the internet?

Maybe that's Web 4.0 stuff....

Clay Shirky: The Internet Makes You Smarter

New book: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age in which Clay Shirky argues that, amid the silly videos and spam, are the roots of a new reading and writing culture.

Excerpt from the WSJ review:

The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we'll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet's abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.

First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.

The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn't whether there's lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.

What the internet is doing to our brains

New book: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr on how the internet is changing the way we think.

Excerpt from the NYT review:

For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. "I can feel it too," he writes. "Over the last few years, I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." While HAL was silenced by its human users, Carr argues that we are sabotaging ourselves, trading away the seriousness of sustained attention for the frantic superficiality of the Internet. As Carr first observed in his much discussed 2008 article in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," the mere existence of the online world has made it much harder (at least for him) to engage with difficult texts and complex ideas. "Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words," Carr writes, with typical eloquence. "Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he's careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.

Nevertheless, Carr insists that the negative side effects of the Internet outweigh its efficiencies. Consider, for instance, the search engine, which Carr believes has fragmented our knowledge. "We don't see the forest when we search the Web," he writes. "We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves." One of Carr's most convincing pieces of evidence comes from a 2008 study that reviewed 34 million academic articles published between 1945 and 2005. While the digitization of journals made it far easier to find this information, it also coincided with a narrowing of citations, with scholars citing fewer previous articles and focusing more heavily on recent publications. Why is it that in a world in which everything is available we all end up reading the same thing?