Tag: Internet

Back around 1992, in the early days of the World Wide Web, a starry-eyed pundit trumpeted “The Internet will do for information what TV did for entertainment!”

“Uh-oh for information,” riposted an editorial cartoonist at the time.

To be sure, television since the 1950s has brought a few new high points of entertainment into homes around the world, as well as faster and farther-reaching news coverage. It has also brought widespread new lows, entire days’ and evenings’ worth of dumb-down, and news that is broad but shallow. In the process television birthed the terms “a vast wasteland” and “sound bite.”

The Internet followed a similar path. As a consequence, more information is far more widely available. But is it any better, more reliable, more accurate, or conducive to better decisions? A strong argument can be made for the position that it is not; that, on the contrary, it is actually worse, or at the very least, less robust.
At the same time that the Web began climbing into society’s lap, nevermore to budge, the cellular telephone attached

itself to the human ear, not merely in the accustomed indoor stationary position but on the street, in the supermarket aisle, at the restaurant, behind the wheel. Now the smartphone has taken over that role and staked its ownership to the field of view as well, if not to total sensory consciousness.

And what do you know? Along came GPS in the technological bargain. All apps, if not all things, become possible when you combine: Internet, mobile phone, and satellite-based positioning.

From the interbreeding of these three springs the latest guest to the party: Big Data.

What the heck is big data?

“Data sets . . .  gathered by ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, aerial sensory technologies (remote sensing), software logs, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification readers, and wireless sensor networks. The world’s technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s; as of 2012, every day 2.5 quintillion (2.5×1018) bytes of data were created.”

I had to check Wikipedia (I know, I know, the prophet hoisted by his own petard) because I had only a vague sense of it myself.

According to Adam Jacobs, writing in the ACMQueue of the Association for Computing Machinery, big data is so hefty that “[its] analysis requires massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers.”

Sounds like a job for Biggest Brother.

Indeed, the government has stepped forward to shoulder the burden; we have only just learned that it did so some time ago. Now not only our phone calls but our locations, our travels, our appointments, can be well known to anyone behind the giant curtain who has a curiosity. If they feel bothered enough to get a warrant, warrants can be got. Cases on record show that the government has opened personal cell-phone records both with and without warrants.

To rehearse the evident, those records now contain our location data. Breadcrumbs. The granularity, the precision, and the hertz-rate of that location data will only increase over time.

This time around, the “uh oh” comes from the information.

Uh oh for us.

Can the development and use of smart technologies actually render us dumber? Have we already lost a mental step or two, as we equip ourselves fearlessly for the future?

Marshall McLuhan, the “medium is the message” guy from back when, preached that tools numb whatever part of the body they amplify. By extrapolation, location-enabling tools render us less aware of our actual place.

It causes me some discomfort to float this topic in the standard bearer for an extremely advanced high-tech industry. Yet I also felt acute and nearly continuous discomfort while reading a book over the winter holidays; a poke here, a prick there, until I was sitting on pins and needles. I had selected the volume with an eye to finding out why my adult and near-adult children, actively engaged online, have little patience with the printed page anymore, and find books practically abhorrent.

Of course, every generation has its preferences, but this trend troubles me because it seems associated with a reluctance to truly explore, to think critically, at length, and in some depth. Also, it’s not limited to twentysomethings. I find plenty of affected folks at every age.

The book is The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. It provided grist galore in the online/print dichotomy — the changes in how we look for, absorb, process, and store information. And as said, it generated no little discomfort as I realized how much I, too, have changed in a decade and a half of increasing online activity, at work and in leisure.

I began to wonder, as I read, where that other game-changing modern technology, global satellite navigation, enters the picture. Sure enough, it surfaced on page 212.

A neuroscientist engaged in studying the brains of London taxi drivers found that their hippocampal area increased in gray matter volume because of the huge amount of street names and traffic-flow data they must memorize. She worries that when cabbies use GPS, that knowledge base will shrink, and possibly that area of the brain will atrophy or fail to develop.

This is perhaps a trivial example that has little to do with you and me. But consider your experience and your awareness as you follow, head down, your PND or a cell-phone screen to your next destination. Do you register the environment en route, possibly including hazard factors? Do you notice other points of interest that might enrich your experience, occasion a stop, detour, or return trip — or even constitute a better destination? Once arrived, could you find your own way there again, or have you become dependent on silicon and signals?

GNSS brings undeniable benefits in areas where it creates capabilities that did not exist before, such as measuring millimetric sway of tall buildings or changes in sea level; that is, largely in professional areas. But where it offers convenience or shortcuts in everyday life, that can be a more double-edged sword. The Internet has proved so; recall also canned, frozen, and processed pre-prepared foods, once embraced as modern timesavers. We now find they stripped essential nutrients out of our diet, undermining health and helping create an obesity epidemic.

In some savage ironic twist, particularly since Carr has plenty to say about how Google contributes to the general online process of mental debilitation, the full 276-page text of The Shallows is currently available via Google Books.