Winning the Presidency 2012 / William J. Crotty, ed. -- Boulder, Col.: Paradigm Publishers, 2013

The 2012 presidential campaign arguably was one of the most important campaigns in recent times.  The campaign pitted a status quo candidate (Barak Obama) against a candidate (Mitt Romney) who was fronting a party that was intent upon making sweeping changes to the role of government in American life.  That Obama came out the victor can be attributed to many things.  It is easy to suggest that the American people (or a slim majority of those who voted) rejected the Republican Party's libertarian agenda in favor of Obama, but that misses two more profound lessons of the election.  The 2012 presidential campaign was the first campaign to be waged under the campaign finance rules set by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling and it was the first campaign to make truly effective use of "big data."  In a collection of essays edited by William J. Crotty entitled Winning the Presidency 2012, both superficial and profound elements of the campaign are examined with uneven success.

Most of the articles provide analyses that are well-known to anyone who paid moderate attention to the campaign and the post-election media pundits.  The demographic shift in the American body politic and the gender gap are reviewed as is the trouble that Mitt Romney had gaining support from the Tea Party elements during the primaries and through to election day.  Many of the widely covered watershed events are brought into the spotlight:  Romney's refusal to release his tax filings, Obama's "you didn't build that" and Romney's "47%" remarks, Obama's poor showing in the first debate, and Chris Christy's praise of Obama for his leadership following superstorm Sandy.  All of these were, of course, important conditions and events of the campaign and so it is valuable that the essays memorialize them.  After all, most will be forgotten in ten years.  A good, clear record will be useful, but it certainly isn't the stuff that will reveal the true historical importance of the campaign.

The first big change from previous elections that would seem to make more than a marginal difference was the ability to form  "super PACs."  Winning the Presidency 2012 contains an essay by Dowdle, Adkins, Sebold, and Stewart that admirably discusses the role of super PACs.   In short, super PACs are political action committees that are able to raise unlimited amounts of money from donors.  This money can be spent directly on election activities as long as they are not "coordinated" with the candidate's campaign.   The prohibition against coordinating with the campaign quickly became meaningless and the assumption was that the candidate that was able to make use of the largest super PACs would destroy the competition.  This did not turn out to be the case as Karl Rove's massive super PAC campaign chest failed to deliver results for Romney or for candidates down ticket.  The lesson, however, has not been made completely clear.  It is not that money will not win elections, but that is is important how that money is spent.  The Republican spending strategy focused on negative media buys, and while these were not without effect, it appears that a saturation point was reached long before the money ran out.  In contrast, Obama's campaign money and sympathetic super PAC money was spent building a highly "data driven" retail campaign organization, particularly targeting swing states.  Though outspent by his opponents, his more sophisticated strategy was able to turn out the votes necessary to prevail, particularly in the electoral vote.

The employment of data was the crucial difference in the 2012 election.  In an essay entitled, "A Transformational Political Campaign: Marketing and Candidate Messaging in the 2012 Election," Wayne P. Steger describes the Obama campaign's use of massive pools of data gathered during the 2008 election campaign and in the period leading up to 2012.  These data were effectively used to segment the voting public in complex ways so that messages could be tailored to fit the audience in ways never before possible.  The segmentation of the voting population went well beyond determining likely voters and persuadable voters, it was able to test messages and funding requests to ensure that the audience would be maximally receptive to the campaign's appeal.  This is the future of campaigning, and we can only expect the science to be developed well beyond the techniques of 2012.

Campaigns certainly will make use of what has come to be known as "big data," i.e., data sets that are so large that traditional means for storing and processing the data are insufficient, and campaigns increasingly will make use of distributed repositories of data, possibly owned by corporations and organizations other than the campaign.  Computer programs will then be written to reveal tendencies within the voting population that will allow highly effective campaign messaging.  Imagine, for example, that a campaign is able to acquire the records of automobiles owned by a voting population and segregate them according to gas guzzling vs. more efficient vehicles.  The campaign might then match the gas guzzlers to voters who have long daily commutes.  The resultant population likely would be quite sympathetic to a message promising to keep gasoline prices low.  Other similarly devised messages could be tailored to other sub-populations of voters.

That SUV owners would be gratefully receive promises to keep gas prices low would not be surprising, but other "big data" mining techniques are thought to be able to reveal extremely surprising and powerful results.  A campaign that can acquire massive amounts of data about voters and can employ talented computer programmers could become extremely effective in reaching and motivating voters.

And so we can put together the two most important developments in the 2012 campaign: money and data.  The disappearance of limits on campaign contributions means that large, valuable, and privately held pools of data, will be able to empower campaigns as never before.  The 2012 Obama campaign was the first to reveal this dynamic.  It will mark the dawn of a new era of political campaigning in which the owners and managers of our society will be able to employ their vast repositories of data to ensure that their candidates win primary competitions and ultimately general elections.  Crotty's book, Winning the Presidency 2012 only hints at this future.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains / Nicholas Carr -- a second look

I don't normally read books twice.  There simply are too many unread books worth reading to return to one I have already read, especially now that I am recording my thoughts about the books I read here on this blog.  I did, however, happily agree to re-read Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows when it was proposed by a member of my book club.  I was curious to see if I would take away something new from it on a second reading.  I suspect not, but my original review by no means covered all of the interesting ideas in this insightful work.  You can read my original review by searching on "Shallows" on this blog.  What stands out for me on this second reading is what Carr writes about the formation of memory and the relationship that is developing between people and our machines. 

In my earlier review, I wrote about Carr's observation that the constant distractions that are presented on the internet are having a detrimental effect on our abilities to transfer working memories into long-term memories.  What I did not emphasize, but what is of great significance is the consequences that this has for our abilities to understand the world.  A broad and deep understanding of the world is only formulated when a wide variety of experiences are assembled in a coherent set of relationships that generate practical theories about future experience.  We need not be conscious of these theories, but they are necessary to navigate the world.  For most purposes, our daily, routine experiences are sufficient to allows us to navigate the day, but understanding more subtle relationships among phenomena and their significance requires more careful reflection.  It requires the patient, probing, and in depth examination of experience which cannot be accomplished without stable, long-term memories as fodder for thought.  If Carr's thesis is true, that the internet impedes the development of stable memories, then it must also be true that it impedes the development of a broad and deep understanding of the world.  Over exposure to the internet would have the consequence of making us shallow and superficial.

It is an extremely provocative conclusion, though Carr does not quantify the extent to which the internet has this dulling effect.  One could dismiss the concern by asserting that our capacities to understand the world in a deep and meaningful way are only marginally diminished by the internet and that the intellectual capacities that the internet fosters more than make up for the loss; however, our ability to objectively reach this conclusion after long exposure to the internet would be undermined if the thesis is true.  Moreover, a simple addiction to the glamour of the internet would also prejudice one's assessment.  Having spent countless work hours connected to the internet and countless off-work hours reading, I am inclined argue that I feel significantly more "human" after a three hour stretch of reading as opposed to a three hour stretch of work on the internet and I suspect this is due to the fact that the activities involved in finding meaning in the world are of a much higher intellectual, indeed spiritual, order than the activities involved in the kind of rapid and ever-changing information observation that comes with working on the internet.

A second and more stunning observation that came out of my second reading of The Shallows is Carr's observation that as our cognitive capacities are changed by the internet, they are changed in a manner that makes us more like the digital tools that we are using.  Computers access and process information, storing it in a manner that makes it entirely inaccessible until specifically recalled in another processing event.  Without the growing store of long-term memories produced by thoughtful reflection, our mental activity becomes more like this information processing, affected only by the immediate inputs of the present cognitive transaction and unaffected by a repository of long-term memories connected in a sophisticated worldview.  Certainly our minds must work in the context of some sort of worldview, but in comparison to a pre-internet world view, it is impoverished.  What stands out about our mental activity is the immediate information transaction and as we are increasingly communicating (receiving and sending) information on the internet in social networks, we are becoming very sophisticated chips arranged in a network.  The only question is, for whose benefit is the network doing its computing?

Certainly, these observations stretch Carr's concerns beyond what one might reasonably have, but there is little doubt that the concerns are significant lead us in the right direction in thinking about the internet and its affect on our selves and society.

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption / Clay A. Johnson -- Sebastopol, Cal.: O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2012

Quite a number of books have been published in response to the explosion of digital information and the technology that delivers it. Many of the works are breathless panegyrics. Others are panicky jeremiads. This should come as no surprise. Digital and internet technology has transformed our lives in unexpected ways and promises to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Consequently, assessing the opportunities and dangers is no easy task, making it easy to predict both best case and worst case scenarios for the future.

Clay Johnson's The Information Diet is neither a best nor worst case assessment of our information future. His general disposition is that our social problems can often be addressed by technical solutions and as the founder of Blue State Digital and a former director of the Sunlight Foundation. So one might expect his leanings would be toward panegyrics. Nonetheless, the overall tone of his book is cautionary. Johnson has become concerned that far from solving our social problems, current information and internet technology is filling our information diets with the equivalent of junk food and poses a significant threat to the rational formation of public policy. Johnson is not only concerned about the individual's epistemic health, he is concerned about the effects that widespread "information obesity" is having and will have on society as a whole.

Much of Johnson's work is not particularly ground breaking. His analogy between information and food diets is perhaps the most novel feature of the work. The two critiques that most inform Johnson are by Nicholas Carr and Eli Pariser. Carr argues that the internet has come to be a complex distraction machine, designed to maximize the number of pages that we view. This has grave psychological consequences for our ability to concentrate, engage in deep, thoughtful reading, and remember what it is that we have read. Eli Pariser argues that the personalization of search results on the internet results in your receiving only information with which you agree, doing nothing more than confirming your previously held views. For politics, this means that people of with differing views are becoming more deeply convinced that their views are well-substantiated. Consequently, our ability to carry on reasonable dialogs with those who hold different views from us is declining.

Johnson is clearly sympathetic to Pariser's concerns. His attitudes toward Carr's thesis is, however, more complicated. Johnson writes, "the Internet is not some kind of meta bogey man that's sneaking into Mr. Carr's room while he sleeps and rewiring his brain." He also suggests that there is a "subtext" to Carr's thesis that "there may be some sort of corporate conspiracy to try to...'dumb us down.'" Having read Carr's recent book The Shallows, I am amazed that Johnson would find a conspiracy subtext in it. Furthermore, suggesting that Carr sees the Internet as a "meta bogey man" (whatever that might be) trivializes his arguments.

Johnson's critique of Carr appears to be founded on the power a person's will. He writes, "Blaming a medium or its creators for changing our minds and habits is like blaming food for making us fat." Such a view, "wrongly take[s] free will and choice out of the equation." For Johnson, the problem arises because we choose specific friends in an online social network, we choose to follow specific links, and we choose to spend a specific amount of time "consuming" specific information. Apparently for Johnson, only we are to blame for the changes we experience as we live our lives, more and more, in front of computer screens.

It is strange, though, that the great bulk of Johnson's book describes the powerful influences that the internet has on shaping all of these behaviors. One is left with the sense that Johnson has internalized Carr's criticism, but is unwilling to acknowledge it. To avoid doing so, he constructs a straw argument to attack and appeals to a dubious metaphysical dogma about free will.

His metaphysics does, however, underwrite the practical point of his book: to encourage us to take responsibility for the information we acquire. He writes, "This book's agenda is to help people make more sense of the world around them by encouraging them to tune into things that matter most and to tune out things that make them sick." This is unquestionably a worthy agenda. The amount of trivia that pours out of the internet when you dare to expose yourself to it is breathtaking.

Johnson's recommendations for tuning into the stuff that matters and tuning out the trivia is technological. For example, he recommends various filters and email preference settings that will reduce unwanted information. He recommends software that will show you the amount of time you spend at various kinds of Web sites and techniques for developing your ability to concentrate. All of his suggestions are fine as far as they go, but are hardly likely to achieve great success. The internet is insidious and seductive. Most of all, it is constructed to serve a profit motive which will not succeed unless most people participate in what it is doing to us. When information becomes the lure for commerce, widespread information obesity will naturally follow.

In general, Johnson's The Information Diet underestimates the power of the structural forces driving the internet and overestimates the power of individuals to resist its damaging force. Realistically, we may have only two choices: to embrace the brave new world of the digital information or to create a nearly internet-free counterculture that values face-to-face social interactions over virtual ones and makes limited forays into the virtual world for only specific and limited purposes.

The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) / Siva Vaidhyanathan -- Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011

Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia prefaces his book The Googlization of Everything with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville that perfectly captures his darker attitudes toward Google: "It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from coming into being; it does not tyrannize, it hinders." Vaidhyanathan is particularly concerned that Google's explosive success is placing too much power over (or perhaps responsibility for) the world's treasure-store of knowledge in the hands of one private company. His concerns are not without merit.

Vaidhyanathan is quick to admit that Google's success is based on the clear benefits that it has given the world. More than any other search engine, Google has "organized and made universally accessible the world's knowledge" and it has done so in a manner that has been comfortable and appealing to most internet users. It has also behaved more or less consistently with its informal motto: "Don't be evil." Having given Google its due, Vaidhyanathan describes practices that Google has adopted that raise important questions.

In general, Google's success depends on the "PageRank system" that they employ in displaying search results. Search results generally appear in descending order based on the number of pages that link to a page that is captured by Google's Web crawlers. This seemingly surrenders any editorial decision-making that Google might otherwise employ in displaying results and makes use of the decisions by a myriad anonymous Web designers to evaluate the merits of Web pages. There are, however, instances in which some filtering is employed by Google, most obviously is Google's willingness to consider blocking a site if they receive complaints about it.

More worrisome consequences of Google's practices stem from their standard practices. While the PageRank system will generally provide an effective quality screen, it also privileges mainstream sites. Popularity among Web designers will lead to a site appearing on Google's first page of results, which in turn will reinforce the popularity of the site. It is not easy for a new or unusual site to break onto the first page of results.

Vaidhyanathan also takes Google to task for their collaboration with the Chinese government in censoring search results. At first Google argued that providing censored information was better for democracy movements than providing no information at all; however, when Google's servers were hacked (presumably by the Chinese government) and information about Chinese dissidents and critics of the government were compromised, Google "pulled out of China." The pull out was less impressive than it appeared, though. Google simply offered its Mandarin-language search service through Hong Kong, and since all traffic between Hong Kong and China is censored by China, China continues to receive Google services, but they are censored by China and not Google directly.

Vaidyanathan also provides an very interesting exploration of the privacy issues that Google's practices raises. Two levels of concern can be identified here: first, Google is amassing a huge amount of information about individual internet users that conceivably could be used against the user. More broadly, though, Google's store of data about users could easily be used by whomever owns the information to understand the demographics of internet users in a manner that could be politically significant. It is already showing itself to be economically significant.

Perhaps Vaidyhanathan's most salient concern is Google's growing dominance in the digitization of our written (and graphic) cultural heritage and here he indicts our research libraries as complicit in a massive, historic act of privatization of a public good. The Google Books project has resulted in the digitization of nearly all of the out of copyright books at Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. Disregarding copyright concerns, Google has also digitized massive numbers of "orphan" works, i.e., books that are not out of copyright, but for which the copyright holder is unknown. This turns normal publishing practices on their head: instead of requiring permission before publication, Google sought to publish until permission was denied by individual copyright holders. While it is true that a massive digitizing project of the sort that Google seeks to undertake would be impossible any other way, their actions are a direct challenge to long-settle copyright law. These actions resulted in a now-famous law suit, that has pitted publishers and authors against Google. The parties to the dispute have been trying to come to a legally acceptable out of court settlement, but have thus far been unable to do so.

Vaidhyanathan appears less concerned about the integrity of the traditional copyright regime than he is about what he calls "public failure," or the failure of public institutions to take responsibility of preserving and making freely accessible the world's cultural heritage and this is certainly the most significant concern that Google's activities have raised. While it is true that Google has not prevented others from creating competing digital archives, the head start that they have gained makes competition highly unlikely. This means that the access to the world's cultural heritage is likely to be -- at least for the foreseeable future -- in the hands of a single private company, unless, of course, public institutions take up the challenge of digitizing the resources for which they ostensibly are responsible and this is Vaidhyanathan's call to action. He proposes a "Human Knowledge Project" on the order of the Human Genome project, where governments around the world allocate the resources necessary to create a cultural digital repository that will ensure that our patrimony remains a public good accessible to all.

The Googlization of Everything is not always the most well organized book. Despite improvements from a pre-publication version, the book continues to read too much like a series of related blog postings; however, by the final chapter, the overall concerns do become clear and seem well argued, though one would be hard pressed to point to how and exactly where the argument was made.

What Technology Wants / Kevin Kelly -- NY: Viking, 2010

Computer technology, particularly the Web, is having profound impacts on the world and our lives, but that is entirely uncontroversial. It is the significance of those impacts that is worthy of discussion. Which changes wrought by technology are important and which are trivial? Which are beneficial? Which are detrimental? How will they shape our future? I had hoped that Kevin Kelly, a former editor of Whole Earth Catalog and the founding editor of Wired Magazine, would provide some illuminating answers to these kinds of questions in his new book What Technology Wants. Sadly, he has not.

What Technology Wants places the rise of technology in an evolutionary -- indeed, cosmic -- context. According to Kelly, technology (or "the technium" as he calls its collective existence) is an inevitable product of the self-organizing forces of nature, set in motion with the big bang. The technium is one of Earth's seven kingdoms of life, an ever developing outgrowth of the human mind that has already taken on such characteristics as autonomy and sentience. These are startling claims outside the circles of science fiction and require much stronger defense than Kelly provides.

Nonetheless, much of What Technology Wants is interesting and informative. In his acknowledgements, Kelly tells us that the book was based on interviews and conversations with the 48 smartest people he knows, and much of that knowledge-base is manifest in the rich detail of his book. Unfortunately, when Kelly goes beyond the details and asserts broader philosophical claims, he is out of his depth.

The book's central idea is disclosed in its title. The technium is (or at very is now becoming) capable of intentional action on the order of highly evolved living species, including humans, but with all due respect to Kelly, I can want to close a window in my house to keep from getting cold, but my thermostat does not similarly want to regulate the temperature in my house. It is simply a changeable physical link between the electric power grid and my radiator system. Kelly blithely disregards the distinction. He willfully attributes human traits to technology based on the slenderest similarities. Furthermore, crucial concepts, like intelligence, sentience, choice, and freedom, are so ill-defined that he can assert nearly anything he likes about their relationship to technology. His treatment of these psychological and philosophical ideas are surprisingly naive.

More worthwhile aspects of his book include his discussion of evolutionary forces. Here, he goes beyond a simple outline of natural selection and notes the significance of structural and historical influences on the modification of species. His extension of these observations to the development of technologies is interesting, though not aways clear. The basic outlines describe a sequence of technologies, where each new technology is predicated on its predecessors. Technologies are transformed by (1) human intention, (2) the laws of nature i.e., the structure of technologies, and (3) historical accident. Together, these forces make certain technological developments inevitable. So much so that any particular discovery commonly is made multiple times, independently, and just at the time they are ripe for discovery. Kelly suggests that this inevitable development is the trajectory that technology "wants." It is unfortunate that he employs this description, since it distracts from a serious examination of the likely future of discovery.

Among the most egregious omissions from What Technology Wants are analyses of economic forces. Today, the inevitable progress of technology likely has to do less with the nature of the technology and more with the imperatives of capital. This, of course, fits with human intentionality that Kelly identifies as driving technological development, but his fixation on the structure of technology underplays this as the most significant driving force. At most, the structure of technology establishes certain limits to what can be or is likely to be developed. By overlooking the significance of economic forces, Kelly overstates the inevitability of certain technologies. Government regulation can significantly influence the path of technological development, if the political will can be mustered.

The second greatest omission is an analysis of the consequences of the end of easily acquired oil as an energy source. This historical accident might profoundly delay or reverse the growth of technology. Kelly suggests that the accumulation of technological advances has led to an constant doubling of the power of the technium. This is known as "Moore's Law" when applied to the development of computer chips. Allegedly, this exponential growth has generated the astounding explosion of technology in recent years, but was is missing here is the discovery and use of easily available oil as a fuel for growth. Kelly might, of course, identify the harnessing of oil as a technology that fits within his growth curve, but he does not recognize that far from being an interim step toward greater growth, oil-powered technologies are only as sustainable as the reserves that fuel them. Kelly's unlimited technological development is more likely to slow and even reverse when our oil-based economy slows to a crawl.

Finally, at least for the purposes of this review, Kelly's notion of progress is based on expanding "freedom" understood as nothing more than a greater range choices. For Kelly, the evolving technium is a choice-creating force and choice-creation appears to be his highest value. Kelly explicitly rejects the alternative value of human happiness as a direct measure of the value of individual technologies or the technium in general. While it is certainly true that technologies often have promoted human happiness, they have also promoted human suffering. Kelly believes the the former slightly out weighs the latter. It is a judgement that is hard, if not impossible, to quantify, but Kelly's infatuation with technology ensures his own answer. It is likely to be persuasive only to those previously convinced of its truth.

In the final chapters, Kelly confides his infatuation with technology. He probably expects the readers who have stuck with him for so long agree with him. He writes, "I find myself indebted to the net for its provisions. It is a steadfast benefactor, always there. I caress it with my fidgety fingers; it yields to my desires, like a lover. Secret knowledge? Here. Predictions of what is to come? Here. Maps to hidden places? Here." He continues this sort of lurid prose for several paragraphs. In the final chapter, Kelly discusses the technium's relationship to God. He writes, "If there is a God, the arc of the technium is aimed right at him....The ongoing self-organized mutability of life, evolution, mind, and the technium is a reflexion of God's becoming," and "we can see more God in a cell phone than a tree frog."

What Technology Wants is a lively, interesting, entertaining, infuriating, absurd book, filled with over-generalizations, willfull surrender to conceptual errors, inappropriate analogies, and dubious metaphysics. Hopefully, better books on its important topic will evolve soon.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains / Nicholas Carr -- NY: W.W. Norton, 2010

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains is a thoughtful examination of how digital communication technology might inexorably be changing fundamental human mental capacities. His argument begins by noting that our brains are not like computer hardware with a fixed, physical configuration that changes only insofar as it naturally degrades. Instead, brain circuitry is part of a living, changing organism, that is reconfigured by use and disuse. This phenomenon, known as “neuroplasticity,” is well established in the scientific literature.

Following Marshall MacLuhan’s thesis in Understanding Media, Carr argues that the medium that transmits information more profoundly affects our lived experience than the information content that it transmits. As cases in point, Car presents the changes that took place with the advent of typographical spaces between words, the printing press, and finally, the “electric media,” culminating in the internet.

Prior to the printing press, reading and writing was done by a tiny minority of people working as professional scribes. These people became practiced at the careful examination of texts that were written in scriptura continua, i.e., text written without spaces between words. Reading scriptura continua meant that reading was tantamount to solving a puzzle, accomplished by sounding aloud the letters to slowly form the coded message. Consequently, readers became practiced at the careful examination of individual characters and the translation of these symbols into sounds. The assimilation of the meaning was slow and interrupted.

With the advent of spaces between words, words could be quickly recognized as wholes, allowing a text to be read easily, quickly, and silently. According to Carr’s thesis, the shift from reading scriptura continua to reading text with spaces would have caused a significant reconfiguration of the brains of readers, activating and expanding new neurocircuits. It would have reduced certain basic mental capacities while it improved others. As reading became less difficult, readers experienced a state of mind Carr calls “deep reading,” in which readers could become completely engrossed in the content of the text. Reading became a meditative act. This also changed writing in that authors could assume that readers were “attentive” and “deeply engaged both intellectually and emotionally,” thus allowing more complex literary forms.

As the printing press expanded the universe of readers, more and more people developed the mental capacities for deep concentration and sustained attention. Deep reading fostered deeper thinking and the development of more complex mental schemas that foster long-term memory and understanding. With changes to brain circuitry, these capacities could be employed not only when reading, but during other activities.

Of course, all of this changed with the advent of what McLuhan called the “electric media,” which is becoming mature in the internet. This is Carr’s main concern. Unlike the deep reading fostered by books, the internet is fostering short, superficial bursts of reading and viewing. Its designers are seeking to constantly interrupt us and lure us to a new Web site where new content and advertisements can seize our attention briefly before moving us on to the next Web site. We find ourselves scanning information for interesting fragments and multi-tasking because we are lured out of one task before it is complete to begin another. We are not reading in the traditional sense, we are “power browsing.”

Proponents of this new form of information acquisition suggest that the wealth of information now available to us will allow us to make more and various connections between intellectual content and generate novel ideas, but Carr argues that while power browsing may be exhilarating, and may seem to be connecting us quickly to just the information we seek, the gains are ephemeral. Citing research on working memory and long-term memory, he notes that power browsing does not allow us the time to fix the information presented to our working memory in long-term memory. It is out of long-term memory that we construct our conceptual schema that allows us a deep understanding of the world. As a result, power browsing not only diminishes our capacity for sustained concentration, it undermines the sort of intelligence that has been promoted by the literary mind.

Carr's thesis is provocative, but he is at pains not to overstate it. Throughout The Shallows, Carr reminds us that the internet is not only impoverishing specific intellectual powers, it is improving others. For example, experienced Web surfers are able to quickly identify on a Web page the item or fragment of information that they seek. This ability to pick out what is critical in a cluttered visual field is a "bottom-up" brain mechanism that transfers to other contexts just as the "top-down" ability for sustained concentration translates across contexts. Nonetheless, Carr’s sympathies are clearly with deep reading.

Certainly, proponents of the internet will down play what is lost with the decline of deep reading and play up what is gained with the ascent of power browsing, but Carr’s warning is hard to ignore. Neuroplasticity makes our changing reading habits much more significant than one might originally think, and I expect that many people who already have developed the habit of deep reading will recognize the cognitive changes that Carr observes coming from working with electronic media, particularly the internet. Perhaps it is because the assessment of the value of this change is coming from a deep reader, but it certainly seems that something very valuable is being replaced with something terribly, terribly shallow.

It is also interesting to consider Carr's claims in the context of Jaron Lanier's recent book, You Are Not a Gadget (reviewed in this blog). Lanier warns that the internet is increasingly dehumanizing us by reducing us to fragmented content contributors to a vast network of computers. He warns that our very personhood is being reduced to what can be indexed in social networking metadata and presented by Web search engines. "You are not a gadget" is Lanier's rallying cry to resist this dehumanization. Unfortunately, if Carr is right about the restructuring of our brains, one might argue that the internet is, indeed, slowly, but inexorably, turning us into gadgets.

You Are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto / Jaron Lanier -- NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

Jaron Lanier was among a handful of virtual reality pioneers, and so you would think that he would be excited about the prospect that a global network of computers, programs, and computer users might allow us to transcend the limits of our pre-internet understanding of the world through the development of a transcendent silicon-based intelligence, but such is not the case. In You Are Not a Gadget Lanier expresses his discomfort, even horror, at the de-humanizing effects of what he calls "cybernetic totalism," i.e., the "ideology" that intelligence, even consciousness, can be explained through computationalism and that the developing global network of computer connections will eventually evolve into a super-intelligence or conscious being.

Lanier offers little argument against this view, except that it is based on the romantic hopes of cybernetic totalists. In the meantime, the popularity of cybernetic totalism has meant that computer engineers are designing hardware and software that dismisses the contributions of human individuals and "locking in" a computer infrastructure that requires devaluing their contributions. Lanier suggests that the computer industry has and is turning its back on many more creative and valuable lines of development in pursuit of cybernetic totalism.

Early in the book, he criticizes Web 2.0 technologies as doing to people what MIDI did to music, i.e., identifying aspects of music that are useful in defining notes, without succeeding in capturing the whole of musical experience. For Lanier, MIDI has homogenized music, forcing it into the constraints of a computer program. Simialry, Web 2.0 technologies have led us to represent ourselves in pre-packaged ways, chopping up our selves into smaller and smaller encodeable fragments that can be captured in cloud computing for the benefit of the "Lords of the Cloud," or those who can mine the collective data made available on the Web by the "Peasants of the Cloud."

The benefits that might accrue to the Lords of the Cloud depend on the truth of a hypothesis advanced by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. (See this blog for a review of The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki claims that very often the aggregated (or averaged) opinions of a large number of lay people will be more accurate than highly educated expert opinion. If this is true, then the Lords of the Cloud can employ "crowd sourcing" to generate a more accurate understanding of the world than was possible prior to the advent of the Web. Lanier's response to this is nuanced. While he recognize that a collective opinion is more valuable in many instances, a small group of people organized around an individual's vision or inspiration often can produce a much superior outcome. Lanier's case is surprisingly strong here.

Lanier's colorful language makes You Are Not a Gadget an entertaining read, but his book is strong on assertions and weak on arguments. In his introduction to the final chapter he tellingly writes, "This is about aesthetics and emotions, not rational argument. All I can do is tell you how it has been true for me, and hope that you might also find it to be true." Unfortunately, much of what he asserts is amenable to rational argumentation. Hopefully, his provocative presentation will prompt others to provide it.

Lanier also skips from subject to subject at astonishing speed. Sometimes the work appears to be more a collection of blog posts than a coherent, extended book-length argument. He appears to have been affected by the very atomization of discourse that he laments. He takes up metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, psychology, sociology, language, and music among other topics. Clearly, he recognizes how his work in computer science has important ties to all of these fields, but it is difficult to know how grounded his conclusions are. Certainly his treatment of metaphysics and political philosophy is at best extremely superficial and at worse sophomoric. Nonetheless, he bravely advances views on issues that deserve more serious consideration than they have received.