Tag: internet

On the Loss of Boredom in the Internet Age

I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! ….”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.”

— Clay Shirky in an interview with Sonia Saraiya on Findings.com

We need a little boredom, to let our minds wander and thus to spur creativity.

Zoë Pollock, on The Dish, highlights the thoughts of Clay Shirky and the response of Nicholas Carr on loss of space for boredom in the internet age.

Mapping Internet Space

A map of the internet from the Opte Project.

The Opte Project has produced a number of excellent maps of the internet. There is a profound beauty in the immensity of the interconnections that’s reminiscent of the suffusion of stars that can be seen in Milky Way on a dark night on an isolated beach. Unfortunately, their website seems to have not been updated since 2005.

Power Down and Disconnected

Like addicts racing to get their overdue fix, my students raced to the computers this afternoon after having had to survive all day without power and without the internet. I’ll confess that I felt the same urge, but was able to restrain it. Until now.

We usually don’t have internet access during our immersions, but then it’s expected and students are not inside needing to refer to the study guides to figure out their assignments. At the beginning of the year I gave everyone paper copies of the study guides, but now there are just a core few who request them.

Fortunately, we had a couple of smart-phones so one student would look up the reading assignment and post the page numbers on the whiteboard. Fortunately, the reading assignments were out of the book.

We weren’t quite surviving without technology, but it was close, and students were getting innovative.

We’ve had storms every few days for the last couple of weeks, which is typical for Memphis at this time of year. Over the last few days a frontal system has just been pushing back and forth over us. When it pushes south we get a cold front with thunderstorms and rain, but clear skies afterward. When the front pushes north it gets warm and humid, and the sky goes overcast for most of the day.

Weather map for Wednesday, April 20th. The blue and red line passing through the southeastern U.S. show the mixed warm and cold fronts that have been oscillating past Memphis for days. Image from the National Weather Service.

This line of fronts marks the general location of the sub-polar low, which is moving north with the spring. But more on that tomorrow.

And Women Inherit the Internet

Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce.

–Aileen Lee (2011): Why Women Rule The Internet on TechCrunch.com.

Last month I observed that the girls in my class were blogging a lot more than the boys. It’s still true, and now there’s an informative, if somewhat hyperbolic, article by Aileen Lee that asserts that the blooming of social media websites is driven, primarily, by women.

I’m always a bit leery about articles like this one. There are lots of statistics, a few anecdotes, and a brief reference back to some scientific research (Dunbar numbers), but the overly excited language coming from a venture capitalist is enough to remind me of the irrational exuberance of the dot-com bubble.

The writing is so over-the-top, that I’m truly surprised that there isn’t a single exclamation point in the entire article! Although, based on Ms. Lee’s first words in the comments section, this might be due to the herculean efforts of a good editor.

My antipathy might also be due to my irrational, visceral distaste of the language of business and commerce, which is so geared toward breaking people into faceless demographic groups to be marketed to that it verges on being dehumanizing. I suspect my feelings are truly irrational because I’ve seen scientists do similar parsing of demographic statistics and have had no trouble; although, perhaps, I may have been a little more empathic because the scientists were looking at issues of vulnerability to disease, infant mortality, and the like.

However, since the article’s anecdotes correlate with my own anecdotes, I find it hard to disagree with the underlying premise: women are more inclined than men to make and nurture social connections so they are a key demographic in understanding the future of the internet.

It’s also a reminder that the social atomization typified by the dominance of the nuclear family at the expense of extended family, is now being ameliorated by social networking, which suggests some interesting social and cultural changes in a, possibly, more matrifocal future.

(hat tip The Daily Dish).