'When you look at old writing technology, poetry suddenly makes sense. It is modular content that comes in fixed-length chunks, with redundancy and error-correcting codes built in. It is designed to be transmitted and copied across time and space through unreliable and noisy channels, one stone tablet, palm leaf or piece of handmade paper at a time. The technology was still unreliable enough that the oral tradition remained the primary channel. Writing began as a medium for backups. Scribes were the first data warehousing experts. They did more than merely transcribe the spoken word. They compressed, corrected and encrypted as well, and periodically updated texts to reflect the extant state of the oral tradition. That is why verses are so eminently quotable outside the context of poems. Poems are extensive oral containers of arbitrary length, in some cases delineated after the fact. Verses are standardized containers designed to carry intense, dense, archival-quality words around. Today we view traditional verse epics as single works. -- The prose book can stand apart from broader social processes in radically individual ways. It can travel from writer to readers largely unaltered, setting up a hub-spoke pattern of conversational circuits. The Web obscures the crucial and necessary distinction between oral and written cultures. Some bloggers perform and talk. Others are scribes.'

'...energy and ideas could be used to shrink autonomously-owned individual time and grow a space of corporate-owned time, to be divided between production and consumption. Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain. Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel. Each new pocket of attention is harder to find...'

'There seems to be a kind of unconscious "hive-mind" at work; how else to explain the kind of unrest occurring now? ...the blowback is considerable in the Era of the Internet. The City of London, with all its deliberate brutality and rigor, is surely provoking the current unrest, or at least deepening it with its absurd policies and insistence on the inviolate nature of banking debt. This is why we present the idea that the old men of Money Power are out of touch and don't know what to do next. Either that, or they are deliberately provoking societal breakdown anent a kind of super-regional or World War. This too is puzzling as the low-key wars that raged after the impact of the Gutenberg Press did little if anything to slow the social change from the spread of its "truth-telling, conciousness-unlocking" information technology. If the Anglosphere elites think they can control events as they did during the past 100-300 years, they may well be miscalculating.'

'The goal of this series (other than to simply entertain) is to raise awareness about the abundance of various tangled messes in the world and to establish the humanitarian fund dedicated to eradicating this blight from the face of the Earth entirely.'

"At electric speed, everything becomes x-ray." -- Electric Age: #1974 End of secrecy #1976 Instantaneous/simultaneous information world #1977 Post-literate generation #1977 Surveillance #1977 Loss of private identity

"I teach books from morning to night." -- Literally.

'A vicious crisis has driven Western citizens to their electronic boxes as they search desperately for a way to understand what has happened to their once-predictable worlds. It has happened before. History is not written by Great Men, by wars or even natural disasters. History is the outcome of a struggle between power elites who create "history" and the great masses of people who only occasionally understand that they are being manipulated to the benefit of a determined few. Technology plays a big role in this struggle, for it is through new communication technologies that masses are occasionally awakened from their slumber – dreamtimes – to confront the reality of their manipulations and the danger of their aggregate plight. The elite of the day fights back with wars, pestilence, famine, whatever tools are available. History is made and then rewritten and rewritten ... until the masses, confused, settle back into sluggish, stultified quiescence. But...'

'Shutting the Internet off with a "switch" is no more feasible than destroying printing businesses during the heyday of the Gutenberg press. Elites throughout history have turned what they could to their advantage. But that does not mean that technology itself or its resulting impact were preordained. What drives human society are its tools. And when the toolkit grows more sophisticated it can change society radically. Government pushback, of course, is quite powerful and will continue to be (at the behest of the elite in our opinion). But when it comes to the Internet, we would tend to maintain that the more the power elite struggles, the more it generates results that are contrary to its expectations. This is what happened during the era of the Gutenberg press. The same mechanisms are at work today. [The Elite's] regrouping can take a lot of time – enough time for a little bit of renaissance to occur. It's happened before. We think it has already begun to happen again.'

Turkle: "There's a kind of self-surveillance that young poeple don't think about... What is intimacy without privacy? This is really a question for this generation. -- Philosophers tell us that we become human when we’re confronted with another face, with a voice, with the inflection of a voice; these kids don’t want to see a face, they don’t want to hear a voice. They want to text. In a way we’re no longer nourished but consumed by what we’ve created. It’s not all good. I see people in retreat as much as they are in advance now that they have all this information. I see people defining a successful self as a self that can keep up with its email. -- We live in a kind of paradoxical time. We’re giving young people a very paradoxical message: The world is more and more complex; on the other hand, we’re only going to ask you a question that you can answer in two seconds. We leave ourselves less and less time for reflection because our communications media push us to quick responses."

'Pink: We have a biological drive. We eat when we’re hungry, drink when we’re thirsty, have sex to satisfy our carnal urges. We also have a second drive—we respond to rewards and punishments in our environment. But what we’ve forgotten is that we also have a third drive. We do things because they’re interesting, because they’re engaging, because they’re the right things to do, because they contribute to the world. The problem is that, especially in our organizations, we stop at that second drive. We think the only reason people do productive things is to snag a carrot or avoid a stick. But that’s just not true. Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful. -- Shirky: ...behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.'

'Newspapers thrived, in part, because reading just one edition provided only a few cents' worth of social currency. Compounding your earnings requires that you read the damn thing nearly every day. Ignore a couple of issues, and you get left behind. Newspapers are designed to be read and argued over. You've got to spend social currency to make social currency. Other institutions do far better jobs at issuing social currency these days. What is Facebook but the Federal Reserve Bank of social currency? And it's all social currency you can use! Like cocktail chatter, a Facebook posting—be it a link, a list, a photo, or travel plans—conveys the message, I am here. Listen to me. If skillfully wielded, a Facebook page can increase a person's status by attracting "cooler" or more influential friends. These days, you can't raise your status more than a bump by carrying the Wall Street Journal under your arm.'

All new technologies are GOOD. All new technologies are BAD. Thinking makes them BOTH.

Reminiscent of McLuhan's insight that people dress themselves in newspapers rather than read them. -- 'Information can now be a matter of facts, data, opinions, or retail purchases -- anything that could be deployed in signaling. The goal is not to become informed so much as to signal a tentative, tactical self in the marketplace of identity. Choice in informing oneself is now driven by the social-networking self (the self that can be ranked and archived and broadcast to ever-more people), which covertly serves the ends of the corporations that control those networks. Less important to be informed than to know the passwords to admission into chosen hierarchies structured in networks online.'

Texting isn't writing: it's talking. -- '...young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. ..life writing, as Lunsford calls it. ...students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.' -- See? There's nothing letter-ly/linear going on here. These are sound-words that are meant to be overheard in an acoustic space conducive to overhearing: the internet. -- 'The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor...' -- Why write for one when you could talk to all?

'My two favorite quotes from the article: "The Attention Economy is (mostly) a sorry excuse for a (predictable, rational) economy." I have been waiting for so long for someone to agree with me on this one. While I get the theory and used to subscribe to the attention ideology, at this point I don't understand how it's any different. Quote number two is under the heading "the model is what matters" and says, "Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself." That one made my head spin a little. It's so true. As a culture we've become more obsessed with understanding how things spread than the things themselves. The model itself is the content. (Or, as McLuhan would say, the medium is the message.)'

'The consequence of self-reproduction in life, as well as in the technium, is an inherent drive toward ubiquity. Technology, too, wants to be ubiquitous. ...the technium favors the type of ubiquity found in open-ended technologies, that is, those technologies that effectively increase the arrival of other effective open-ended technologies. This expansion unleashes cascades of other technologies that spread pervasively. Total ubiquity is the end point all technologies tend toward but never reach. -- '...something strange happens with ubiquity. More is different. When a technology saturates, or even supersaturates, a culture, it unleashes patterns not seen in lone examples of it. A few isolated manifestations of a technology can reveal its first order effects. But it is not until technology fills a vast, thick interacting pervasion do the second and third order consequences erupt. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity.'

"What if the reason no one's figured out why Twitter matters is that it's bigger, in fact, than anyone's imagining? ...by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation. It's not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven't always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It's just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life. And that may be all the point that Twitter needs."

'It’s a safe bet that the Kindle is unlikely to attract people who seldom pick up a book or, on the other end of the spectrum, people who prowl antiquarian book fairs for first editions. But for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, “He’s Just Not That Into You”?'

"James describes that people that have seen his photographs tend to have a strong reaction to the piles of books and derelict classrooms and tend to project more sympathy towards those things than the children that won’t have the chance to use them." -- Comment: Kamil Niemira: "Books on the floor! Barbarians!" -- Hehe. The medium is the message.

"Only when huge digital throngs of people spontaneously arrived to crack open that information loop and add themselves as nodes on online social networks was Wiener's cybernetic vision fully realised. As armies of human nodes queued up to send and receive a constant stream of messages from their electronic ties, they unknowingly become the infrastructure and the backbone of a new kind of network or continuous information loop. Where this constant cycle of messaging and feedback has left us, I argue, is a place called Cyburbia. Cybernetics has brought us a long way, but now that its global information loop is fully built, it is in danger of leaving us lost and directionless. Now we need to spend some time thinking about the message - what it does to us to have the new communication technologies around, and how artists, culture-makers and everyone else might harness that new sensibility and turn it to their own advantage." -- (h8 cheap McLuhan derivatives ><)

"The sort of extroverted, harmony-seeking, consensus-driven collectivists who think it is all about the group, cutting big-ego prima donnas down to size, and building Brave New Egalitarian Communities that enshrine social justice values. It also explains why thoroughly introverted, unsociable, egoistic and ornery individualists (I am one; among my nicknames in college was “hermit”) take to the medium like ducks to water. This conflation of social with sociable, collectivist and communitarian is extraordinarily tempting. Yes, the medium fosters communication and collaboration, but remember, wolf packs communicate and collaborate rather better than sheep. And they compete viciously for the carcass right after. The true nature of social media, the “message” of this medium, is one of radical, uncompromising individualism, within a brutally competitive, bubblegum-flavored Darwinian virtual environment. The “social” adjective is about something else entirely, not collectivist utopia." ...

"For some advocates of computers in education, programming encourages children to think like epistemologists and psychologists because it raised questions about procedural thinking and encouraged reflection on one's own style of learning. In my own research I found that for some people, understanding how a computer worked supported the belief that you could understand how other things worked as well–in the social as well as in the technical world. The transparent understanding of a computer could become a metaphor for political empowerment. What dominates [now] is simulation and presentation as its own powerful idea. the computing that children are most immersed in has moved from programming and the aesthetic of the algorithm to software that socialises users into the culture of simulation."

"Human beings both want to -- and, in a deeper way, need to -- feel a sense of being autonomous. When someone else begins to seduce you into behaving with an offer of a reward, it takes away your sense of being autonomous. Now you are doing it for someone else. External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful -- tasks that telegraph something about a person's intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values. People will voluntarily perform intellectually arduous work, for example, because it gives them pleasure to solve a puzzle or win a game of wits. It is easy to offer a reward, but it is not easy to help people find their own motivation." -- Numbers numb.

"But just because television is dying as a commercial enterprise doesn’t mean it has to die as an art form. For producers looking to energize dramas and sitcoms, here’s one solution: set more shows in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — eras when TV wasn’t dying."

"The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us."

"Successful and truly creative ads, I think work in quite a different way. If we pretend that advertising is predominantly digital, then we'll feel justified in thinking of any ad as being reducible to an intellectual, verbal construct, a message or a proposition or an idea. But if we understand that the important relationship building communication is taking place through the analogue mode, then we should really change our focus away from this abstract digital idea, back to the visual, visceral power of the entire advertisement; its colour, movement, music, timing and every detail."

"Most of the defenders of current culture don't even try to explain why it was OK that the printing press destroyed scribal production, but not OK that the internet threatens newsprint, or why a proliferation of new creators and experimentation with new forms was good in 1508 but bad in 2008."

"We might learn to see our movement from one medium to another less as a net gain or loss, but rather as a shift of landscape that can be exploited positively if we take the time and energy to honestly survey the opportunities of the new terrain."

Comment: Keving Kelly in reply to Nick Carr: "I agree tools can affect our thinking. What I don’t assume is that a) we will be self-aware of what those affects are, or b) that we can acertain which tool does what."

"Question is, do you get off Google or stay on all the time? I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time."

"We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize... and, all too often, we miss the fine point."

"... the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the *idea* of reading War and Peace."

"Sex and murder simulators."

Comment: "the Bernbachians will need to acquire McLuhanistic sensibilities of a gyroscopic view of mediums as opposed to a single screen view of the world; and the McLuhanites will probably need the Bernbachian sensibility of craft and storytelling."

"They feel that TV shows are better written and more interesting. For roughly $40US, they got something like 25 episodes... My son read four 600 page Harry Potter books on our two week trip..." -- Again: They're hungry. Beware of their appetite.

"They want to participate in the process, but sometimes you think they're so busy doing that, it must be hard to actually pay attention." -- Attention to what? The medium is the message, the user is the content. Hehe.

"The computer should be below man, not above. Virtual reality, though, involves walking into and subordinating oneself to what should have been only a tool." -- Haha. And the writing tool of causal linear thought? Not 'under' that tool, are you??!

"We're still just beginning to exploit atomic-scale effects in revolutionary new materials — semiconductors (processing power), ferromagnetic compounds (storage), and fiber optics (bandwidth)"

This isn't so much a digital divide, more a literacy vs oralcy divide.

"Given the high similarity of DNA amongst family members, is it most ethically appropriate to discuss the situation with relatives ahead of time?"

"The real content of any medium is the user of the medium. We are the content of our media. Each medium delivers a new form of human being, whose qualities are suited to it."

"... in 2005 an obscure internet forum about video technology became deluged with messages after it became the top result for Google searches on the phrase "I am lonely", which thousands of people, it turned out, were typing every day." Video? Figures.

"All we are doing is adapting to modern technology, just the way people moved on from parchment to paper." and type, then text, and now - you've got a problem, because it's back to voice. Oral. And monotheism didn't catch hold before writing. Last gasps.

"Do desired behaviors dictate the devices and formats used, or are devices developed to cater to and facilitate our behaviors? In essence, do behaviors follow devices and platforms, or the other way around?" Neither. Behaviours follow functions: senses.

Great comments: 'It's not "freedom from", it's "freedom to".'

"How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing them with chances. A chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents they were born with, a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds, a chance to create something their own."

"children want digital apps that are under their control, help them pass time, provide entertainment, connect with peers and evade supervision.. It’s not the tech/gadgets that attract the kids it’s the desire to break out of that space and experiment"

"A medium for distributing actions."

Noah Brier: "Embed the marketing in the product."

'some agencies have really struggled with the fact that unlike traditional advertising tactics digital isn’t a channel—it’s a lifestyle. I’m currently working a through a set of “Digabilities”'

"... people enjoy the putting together of the system almost more than they enjoy playing it."

"The word ‘text’ is derived from the Latin word ‘textere’ meaning to ‘weave’ and the word 'rhapsody' literally means ‘to stitch together’ in Greek.. cutting and pasting is simply a new way of cutting and sewing – a recombinant process."

"PlayStation3's Little Big Planet walked away with the Best Original Game award... Yet the reaction from some of has been surprising. Forum members on several sites appear aghast that a "a phyics [sic] simulator/level editor" would take such a prize."

François Mahieu, Orange: "We want there to be a direct link between what they can see on TV and listen to on their mobile"

'...phatic messages, each presupposing and building on its predecessor. These messages are: #1. I exist #2. I'm ok #3. You exist #4. You're ok #5. The channel is open #6. The network is exists #7. The network is active #8. The network is flowing.'

"The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living. We're so busy recording our lives that we have little time left to examine them."

"YouTube and MySpace ... encourage your lame personal contributions. They do that because they've built their business models on the premise that you're a total loser in complete denial of the fact. That, and you have this incredible need to share."

"Man is God. He is everywhere, he is anybody, he knows everything. This is the Prometeus new world. Experience is the new reality" (Voice: Philip K. Dick's Avatar)

Video: Keen goes up against Leadbeater. None of it matters, though. The medium is teh message the user is the content.

"Innovative digital agency execs will take the stage and explain how their unique business models are custom-built to react quickly to current and future challenges."

"As social networks define themselves as platforms the hum of a media operating system becomes louder. Consider the network a bag of nerves; an emotional net that individuals define their transmission and reception rules."

"A quest is a journey towards a goal used in mythology and literature as a plot. Quests can be found in the folklore of every nation. The objects of quests require great exertion and the overcoming of many obstacles, typically including much travel."

"in-person event; video blog; puzzles; characters; chat room; website; invites; seminar; location; cult-like organization; joining sect; brainwashed; ; survey; joining group; instructed; meet; clues - the guests were pulled into an actual LG15 episode."

"I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that's being produced. And I think it's the wrong thing to look at. It's actually the pursuit and the perception change that people are experiencing about the world

"Steve Lambert, a conceptual artist, plans to add his own twist to one type of software that blots out commercial messages. His add-on will replace the display ads - with curator-picked artwork from contemporary artists."

'Friction TV, a UK user generated content website billing itself as a virtual speakers' corner Mr Sheikh added that the aim is to see the "whites of people's eyes" - all topics must begin with a video posting.'

Going straight into my favourites. No summary. Just read it.

McLuhan: "My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks."

McLuhan was right. Look around you. We have moved to a tribal (oral/conversation) culture from a literal (words/images) culture. From fragmentation (specialism) back to integration (generalism).... conversation/collaboration/roleplay/simulation/extension

Sarah Morning's excellent paper: 'The Digital Consumer' Contrasts Digitourists (passives) and Digitravellers (interactives). Pass it on.

"In this brave new world of the web, even suicide can be an interactive performance egged on by a crowd of eager spectators. Small wonder, then, that the marketers, venture capitalists and media behemoths are exploit[ing] this orgy of self-expression."

'Bosses at the two firms said it was a concept that bridged the divide between traditional TV and video games. "With Virtual Me we are at the forefront of a new, hybrid form of entertainment that takes gaming beyond the console"'

"KateModern will tell the story of her struggle to balance her complex social life with "the dark forces that shadow her". Bebo users will post messages for the show's characters, exchange plot ideas and upload videos to the characters' profile pages."

"All media are extensions of some faculty - psychic or physical" "we are back in an acoustic space. We have begun again to structure teh primordal feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us" "All the world's a sage"

"Sarah Robbins (Intelligirl), sees Second Life and its avatars as both tools and object of study: We talk about how to 'unpack' certain types of messages... The students read avatars as you would read a text... We see it as a form of composition."

BBC Horizon's recent Human2.0 documentary freely avaiable to watch online.

"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magicalthinking that confuses messageandmessenger: ifyouspeakofthe simulacrum, then you are a simulator... it isthe system itselfthat has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today.

"One of the most delicate and issues in tv is the question of how stupid the producers imagine the viewer to be. 'The viewer isn't stupid.' However, in recent years, much reality tv and early evening news have been constructed on the opposite assumption."

"Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL."