Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What's at Stake?

Ten Things Every Writer Needs to Know

I am Trayvon and Sometimes Lebron: Negotiating Microaggressions Within and Outside of Academe

This commentary centers on an experience that one African American male scholar had with microaggression. Parallels and intersections are drawn among microaggression, racial identity, and the contemporary Trayvon Martin case.

SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions

Jimmy Wales reiterates support for Wikipedia porn filter

Over on Twitter, I’ve been having the first conversation, of sorts, I’ve had in years with Jimmy Wales. First, I wrote (pointing to my post, “What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem?“):

Jimbo replied:

Hmm, I thought:

Jimbo had a couple of replies to this, too:

I found it implausible that the God King could do nothing:

And that’s as far as it’s gone, as of this writing.

As much as I appreciate Jimmy Wales’ willingness to state his views publicly, it is hard to believe him when he says he “strongly” supports a filter. He is not only on the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, he is the only member of the board that, if I’m not mistaken, has a seat made especially for him. He surely knows the situation with the filter: he surely knows that the Wikipedia community has come out against it, and that the Board he sits on has let the matter drop. So why doesn’t he ask the Board to take it up again?

The trouble for Jimbo, Sue, the Board, and the grown-ups in the community generally, is that there are a lot of very loud filter opponents who will scream bloody murder if work on the filter continues, and even more if it is finished and installed. I’m sure they wish the whole thing would just go away. But that is the weak way out. That is why it is important that we not just let it go away. Jimmy Wales has boldly declared that he “strongly” supports the filter. I will believe him when he takes decisive action to help it come into being. Until then, I must conclude that he “weakly” supports it.

Some other Tweeps have shared “What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem?” as well, including Robert Scoble (261,146 followers) and TJ Manotoc (128,146 followers), who says “this is a bit of a shocker.” Several high-profile journalists (in order of response, Dan Murphy, Declan McCullagh, Andrew Lih, and Jason Walsh) have retweeted, expressed support, or told me they were reading the post.

Black Achievers’ Experiences With Racial Spotlighting and Ignoring in a Predominantly White High School

This article examines how high-achieving Black students respond to experiencing racial microaggressions in the form of racial spotlighting and ignoring in a predominantly White high school. The author discusses students’ resilient behavioral strategies, which represent resistance to these types of microaggressions and enable these students to maintain academic and social success despite experiencing racism in the school context.

What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem?

I want to start a conversation.

I. Problem? What problem?

So, you didn’t know that Wikipedia has a porn problem?

Let me say what I do not mean by “Wikipedia’s porn problem.” I do not mean simply that Wikipedia has a lot of porn. That’s part of the problem, but it’s not even the main problem. I’m 100% OK with porn sites. I defend the right of people to host and view porn online. I don’t even especially mind that Wikipedia has porn. There could be legitimate reasons why an encyclopedia might want to have some “adult content.”

No, the real problem begins when Wikipedia features some of the most disgusting sorts of porn you can imagine, while being heavily used by children. But it’s even more complicated than that, as I’ll explain.

(Note, the following was co-written by me and several other people. I particularly needed their help finding the links.)

Here is the short version:

Here is the longer version:

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and its project communities have recently stopped work on an optional, opt-in filter that the Foundation’s Board approved [*] in 2011. “Opt-in” means the filter would be switched on only for users who choose to turn it on. It would hide certain content behind a warning, and even then, the content would still be accessible to all users. It is accurate to call this proposed filter “weak”.  Nevertheless, after a period of community reaction, some Board members have made it clear that they do not expect this filter to be finished and installed. WMF director Sue Gardner implicitly endorsed their description of the situation at the end of this discussion [*] (at “I wish we could’ve talked about the image filter”).

That is Wikipedia’s porn problem.

II. Is inaction acceptable?

The official Wikipedia position on this problem appears to be: do nothing, and heap scorn upon anyone who suggests that something needs to be done. That also seems to suit many techno-libertarians, especially young males without children, who are the most enthusiastic consumers of porn, and who often dominate conversations about Internet policy.

I think inaction will prove unacceptable to most parents. At the very least there should be a reliable filter available, which parents might turn on if their younger children are using Wikipedia. I know that I would use it with my 6-year-old; then I might let him look at Wikipedia, if it were reliable. It’s hard to look over your children’s shoulder every moment they’re online. Wikipedians often glibly advise parents to do just this: if Junior is using Wikipedia to view porn and learn all about creative sexual fetishes, it’s your fault. You should be monitoring more closely. This obviously doesn’t wash, when it is well within Wikipedia’s power simply to add a filter that parents could turn on.

It is also unacceptable for most teachers and school district technology directors. How, really, can you defend giving kids access to a website with so much porn, when it is so obviously counter to CIPA rules, and when their parents would in many cases object (if they knew of the problem)?

What about you? If you agree, I’m going to make it easy for you to comment. I know that some Wikipedians might want to respond in a very hostile fashion–I’m no stranger to such disputes, myself–and this would put off a lot of people from commenting. But since this is my blog, happily, I can make up the rules, and so I will. I particularly encourage participation by parents, teachers, and women generally. I would especially like to hear from people who support the idea that Wikipedia tackle this problem. If you are opposed, that’s fine, but I will post your contribution only if you are polite and well-reasoned. I will not post anything that is personally insulting, and I also reserve the right not to post “flame bait” and merely silly or stupid remarks (and on such matters, my judgment is final). I will also pull the plug on any opponents who attempt to dominate the conversation. We already know there will be significant opposition, namely, from some Wikipedians and some of Wikipedia’s supporters. The purpose of this post is to get people talking about whether Wikipedia should be doing something about this problem.

III. What should be done?

There are a few things we might do.

First, we might blog, tweet, and post on Facebook about the problem. For better or worse, we’re all connected now, and getting the word out there is simply a matter of using social media. One person’s comment won’t amount to much–even this one won’t, probably. But a lot of people together can create a groundswell of support. So add your voice.

Second, we might contact leading Wikipedians, including Sue Gardner and other members of the WMF Board of Trustees. And don’t forget the many leading members of the Wikipedia project itself, such as the “checkusers” and the active administrators. If these people hear from readers not in the community, it can really make a difference. If enough of us write, Wikipedians might finally get the idea that there are a lot of readers out there who want a voice in determining what options are available to users.

A few months ago, I repeatedly (just to be sure) mailed Wikimedia chief Sue Gardner about Wikipedia’s porn problem. In 2010, she and I had a very productive and polite exchange, by both email and phone, about these issues. But recently, she has not responded. That was disappointing, but I believe I understand. My guess–it is only a guess, and I will correct this if I learn differently–is that Sue has been beaten down by her dysfunctional community. She has given up. I think she wants a filter installed, but it is politically impossible, and she fears for her job if she takes a hard-line stand. That’s my guess. If I am right, then external pressure will wake up the Wikipedia community and make it easier for her to insist that the community do the right thing.

Third, talk to the press. If you know reporters, or people who have lots of followers online, ask them to report about this story. It’s a big story. Why isn’t it big news that Wikipedia has given up its 2011 commitment to install a porn filter? Surely it is. It’s time to ask the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the leading Wikipedians, some hard questions. (And reporters, do be sure to ask questions of leading Wikipedians; I say that because the WMF does not control Wikipedia or Commons. If they did, they would be legally liable for a lot more than they are now. The people really making the decision, arguably, are the adolescent-minded Wikipedia admins who see nothing wrong with the current situation–not necessarily WMF employees.)

The fourth option is the “nuclear” option: we might boycott Wikipedia. Now, I’m not calling for a boycott–yet. If anything, I’d like to kick off a public discussion about whether we should boycott Wikipedia. I have been talking about this with some online acquaintances, and I am honestly torn. I don’t want this to be a mere publicity stunt: I want to call for a boycott only if it could possibly have a positive effect. I also don’t want to call for a boycott if I don’t know that there will be a significant groundswell of popular support. And I don’t want this to be about me. I want it to be all about making Wikipedia more responsibly managed and more useful for children–kids are some of its most important users, even if Wikipedians loudly insist that it is not “censored for children.”

But if Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation do not take decisive action between now and end-of-year fundraising time, I might very well call for a boycott. For now, let’s get the word out, start a conversation, and see if we can make a difference without taking such drastic action.

Please feel free to repost this online.

UPDATE: in a response to me, Jimmy Wales has reiterated his support for a Wikipedia porn filter. But this wouldn’t be the first time Jimbo has supported a Wikipedia proposal that never saw the light of day. Let’s make him put his money where his mouth is.

UPDATE 2: I made a video vignette, “Does Wikipedia have a porn problem? Dad investigates.“

South Korea’s Model Education System? Think Again

Politicians and policy makers frequently cite South Korea’s education system as exemplary because of impressive test scores. However, a firsthand look indicates that a South Korean education might not be the best model after all.

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media

Partnerships for New Teacher Learning: A Guide for Universities and School Districts

Ethnicity, Race and Education: An Introduction

Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Stop Linking School Improvement, Economic Competitiveness, and National Greatness

Most efforts to improve schooling in the United States have limited impact because opinion leaders’ repeated appeals to global economic competitiveness and national greatness don't inspire teachers and students. Educators and citizens need to challenge narrow utilitarian assumptions about the purposes of schooling and instead frame teaching as a profoundly challenging, rewarding, and important form of community service.

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters

Bringing the Fight: School “McLeadership” and the Social Order

Transformational leadership is not polite. It is political. For school leaders, that assignment exacts a multilevel (individual, organizational, societal) accounting of the congruence between our espoused values and how we choose to live with one another in this democratic project. In this piece, I argue that cultivating authentic school leadership requires nothing short of the politicization of educational leadership preparation curricula and that only through authentic engagement with the political and economic life world can we begin to decipher and challenge the governing apparatus that constrains our very ability to move beyond pedestrian leadership preparation or boutique scholarship toward a project of authentic justice.

An assortment of things that should exist

Occasionally I wish I had time to write a book to explain these ideas in detail. (Some of these are actually book ideas. Some of them are project ideas.)

1. A tutorial system, independent of any university, managed via a neutral online database; and an expanded system of degrees by examination.

2. Textop! I love this idea whenever I think about it!

3. A medium-sized secular (but not anti-religious) chapter book explaining for elementary-aged children, in non-condescending but easy language, why various virtues are virtues and their corresponding vices are vices. It should also explain why moral relativism is silly, which of course it is. I’ve looked for such a book, hard. I’ve started to write such a book, but never find enough time to finish. I truly believe such a book would be an enormous best-seller.

4. A system of non-fiction e-books, roughly similar to what you can find here, but which have more intelligently-written scripts, like some of these videos and these powerpoints. I hope to start such a system using the ReadingBear.org software as a platform.

5. This is going to be very hard to explain briefly, and it will sound half-baked, but since when did that ever stop me? Actually, the rough idea (not my version, but something vaguely like it) comes from a Heinlein novel (I forget what Heinlein calls them and where–maybe someone will tell me) combined with my original idea for neutrality on Wikipedia (and before that, Nupedia). I think that civilization could use a society of people who are meticulously and publicly committed to neutrality. Somewhat like judges, but who operate in the public sphere, they do not make any public judgments on controversial issues of any sort. Their role in society would be, rather, to summarize “what is known”–or what various people take themselves to know–about this and that, according to some clear and deeply studied rules of scholarship and neutrality. If someone, or a group, required a neutral, expert analysis of a question, a field, or a situation, they would provide it. These people would have to be experts in ideology, logic, and the arts of communication, understanding when a statement is the slightest bit tendentious, and be able to quickly formulate a more neutral one. These people would be perfect candidates to write neutral Congressional reports as well as serve as expert witnesses in trials. There would have to be a fairly elaborate system of professional ethics for this group, and members would no doubt have to be regularly evaluated by their peers. Among other things, they would not be able to serve in politics, as attorneys or judges, or as corporate executives. They could serve as journalists and scholars, but under stringent rules that do not apply to most journalists and scholars. – Why such a profession? Because the world has gone insane, and it desperately needs people who are professionally committed to explaining obvious things to crazy people. Do you really think that people well-qualified and publicly committed in the way I’ve described would lack for work? They’d be extremely well employed as consultants, internal and external.

6. A website+app with spaced repetition questions that teach basic facts school students (preK and up).

I’ve had quite a few more. I’ll make another post later, perhaps, with more of the same.

Feel free to swipe any of these ideas and do a world of good by bringing them to fruition. You might or might not get rich, but if well-executed, you certainly could help a lot of people.

Why is spaced repetition not better known?

Suppose a method let you remember things with a 95% success rate–in other words, whatever information you’ve put into a system, you’d have a 95% chance of recalling it–and this effect is permanent, as long you continue to use the method. That would be quite remarkable, wouldn’t it?

Well, there is such a method, called spaced repetition. This is the method used by such software as Supermemo, Anki, Mnemosyne, and Memrise.

The figure, 95%, is very impressive to me. I’ve been thinking about it lately, as I delve into the world (it is a whole world) of spaced repetition. Ordinarily, we require much less out of our metrics. 95% is practically a guarantee. With just 15 or 30 minutes a day, adding maybe 20 questions per day, you can virtually guarantee that you will remember the answers.

In particular, I am wondering why spaced repetition is not used more widely in education. Of course, I’m not the first to wonder why. The answer is fairly simple, I think.

The more I read from and interact with educationists and even homeschoolers, the more I am struck by the fact that many of them hold knowledge in contempt (q.v.). Of course, they will cry foul if you call them on this (q.v.), but that doesn’t change the fact (q.v.). So naturally I expect them to sneer at me when I express amazement at the 95% recall figure. I can hear the “arguments” already: this is “rote memorization” (not if you understand what you’re memorizing); education is not about amassing mere facts (not just that, no); it suffices that you can just look answers up (wrong); we should be teaching critical thinking, not mere memorization (why not both?).

I am not going to defend the value of declarative knowledge (again) here. I simply wanted to observe what teachers (including homeschooling parents) could do with spaced repetition, if they wanted to. They could spend a half hour (or less) every day adding questions to their students’ “stack” of questions; then assign them to review questions (both new and old) for a half hour.

Imagine that you did that, adding 20 questions per day, five days a week, 36 weeks per year (the usual U.S. school year), for six years. This is not impossible to manage, I gather, and would not take that long, per day. Yet by sixth grade, your students would have 21,600 facts in recall with about 95% accuracy. These would merely be the sorts of facts contained in regular textbooks.

Next, consider an exam that drills on a random selection of 100 of those facts. The students who used spaced repetition faithfully would probably get an A on the exam. That, I suspect, is much better than could be expected even from top students who used ordinary methods of study.

Would students who spent 30 minutes out of every class day on this sort of review benefit from it?

I think the answer is pretty obvious.

Educating Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders for their Future

Students with autism spectrum disorders are characterized by social communication impairments and stereotyped and repetitive behaviors and interests. Cognitive ability, adaptive behavior, and social communication skills vary across students on the autism spectrum; some individuals have average to above average IQs (e.g., individuals with high-functioning autism, individuals with Asperger syndrome). However, education for students with autism spectrum disorders has often emphasized their weaknesses with little emphasis on their strengths. Educational goals for students with autism spectrum disorders are often limited to what a student will learn within an academic year. Most children with typical development are often asked by their teachers, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But, children with autism spectrum disorders are seldom given the opportunity to express their career aspirations.

Teacher Learning That Matters: International Perspectives

How not to use the Internet, part 4: how “social” is social media?

<< Part 3: How the Internet’s current design philosophy fails

4. How “social” is social media?

A person who is “social,” we think, gets along with others and does not always stay at home. They mix well. This is, we hope, because they like other people, not because they’re trying to take advantage of them. They have an interest in getting to know others and doing fun things with them.

So I wonder if “social media” is misnamed.

Social media features the trappings of social behavior: conversation (with head shots and indications of mood), sharing interests, and doing things together. But how these activities happen in so-called social media are mostly a weak shadow of what happens face-to-face. The conversation is typically brief. It is rarely one-to-one, but instead one-to-many, rather like broadcasting a message over an intercom to a group of people who are only half-listening and busy broadcasting themselves. We often do not know who, precisely, is receiving our message, and we act as if we do not care. We do not expect a reply, and if we do not receive a reply, we are at worst disappointed; face-to-face, if we received no reply at all, we would think the person we spoke to was rude and cold. In many venues, the conversation happens among literal strangers, often from around the world, which at first glance seems charming—and it sometimes is. But after the novelty wears off, we discover that the rewards are rare. Such interactions rarely involve personal understanding and regard, as friends share.

Conversation online is rarely as meaningful, from a social point of view, as conversation face-to-face among friends and known colleagues. (In terms of logic and rhetoric, I have found that it can be more rigorous and rewarding than much face-to-face conversation. But I’m talking about sociality now, not logic.)

When we get online and engage in “social” media, I wonder how much we—most of us—do so because we like people. I wonder if we do it because we want to use people and promote ourselves. This is not social, properly speaking, any more than PR work is “social.” “Now just a minute, Sanger,” I hear you saying, “you’ve gone too far. I like people. I am not a user. How dare you accuse me, and all users of social media, of being selfish ‘users’?” I apologize if I offend. I did not accuse all users of social media of being “users” of people. That really isn’t my intention. But I have an important point to make and it isn’t pretty. When you do an update, are you acting like a friend, or like a PR agent? I’ll be honest. Personally, I do a lot more PR updates than friendly updates. I find it a little surprising and charming when my friends and acquaintances respond to such updates, but that doesn’t stop them from being, mainly, PR updates. Sure, I understand that some people do mainly engage with their close friends. I think that’s nice (as I said before), as far as it goes. But a lot of what we say is personal advertising, so to speak. Some have even taken to speaking of their online identities, to mind rather pathetically, as their “personal brand,” and they invest much time on social networks buffing their “personal brands.” This behavior is “social” in a very weak sense, in that it involves people, but not in the strong sense that it involves building friendships.

Social media is a poor replacement for a real social life. To the extent that social media is replacing it, friendship as an institution weakens.

Relevant links:

I was tempted to try to coin a phrase, “anti-social media,” but of course someone beat me to it.

On “personal branding,” see this Mashable post.

How not to use the Internet, part 3: how the Internet’s current design philosophy fails

<<Part 2: The pernicious design philosophy of the Internet

3. How the Internet’s current design philosophy fails.

Websites compete for the really limited commodity online, namely, attention. That much is understandable, and not likely to change. How they compete is the problem.

Putting lots of menus, internal links, feeds, and self-promotional media on pages drives traffic around a website internally, while putting external links and various media on a given page is thought to increase its value and interest to end users. Competition for limited attention also motivates others to link to us (through reciprocal links, which are often automatic in blogging systems). More information seems better, so more pointers to information and ways to organize it seems better. Similarly, systems for regularly alerting us to mail, news, blogs, and so forth are straightforward attempts to grab our limited attention. Software-driven media tries to prove its relevance to us this way, and sometimes succeeds.

But if we really are trying to capture and hold each others’ attention, isn’t this busy, distracting design philosophy puzzling?

Why saturate a blog post (or other media) with a panoply of enticing choices to other things on our website, when we surely know that most users will, by habit, bounce right off of the page that brought them to our website, the very page that has the best chance of keeping them there? Such internal links might in a few cases get your user to go elsewhere on your site, but it also reduces the chance that the visitor will at least read the thing that brought them to your site in the first place. Why not seize the bird in hand? For that matter, why have so many external links right in our own text? Why don’t we design our pages so that, when we are graced with a visitor, the visitor will focus on, and actually want to stay to the end of, what brought them?

Similarly, if we really want to get others’ attention, why do we flood their Twitter and Facebook feeds with so much noise? Why do we bore them with too much news, repetition, and chitchat? We are instructed to increase the signal if we want more followers, yet most of us don’t. Why not?

Yet if the choices of web designers and marketers  seem paradoxical, how much more paradoxical is it that we, as end users, continue to consume—ravenously—what so often contains more noise than signal? Consider that many of us follow hundreds of people on Twitter (far more than we can really keep up with), that we have “friended” people from high school whose names we barely remember, that many of us welcome in more mail than we can reasonably manage, and so on.

Both paradoxes, of Internet producers and consumers, disappear when we reflect on the fact that we are very anxious about “missing out,” and Internet producers are merely exploiting this anxiety. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that we are in a collective panic, a veritable mania, over the fantastic content now online. Information purveyors, working in this frenzied atmosphere, and who are end users themselves, naturally go to great lengths to seize their portion of the online public’s attention. Faced with a zillion things to pay attention to, calm, slow decision-making seems ridiculously inefficient. In this atmosphere, there is no time to exercise wisdom.

It’s bad enough that this design philosophy looks, at least to some extent, self-defeating for information purveyors. Even worse is that it doesn’t really benefit the end user. Consider:

Many of us spend a lot of time on Twitter. Why? The people you’re following come up with some quite insightful observations? Actually, not so often. Few can say much that is really worthwhile in 140 characters. The best that most of our Tweeps can do is be occasionally interesting, clever, or funny—and otherwise a waste of time. But maybe you get a lot of links to fascinating news articles, blogs, and so forth? Maybe, yet most of the links go unclicked. You are usually quickly in-and-out of those that you do click. Even if you don’t bounce out after a glance, even if you actually read something, you’ll probably just skim it quickly and forget it, which means you don’t really benefit from even the things you spend the most time on. But, you fret, if you don’t follow your feed, wouldn’t you be out of it and disconnected? Not necessarily. If you focus on a few high-quality news sites and blogs that cover your industry and interests, if you actually read them, you’ll almost certainly be more up-to-date about those topics than someone who uses Twitter as a replacement for such sources.

But you knew that. No, surely in your heart of hearts you know that the reason Twitter exists is not information exchange, but a kind of socialization. Yet it’s rarely bona fide socialization or friendship-building. It’s mostly networking. For most people, I suspect, we just have a somewhat pathetic desire to see our username replied-to and retweeted. This makes us feel relevant, popular, and connected. Our ego swells with each new follower, reply, and retweet. Yet this is clearly illusory. It is increasingly fashionable to apply the self-effacing epithet “narcissistic” to these, our common social networking habits. We know that, just because our vanity is flattered by public attention, it does not follow that we are relevant, or popular, or connected in any way that matters.

Face it: the only reason we (some of us) waste so much time on Twitter and Facebook is that “everybody else” is there, wasting time too, and we would feel out-of-it and incomplete, somehow, to be drop out. The whole advent of truly mass participation in social media, beginning in the mid-2000s with Myspace, seems to reflect not “the wisdom of crowds” but “the madness of crowds,” like tulip mania. I think Twitter exemplifies this observation perfectly.

Facebook looks open to the same observations. Why do you spend time on Facebook? Because your Mom and old friends are on it, for one thing. Are you closer to them now than you were before Facebook? Probably not, in most cases, except for the few comments you’ve exchanged with people you haven’t otherwise spoken to in years. On Facebook, we frequently exchange sentiments (and media) with people close and not-so-close to you, and that is being sociable. I won’t be so churlish or anti-social as to deny that it’s nice. Of course it’s nice. But this style of interaction makes socialization less personal than it once was. If you spend a lot of time socializing on Facebook (I’m guessing; no doubt someone’s done a study) you probably talk less on the phone. You probably feel less of a need to spend face-time, or even ear-time, with loved ones. Be honest, now: is Facebook really enhancing the quality of your social life and family relations? For society as a whole, is it bringing us closer together and improving our social relations in general? I strongly doubt it. It seems only to make our social lives more “efficient”—and impersonal, too. Doesn’t this social media par excellence actually make us less social, in the ways that matter? Why shouldn’t I draw that conclusion? Some might have a knee-jerk tendency to call me a Luddite for saying such things. But I live online and have devoted much of my adult life to building bits of the Internet, so that would be silly; can you explain why I’m wrong?

Wikipedia is an amazing and frequently useful resource. (For all my criticisms, I’ve never denied this.) But when you look something up there, how often do you increase your store of knowledge, rather than gaining a temporary grasp of not-fully-reliable “fact” and fleeting sense of understanding? Is your mind significantly improved? Probably not. Even if you spent the evening lost in Wikipedia’s hyperlinkage, you are apt to forget most of what you come across. It’s intellectual fast food; the taste is strangely compelling, but it is not exactly mentally nutritious. Building your personal store of knowledge requires deep reading and critical study, focus on a topic for a lengthy period of time. The design philosophy of Wikipedia—the copious irrelevant hyperlinks, and the way text tends to be written in smallish, loosely-related chunks instead of woven into a coherent narrative—militates against deep reading and critical study. I’m not saying you can’t use Wikipedia as part of a program to do serious research and gain solid knowledge. Of course you can. Some people even have, I’m sure. But I doubt that’s how most people use it. Its design encourages surface grazing, not immersion.

Even Google Search itself falls prey to this sort of analysis. What could be better than Google, which delivers highly relevant results and often answers your questions instantly? Well, yes. But we should demand more. There is more to search than faux-relevance and speed. When you do a search to find the best possible information on a subject, is that what you are shown? Not necessarily, because what Google shows you is the most popular and the most recent (and now, if you’re logged in with your Google account, what they think you’ll be most likely to click on). The highest quality results are too often far down the list. Google’s daily influence on us may well have trained us to overvalue popularity and recency, frequently at the cost of more significant qualities like reliability, clarity, historical importance, and depth.

I could give many similar examples, but let me skip to a general conclusion.

The Internet is ostensibly set up to let us help each other navigate the wealth of information online and, by speeding communication and new ways of collaboration, bring us closer together. But that isn’t quite what it does. When I spend much time on social networks, I find the experience to consist more of noise and alienation than signal and connection. What many, including myself, have touted as a potential tool of enlightenment and increased social connection right now seems to be making us less enlightened, less sociable, and less disciplined to boot. The Internet caters particularly to those who want to promote their work. Because so many people are doing this at once, its most striking effect is to distract us endlessly with what are, at the end of the day, mostly trivialities.

Part 4: How “social” is social media? >>

Relevant links:

I know that SEO people have answers to my rhetorical questions about menus and links. Here is a sample (chosen only because it’s highly ranked in a Google search and thus, no doubt, played the SEO game well). But the SEO strategy is about building traffic. It is not about encouraging them to finish reading what they came for.

It’s common advice to Twitterers that they increase their focus and signal in order to get more followers; example.

This Google search is a good place to start reading about how social media is narcissistic.

The famous phrase “the wisdom of crowds” seems to have gotten its start in the book by James Surowiecki of that name. “The madness of crowds,” by contrast, comes from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I’ve read the former but not the latter, even though it is free (courtesy a part of the Internet that really doesn’t suck).

I read on the Internet that 71% of all U.S. citizens are on Facebook. So, probably, your Mom is.

While I don’t recall ever being accused of being a Luddite, I probably was at some point. Nicholas Carr, though, makes much of the purported “Luddite” aspect of Internet criticism.

Wikipedia doesn’t seem to place much stock in narrative coherence, contrary to Citizendium.

On the idea that the Internet generally (Wikipedia is not mentioned) encourages surface grazing and does not increase our knowledge significantly, see this speech of mine.

How not to use the Internet, part 2: the pernicious design philosophy of the Internet

<< Part 1: It’s a problem that the Internet distracts us

2. The pernicious design philosophy of the Internet.

The way that the Internet is designed—not graphic design, but overall habits and architecture—encourages the widespread distractability that I, at least, hate.

This basic notion is not my idea; I freely admit that I learned it from Nicholas Carr. I did not quite notice some features about the Internet until reading Carr’s The Shallows some time ago, and the following borrows from Carr. My analysis consists of two related parts, the first being about the nature of the Internet, and the second being about the design philosophy of the Internet.

First, consider what the Internet is, or the public side of it, so to speak. (Not the technical, “back end” part.) The public side of the Internet consists of (a) information of various media that is presumably of some public interest, together with (b) ways of repackaging, sending, publishing, and rating the information and, especially, of linking to it for public consumption.

Category (a) is rapidly growing to include all of the public information we know of, or at least all of it that can be digitized—and not just all extant information, but also all new information that arrives on the scene. This fact is of interest not just to “geeks,” but to everyone who finds books, news, movies, and virtually everything else that we can communicate and share digitally. Category (a) is the concern of all of humanity, not just geekdom.

This makes category (b), what we might call the net’s meta-information, all the more important to us. Google makes the inherently interesting information findable. Wikipedia tries to summarize it. Email, texting, and VoIP (like Skype) allow us to communicate it more efficiently. Twitter gives acquaintances and colleagues a way to share the latest and greatest with us. Facebook gives us easy, one-page access to information about our friends and families. Other sites, like YouTube and Amazon, offer us view counts, ratings, samples, and reviews that are crucial to deciding what long-form content worth pursuing.

Now I can explain a notion, which again owes a great deal to Carr, of the current two-part “design philosophy” of the Internet, to wit:

Interconnectivity: information that is of some inherent public interest is typically marinated in meta-information: (a) is bathed in (b). It is not enough to make the inherently interesting content instantly available and easy to find; it must also be surrounded by links, sidebars, menus, and other info, and promoted on social media via mail. This is deliberate, but it has gotten worse in the last ten years or so, with the advent of syndicated blog feeds (RSS), then various other social media feeds. This is, of course, supposed to be for the convenience and enlightenment of the user, and no doubt sometimes it is. But I think it usually doesn’t help anybody, except maybe people who are trying to build web traffic.

Recency: the information to be most loudly announced online is not just recent, but the brand-spanking-newest, and what allegedly deserves our attention now is determined democratically, with special weight given to the opinions of people we know.

Something like this two-part design philosophy, I believe with Carr, is what makes the Internet so distracting. Carr found some interesting studies that indicate that text that is filled with hyperlinks and surrounded by “helpful” supporting media tends to be poorly understood, and we spend less time on each page of such text. As soon as we come across a link, video, or infographic sufficiently interesting to distract us, the surrounding mass of text becomes “tl;dr”. Over time, we have largely lost the habit of reading longer texts, and this problem is apt to get worse.

Moreover, when we and our social networks place a premium on recency, we naturally feel a need to check various news streams and data feeds regularly, and coders oblige this tendency by providing us various distracting push notifications when the latest arrives. Even more, the Internet industry hungrily pounces on new tools and devices that allow people to share and be connected in ever more and newer ways. The Internet increasingly goes wherever we are, first with the advent of laptops, then smart phones, then the iPad—and eventually, maybe “Google Glasses.”

The result is that, soon after we surf to a page of rich media, its interconnections lead us away from whatever led us to the page in the first place, even while our various alerts and, just as important, our habits of checking stuff, conspire to pull us away as well. Ironically, what might look to the naive to be an efficient, intelligent system of alerting us and giving us instant access to the latest and greatest online has the effect of making us unable to focus on any one thing for long.

Let that sink in a little. Back in 2000, what we were so excited about, when we thought about the potential of the Internet, was the sheer amount of knowledge that would be available and presented (and developed!) in all sorts of brilliantly engaging ways. Now it is 2012. Is that what we have? Yes—and no. Some of the dream has indeed arrived. Vast amounts of content are there. Frequently it is presented engagingly (although we have a lot more to do before we reach our potential). But it is also presented in a context that is so extremely distracting that we, even despite our best intentions, often do not really appreciate it. We are not encouraged to study, absorb, savor; we are encouraged to skim and move on.

I think there is something really wrong with this design philosophy. We ought to try to change it, if we can. But how, especially considering that it mostly grew organically, not as a result of any grand design?

Part 3: How the Internet’s current design philosophy fails >>

Relevant links:

Nick Carr’s blog, “Rough Type”

To see how SEO analysts (and many webmasters) think about recency, see “New Rules: Fresh Content Is King” (undated, natch!).

Of course, the Google Glasses that appeared in the video are probably vaporware, for now.

“Vast amounts of content” that is “presented engagingly”? Well, Wikipedia and YouTube, for just two examples. I didn’t say presented perfectly, but their popularity is evidence of their being engaging. Their vastness is obvious. Many more examples could be given.

How not to use the Internet, part 1: it’s a problem that the Internet distracts us

For almost a year, I’ve been at work on a very long essay about some problems with the Internet and social media in particular. I’ve worked on it now and then and occasionally I think I’m really going to finish it—but I never do. So, as a concession to failure, or partial failure anyway, I have decided to divide it up into several self-contained brief essays. I’ll release an essay a day and see how it goes. Here is the first.

Note, rather than tempt the reader to click out of the essay, I’ve moved links to the end, and annotated them. This is an example of one way in which the Internet could change (although I’m not exactly holding my breath).

1. It’s a problem that the Internet distracts us, dammit.

I too am distracted by ubiquitous digital media. This is a problem—a common, serious, and real problem—and I wish I could get to the bottom of it, but it is very deep.

In the last several years, like many of us, I’ve often felt out of control of my time. Following basic time management principles is more difficult than ever, especially when I’m spending time online and looking at screens generally. My situation is probably similar to that of many people reading this: I check my mail many times per day; Twitter and Facebook beckon, as do my favorite online communities (and I dread joining Google+); people push the latest news at me; people Skype me; and the time seems to slip away in spite of my better intentions to, you know, get work done.

What I think of as an unmitigated vice has been complacently described by some as “multi-tasking,” as if allowing yourself to be distracted were some sort of advanced technical ability. We are told (though, I gather, not by most psychologists) that being able to multi-task effectively is one of the skills that should now be in every plugged-in person’s toolkit. But the notion that multi-tasking is an advanced ability is merely an excuse, I think. When you are “multi-tasking,” usually, you are not using your time efficiently; you are simply letting yourself be distracted, because you don’t want to “miss out.”

That’s not all. As much as I hate to admit it, the Internet also seems to have made it difficult for me, as it has Nicholas Carr and Richard Foreman, to write and pay attention to long texts, and to think deep thoughts. To be sure, I still try and occasionally succeed. I seem to skim more along the surface of things, despite myself. Thoughtful insight is far from impossible, but it seems to require more deliberate effort. Creativity still flows, but less often and less spontaneously. Believe me, I wish it weren’t this way. I fear that I, too, am becoming one of Carr’s “shallows” and one of Foreman’s “pancake people.”

Many heavy Internet users have fairly admitted the same, often apparently with pride or without shame—or at least without hope of improvement. Do you feel the same?

The nature of these now-common problems—a mind ironically made poorer in spite of, indeed by, the Internet’s riches—has been much discussed, for example by Maggie Jackson in Distracted, Mark Bauerlein in The Dumbest Generation (a much better book than you might expect from the title), Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, and Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget.

So why do we let ourselves get so distracted? Why are we so often incapable of sticking to a single task?

I think there is a simple answer, actually: we intensely feel the presence of all the world’s information and people and the digital fun that entails, miraculously made available to us. Impersonal information made it bad enough for us early adopters in the earlier days of the Internet. But now that everybody and his grandma (literally) has joined social networks, the situation got a lot worse, for me at least. We are constantly available to our colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, so they may “interrupt” us at random times throughout the day, offering insights and telling us that some new website or blog post or picture or video is a “must read” or “must see,” or simply reporting their own sometimes-interesting thoughts and news. We constantly feel pulled in a thousand directions. This general problem seems likely to worsen as our access to the world’s information becomes more and more complete, speedy, and convenient. Before long, we will have virtually instant access to every bit of content we might want, always and everywhere, and with a minimum of effort (though not necessarily with a minimum of cost). We are nearly there, too.

This revolution—inadequately described as a revolution of ”information” or the “digital” or the “Internet”—is wholly unprecedented in history. Not long ago I had to tell blasé skeptics that it is not “hype” to call it a revolution. But clearly, a lot of regular folks, not necessarily in the vanguard, have started to understand the enormousness of how the world has changed in the last fifteen years or so. It’s a real revolution, not a mere fad or development, and even as we stare it in the face, it is still hard to grasp just how far-reaching it is. We have been swept up by the one of the most novel and dramatic transformations that humanity has ever undergone. We read about “revolutions” throughout history, the printing press, of religion, of ideology, of industry. This is another one; it’s the real deal. It’s more important than, for example, who will be elected president in 2012, whether the Euro will collapse, or Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Anyway, this revolution is so novel that it is not surprising if we act like kids screaming in a candy store, not knowing what to sample first. Maybe it’s time that we started taking stock of the Internet’s candy store more like mature adults and less like sugar-crazed children.

For some time, I’ve known that I would have to come to a personal understanding of this situation, and make some personal resolutions to deal with it. Like so much else, I’ve been putting this off, because the problem is massive and I haven’t felt equal to it. I’m not sure I am yet. Nobody seems to—not even the above writers, who offer bleak reports and little in the way of helpful advice. The Internet bedazzles us. But for me, things have come to a head. I do not want to go through the rest of my life in the now all-too-familiar state of Internet bedazzlement, if I can help it. For me, it begins now. It’s time for me—and maybe, for you too—to get over the fact that all of the world’s information and the people that drive it are (or soon will be) accessible in moments. But how?

Some people won’t admit that there is even a problem in the first place. They celebrate the Internet uncritically, leaping upon every new site, app, or gadget that promises to connect us in newer and deeper ways. But it is precisely the wonders of the Internet that we celebrate that have become a major distraction. Some people don’t seem to want to admit that distractability is a serious problem; they do nothing but offer blithe predictions and analysis of how thinking, social interaction, education, etc., are moving into a wonderful new age. That is all very well as far as it goes, but I sometimes wonder if some of the recent economic downturn might be explained by the amount of time we waste online. Surely it’s possible that the global economy is significantly less productive because we’re distracting ourselves, and each other, so much, and with so little to show for it.

Other people seem to think that there’s nothing that can be done about our distractability and “shallowness.” Whatever their disagreements, Internet commentators Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr seem to agree on this: the brevity of information chunks, the pace of their flow, and the fact that they are mediated democratically by giant web communities are all inevitable features of the Internet; so we can’t help but be “distracted.” Or so Shirky, Carr, and many techie A-listers seem to think. This is where modern life is lived, for better or worse. If you want to be part of things, you’ve got to jump into the data stream and do your best to manage. If your distractability is making you “shallow” or “flat,” that is just a new and unfortunate feature of life today.

I will not “go gentle into that good night.” I can’t help but observe that this sort of techno-fatalism might be why some Internet geeks are becoming anti-intellectual. I’m far from alone in my view that the overall tendency of the Internet, as it is now and as we use it now, is to make us less intellectual. So, many Internet geeks make a virtue of necessity and begin slagging intellectual things like memory (and thus declarative knowledge), books and especially the classics, expertise, and liberal education. At least critics like Carr and Lanier have the good taste and sense to bemoan the situation rather than mindlessly celebrating it.

As to me, I disagree with techno-fatalism strongly. Isn’t it obvious that the Internet is still very new, that we are still experiencing its birth pangs, and that dramatic changes to how we use it will probably continue for another generation or two? Isn’t it also quite obvious that we have not really figured out how to design and use the Internet in a way that is optimal for us as fully-realized human beings? I love the new universal accessibility of so much recorded knowledge. Over the last dozen years I have been a booster of this myself, and in my work I still aim to enlarge our store of free, high-quality knowledge resources. I also deeply love the free exchange of ideas that the Internet makes possible. These things are why I “live online” myself. I do agree with the boosters that all this will, in time, probably, change us for the better. But the idea that the mindless digital helter-skelter of the early 2000s is how things will always be, from here on out, is highly doubtful.

We simply can’t go on like this. I think we can change, and we should.

Part 2: the pernicious design philosophy of the Internet >>

Relevant links

A good place to start learning about what psychologists say about Internet distraction would be via this search.

Nicholas Carr’s famous essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic, is one of those articles you kind of wish you’d written. It focused many people’s thinking about the effect of the Internet on how we think. I actually prefer his book The Shallows, however.

The “pancake people” reference is to a short essay by Richard Foresman in Edge.

For some of what I’ve said about the “revolution” that the Internet and digital media represent, see this, this, and this, just for example.

When I think about the suggestion that it’s not a bad thing that information chunks are getting smaller, I think of this Britannica Blog post by Clay Shirky, lauding short-form online communication as an “upstart literature” that will “become the new high culture.” Perhaps an older, more widely-read introduction to this notion would be Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger–it’s just that the pieces are even smaller and looser than when Weinberger published that book (2002).

“Go gentle into that good night” is, of course, a phrase from the poem “Invictus.”

The surely absurd notion that there is a new geek anti-intellectualism is broached in this much-discussed essay.

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