Monday 31 May 2010

What does the internet do well? How about doing the opposite?

There now follows some space:
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Make of it what you will.

My point? Simply, that online there's not much of it to be found. Some other things largely missing: slowness, stillness, silence, length, permanence, distance, boredom. In short, the room to stop and think and absorb - or even just to stop - and the promptings so to do.

What do I mean?

Sites and information don't always stick around; news stories remain hot for at most a few days; emails/tweets/status updates/RSS-feeds can be checked again and again; pages auto-refresh; and even as you read, almost every site (including this one) constantly invites you elsewhere with hyperlinks, while nagging from the periphery with its widgets, lists and further options. In short, distraction is ever-present. So too the feeling of things rushing past. Always the urge to move on to something else. To catch up. To find out. To keep up.

And so we do. But how much do we absorb?

Some while ago, I got rid of my television. I was fed up with endlessly watching stuff I could hardly remember the day after. Now, I spend hours on the internet endlessly reading stuff I hardly remember after even half-an-hour - assuming that retaining just enough to successfully Google the rest some other time counts as remembering; which it doesn't. (Progress, they call it, mutters the grumpy old man who lives inside my spleen.)

Dr Paul Kelley, neuroscience-literate headmaster, and author of Making Minds: What's Wrong With Education?, advocates what he calls 'spaced learning': a teaching method that aims to create long-term memories through short bursts of intensive learning, followed by breaks, often physically active, during which the brain cells get to do whatever it is brain cells are supposed to do when there's something new to assimilate. On the web, unless we've happened across something startlingly new or revelatory, usually we just move straight on, to yet more information.

And even as we're reading we're distracted. Some research into multi-tasking - and I suppose that's what reading while trying to ignore/attend to distractions is - has found that rather than being super-efficient, multi-tasking often just equates to doing lots of different things concurrently slightly less well than if we'd spent the same time doing each one separately. (Or something like that, I forget.) Maybe that's another reason why many people still prefer to read anything of length offline, in printed medium, just the words, quietly framed by space?

But, of course, that's just how the internet is: lots of information, served up quick, in bitesize chunks - often paid for by ads, which thus have to go somewhere. So, maybe, I should just use a little self-discipline and just not move on so quickly, if I want to be sure of absorbing what I read?

True. I should. But that still doesn't alter that distraction is inherent in the internet. Even if you don't succumb to it, there's still the constant background distraction of trying not to. (Quick, stop thinking about polar bears! Now, what are you thinking about?)

I mentioned boredom, earlier. The internet is perhaps its ultimate antidote, and I love it for that, but we also need boredom: it's the very thing from which much worthwhile thought, creativity and invention arises in the first place - in rebellion against it, or just out of being forced to stop, imagine, reflect, think. (And now a couple of interesting boredom links, inserted by the hypocrite that lives inside my mouse). Boredom has value, purpose, qualities all its own, when you get to know it well.

But this isn't intended to be some reactionary screed - as I've already said, I like the internet. My intention is to suggest that what constitute the internet's strengths are also very much its weaknesses: in being quick, it lacks slowness; in being content-packed, it lacks space; in being ever-changing, it lacks stillness; in never ceasing, it lacks somewhere to stop. These are human needs too - for respite, peace, and the space to reflect and then act - but ones that are rarely met online. (EDIT: Will start searching out examples, over the next couple of weeks, for hopefully another blogpost.)

For those whose work involves the web, then: when you want to be noticed, to get a message across, to make your work stick in the memory, don't just look to the internet's strengths, maybe try - as well, or instead - to supply what it lacks. Make room for your audience: to stop, think, imagine, and look around. Give them somewhere to breathe. Somewhere refreshing. Space to unwind. The internet is always changing, but...


Maybe, sometimes, it should?
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Saturday 29 May 2010

The Weekly Links Post: No. 11

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Following her libel case win against the Independent on Sunday, blogger Zoe Margolis (Girl With A One Track Mind) examines the need for libel reform.

The problem with twenty-somethings in the workplace - or is the problem with their employers?

Hands-on with the iPad on UK launch-day: Charlie Brooker and Stephen Fry (speaking in a Flash video that the iPad won't play).

For musicians, the money's in the touring, nowadays - right? Not anymore, says Imogen Heap.

Cory Doctorow explains why offering free e-books can increase hard-copy sales.

Social Media

New Media, Old Media: how blogs and social media agendas relate and differ from the traditional press - a report by Pew Research.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Rob Self-Pierson has had a big idea: Copy Is Art - soon to be an exhibition, called 26 Treasures, at the V&A.

And on another text as art tangent: Tim Etchells recently exhibited City Changes, "a description of a city in which nothing ever changes... rewritten 19 times to produce a sequence of increasingly preposterous variations, mutations and exaggerations of this imaginary place." More details on the Gasworks Gallery website.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

At last: browse the internet without seeing even a single mention of Justin Bieber.

Encrypted Google searches are now available: as simple as changing 'http://' to 'https://'.

Music

A free Jamaica-inspired mixtape compiled by Major Lazer, and featuring La Roux. (EDIT: Some lyrics definitely NSFW.)

You Go On Without Me: a beautifully unassuming and understated track by Amy Duncan and Wynand Huizinga. (Found on SoundCloud.)

Games & Other Distractions

Smashing Magazine's favourite bizarre and beautiful time-killer websites.

Neave.com is especially recommended - in particular, the brilliantly bewildering television without context application (although it doesn't seem to be working properly tonight...).

Miscellaneous

Warner Bros. are being sued - for pirating anti-piracy technology, says MPV.

Saturday 22 May 2010

The Weekly Links Post: No. 10

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology
(Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Cory Doctorow on the dangers of claiming 'Information wants to be free'.

James Murdoch unhappy with British Library's plan to digitise its newspaper archive; News Corp in talks with Google.

Google has its eyes on TV now; and on showing up Apple.

While The Times is putting up its paywalls, The Guardian is opening things up with Open Platform.

Social Media

Yet another prominent music blog closed by Google, apparently unfairly and with little right of appeal.

Youropenbook: see Facebook status updates that probably shouldn't be seen. (The aim of the site is to highlight the need for simpler Facebook privacy settings.)

Check and alter your own Facebook privacy settings
with a simple bookmarklet from ReclaimPrivacy.org.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

An interesting experiment over on the Everyday Genius blog: a short story written live, online and in public using collaborative editing software.

Exploring the possibilities of using WordPress as a book publishing platform.

7 add-ons for turning Firefox into the ultimate writers' suite.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Learn a foreign language with public domain textbooks and audio from the US government's Foreign Service Institute.

Keep up to date with the latest, most useful Firefox tips, news and add-ons at the Firefox Facts blog.

Music

Playlistify: create Spotify playlists from iTunes, YouTube, Last.fm and WinAmp playlists, share them, and discover other people's.

Games & Other Distractions

Cluesweeper: a diverting cross between Cluedo and Minesweeper.

Miscellaneous

Come to Cornwall for sun, sea and... er... solar panels, apparently.

Saturday 15 May 2010

The Weekly Links Post: No. 9

Apologies for last week's illness-enforced break in transmissions. Health and verticality have been restored. We now return you to Episode 9 of our scheduled programme:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology
(Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Twitter predicts the election results. Or at least does somewhat better than most of the established polls.

Why some of the best election data came from amateurs.

Paul Chambers on the Twitter joke that got him a criminal record. (For the full story, see Social Media links below).

Apparently, it's not just me who's irritated by Facebook's ever-changing privacy settings.

Social Media

Careful what you write on Twitter - and pretty much anywhere online.

Jack of Kent explains why he believes the legislation used to convict Paul Chambers is flawed, illiberal and dangerously open to misuse.

Paul Chambers' partner tells her half of the story.

Wired calls for an open source alternative to Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Only 3% of all books published in the US (and UK) are works in translation - hence the excellent Three Percent blog, which aims to highlight the best in translated fiction and poetry published in America. It's also home to the Best Translated Book Award.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

SeeSaw.com: a new TV catch-up site, offering BBC, 4oD and Five all in one place.

Not keen on the recent changes to Google? You can still go back to the old search page - for now.

Music

CODEORGAN: find out what any website sounds like as music - even this blogpost.

Games & Other Distractions

"When a certain Kafka story, named Before The Law, awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, it found itself transformed... into a short browser-based interactive Flash thing."

Miscellaneous

Scientific study finds that maybe we just shouldn't be giving knives to robots.

BBC Radio 4's archive of In Our Time is now available online - as well as over 500 radio documentaries from the World Service, ranging from Afghan Bloggers to Mexico's Missing Island to The Virtual Revolution.