Ahh the “New Media makes you dumb” debate. The WSJ has it going, and Slashdot picked it up.

My spin agrees with both sides, in the context of actor-responsibility/meaningless-drone. That itself is a rough divide for humanity; I mean, how many of us are *fully* determined in our thought patterns? Most of us are in small ways, but not in all ways. Further, we are only as determined by what is available to us. If no one is ever forced to turn off the TV, read a book, or read a full webpage, they never will. Humanity is *that* fickle. We’ll live in the present, assuming the past isn’t consequential. The Internet has only “given the people what they want” in that regard.  To this end, Shirky did a wonderful job with the history of new media; theories are only good if they hold water across time & place.

But this consistently distracted state is in some ways my own life. I have trouble filtering out background conversations when in a restaurant, among other examples. I’m sure it’s giving rise to affective disorders (let’s not get beyond simple parole: dis-order = out of order). How can someone know what to love if there is no order or priority to in and out-flow of info, people, experience, etc.

The spiritual consequences are huge then. Jesus’ 2 commands of love God & fellow-man could be well-undermined by this novelty. That’s why I’m agreeing with a friend’s recent Facebook status: “Discipline is remembering what you love.” Discipline isn’t about saying “no,” so much as remembering, and remembering & reflecting is being killed off.

Reflection is a time-intensive activity, one which now-now-now-or-you’ll-miss-it-or-get-too-far-behind media won’t allow for, and as noted, is required:

“The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren’t even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. “Everything distracts them,” observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab.” — Nicholas Carr

This is exactly what the other side of the debate agrees with as well:

“Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers.”–Clay Shirky

But what I like about Clay’s statement is the next line: “Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read.” Resources maybe anything from mothers to educators, from $ for private tutoring to the publishing industry.. but it is always about time. My own time reading is only worth it if I spend the time to stop every other paragraph or so. Ideas need to sink in for any foundation to be placed. Who wants a skyscraper built on unset, wet concrete? That’s the best analogy I can give for what the Internet is doing: providing shortcuts for our memory, and keeping us from remembering anything. Even the act of scrolling a webpage is vague. Turning a page is much more definitive. I can’t glance-back as easily as I can scroll back & forth. (Ok, maybe not the best example..)

I suppose what this means for future information-design is clearspace. Data can also be held better when it is interacted with. Static graphs are visualization of too many numbers; interaction/overlays, compare-contrast is a beginning for too many graphs. Fickle “daily info-graphics” sent to my inbox or RSS reader only clog my mind, unless they spark interest  for further research (assuming I know where & how to research it!). I’d much rather have the data in contrast with something else, both of which are in connection with present values and personal states of knowledge. This way graphics could be delivered to my inbox for me, which overlap/redundant, and over-time help me learn and meat specified goals.

And finally for a sociological perspective. This little idea about remembering can be expanded further to include any binary-division, even gender-roles. While there’s a pressure from amongst egalitarians to “be equal” between/across genders, there is also a consequence of each gender doing everything, overburdening itself with too much. But that is still no “win” for anyone who would espouse a fascist (Modernist) sociology, where each person must fit the role assigned 100%. (I’m looking at you SB-preachers!)

Update: NYT picked this up too with their own spin that sounds like a good middle ground/awareness campaign.

The WSJ sent a 99% full-sized image in it’s paper today, so I did what anyone else would do: I cut it out and went around the house comparing!

First up, a Kierkegaard book I just got done writing a paper on. It is the size of said small book opened up.  Next, a sheet of college-ruled paper: the screen is a little shorter & wider than such paper, folded in half. That’s more precisely 5 3/4″ x 7 3/4″: The same width of a CD (1.3 times taller), and just about the same size as a DVD-case! Compared to my 13″ macbook screen? The right-half of it, but a bit longer/taller.

The whole thing is nearly the same area as my 7″x10″ Canson sketchpad, which I already carry around everywhere, and like the size of (uh oh!). But overall, it is a tad smaller than I expected.

The icons on the screen are just over 1/2″ in size, and just over 3/4″ apart. So, any ideas about Chess or Checkers are do-able (8×8), but I wouldn’t want a grid anything larger (smaller blocks!) than 10×10. That means full-on Scrabble (R) might not be for grandpa’s cataract-eyes. Likely a non-fullsized board will be made, or panning/scrolling. Either way, better than the present solution, right?

One “feature”: the screen when widened is technically capable of supporting the same keyboard distance from q-p on the 13″ macbook. But my little fingers tend to notice & live between those keys, in cracks which glass-screens don’t have.

Critique: once it decouples from iTunes (and becomes its own device), lets me plug in USB & SD card-stuff, and generally improves as a media creation-device, I’ll be sold. Until then, I’ll be theorizing on all these new toys (Courier!!) could become!

Just last night I found out the glory of Yahoo Pipes. The idea is one for which I’ve wanted & waited a long time: Take *any* web-source & turn it into (through combining, filtering, etc) any other web-source: iCal, RSS, etc.

So the consequence? I now have 3 rss feeds: One for Friend’s Statuses (twitter+facebook), one for news (google news feed) and another for everything else from friends blogs to tech-news.

It would only seem obvious that these 3 can and should be on the same rss reader (I use google reader’s iphone interface, even on my main computer).

The trouble with combining these 3 or 4 types of news into ONE ‘technological ontology’ (a single rss reader) is a simple lessons learned from psychology.. there’s lots of theories like this, but I learned it from Urie Bronfenbrenner, “The Ecology of Human Development.” Basically, we all have various circles, some more core than others, of family, friends, and aquaintences. They affect us differently.

Likewise, we can say data from each source must retain it’s affective priority. Notice how different this is than most News/Social Networking Aggregrates, which merely pull in everything without priority. Likewise, facebook and other marketing groups try to get your affectively involved in their little sphere.

With a little finesse and basic coding-think, yahoo pipes allows me to get each level of data from friends, news & otherwise. Reading them one by one allows me to maintain a relatively consistent affect when reading all 500 tweets, instead of trying to have little affective response to a random news-blip, and then to care deeply over another friends’ status, only to return to not caring. Perhaps that emotional flexibility is possible and desireable in kids, but I’m getting too old for that?

Remember your first cell-phone? It was likely not the *original* cellphone,

In my case, it was a kyocera green-screen on my parents verizon network. It DID have mobile-web (remember those WHTML/WAP-sites?) when I went to Chicago. My next was a color-screened nokia until both myself and the web got serious and my sony-erickson was the fastest GPRS connected phone (which I infrared-connected to my HP WinMo device quite requently!)

Enough about my history, on to my point: I’m a geek, so I loved the capabilities of the phone, no matter how tedious it was. Most consumers aren’t willing to go through the tedium for the glory, and *finally* we have a crop of large-screened phones which allow something aside from left-down-right-up-left-left-down-ok magic of the early Nintendo days!

WinMo tried to be this player years back. Wow! An interface that was colorful, full and wasn’t ridiculously hidden behind 19 menus. It had a Today screen which told me more than the TIME! But Windows/M$ got lazy, were happy to ignore emerging tech while raking in the cash, and Apple took over, overnight.

Now, in the wake of the iPhone, LG & Samsung have created their own semi-smart interaces. I’ve been running the Samsung TouchWiz for awhile now, and I like it. I’ve played with LG’s, and it seems quite on-par.

But just look at this:

Facebook. There. Touch it!

Compared to 4 yrs ago:

Right-Down, Right, ok, Right?

Compared to 10 yrs ago:

There's an interface? Where?

Just got a notice in the mail from Comcast:

“You recently received a message from Comast that stated that we offer ‘unlimited’ high speed internet usage. The message you recieved was in error on this point. Comcast has a usage threshold of 250 Gigabyes per month.. We deliver a high value Internet service that gives you .. the fastest download speeds available – up to 50 Mbps.”

Let’s do the math:

250 GB = 2000000 Mbits
2000000 Mbits/50 Mbits = 40000 seconds
40000 seconds / 3600 seconds = 11.11 hours.

Seriously? I can only use your service for 11 hours out of the 30 days (720hrs)?? That’s 1.5% of the time. That’s worse than pulling a play from a doctor’s office: 10 minutes after waiting 1 hour.

I can’t believe there’s no competitor in my neighborhood.

There’s got to be a million crappy software recipe managers out there. My major concern is that each website now has it’s own version (from foodnetwork & epicurious to kraft!) –how UNinteroperable are these?! The best I get is to physically print-out the recipies. How helpful / futuristic is that? Not at all.

Gourmet to the rescue! This wonderful piece of software is only available for Linux right now, but with a little linux server in the house, what’s the problem?! Somewhere between running VNC to running an X-windows app over ssh (yes, in Mac!) I aim to have this app at the heart of my kitchen-future.. especially with this years promise of cheap android tablets!), as well as Gourmet’s ability to IMPORT webpages (with images!) and export them to a standard format, be it PDF to recipe-XML. (XML would then allow a web-app to be built, btw!)

Today, there’s a happy Mark.

The bits missing from the Courier Video-demos:
First off, it is very, very limited:

• Left:
  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • Web
  • Photos
• Right:
  • Maps (associated with contacts)
  • Journal (dual-pane)
  • web also (wait, which side do I view webpages on.. both?)
• Middle:
  • Clipboard-Pocket

This is it? Doesn’t sound like much. So what do I use my laptop for these days?

• Libraries of media, for which iTunes & Amazon are trying to be the end-all. For this, I likely will run a streaming media source, or keep my library on a home server, so the laptop neWed not have a multi-terabyte drive.
• Basic file editing/viewing, for which Google Documents is trying to be the end-all. And so long as your online (or whenever local caching of GDocs hits) this might work. But Google doesn’t support various Journal formats at present.

Web viewing

There doesn’t seem to be any web-organization, just a list of tabs/Safari-like window-images. My use of the web falls into the 2 categories previously mentioned: the daily views of interest & responsibility (like reading the news & checking the bank) and researching the latest idea & interest I had, or for classes.

File-Viewing

I wanna make sure this has full office & PDF file editing & annotation, otherwise, it’s not a laptop replacement. Clearly this thing won’t be creating the office-heavy/design-heavy files.. but it should have full-view of them.

Filetypes supported are likely OneNote->PDF instead of the millions of incongruent filetypes presently on any one system. Others’ ability to edit & comment on PDFs at present is limited. This is an early-collaboration tool, not a late-collaboration, final-product kind of tool.

Pocket

There is a heavy amount of visual drag-and-dropping, specifically of web/PNG images. But I deal with excel and photoshop files too. Will previews be auto-generated for these as well? How will I know which spreadsheet is which when I place it in the pocket? Sometimes filenames *are* handy.

Minor

We didn’t see any online chat-abilities with the contacts, something my nokia N800 did well.

The 2 biggest hurdles for development:

1. Metadata heavy
2. Handwriting heavy

The iPen, by Finger System, Inc.

First off, sometimes you can judge a book by it’s cover– especially when a marketing department has ahold of the cover. By this I mean the “Ages 5 & up” label. Yes, this IS a kids play toy, and I’m going to try and take it seriously. I hope that doesn’t make me a kid. Likely does.

First Impressions

first 15mins:  holy crap this is fussy! How does this work right at all?

second 15mins:  let’s try to figure some workarounds..

third 15mins:  ok, now with a basic system in place, perhaps there’s a chance.. a very small chance..

last 15mins:  It brings back the good ol’ days of owning a pocket pc.

1 month in: with the right linux-config’d system in place, the iPen has it’s place, and can even replace the need to own a full $1700 tabletPC. For $15, it’s a steal. But the whole repetitive stress thing isn’t any better or worse, but that’s my fault for being tied to this thing for 12hrs /day!

“The System” (My Linux config)

0) You really should use the old-school optical 1mm grid they provide.. graph paper doesn’t cut it. I ended up cutting a 2″x3″ square out & taping it on the corner of my laptop (nearly over the trackpad!) when I’m not at my desk. However, when running in ‘super slow mode’, i need the whole thing. Choose cutting wisely.
1) hold the mouse a bit more upright than a regular pen, especially when not using the grid-pad
2) Slow the mouse settings all the way down: xset m 0 0, (or see my ultra-slowed-down xorg.conf)
3) Use xournal to scribble notes & PDF annotate, zoomed in to full-width (150%), unless running ultra-slow, then tis fine zoomed out where the notebook lines are like college-ruled. (yes, i measured). Xournal also supports graph paper, colored paper & custom-paper sizes. Handy for when I rotate the screen. Also, I found having the default right-click to be the ‘hand’ is very handy (like acrobat’s hand/grab-drag-scrolling)
4) Use cellwriter for single character input (aka PocketPC-land!). Takes some config, but it gets pretty good.
5) Firefox plugin: “Grab and drag”!  This is when it hit me: “Don’t try and use a pen like a mouse. Use a pen like a pen!”

The Speed Test

With cell writer config’d & trained (not a hard process at all),
and using the sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”:
Typing: “THe quick brown fox jumped over hte lazy dog” is 8-9 seconds, with only 2 errors.
Cellwriter: “the quick brown fox jumped overthe lazy dog.” in 58 seconds, first try, then 44s!, with 2 errors as well.
Handwriting on paper: 13seconds
Xournal: 24seconds.

A 5-6 times increase in time is wretched. Especially if I in-line corrected about 4-6 characters thanks to a shaky nervous hand! No doubt I’ve cellwritten faster since this early test, but I seriously doubt it will ever come close to touch typing. The other variable is that when typing, I type faster than I think, so I’m always stopping to think about what I’m saying. But with cellwriter, I’m writing so slow, I can think about what I’m saying. Trouble is, if it’s too slow, I’m thinking about writing the characters & forgetting about what I’m saying.

Improvements

It’s amazing just how sensitive the nature of handwriting is. There’s 2 very strong components to pencil writing that is lacking with this digital pen.
1) Pencils are pressure sensitive across a gradient, not a binary on/off. You can swipe a pencil and get a line. When you lift a pencil while handwriting, it’s more a light drag across the paper than it is a full 1mm lift. Hopefully I’m explaining this right: the ipen requires a 1mm lifting or dropping of the pen to register a swipe. This is not natural, however oddly enough, when the mouse is super-slow, this problem dissipates, as well as with getting used to it.

2) Tracking. When we lift a pen and move it, it now resides to write in the new location. On the slowest mouse motion, the ‘mousing area’ is still 2″ wide x 1.5″ high. This is hardly a one-to-one (like true tabletPC’s have) with a 13.3″ diagonal screen! Second, this pen is very sensitive and you have to lift the pen a good centimeter off the surface to stop it from moving the mouse cursor (to get the mouse cursor where you want it, relative to the hand-on-paper position). This is also shown when setting down & picking up the pen.. a mouse or trackpad will leave the cursor & mouse, the pen must be set & picked up again.
One last comment, I’d prefer to have a scrollwheel where the right click button is. But some of that is solved by FF’s grab-and-drag plugin. If only that plugin was across all X/GNOME/KDE applications!