Resistance Is Futile

I used to be quite a disciplined reader. Back when I rode the GO train into work every day (this was 8 or 9 years ago) I used to be able to read straight through a book from beginning to end (not in the same day, mind you!). Nowadays, that seems like a distant memory as well as an admirable achievement. Lately, I've been joking with my wife about how I've become a "chronic book starter". I'll start a book (non-fiction ones, that is) and some other topic catches my interest and I'll start another book about that other topic. I still have every intention of finishing the first book but my mind just gets engaged with the new topic and I have to just start reading about it. This pattern continues and, at the present moment, I believe I have started a good handful of books (5 or 6) without having finished any one of them.

I wonder if this behaviour might be related to hypertextual thinking. In fact, now that I think about it, this tendency of mine to start books - jumping on topics that engage my mind - started at around the time when I became a more frequent net surfer (i.e., the rise of high speed internet access). I'm grabbing information all over cyberspace whenever a certain question springs to mind and I believe this way of thinking has crept into my "physical" life: I now do this with books! I have a question, or I'm curious and/or interested and/or engaged about something, I and pick up a book about it and start reading. Might this can be considered a form of attention deficit disorder (ADD)? I tend not to focus on any one topic for any great length of time. Because I spend so much time on the net (not only at home, but also at work), my mind has gotten used to (spoiled by?) the fact that I can just explore or investigate a query at any time; just open up another browser window and go. In realSpace, it's "just buy another book and start reading!"

I wonder if anyone else has experienced this kind of phenomenon: habits from cyberspace creep into realSpace or begin to shape other cognitive processes in realSpace. I can see how the ability to edit your communication (be it in a blog or an e-mail) might have an impact on how we verbally communicate. Might we get so used to being able to edit and correct what we say that quick and witty communication may become a lost art...?
Discuss

This started out as a posting to a discussion on Katherine's blog but it turned out to be quite lengthy and I thought it warranted a new post in my own blog. (Sorry about that Katherine.)

I think communication takes place on several different levels. When you talk on the phone, there are a number of things being communicated (apart from the actual words/content): tone of your voice, volume, speed, etc. When it comes to e-mail, there is NONE of that. The only thing that is communicated is the text (and perhaps some emphasis, when possible, i.e., italicized, underlined, or bolded text). The fewer the levels on which the communication takes place, the less personal it is, and therefore the lesser the possibility of collaboration.

Talking on the phone definitely communicates on more levels than e-mail, but the phone also communicates on fewer levels than visual contact. When you can see a person communicating, there are a bunch of other levels on which to absorb the communication: posture, facial expression (the eyes say it all!), gestures, etc.

I would even go so far as to say that video conferencing is not the same as face-to-face or in-person communication. With video conferencing, you don't get the same appreciation for the spacing that one uses when communicating: Does the person talk closely to you (to borrow the phrase from Seinfeld, is he/she a "close talker")? Or does s/he talk at a distance, respecting your personal space? Does the person pace when talking, or rock back and forth? etc. You may be able to catch some of this via a video conference hook-up, but often times you can't see details like that on a screen. Therefore, I would contend that in-person communication conveys more information than the video conference.

All this leads me to believe that the more levels on which communication takes place, the more "human" it becomes, and therefore the greater the potential for collaboration. (I say "potential" for collaboration because sometimes the intent of communication, whatever the medium, is not to collaborate!)

I do find that there is a certain "dehumanization" effect with different mediums; the fewer levels on which the communication takes place, the more "dehumanizing" the communication gets. In fact, this reminds of the time I once really hurt the feelings of a friend of mine during a thread of e-mail conversations. One thing in particular that I did that really upset her was the practice of quoting something

> that she had said,
> kind of like this

and then responding to what I had quoted. She was so upset and offended at that type of communication! I was nothing short of bewildered and completely surprised. But that just illustrates the potential for misread messages or misunderstandings in a medium like e-mail that takes place on really only one level of communication.

In the business world, one's feelings tend not to get hurt because the messages conveyed on e-mail are very business-oriented -- unemotional and neutral; and one tends not to have too many colleagues or business associates as friends. I still think it is "dehumanizing" in the sense that you really only know the person on in one dimension.

Thanks for the interesting post, Katherine!
Discuss

What would be considered the "reality of cyberspace"? Is it the subjective reality that I spoke about in my previous post that constitutes that reality - the experience of the on-line encounter? Or can this subjective experience be reduced to the physical dimension - the hardware, the network cables, the physical 1's and 0's that are stored in the code? Is the experience of a web page "real" in the sense that that web page exists on a server somewhere, on a segment (fragments?) of the harddrive? When we say that this virtual world is real, can I open up the web server, pull out the harddrive, point to it and say, "There! There it is!" ??
Discuss

I was really intrigued by the idea that Mark mentioned in tonight's session when he asked: "What is reality?" Is it constituted only by things that can be touched and/or seen, experienced/verified by others, in a physical sense? Or is it something that can be more private, like the experience of meeting someone online in a chat room somewhere? Both experiences are "real" for the person experiencing it, but one is closer to the physical end of the spectrum of reality while the other is closer to the "private" end of the spectrum.

Another example: Many people will say that God is very real. Christians (I come from a Christian perspective and I won't even try to speak for other faiths or religions) say that God is very personal, that they have a relationship with God. Pentecosts in particular claim to "experience" God in a very personal way. Contrast this with what atheists (at least, most atheists that I've come in contact with) generally say: God is not real because his presence cannot be proven. Nothing exists outside of the material world. If it can't be measured or observed, it doesn't exist.

Now, I'm not here to try to prove the existence of God. But I think there are two extremes of "reality" being illustrated here. One is a very personal experience, difficult to physically verify with anyone else; another is a very physical existence.

I think in the case of collaborative communities and virtual reality, these spaces are "real" in the sense that they are experienced by the participants in that space. What seems to take away from the "real-ness" of these spaces is the fact that they cannot be shared or verified, at least not physically with other people around you. For example, in your den, you might be participating in some kind of cyberspace environment and, after "being there" (mentally anyway) for some period of time, you walk into the living room and tell your spouse about this experience. To him or her, this is something that is in your head - a very private experience. It's not "as real" as some thing that she can pick up, look at, examine, feel, smell, etc. Fewer senses are being engaged in this case. It's only her ears and her imagination that verify it's realness. Compare this to the physical reality of an object that you can pick up and examine - your senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and perhaps taste are all engaged and this physical reality is "more real". Of course, the experience of this physical object is much less personal and extremely, well ... objective. So perhaps we can define the spectrum of reality to go from subjective to objective?

People tend define "reality" as that which is objective, at least that's been my experience. We all have our own subjective realities - a collection of our thoughts, our visions, our dreams and nightmares from the night before, the inner voice we constantly hear, etc. These are thoughts and mental processes that are definitely real - real in the sense that they are happening as some kind of neural activity in one's brain, not imagined; there are neurons being fired and synapses being triggered (do synapses get triggered anyway?) that represent the "reality" of these thoughts, visions, dreams, online experiences -- things that are very personal. But the fact that they are subjective is precisely why they are rarely thought of as "real". They cannot be independently verified by someone else.

Reality tends to be that which is objectively verifiable and agreed upon by others. Now that begs the question -- who are "the others"?
Discuss

Since I started taking this course, I started thinking about issues like technology and connectivity and how this affects, in particular, work culture. This is relevant to me as I work in a large corporation with interesting work habits that, I think, have been changed by the development of connective technology. Here is what I've observed since the course began (i.e., since I started making a conscious effort to think about how we've changed):

1) E-mail captures the scattered thoughts of the information worker and allows him to send out those thoughts whenever they occur to him.

2) Technology has facilitated a proliferation of "multi-tasking" in that it allows people to juggle many different projects and different issues all at once, mainly due to the fact that randomly occurring thoughts are captured and communicated via e-mail.

3) The recipients of e-mail subsequently are bombarded by the randomly occurring (yet relevant) multi-threading thoughts of their peers and managers. This leads to an huge increase in the volume of e-mail being received.

4) More often than not, important e-mails are not read simply because they are buried in an avalanche of e-mail.

5) Subsequently, issues in the workplace are resolved not via e-mail (because many of them are not read or are put off until later), but via face-to-face conversations.

I have been trying to test the validity of my observation #5. This past week, I've resisted the urge to send out an e-mail on an issue and instead chosen to walk to the person's desk and ask him/her about the issue. In all cases, my question was answered and the issue was resolved immediately. This has decreased the number of "open threads" / open issues I have to deal with at any given time.

When I have chosen to send an e-mail, the issue is allowed to remain "open" until the recipient of the e-mail reads it and decides to respond. WWhen the recipient reads the e-mail (one of countless e-mails he/she needs to respond to), the recipient inevitably chooses to "deal with this later". The result is that my issue is left open.

The larger result is that all the projects that are dependent on resolution of these issues are left hanging. Instead of having closure on many issues, I've got multiple open issues to deal with and manage.

I wish I could do a more scientific study on this and perhaps my research project for this course will relate to efficiency of technology in the workplace. However, my very initial observations show that e-mail is actually creating a bottleneck that would not have existed otherwise.

How can we (in the corporate world) use technology to the degree that it actually makes people more efficient as opposed to slowing things down? This may not be the case in other spheres, like the academic realm (guessing?) or perhaps the not-for-profit world, but I think there is an epidemic going on in the corporate world - an overuse of e-mail and an abuse of technology.

Discuss

When reading about online-marriages, "meditainment", haptic touch, etc., the skeptic in me (can you tell I'm a bit of a skeptic?) asks the question, "Why are these people doing this?" Am I off base here or have the people/scientists who are developing these things watched too much Star Trek?

It used to be that invention was driven by need. I realize that many "inventions" ended up being used for purposes that were not the original intent (gunpowder being the best example in my opinion). But, while most inventions have had their usages twisted from the original intent, at least there was an original intent! What is the intent of haptic touch? Online-marriages? Even "virtual reality"? What is the point of all this? Are these developments nothing more than technological toys, distractions? Shouldn't we be spending our time on more important matters, like healing that rift between an old friend, re-igniting the romance with your partner, or developing that latent artistic talent?

Like Tammy, I am fascinated by much of this. At the same time, I think some of this is just a waste of time. In her words, "I can't help but wonder how far will we go as a society before we become completely disconnected with reality as we know it..." Whatever happened to real face-to-face human relationships? Do we worship technology so much that we've forgotten the value of face-to-face conversation, we've forgotten the value that we can bring into our physical world? Will anyone question the motivation behind these developments? I don't mean to say that there are sinister intentions to these developments. But, honestly, how can the world be made a better place with on-line hugs? Go hug a homeless person on the street if you want to make the world a better place.

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."
Discuss

I'm wondering what difference there is, cognitively, in reading from a physical piece of paper vs. reading from a screen. (This probably falls into the realm of "screenology" that Derrick introduced a few weeks ago.) The reason I thought of this contrast between paper and screen is because I just spent about five minutes printing out some articles that I found posted on the web - articles that I could have easily read online. But I preferred to print them out and read them on paper. It made me think of something, and that was the fact that I am a much better reader when I read off of paper than when I read from a screen - even when I'm not marking up the page or highlighting it; even when I'm simply reading. It's not just the portability of the paper; there's something untangible about handling it, bending it, turning the pages, feeling it in my hand, even smelling it. That's a completely different type of communication experience for me, for some reason. All your senses are engaged, instead of just your sight (as is the case with a screen).

E-books and e-documents have not been nearly as successful as was once anticipated (at least not to my knowledge). I have an e-book reader on my Palm Pilot. Have I ever bought or read a book on it? No. Was it because of cost or a lack of selection? No. I just prefer reading from a physical book, bending the pages, hearing the crack of the spine, folding the corner of the page to remind myself of a memorable passage, etc. There's something missing in the experience of reading from a screen; there seems to be less of a connection.

With the proliferation of on-line journals and blogs and the trend towards putting everything on the web, will society migrate towards a different kind of reading experience and altogether forget the beauty of an open book?

Discuss

These discussions are pretty fruitful so far. I'm wondering (being a rookie at blogging) if this quality of discussion is achieved with other blogs - ones that are not organized around Masters-level courses and seminars but just open to the public. Do we get "fools" like the one who posted to Tammy's blog? Or do you get thoughtul and intelligent people?

I think an important "success factor" for blogs is the ability to match up intelligent people and group them into discussions that truly interest them. From what I can tell so far, the subject matter of blogs can be extremely specific. Try doing a Google search on blogs or even a Google search on a more specific topic like blogs and media studies and try to find a good blog in those huge result sets. It's hard to find a good blog where intelligent people gather and talk about specific things that truly interest you.

Again, I'm speaking as a rookie, but my thinking at this point is thus: our course blogs will be very fruitful due to the structuring around them (i.e., our weekly meetings, seeing each other face-to-face every so often, the structure of the lectures and discussions, etc.). But how fruitful are blogs that are just "out there"? Are you really able to get a good audience together? Google doesn't seem to help...or maybe I need a more specific Google search topic?

I may be convinced ... one of these days.

Discuss