These Days, High-Tech Options Can Short-Circuit a Romance.

Can a texter love a Twitterer? Can star-crossed lovers overcome wire-crossed gadgets? Can these relationships be saved?

...

Each form of communication has its own followers and rules, which means dating today is a law of inverse proportions: As ways to communicate increase, the chances you will date someone who speaks your technological language decrease.

Very interesting article on today's Washington Post about how technology affects romantic relationships.

Social Networks

Here's an funny Facebook status update from one of my "friends" (yes, one of those with whom I haven't talked for a while):

Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, AIM, G-Chat - if you think about it, we have enough personal networking distractions to keep us completely occupied every minute of every day at work. If only we got paid for it...

It reminded me of last class' presentations!

And here's LinkedIn, to those who want to know more. See Wikipedia's entry on LinkedIn here.

I want more and I want it now.

DeGrandpre's readings made me reflect upon technology's implications over our society, especially over our children. What will it be like 100 years from now? Will engineers still be trying to develop a faster video game, something even more interactive than Wii (and perhaps Wii's sucessors)? Will ALL, and I mean ALL, newspapers be online-only? (Well, not necessarily online, but delivered in some interactive fashion.) Will hardcopies of books only exist in some sort of "antique" bookstores and libraries? Will libraries exist at all? I'm not sure what the answer to these questions is but, if DeGrandpre's assumptions are right, and I think they are, then the answer would be "yes."

"Another all-too-popular solution is to simply plug in more stimulating activities at school and home," says DeGrandpre. I was at a party the other day, where there were lots of young kids playing around adults. A "bored" 3-year-old started to become grumpy and complainy, when her mother took a portable DVD player and made the girl watch a movie (I think it was Madagascar). I must admit that it worked: the little girl was quiet and entertained for quite a while (so that all the adults could talk). Is that right, though? How about giving the little girl a piece of paper and crayons, or even an age-appropriate book, to help develop her cognitive abilities? "That's too much work," some parents would argue. Parents try to accomodate their young kids to a distracted way of life rather than trying to reduce their distraction by unplugging them, says DeGrandpre. I totally agree with him, because that's what I have seen lately.

Our habituation to all this stimulation makes the unplugged world to fail to grab our attention, and, as a result, people have constant need for an "optimal level of stimulation," DeGrandpre argues. No longer it is enough for many people to read the hardcopy of a newspaper, they need a video to go with it, I would add to DeGrandpre's "no longer" list. Although DeGrandpre wrote Digitopia a few years ago, his principles totally apply today. People's hunger for even more stimulation never stops. What's coming after Wii, Playstation 3 and games like Second Life? I'm sure there will be something new to satisfy people's "inflated need for speed." Wii's "wow factor" will soon be over, and users will want more out a video game.

Similarly, when DeGrandpre talks about our ever-lasting need for speed, something came to my mind right away: people are always complaining about their internet connection. Have you all realized that? It doesn't matter how fast it is -- people will always complain and want a faster one. Back in Brazil, where my house's broadband internet connection wasn't as fast as the connection we have on the UT campus, I used to complain a lot. Now that I'm here and have a pretty fast internet connection, I still find myself complaining at times. Isn't that funny? Does this happen to you as well?

"The more sensory addicted you become, the more you find that the unplugged world doesn't go fast enough or seem interesting enough," says DeGrandpre. There has to be a "half way through," in my opinion. Kids need to be exposed to fast computers and good graphics, but they should also appreciate and know the value of activities such as drawing, listening to music without the videoclip, and reading a book. As we discussed in one of our previous classes, because there is no end for the development of technology, I think it will be up to parents to stimulate children's interest in the unplugged world. This doesn't mean that I don't appreciate technology and that I think that kids have to keep a distance from it. I know it may sound a bit contradictory. I'm only defending that parents try to promote kids interest in the unplugged world as well.

Should the public's right to access information surpass news stories subjects' right to privacy?

As I read "A Nation of Voyeurs," I remembered of an issue I had recently seen in the Spanish newspaper El País. I will try to explain it to the best of my ability (my sources are in Spanish).

El País' reader's advocate (that's right, it's an actual position that the newspaper has) Milagros Pérez Oliva discusses in an article the Internet's role in exposing the subjects cited in the daily's news stories.

"If you do a name search using my name on Google, you will see that the second result is a story about me, from twenty years ago, which is not nice and which I don't want my grandchildren to see. (...) I kindly aske you [El País] to remove it." This is a section of a letter written by a Buenos Aires pharmacist that was sent to El País and reproduced by Oliva in her article. In 1998, El País published a story about the Argentine man, who had been arrested for alleged connections with the separatist group ETA.

According to Oliva, El País receives on average three removal requests per week -- all urging the newspaper to remove unpleasant stories from its digital files. "The concern is understandable," she writes. "But it's not as simple as that."

Consulted by the reader's advocate, the legal department of El País said the newspaper cannot change its past. "That would distort history. The files are untouchable. The problem is the ease with which Google or any other search engine makes these stories accessible," writes Oliva, quoting the daily's legal department.

In response, Google's director of institutional relations said it is not the search engine's task to block information. "We just crawl and index Web pages for public access. When someone asks us to withdraw any sort of information, we address the person to the owner of the page, the only one that can modify it," writes Oliva.

In a recent resolution of a lawsuit brought against Google and El País, the Spanish Agency for Data Protection concluded that the ability to freely access a certain news story "directly affects the personal situation of the victim in a justified and legitimate way." The agency ordered that Google removed the information about the lawsuit author from its search index and blocked any access to it. In the name of freedom of expression, the agency rejected the complaint against El País, but noted that the need to publish the identity of story subjects must be better balanced.

What do you think about this? How can we, as (future) reporters, better balance the identity of the subjects in our stories? Is that possible at all?

Should the public's right to access information surpass news stories subjects' right to privacy? I guess most of us would say yes: after all, the information is true and accurate, it did happen, and it's not our fault that those people did what they did (the pharmacist was arrested for alleged connections with ETA; Michael was arrested for DUI). Therefore, all news stories ever published should be open and accessible to the public. But... what if WE were one of those subjects?

Open Source and Diversity

I think the open source concept is brilliant. Nowadays people give a lot of importance to diversity, right?

I believe the Internet and other daily tools that we use should be diverse. And by that I mean that they should not be in the hands of only one or two big corporations. Competition motivates the creation or development of better products. Plus, competition may make big corporations review how much they charge for their products and, hopefully, bring them down.

Today, Internet Explorer is clearly a better product ever since its main competitor, Firefox, appeared. Here's an example: IE didn't offer the tabbed browsing feature (that is, to open multiple Web pages within the same browser window) until 2005.

"The feature--long offered by IE competitors like Opera, Safari and Firefox, and by browser shells built to run on top of IE--is one of many that Web surfers have said they missed in the aging IE 6," says a CNET article published on June 8, 2005.

To me, it's much more convenient and time-efficient to have all my Web pages open within the same window than to have multiple windows, which I think also slows down my computer. So I assume this can be considered a good example on how IE is a better product today.

This takes me back to the article about "Mitchell Baker." She "considers it a success that Firefox has already spurred Microsoft to invest again in browser innovation," and I have to agree with that based on my own experience with Web browsers.

In fact, I read that Microsoft is building a new Web browser: Gazelle. The article says that Microsoft is "hoping [Gazelle] will be more secure than existing browsers while at the same time being able to function as an operating system platform for future web-applications." As we can see, Microsoft is clearly investing in browser innovation.

I must confess, though, that I started using Firefox on a daily basis not too long ago. When my computer crashed a year or so ago and I lost everything that was in it, I got it repaired and had to install Windows again. I guess something went wrong and, almost every time I opened IE, it would crash, an error message would appear, and the pages/tabs I was working on would be closed. Because I had Firefox installed in my computer as well, I started using it. Today, I don't even remember what IE was like. Firefox meets my needs and it never ever crashed or gave me error messages. At work, I will chose Firefox over IE. At UT, I will do that, too. In short, I'm a Firefox adept. :)

I believe the "Diffusion of Innovation Theory" also applies to the open source technologies.

"Diffusion is the process in which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system." (Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations)

Because so many people use open source software and have a good experience, these people spread the word and, as a consequence, other people start trying open source software. If they have a good experience, they will pass the word on to other people, who will try the products, and so on and so forth.

Generally speaking, it takes time for an innovation to reach a lot of people. For several reasons, some take less time (electricity, light) and some take longer (microwave, telephone). So, according to the article about "Mitchell Baker", today, Firefox has a market share of 8-10%. In the future, I expect it to be a much larger number because Firefox will have new adepts/adopters, who will chose it over the leading browser, as it happened to me.

As I was searching the Internet to find out more about open source, I saw that there's an open source software for Photoshop! It's called Gimpshop and, supposedly, is very similar to Photoshop. I'm definitely downloading it and trying it out. If the product really works and has the same features of Photoshop, I think it's great that people don't necessarily need to rely on Adobe, nor they need to contribute to the Adobe monopoly with Photoshop.

And below is an interesting CNET video about Gimpshop and other useful open source software:

Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains

And here's a blog post on Wired.com about something we've been discussing in class: technology (and, with it, the overload of information) and how it affects our attention. Very interesting!

In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively.

The danger of the media equation

Although it seems a bit surreal to me that media and real life are the same, as Nass and Reeves argue in "The Media Equation," I was able to identify with some things that they mention.

"[T]he more a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules, the more enjoyable the technology will be to use" (p. 8)

When I read this sentence, it reminded me of how newspapers and TV networks are much more interactive today, therefore consistent with social rules.

When the spectator reads or watches something of his/her interest, he or she will feel compelled to respond to that. Because both newspapers and TV channels have their own online version, which interacts with their print or broadcast version, people are able to interact with the content, with news anchors or writers, and with each other -- therefore making the whole experience a more enjoyable one. Does this make any sense? :)

"When our brains automatically respond socially and naturally because of the characteristics of media or the situations in which they are used, there is often little to remind us that the experience is unreal. ... This is effective, for example, at a scary movie." (pp. 12, 13)

For this reason, I haven't watched scary movies since I realized that it doesn't make me any good to watch them. I feel nervous and scared before, during and especially after I watch it. I can't sleep at night, thinking that the bad guy will come after me, too (haha). So I simply don't watch this type of movies anymore because they seem/feel a bit too real and I don't like that feeling.

I know this sounds stupid, but it is exactly what the text authors argue -- "Absent a significant warning that we've been fooled, our old brains hold sway and we accept media as real people and places." I'm unconsciously fooled by the media, I guess. But come on, girls in the class, who has never cried during a sad movie? Has anybody seen Marley and Me? Yeah, I could barely open my swollen eyes the next day. :)

I guess all of this relates to a post that Eun Sook recently wrote on the "Reset Syndrome."

People who suffer PC reset syndrome tend to think a criminal act easily, because they have an illusion between cyber space and reality. In addition they think that is okay they can press reset button in reality.

Although our brains are very easily tricked by what's real and what's not, I believe people should try to differentiate both. The PC Reset Syndrome, for instance, is a disease and may harm the people involved.

The author of "A Human-Centered Technology" is worried about that.

"I am concerned that the new tools have moved us in unexpected ways to accept experience as a substitute for thought." (p. 15)

As a solution, he says that we need the "effort of reflection." He argues that, instead of having a "brilliant lecturer" speak to school children, and of showing these kids "prepackaged films and videos " to engage them, the school needs to make them think.

The problem is that the author doesn't give concrete actions that schools should to take in order to make young students reflect.

So what we, as heavy technology users, can do in order not to accept the technological experience as a substitute for thought? Any suggestion?

The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives (NYT story)

Here's a NYT story published on Feb.16 that is EXACTLY about what we discussed last class:

"The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information..." Read more here.

As technology evolves, social interactions change

Recognizing and analyzing people's agency in the usage and effects of technology is an important step in understanding our social world. (Humphreys: Cellphones in public, p. 829)

At first, the text "Making Connections: Single Women's Use of the Telephone in Dating Relationships With Men" seemed irrelevant to me. I often asked myself while reading it: "Really? You wrote an entire research article to tell me things that I already know about?" But after thinking about it for a moment, and especially after I read "Cellphones in public: social interactions in a wireless era," I figured how technology, no matter what it is (i.e. cell phone, computer), affects people's interactions and, as a consequence, our social world.

Back in 1993, when Amy Sarch's article "Making Connections" was published, telephone use showed an interesting pattern in women's dating relationships -- that only men were expected to pursue them. The social norm ruled that women could or should not show their interest. That obviously affected how they communicated via phone. Women weren't supposed to call. Women were expected to anxiously and passively sit and wait for the men's attitude. WHat a horrible feeling!

I experienced that during my teenage years, although I must confess that I didn't always sit and wait. :) Perhaps I belong to a generation that started to see things differently, to not accept the norms, and to act more proactively. There's a good chance that the advances in technology contributed to that.

Nowadays, with the newer generations of cell phone and social networking sites, men and women in dating relationships don't need to rely on telephone only to communicate. In fact, most people don't. I have noticed that people who are still seeing each other and/or have just started to go out together will most frequently text message or facebook each other instead of calling. Does it matter who sends the message first? I'm not really sure. Perhaps men are still expected to be more active than women, but that's no longer that big of a problem as far as I can see it. Of course I am speaking from the Western culture perspective and this may not be true in other cultures.

Sarch discusses the social meaning of answering machines on p. 140 -- she says that women would not leave a message when they first reached the answering machine of their dates. After carefully thinking about what their message would be, they would call again and only then leave the "right" message. Nowadays, in an era when couples can can text message and facebook each other, leaving the wrong message is no longer a problem. People can think about what they are going to say and leave the message right away.

So it's interesting to see how technology can bring different types of interactions to our society. And, to me, this is the most important aspect of both readings.

Below is a funny video I found on Vimeo, which shows how people are now often choosing texting over talking... a consequence of technology?

Welcome to the Attention Economy!

It's very interesting to see how the author of "Welcome to the Attention Economy" applies economic definitions to both information and attention. "Today, attention is the real currency of businesses and individuals," he says.

We've been discussing in class about the development of technology and how it has affected our lives, but I don't think anybody has mentioned (enough) how hard it is for us (human beings) to cope with what the advancements in technology have brought us. One thing it has certainly brought us is an exhaustive amount of information.

"Previous generations of citizens didn't have an attention problem, at least not compared to ours. They didn't have the Internet with its ever-increasing number of Web sites. At most, they had a few channels of broadcast television, a local newspaper, and a few magazines. ... The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than in all the written material available to a reader in the fifteenth century. "

So it's like a cycle. The more technology we have, the more information (or access to it) we have. The more information we have, the bigger the demand for people's attention to receive and communicate that information becomes. "The technologies were used to communicate more information to more people, who then went on to create even more knowledge, which then had to be communicated to other people within the organization, thus creating the need for more bandwidth, and so on, and so on. This simultaneously virtuous and vicious cycle got us where we are today," the author says.

A couple of years ago I started complaining to my mom about my lack of memory. I wouldn't remember things I had recently done. I would watch a movie I had already seen and not remember the story nor the ending. I would read a book and, a few months later, not remember what had happened to the main character.

I went to our family doctor, who said I needed to pay more attention to things. But I wasn't happy with that "diagnostic." Some time later I decided to go to a neurologist (yeah, not remembering things really bothered me), who, after talking to me for some time, told me that we have a selective memory and there's only this much information it can absorb. "Can you imagine if we absorbed all the information we are exposed to everyday?" he asked. So I now assume there's nothing wrong with me, my memory, or my brain. I just select the kind of information I'll pay attention to. And after that conversation I had with the neurologist, I've been trying to pay more attention to what's really important to me, and not so much to the rest. It's a hard task, though, and I can't always accomplish it.

This is basically what the "Welcome to the Attention Economy" is about. "But remember that if attention goes one place, then it can't go another," the author warns. "As a consumer of information, I have to be very careful about my attention allocation," he adds.

It is really incredible how businesses can easily fail if its managers don't allocate their attention effectively in, say, communicating with employees and making the right decisions.

Now the main question is... will this ever get better? According to the author, no, it won't. "As the amount of information increases, the demand for attention increases."

What we have to do, he says, is "more focus on, and more rapid processing of, informational messages," like e-mail messages. Who hasn't ever deleted an important e-mail because of lack of attention? We have to be able to manage our attention and where it goes. But... how do we do that? Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed that the author doesn't provide us with many answers regarding what people can do in order to become "diligent managers of attention." But at least now I can be even more aware than I was before reading this chapter. Perhaps I should read the whole book. : )

How, and where, to hyperlink

The Online Journalism Review has a post about hyperlinking. Some of you may find it interesting, and it may also contribute to our blogging, so here it is.

The Communications Revolution

By having full, easy access to the telephone, the television and the Internet, many of us end up taking for granted the process it took for these telecommunications technologies to evolve.

It is crazy to imagine that, in 1956, when the first transatlantic telephone cable went on-line, only 89 simultaneous conversations could take place between Europe and North America. According to Frances Cairncross, "international and long-distance call rates have been falling, changing our mental map of the world," and, thanks to that, I can communicate via phone with my parents and friends back in Brazil on a daily basis. It is incredibly cheap. And, although the telephone does and cannot substitute a hug, it does bring us closer despite the distance. So I do agree with Cairncross when she says that "[d]istance will no longer determine the cost of communicating electronically" -- or the so-called "death of distance."

When I was about 8 years old, in 1992 or so, I remember it was very expensive for the Brazilian population to get a landline phone. Not everyone had one. People would even have telephone shares in the stock market, which completely disappeared only a few years later, when telephones became much cheaper and affordable (and the shares had no longer value). When my grandma passed away, in 1995, my mom inherited a landline from her, which I recall being worth a good amount of money. The same wouldn't apply today.

The discussion about mobile phones also called my attention as I read the text. "For conversations, people will come to use mobile phones almost exclusively," Cairncross says. As we can see below in the Associated Press video (from May 2008), this is apparently what is happening here in the U.S.



But until today, cell phone minute rates are pretty expensive in Brazil. Obviously, it's not as expensive as it was five years ago and it's much more accessible to everyone, but people will use their landline phones for longer conversations (even local) and long-distance and international calls. This clearly doesn't apply to the U.S., where in most cases long-distance rates cost as much as local rates. That is why, I believe, most families still have landline phones in Brazil.

On a side but related note, Cairncross says that "[a]lready [the Internet] carries telephone and video conferences as well as live television and radio broadcasts." In one of my classes, we started learning about Podcasting, which sparkled my interested in it. Today, I subscribed to a couple of them and was amazed at the sound quality and all the information we can get through free podcasts, which can be subscribed to and downloaded automatically when new content is added. However, podcasts are still evolving. People are still getting used to this new tool and source of information. But that made me think whether the radio as we have seen it over the years will continue to exist or become obsolete, just like landline phones are starting to.

Readings // Eva

All the three texts brought up very interesting points, some of which had never crossed my mind before.

I was stuck, however, when I read Is Google Making us Stupid?. Like the author, Nicholas Carr, I also often find myself struggling to read longer pieces, such as novels or research articles. Indeed, it used to be easier for me to read these longer pieces a few years ago. I had never realized, though, that my brain could be changing because of how much I use the Internet -- for leisure, work and school. Yes, I must agree that "the Net is becoming a universal medium," as Carr said.

I'm not saying these changes (to Internet users' brains) are good or bad. If they are true, which science will tell us sooner or later, everyone should be aware of them, because then we'd have the need for two kinds of literacy: an offline, and an online. And both would be equally important. That is, it is important for kids, for instance, to be able to effectively read (print) novels as much as it is for them to be able to effectively read online. And this thought refers me to Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?.

The Internet shoudn't be the enemy of reading in print. It should complement reading and add to the users' knowledge. Parents and schools need to find a way to teach their kids to appreciate books and libraries as much as the Internet and all the wonderful resources it has to offer.

Carr says: "Research that once requires days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes." I do agree with him. What I don't agree is that one excludes the other. The Internet is here as a research aid, but it does not substitute books and periodicals in libraries. The Internet should serve as a guide to those in search of information. It is important for these people, if they have access to libraries (like we do at UT), to go after other sources of information. It is important for parents, teachers and professors to teach their kids and students that the Internet is just ONE of the resources available out there, that what they see online is not always true, and that it is important to question and not just accept what you see first. Kids need to be able to recognize what information is reliable and what isn't online. I know there is a lot of junk, but there also is a lot of good, useful information and articles written by scholars online. That's why I say that, when doing a research, the Internet can and should be the starting point, but definitely not the final one. These would be some of my answers to Alexandra Frean in White bread for yound minds.

There aren't answers, however, to all of the questions posed by the readings -- perhaps none of those questions has exact answers. This week's readings were extremely worth it in the sense that they've made me think about such a debatable topic (the Internet and its consequences to the society).