Spirited Thought

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

Social software maps the networks we already know. Presumably, the goal is to have the systems we interact with enable or inform us about something or someone we do not.

Recently I have been beating a drum with a colleague on the lack of critical thinking people bring to bare, regardless of environment – digital or real – and how we might support more thoughtful interactions. The disturbing trend is that people communicate critique through disengagement and silence. Anyone who has enjoyed a college-level art class can affirm that the most humbling and beneficial moments come from open critiques.

Your work, something you sweat over for hours, is hanging up against a wall along side those of your peers. Artists hang their work on the wall, stand back and review in hopes to see what they might be missing. The things we like and dislike about art often thought to be subjective, that taste is something unique to us. If this were true then more people agree than disagree on esthetically pleasing artistic expression. Go to an art critique and watch as people judge both on the technical execution and on the way the piece makes them feel. For the artist, it is likely the first time anyone has interacted with them around their art; it is the beginning of a dialogue. When there is agreement, the artist has communicated something so well that everyone remarks. If the reaction is not in-line with the artist’s intention, then it is an opportunity to learn and adjust. Art is, at least in part, communication. For whatever reason, we do not ask our peers to hang Power Point slides up on the wall and reflect. Ask a developer to be honest about their anxiety of participating in a code review. We have created a culture of quite, passive, secret thoughts.

People need to be more critical. Not negative, critical. We have an opportunity every day to contribute to the reality we share, if even only to compliment. Why withhold so much in fear that we might offend? Try starting with what you liked and then follow up with your suggestion. Venture out and express how you feel the next time someone asks you for your thoughts. Do not just say, “looks good,” because that is the same as silence.

When you organize jour [sic] social world solely around affinity, then you get an endless hall of mirrors. - Adam Greenfield, Author, Adjunct Professor at New York University, from an interview with Zachary Jean Paradis, Sapient, interview.

Social spaces are about the participants and their connections. If they are unable to show us something other than what we know, they have failed. Collecting the list of people we know is an ego game, whose meaning is short lived. Part of addressing this challenge is in valuing the diversity among us – go beyond gender, race and include thought. Love the person who disagrees with you, because you have the opportunity to learn something new. Be more critical of what you see. Find others that are willing to be more critical of you. Decide that a hall of mirrors, while familiar, is not as interesting as what other people are showing.

It is amazing when the comment section of a blog post is longer than the post. The barrier to post is high enough that most people don’t. The comments I refer to are the ones that equal in quality and value of the original, twitter sized posts need not apply. This barrier is true for many online social interactions for at least three reasons:

First, “what’s in it for me?” goes unanswered. What is the incentive to participate? If you write a blog, it might be part of your life interaction model – comment and catalog in your space while linking to the inspiration. If you bookmark, it might be in hopes to remember and revisit. In general, there are relatively few obvious benefits. One answer is to be heard – just remember to have something worth saying.

Second, the efforts of a few benefit many. The vast majority of information is unvisited, untagged, unrated and uncommented. For those who participate, thank you. The time you take to read, understand and evaluate (even if imperfectly), makes finding information easier. That someone takes the time to “touch” something interesting adds value for those who come behind it. The fact that many are willing to join in, leaves well-worn and lasting marks.

Third, contribution takes time. In our information congested, attention sliced, multi-tasked world, taking a moment to contribute back costs too much, especially when considering a well thought out, well-written comment.

Yet, more of the world is growing up in time when participating is commonplace. Enter stage right: YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg, Twitter and Facebook. The question is, are we saying something worthy of further thinking? There are certainly professional circles that are interested in mining the social data created, but what is it that we are contributing? This is all, very much, a social experiment without the vague beginnings of a thesis. However, it is the world we live in and for an increasing many, the only world they know.

One of Michael Wesch’s anthropology classes at Kansas State pulled together another three minutes of visual delight expressing the current state of the student.

With an average class size of 115, only 18% of their teachers can recognize them and call them by name. Let us be generous and say a given student has 10 teachers, that means two know them from another. Eighty percent of the time, students are anonymous.

This is good, because they only complete half of the assigned readings 70% of which are irrelevant to their life. You can just feel the low grown from all the humanities majors, especially those from Ivy League schools. Makes you wonder what they missed in the other half of the readings or what it means to be relevant. The good news is that they read! The eight books per semester average seems insignificant to the time and attention devoted to the 2300 web pages and over 1200 FaceBook profiles. I am still stunned that they read! The level of real literacy is astounding. I digress. The interesting part of this is that the books and assigned readings have been hand selected by highly educated people. The web pages and FaceBook profiles are self-selected. With the undisputed fact that we exist in information chaos, the idea that students would skip 50% of the hand-selected literature is amazing. Furthermore, the content of the websites and certainly the sophistication of FaceBook profiles is not quite that of the New York Times – most college reading is, at least it use to be.

Students write 42 pages for class in a semester and over 500 pages of email. Apparently, there are 105 days in a semester at Kansas State, which means a student on average writes one page for class every 2.5 days and in that same amount of time will generate 12 pages in email. Are we asking students to do too much? Certainly, writing for class is harder than writing email, but when they enter the work force, most of the emails, papers and presentations they will give should approximate the level they develop for class work.

At one point in the video a young lady holds up a sign saying that when you total all of the time they spend on things in a day it goes over 24 hours. Brilliant! Soft productivity measures are often captured in “time saved.” Many joke that we save more time than there is in a day by introducing and improving business solutions. In the next scene, a student holds a sign saying they multitask, because they have to. We all do or we cannot competitively produce results. Those 24 hours need to contain the productivity of a much longer day. The busiest among us seem to deprive of sleep, regular meals and personal time to accomplish their goals. The students say they get seven hours of sleep, which is good, because sleep is important for a healthy mind and body. Well-rested people are more productive than their non-stop counterparts are over time – a simple Google search will show you all the ways skimping on sleep hurts. The multitasking skill will come in handy as they cram more than a days activity and get countless hours back from corporate IT to fit it all in.

Generations of students are being built by systems that fail to fully educate. As a society, we communicate academic achievement by single, standardized measures, not more fundamental values around identity, society and global impact for example. We fail to consider the fundamental changes in our children (e.g. read about millennials) as relevant input to evolving education. We alter the standards by which we set and measure expectations by allowing students to proceed with no correction – they too will become teachers, doctors, business-folk and what will they value? If we are what we eat | read | think | express, then what does it mean when your reading and writing is so FaceBook, Twitter and email focused?