Somewhat naively I thought I had sold my old laptop for £160 within a day of putting it on Gumtree. Turns out I haven’t and that (quel suprise!) I was unlikely to receive payment if I sent it. So to anyone else in this situation, resist the temptation to believe you’ve found a buyer and lower your unrealistic initial asking price:

Hello, I was just browsing through gumtree to see if i can get a very good and nice item for a very good friend and a colleague of mine who has just been posted abroad on a training course on Environmental pollution while i have being posted to Asia on a training course on Population so we are into exchange of gifts with each other, and i came across your lovely item.

I want to know if the item is in its top condition,I will like you to help me send the item down to my friend in Lagos Nigeria on my behalf as i am due to leave for Asia soon so won’t be able to receive the item here in the state..I will be offering you 150 pounds for the postage via Royal Mail International Signed For,with p&p, so i will quickly want you to get back to me with the total cost including your pay pal e-mail so i can make payment also get back to me with your item number on gumtree and your full name for me to make the payment.

Hope to read from you soon… God bless

I’ve been reading this book recently and it has a very interesting discussion about the sheer influence that Alan Greenspan had on markets at his peak and his resulting reluctance to speak in anything other than the most arcane and impenetrable ‘fed-speak’ lest the markets inadvertently seize on what he says and respond in a way that he, at least, would deem undesirable. In a way it’s symptomatic of the media age in which we live where access to information, far from liberating us, threatens to overwhelm us. Too many people seem to imagine that the Internet is inherently democratising – why else would China go to such trouble to restrict access? As a song by one of my favourite punk bands puts it:

At some turning point in history,
some fuckface recognized that knowledge tends to democratize cultures and societies
so the only thing to do was monopolize and confine it to priests,
clerics and elites the rest resigned to serve,
cuz if the rabble heard the truth they'd organize against the power,
privilege and wealth hoarded by the few- for no one else.
And did it occur to you that it's almost exactly the same today?

Yet the historically unprecedented proliferation of information – understanding both terms in the widest sense possible – has a weirdly ambiguous character. It undercuts established authorities, engendering  plural and often cynical resistances to taken for granted truths, yet it also establishes new authorities, as busy people with finite attentional resources look to understand and negotiate a path through ever more complex and opaque systems while they drown under a media torrent that simultaneously makes some working conception of truth more desirable and necessary than ever while systematically stripping away the epistemic markers with and through which we’d reach such an outcome. Thus you have the information cascade as the endemic intellectual (and social) problem of the ‘information age’. Far from setting us free, in the internet age the truth – or at least the search for it – paralyses us.

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.

The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

Greenfield believes ministers have not yet looked at the broad cultural and psychological effect of on-screen friendships via Facebook, Beboand Twitter.

She told the House of Lords that children’s experiences on social networking sites “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity”.

Arguing that social network sites are putting attention span in jeopardy, she said: “If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.

“It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in screen technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”

She also warned against “a much more marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity, a disregard for consequence, can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.

“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction. So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”

Greenfield also warned there was a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less. “Unlike the game to rescue the princess, where the goal is to feel rewarded, the aim of reading a book is, after all, to find out more about the princess herself.”

She said she found it strange we are “enthusiastically embracing” the possible erosion of our identity through social networking sites, since those that use such sites can lose a sense of where they themselves “finish and the outside world begins”.

She claimed that sense of identity can be eroded by “fast-paced, instant screen reactions, perhaps the next generation will define themselves by the responses of others”.

Social networking sites can provide a “constant reassurance – that you are listened to, recognised, and important”. Greenfield continued. This was coupled with a distancing from the stress of face-to-face, real-life conversation, which were “far more perilous … occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses” and “require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones, those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously”.

She said she feared “real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.”

The solutions, however, lay less in regulation as in education, culture and society.

Greenfield argued that the appeal of Facebook lay in the fact that “a child confined to the home every evening may find at the keyboard the kind of freedom of interaction and communication that earlier generations took for granted in the three-dimensional world of the street. But even given a choice, screen life can still be more appealing.”

She quoted one user saying they had 900 friends, another saying the fact “that you can’t see or hear other people makes it easier to reveal yourself in a way that you might not be comfortable with. You become less conscious of the individuals involved [including yourself], less inhibited, less embarrassed and less concerned about how you will be evaluated.”

But Greenfield warned: “It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains

It’s interesting to read the comments that were posted on the guardian website, as they point to some of the difficulties inherent in trying to have a sensible debate about this. People seem to be far too prone to making knee-jerk accusations of intergenerational prejudice or  technophobia. Just because prophetic warnings about past technological advances largely failed to be matched by actual social consequences, it doesn’t license us to engage in an a priori dismissal of a specific case being made with regards to a particular kind of technology. The point is that the internet, particularly in the incarnation of web 2.0, is something that is genuinely radically new. Real lives and web lives, personal identities and online personas, are coming to intersect in ways that destabilize the boundaries between online and ‘real’ life. This is not exactly a new or radical point but outside a very specific sphere of theoretical discussion, it seems to go largely unrecognised when it should surely be pushing us towards a serious and open-minded evaluation of the way that the technological immersion of great swathes of young people  might be impacting on the structures of their minds and personalities.

Suppose that there is a crossroad where everyone must choose whether to go left or right. If a person goes the wrong way he will be eaten by a grizzly bear, but if he goes the correct way he’ll end up in safety. Unfortunately, people have imperfect information, so they’ll only be right 2/3 of the time. If person 1 thinks left, he will go left. If person 2 thinks left he will also go left. However, if person 3 thinks that right is correct he will go left anyway. This is because the combined information of observing person 1 and person 2 go left is greater than person 3’s private information that right is correct. Even if every other person thinks that right is correct, they will all go left based on the actions of the first two individuals. In this scenario society will usually go the correct way, but at least one out of nine times everyone will go the wrong way.

The wiki article on information(al) cascades is suprisingly good. Whereas you could imagine the concept playing a suspect normative role in the theoretical output of pre-internet rational choice theorists, the massive pluralisation of information pathways in the information age leaves it as a concept which must, at the very least, be engaged with. If we accept the argument that market failure results from, among other factors, imperfect information then the obvious next-step is to ask how we might model the gaps and errors so as to understand the causal routes through which they manifest themselves in the social world. There’s an interesting article on the NY TImes website, invoking the concept in an analysis of the housing bubble. As the writer argues,

The failure to recognize the housing bubble is the core reason for the collapsing house of cards we are seeing in financial markets in the United States and around the world. If people do not see any risk, and see only the prospect of outsized investment returns, they will pursue those returns with disregard for the risks.

Were all these people stupid? It can’t be. We have to consider the possibility that perfectly rational people can get caught up in a bubble. In this connection, it is helpful to refer to an important bit of economic theory about herd behavior.

Three economists, Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch, in a classic 1992 article, defined what they call “information cascades” that can lead people into serious error. They found that these cascades can affect even perfectly rational people and cause bubblelike phenomena. Why? Ultimately, people sometimes need to rely on the judgment of others, and therein lies the problem. The theory provides a framework for understanding the real estate turbulence we are now observing.

The internet is radically restructuring the way in which information flows through the social world. The communication possibilities this opens up and the ensuing globalisation of politics, economics and culture all leave information flows with a growing centrality in the economic and political life of the world. Thus it’s imperative that we adequately theorise the dynamics of these information flows, in a sociological way, as well as the observable socio-ecoomic effects they generate.

From this point onwards I utterly refuse to you Microsoft Word. I’ve known there are alternatives available for a long time and yet I’ve persisted with it. A lot of this is down to simple laziness. The hegemony of MS Office means that for many PC users, it’s the default option. Either it comes packaged with their PC or, as in many case, its part of the default installation on the network they work on. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that Word is a piece of software equipped with a huge degree of functionality. In fact this is the problem. Given the communicative possibilities opened up by the internet and modern cable connections, why do we persist with software packaged for as broad a market as possible? What percentage of Word users actually understand, let alone utilise, the seemingly quite excessive functionality the software is equipped with?

In a way there’s a parallel here to game consoles. Sony put their focus into progressively improving the technical capacity of their consoles as an end in itself whereas Nintendo (quite rightly) put their emphasis on usability, satisfaction and enjoyment. The latter approach doesn’t preclude technological innovation but it conceives of them as a means to an end. Surely the way things should be? There’s a business model implied in the Sony/Microsoft approach which is increasingly anachronistic; blindly expanding functionality with each progressive version as a means of ensuring planned obsolescence. If you pack enough new features into each new version, it (a) has a broad appeal to your entire userbase (b) it underscores the qualitative superiority of the new version over the old. However it also leads to the cumbersome piece of shit that is MS Word which crashes repeatedly and destorys my formatting when I try and add margins to my dissertation writeup (thus prompting the disjointed rant you’re currently reading, as well as a frenzied two hours of formatting to get it done prior to the deadline).

I think that WikiHow is potentially the single greatest thing to emerge from web 2.0 – if it takes off in the way Wikipedia itself has, it’s difficult to state quite what a widely useful resource it could be. Of the course the problem with the latter – that the former pleasingly avoids because the same issues aren’t at stake in the lose practical knowledge that WikiHow offers – is that it’s simply not reliable. Of the philosophical, sociological and political content on there, much is simply far too brief and superficial, presumably because the people who have the time and inclination, as well as the ability, to do it otherwise are few and far between. The articles that generate the most interest are inevitably those which are sites of ideological contestation. For instance, go look at the histories of the anarchism and anarcho-capitalism – as well as the anarchism and anarcho-capitalism page that the original dispute eventually spawned – where the loftier aim Wiki has of being an encyclopedia is reduced to being a catalogue of the views of people who choose to argue about them at a snail’s pace online. Is this unfair? I can see why someone might accused me of subscribing to a naivé conception of knowledge and truth, such that I’m counterposing the ‘objective’ truth of the ‘real’ encylopedia to the ’subjective’ mess of the young internet pretender. I’m really not doing this though. I’m just saying that if something is very consciously put forward as a contribution to an ongoing polemic on both sides, this gives us an a priori reason to take a critical (and cynical?) distance from the truth-claims it makes.  The dispassionate pursuit of truth doesn’t guarantee that truth is what we get, however passionate participation in a long and polarised conflcit does, ceteris paribas, give us a reason to be sceptical about the grand claims to truth which inevitably manifest themselves (not least of all because it’s reasonable to assume that they are, at least partly, a function of the desire to win the argument!).