2.5 Notes

Turing Machine
Alan Turing (1912-1954)

Implications... the universal machine.
"A Turing machine is a hypothetical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a com." -Wiki/TuringMachine

Turing found that any mathematical computation could be done on a mechanical device, using the binary system. It changed the way people thought about computation. "Computers" used to be women who did computations. Some call it "the moment the digital age began." He invented the concept of computers – he started something genuinely new.  His ideas are the fundamental truths that have remained true throughout all automated computing. (From video: "The Universal Machine")

The machine was hypothetical, to him, but has since been created in first a digital form, and later an analog form.

Smart phone processor chip, plus the memory (tape of the Turing Machine).

Turing Test
"The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of an actual human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test." -Wiki/TuringTest

Midterm...
Make conceptual connections between readings. Joyce, Gleik


Intellectual Property/Capital

Early MUDD 
Chat room to interact with people via text. Avatars, they were getting hijacked – girl's avatar got raped :/ ("A Rape in Cyberspace")
Leave your facebook logged in? Get hacked.

Bendito Machine III

Black and red 2D movie. Evolution of the TV, computer, knocking people about. People pitch the old devices off a cliff. New ones fall on, squash, and kill people. Kind of view that technology is not neutral, it's controlling

Edwards: "Some philosophers identify three attitudes toward technology: 

Technological determinism, which presumes that technology is an autonomous force that determines social structures and cultural values. 

#Moore's Law, no human 

Technological instrumentalism, which presumes that technology constitutes a set of tools under conscious human control.

Technological substantivism, which presumes that technology is not neutral but carries with it certain values."

"Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different media have different political biases" – the Tweet or the Reddit headline, versus a journalistic article. One is more sensational, just the who/what/when/where, but the reporter may write about the why and go more into depth. We think we're informed because we instantly "know" what happened, when really it takes more time to get to the real meat of a story or occurrence. 

"Ah, so the velocity of information changes the quality" -Edwards

Claude Shannon and "The Medium is the Message"

Claude Shannon came up with definitional characteristics for information that help us distinguish the difference between content and the medium that delivers content to us. His definitions:

Uncertainty (219): "'Information is closely associated with uncertainty.' Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information."

Difficulty (219): "What is significant is the difficulty in transmitting the message from one point to another." Perhaps this seemed backward, or tautological, like defining mass in terms of the force needed to move an object. But then, mass can be defined that way. 

Surprise (219): Some messages may be likelier than others, and information implies surprise. Surprise is a way of talking about probabilities. If the letter following t (in English) is h, not so much information is conveyed, because the probability of h was relatively high. 
(247): "For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same. The more inherent order exists in a sample of English text... the more predictability there is, and in Shannon's terms, the less information is conveyed by each subsequent letter. When the subject guesses the next letter with confidence, it is redundant, and the arrival of the letter contributes no new information. Information is surprise."

These definitions seem relative and contextual; to define information as entropy or disorder, one needs an understanding of the opposite: order. If text is formulaic and requires no mind to decipher, or cannot be deciphered, it cannot be information. YET. 

Information is not information – until understood beyond the dots and dashes that facilitate our opportunity to understand it. Without a "backboard" or basis to bounce on (language, body language, code) it is not information. 
(I am struggling to find the converse of information – perhaps "beeps", in Shannon's words. Keep reading...)

Gleik writes on page 246, "[Shannon] was talking about information as something transmitted from one point to another... What mattered was that he was going to represent the information source as a statistical process, generating messages with varying probabilities." 
And on 248, Shannon explains the difference between signals and information: "There were 'beep beeps' but that was all, no information. The moment one transforms that set of signals into other signals our brain can make an understanding of, then information is born – it's not in the beeps."

To illustrate, here's a metaphor about trees.
People often pose the question, "If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?" The tree crashing to the ground does indeed create fluctuations in the surrounding air waves. These waves, in the presence of an ear, can be interpreted as sound. But without an ear present, there is no sound – merely disturbed air waves. Thus, it does not make a sound.

Shannon meant that without a medium to process content, it cannot be information. 

***

This brings us to our quote from Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message."

To expand and put into a "big idea" context, McLuhan also said in 'The Medium is the Message,' (1967): "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which mean communicate than by the content of the communication.”

Some people have format preferences for the intake of messages. My reading comprehension is better when I read text on paper than when I read it on a computer screen. I have evolved (or devolved, perhaps...) to the point where when I look at a screen, my attention splits. My brain is wired to buzz with tappable possibilities that Internet devices afford.
With a newspaper, the medium is constrained. My brain goes into paper mode, and I don't get the urge to press (command+t) when I don't understand a term or an event in the text. I focus more on what I can read in that moment.

I think that's what this quote is getting at. Content is essentially the same from screen to page, and from podcast to radio broadcast. But the device – the medium – is what's capable of changing a society. As a generation, we have felt how the Internet changes our attention span, our expectations for information and our habits. 

Cellphone gave us mobility. They snipped the curly cord that chained us to desks.

The smartphone made it almost impossible to stay off the grid. We sleep with our phones and keep them in our pockets all day. The Web is an extension of reality, of our species' consciousness, intellect, and attitude. Things that happen online are "real life."

Not much content has changed an entire society like that. A single broadcast, publication or piece of art does not have the same embedded potential to rewire a mind. 

More elegantly put, "The macro-level interpretation suggests that the form of mediums have an effect on the perception, cognition and actions of humans and society at large, quite regardless of the content. The inherent qualities of the medium do not need to attach themselves to content and fuse in a symbiosis to create an effect. At this larger scale, the medium has a message of its own. Furthermore, the message of the medium as a whole is far greater than any individual piece of content." -Media and Architecture blog, "The Medium is the Message"

So the quote is not saying that content does not create change in a viewer/reader, or that medium and message are the same thing. The medium is ultimately a more powerful vehicle for change – even though it is easier to perceive a change in oneself at the impetus of specific content, rather than the slower, more subtle evolutionary effects of a medium.


For a more elaborate example of this effect, I will write a future post about the difference between Twitter and Vine, a new Twitter-like video app. Check out Vinepeek for the most basic introduction, and stay tuned!

"As We May Think" Vannevar Bush - Notes and Response

First, who is Vannevar Bush? 

Wikipedia tells us....
(1890-1974) He was an American engineer who lived during WW2. He headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development. "His office was considered one of the key factors in winning the war." 

#Tags: 

• Analog computers
• Raytheon (American defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in defense systems and defense and commercial electronics)
• Memex ("memory"+"index" an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web)
• Profile trancer
• Differential Analyzer (analog computer that solved differential equations)
• Digital circuit design theory
• First presidential science advisor

-source

"As We May Think" was published in The Atlantic in 1945 (before the nuclear attacks on Japan) (it was republished that same year, after the attacks). "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified," he says in the piece.  

#Tags: 

• Destruction vs. Understanding -- his perceptions about the direction of technology
• Collective memory machine
• Turning information into knowledge

-source (sorry, it's Wikipedia too)


Summary: Quotes & Paraphrases from  "As We May Think"

Editor's note: Bush was among the first to grasp that technology can head toward making tasks easier for the human mind, as before they had made only physical tasks easier.

"First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence."  Machines have made our bodies stronger #physicallabor #health #medicine #mentalhealth

Science and research foster the best communication between individuals: "It has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual." Specialists are needed to sift through all this information. And now we need to be able to bridge the gap between disciplines.

"...publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record."

Attempts had been made (Leibnitz's calculating machine, Babbage's analytical machine) but it wasn't cost- or time-efficient.

He predicts many improvements for photography as an example of a technology that has much room for growth.

Machines have got "repetitive thought" down, but there still lack machines for "mature" or "creative thought."  Even those existing still stand for much improvement in speed. But there is still a need for the need for Bush's hypothetical technologies. "...the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population," he says.

"Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge."

He proposes ideas that sound a lot like command+F or voice recognition for selection - making it easier to FIND information.

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." Sounds like a hard drive!

He uses the word trail ... it signifies the stream of links from different sources, and he seems to mean it as a stream of consciousness. Earlier, he made a statement that human thoughts are not linear, but web-like and driven on associations. But these trails, unlike a human stream of consciousness, does not fade. 

For example, a friend tries to explain a thought that he made a trail of earlier -- "In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

Translation: Friend recalls memory of something he read up on in the past. He takes his friend through the bookmark of sites he read at the time. Then, he emails the bookmark file to the friend so he can access the links on his own browsers.

"There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record," Bush predicts. Little does he know, that activity will hardly be considered a profession in the future -- instead, a basic, required skill. Those best at this skill, we call professors. The worst, simply bloggers.

Here is where his ideas begin to surpass current technologies. "Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form?" 


Response and Comparison to "Blueprints of the Afterlife"
Bush was getting at the idea of an implanted Internet. He says that the ability one would have with future technology to objectify information in one's life should lift a person's spirit. One should be able to rest his overburdened mind because he can store memories elsewhere, forget about them, and recall them if ever he needs to (sounds like a good counter-argument to Plato's beef with the transition from orality to literacy.) Technology will give people the means to living better-examined and healthier lives. 

This thinking reminds me of the same respite that the Industrial Revolution was predicted to bring to housewives. With so many new appliances for cooking and cleaning, a housewife hoped to finish her chores sooner, having more time for chosen pleasures. On the contrary, the expectation for a cleaner house – especially since it was so easy to achieve with new tools – demanded that women spend more time and energy on those tasks than their mothers did. (Sorry I don't have a source for this – this argument came up in a freshman architecture class I took from Ayad Rahmani called "The Build Environment.")

Knowing what we do now of technologies, Bard's predictions are narrowly optimistic. Science fiction author Ryan Boudinot describes a dystopian world armed with the implanted Internet Bush theorizes in his novel "Blueprints of the Afterlife."
(No spoil alert – I highly recommend reading this book if you're a DTC major)

Boudinot names it the Bionet. It gives a user access to all the Internet's information, plugged into a part of the brain associated with the subconscious. In the book, people in the future who have Bionet implants risk becoming "embodiments" -- versions of themselves that a DJ has hacked and now controls, sometimes not to the host's knowledge. Boudinot exaggerates a type of present day identity theft or brainwashing to such an extreme that individuals lose control of their data, their bodies, and eventually their minds. 

A feature of the Bionet grants Boudinot's characters the ability to remove painful, unwanted, or unnecessary memories and stored them on chips. At times, characters re-access the memories when needed for reflection or problem-solving. In Boudinot's futuristic dystopia, the characters who log away painful memories can never truly escape the original pain. 

In our real present world, there are obvious advantages that technology and the Internet have made to our spirits. But they are often accompanied by feelings of insignificance, depression, misinformation, intolerance, and desensitization (to name only a minor few that I have personally felt). 

Bush had good intentions with his theorization of the would-be Internet, but indeed -- the Net Generation/Millienials/Generation X has been scoffed at by those older for being less intelligent and lazier than they. We never finish books or memorize things we can look up. Why would we commit those things to memory when we have e-books + the find key, bookmarked web pages, or simply an Internet search engine? The new generation sees that with all the accessible information, it would be impossible to thoroughly memorize entire concepts like our parents were required to. I'm getting onto another issue here... see my blog from October on Don Tapscott's "Grown Up Digital" for more on the generation gap.

The Internet has definitely facilitated the type of life Bush aspires technology to provide. It is incredible how far ahead of his time Bush was. But if he thought war and physical destruction were the only negative possible consequences, his big thinking neglected the smaller, more obscure inflictions and vices that technology has brought upon our species – and indeed, our collective memory.

Response to Adam Ward's DTC356 post #2 on Megaupload's FBI Shutdown

Sorry this isn't on Adam's Tumblr, but there was no option to leave a comment there. 

Adam used an anecdote about the government shutdown of Megaupload to point out more unfair treatment online. Unfair treatment meaning the government's pick-and-choose prejudice against certain pirates or pirate hosting sites – like Megaupload, the Pirate Bay, or Aaron Swartz – and not others, like YouTube. 

I agree that the government's bias in dealing with these sites/individuals is pretty blatantly skeezy. Make an example of the little guys who aren't profiting, but allow the profiteers (like Google, for owning YouTube) to keep on profiting. I wonder why... It seems like the same permission given to the architects of the financial bank crisis: they're too big to jail.

Adam explains that Megaupload moved its services to a New Zealand server and changed the mechanics of its site to skirt away from some of the blame. I think the Pirate Bay was getting away with the same thing for a long time. They no longer store the data on their servers and s0 cannot give its users direct access to download the material – now they just linked up the people who have the data so they can share with each other. This type of activity was/is not illegal in Sweden  (not sure what the update is after their lawsuit), where the Pirate Bay has its servers. But that didn't keep American companies like Apple, Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, and others from threatening legal action. The documentary on the Pirate Bay's lawsuit will be piratable soon, I hear.

Adam says, "It’s basically like this: if you let someone borrow your cell phone and they  used it to commit a crime, but then erased any evidence of placing a call, sending a text, or using the internet, you would be none the wiser to anything wrong being done with your property. That’s the theory behind Mega.co.nz, and considering the federal government’s hasty and unnecessary prosecution of people like Aaron Swartz, Kim Dotcom is potentially marching himself right into information freedom martyrdom."

The bootleggers/pirates/whatever you want to call the people who share files are getting more creative to get around current law. I think it's pretty clear that computer programmers get a lot more done in a lot less time than lawmakers do. However, Adam is right. Kim Dotcom is in danger for outsmarting the system, being "civilly disobedient," but in the eyes of the property owners, taking away their livelihood. 

Aaron Swartz: Champion for Internet Freedom and Global Intelligence

Tags: Aaron Swartz, free information movement, Occupy Wall Street, activism, civil disobedience, control

Aaron Swartz is a martyr for the Free Information Movement.

The recent suicide of the computer programmer and activist for Internet Freedom has been distracting me from working on my honors thesis. 

Not to make light of the situation. 

It has been little over 10 days now since I heard the news, and I've put around a month of research into my thesis on collective action demonstrated by Occupy Wall Street. It's been a tempting consideration to switch my topic – not because I don't care about analyzing the #Occupy movement, but because what they so stubbornly sat around protesting, Aaron embodied with his life as well as his death.

The majority of Occupiers were protesters: sleeping in the streets, holding up signs, shouting, complaining, struggling to make their voices heard and pounding their fists against the walls of corporations – sometimes smashing their windows with bricks. I am trying to find merit in their methods (as opposed to their cause), but it has been difficult. Frankly, it has been hard to glean much more from Occupiers than a thorough laundry list of complaints. (However, I'm not giving up on #Occupy. My graduation depends on it.)

Occupiers' demands do make sense, at the root:

End corporate greed.

Give us jobs.

Tell us the truth.

But they're just demands; (justifiably) frustrated feet stomping the ground for change. 

Please don't be mistaken – I'm not hating on the movement. In fact, without Occupy's strong response to unfairness in this country, it would be much more difficult for [empathizers, organizers, and those truly motivated enough to make change] to actually act for the foot-stompers.

My question is, how many people with complaints about #theSystem #theGovernment #CorporateAmerica have actually done anything about it? (I will eventually find an answer to this question. It's basically my thesis' thesis statement.)

Aaron Swarts did more than simply embody both the OWS and Internet Freedom movements. What he accomplished by the time he was 14 is more than most of will in a career #RSSfeed. By the time he was 18, he had helped cofound Reddit, a popular news/social media sites on the Internet. 

And while it would be unfair to compare all Occupiers to Swartz (Aaron undeniably had more than a knack for what he did) he worked in a very real fight for the freedom of information. The fight for information is essentially a fight for human intelligence. It is one for which Swartz shouldered not just political and financial repercussions; it cost him his life.  

He believed that information should be accessible and affordable (arguably, free), and he applied his talents to make real steps forward for mankind. I'm not talking about a website, single bits of information or a web-browser add-on; Swartz was fighting for the advancement of the human race. 

Swartz accessed the online academic digital library JSTOR via MIT computers to download millions of scholarly articles. JSTOR stores published articles on its servers and provides free access to students, libraries and a few other groups (though universities pay to allow students this access). Those outside the "free" realm have to pay to access the articles. To Swartz this must have seemed wrong – after all, much of the research stored in the archive was funded by federal dollars. Essentially, taxpayers were having to pay to fund much of the research, and again to access it.

Swartz' prosecutor (the Department of Justice – NOT the "victims" of the crime: MIT, JSTOR or JSTOR's publishers) assumed that he was intending to make these articles free to the public. Some would say he was close to the spirit of JSTOR's mission: "Our mission involves expanding access to scholarly content as broadly as possible, in ways that are sustainable and consistent with the interests of our publishers who own the rights to the content" –JSTOR FAQ. But the DOJ considered him a felon for his actions. 

"From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way," said Frank Lessig, a lawyer and friend of Swartz. "The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar." 

"What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense*," said Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Guardian. "This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data activists) for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities."  

*In this quote (not the second), Greenwald was referring to Swartz' successful download and share of court documents from Pacer (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which charged the public for court documents created at the public's expense.

However, Swartz was caught before he could make the articles accessible. He was threatened with an overzealous sentence: felonies, a million dollar fine, and decades in prison.

Some try to make Swartz out to be thief, greedy to profit from the work of others. Civilly disobedient, yes. But greedy, no. There is obvious merit to the notion that what Swartz was assumed to be doing would potentially lessen the money that JSTOR's publishers earned from the site's access fees. But note that the profit was going to the publishers – the owners of the content – and not to the authors. From what I've heard, published authors make no money directly from publishing articles. This is part of the "system" that must reform to allow for freedom of information at the same time that creators can still earn a livelihood from their intellectual property.

Greenwald continues, "Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never intended to profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the company's 'terms of service' by making the articles available to the public. Once arrested, he returned all copies of everything he downloaded and vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes."

In the recent buzz of Swartz' suicide, JSTOR has made a move to free up some of its articles to registered users. I think this shows progress for Swartz' and other Internet activists' efforts. Some people and organizations understand that it is wrong to withhold information from the public that they essentially helped fund. 

The issue is not black or white, though some make it out to be. One one hand, "Information should be free to everyone" and on the other, "Aaron Swartz stole intellectual property that did not belong to him." 

"The system has got to change!"

And HERE is where I feel like one of the Occupiers. America's governing and judicial systems have simply not caught up to speed with the Internet. The Internet is a place for networking, learning, sharing. Many people have come to appreciate how powerful it is and embrace the Internet (*cough* DTC majors). Others see the Internet's potential for sharing information as a serious threat to their power. Keeping information from people is a form of control, and the DOJ obviously saw Swartz as a direct threat to that control. 

"Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a 'justice' system that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge power... his real crime in the eyes of the US government: challenging its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that information. In that above-referenced speech on SOPA, Swartz discussed the grave dangers to internet freedom and free expression and assembly posed by the government's efforts to control the internet with expansive interpretations of copyright law and other weapons to limit access to information" (Greenwald).

To wrap up, I'd like to post a comment from one of my friends in a debate that happened on my facebook page on a thread about Swartz. Nick said 

"How brainwashed are we by our beliefs to make such strife when this guy just died. As in passed to the next realm of conscious existence. As in people are losing their lives over this issue... you seriously cannot see the bigger picture? 

The future of bio-technology, nano-technology, cold-fusion, solar cells, quantum computing, medicine are in those journals stored [on] private servers like JSTOR. Basically holds the goldmine of future inventions. Are you that selfish that you cant see that one invention invented by man is an accomplishment for all mankind? Should we all have to invent the wheel after we are born?"

By today's rhetoric, Swartz was making copies of others' property and giving it indiscriminately to others. By tomorrow's rhetoric, Swartz will be known as not just an advocate, but a champion for the intellectual evolution of our species.

Pre-Mechanical Computing in Gleik's "The Information" [DTC 356, post 1]

Chapter 4 of Gleik’s “The Information”  titled “To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work” demonstrated themes in the heart of the C in DTC (Digital Technology and Culture) by the story of Charles Babbage's pursuit for mechanical computation. Babbage sought to create a “rational machine. It would be a junction point for two roads – mechanism and thought” (Gleick 99). In Babbage’s time, the culture surrounding technology differed greatly from today’s culture. Much of this was to do with public understanding of technology and the volume of it invented at the time, but culture was also influenced by the rhetoric used to describe thoughts and objects related to technology.

Babbage's attempt at creating a universal language for his technology (I thought of it as a coding language, but for people to understand mechanics) showed him the challenges of capturing the quirks and kinks of communication. "As philosophers came face to face with the multiplicity of the world's dialects, they so often saw language not as a perfect vessel for truth but as a leaky sieve. Confusion about the meanings of words led to contradictions" (90). In his work – and indeed, the work of all mechanical and electrical inventors – clear and precise rhetoric was of the utmost importance. He mentioned the difficulty he had in describing his invention, and even more in explaining its usefulness. On page 104, Babbage was quoted to say of his fellow Englishman, "If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."

In Babbage's time, there was a different attitude toward information. Babbage demonstrated this with his pyramid problem – supposing that a child wanted to find the number of bricks in any layer of a pyramid. It must have seemed not pointless, but because of the difficulty in trying to find the answer, a question unworthy of consideration. "Perhaps he might go to papa to obtain this information; but I much fear papa would snub hum, and would tell him that it was nonsense – that it was useless – that nobody knew the number, and so forth," Babbage pondered (95). That seemed to be Babbage’s most difficult endeavor: not to explain his technology, but to convey its usefulness.

This was a time in history when few may have imagined the ease with which they could do simple tasks with the help of technology. Those who did (Babbage) must have grown frustrated with the hassle caused by the gap in understanding. These days we take advantage of that mutual grasp – the imaginative power we possess that comes from understanding past and current technology, and its potential to make our lives better. Not to mention the ease of we have of explaining concepts or objects with tools like digital images or Google. We reference past technologies as well as those imagined in science fiction movies, and find fuel on the Internet to foster support other ideas. 

It is difficult to even consider what people must have thought about technology (or IF they did) before digital technology, let alone before mechanical technology.  Let alone FURTHER – how they talked about it, and what rhetorical strategies they used to describe.

Tapscott Part 2 "Grown Up Digital"

As I keep reading his book, I get the feeling that Tapscott is almost pandering to the Net Generation -- at times it seems like he's too good at turning our criticisms into encouragements. He gives advice on how to change the world to fit the Net Generation, but it seems quite transformational of present systems. I'm not all too sure that "our way" is ultimately going to be the "best way." Tapscott isn't offering ways to meet the Net Generation in the middle; he suggest ways to completely change things like the workplace or schools to accommodate their new values. 

For me, he comes off sometimes like an overly proud grandmother bragging to her church friends about how wonderful we are. But I get that perhaps he intended this book to be ultra-encouraging because there are so many skeptics (especially among people in his age group, he says) who don't believe in this generation. Overall, I think it's good that he's advocating so strongly for us. And he's doing it with a lot of research -- Tapscott's studies, polls, quotes, and anecdotes portray the Net Generation is very flattering light.

The second part of "Grown Up Digital" goes over four important systems in a Net Gener's world: school, work, the store, and the family. Again, he ends each chapter with a list of tips to help the world understand and accommodate the Net Gen's norms. One of the biggest changes to differentiate the Boomers and the Net Geners is their method and expectation of communication. It comes up in the classroom, advertising, and the workplace: the Boomers hold onto a broadcast method, while the Net Geners have adopted a network method. In other words, the older generation believes that one person at the top of a hierarchy knows, controls, and distributes the information (one-to-many). The younger generation has grown up sharing all information with everyone, collaborating (many-to-many). 

Problems are cropping now that the new expectations do not match the systems that govern Net Geners. In school, they want to be part of a discovery process – not sit in front of an all-knowing teacher who dumps knowledge into their brains. In the work place, they want to be a part of the team, not a low-level grunt who has to "pay his dues" before he earns any credibility. When shopping, they want their opinions to be reflected in the products they buy, and expect companies to take them seriously or they'll shop somewhere else.

The family forefront has a different contrast. Different factors shape the argument for Boomer-vs-Net Gener, but they still cause friction and misunderstanding between the two. The new generation has become notorious for moving back home after college and staying inside on the computer, whereas the Boomers would never think of moving back and found freedom in the outdoors. Boomers typically criticize their children for being coddled and lazy, but things have changed since their times. The outdoors were not a "free" place when we were growing up, as AMBER Alerts and stranger danger campaigns ran all over television. Instead, we turned to the web for freedom. 

And many kids move home and value their relationships with their parents, not just because they are trusting and honest, but because many Net Geners find themselves in debt when they finish college. Not to mention the huge incurrence of "helicopter parents" – Tapscott tells stories of mothers who submit job applications for their kids, or who complain to the CEO at their kids' jobs. Not cool. 

I think Tapscott is doing a good job of giving evidence that the Net Generations have huge potential for success, despite the haters. The only thing that has me worried is that some of his conclusions are based on the aspirations or the intent of the Net Geners, not their actual actions. He balances out these out with anecdotes of successful twenty-something year olds, but I don't think our credentials are quite as shiny as he makes them out to be -- yet. Maybe my skepticism is rooted in my experiences and judgements of my peers in college. Many of my peers have bright futures and tons of potential, but I know an equal if not greater number of people who seem to have already settled.