Archive for July 20th, 2008

I have a post up at Techdirt about the misuse of a radar gun to erroneously ticket a teenager with speeding.

Luckily for the teen, his car had an advanced GPS system which not only provided directions but measured velocity to “within 1 mph.” After receiving a trial and bringing a GPS expert to testify to the accuracy of the device, the $190 ticket has been dismissed.

More interesting than my singular post are the comments which include many stories about bad radar guns or police officers neglecting to calibrate them correctly. Yet, too often, courts place blind faith in technology which is used to enforce the law. To me, it is nonsensical to do so. Everyone, including judges and police, have had malfunctioning computers or cell phones. They readily accept those as failure prone, but not radar guns or red light cameras.

The Britannica Blog is holding a forum on Nick Carr’s recent piece in The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Most of the debate surrounding the piece is rather disappointingly superficial - much like the original provocation which relies heavily on Carr’s personal experience. Carr is a smart thinker who has a firm grasp on technology and its role in society, but he is also a pessimist who thinks the march of technology is bringing humanity into a nightmarish scenario. In his article for The Atlantic, he ponders the possibility that the Internet is rewiring our brain to value the brevity of blogs instead of the long writing of books. He writes, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” I do think that the medium of information can influence the way in which we interact with it, but placing a value judgment on such a new medium (and probably any medium) is a rather pointless exercise. Sure, the Internet may favor brevity, but it isn’t making us stupid. Look at John Battelle’s wonderful refutation:

“Carr may believe that search and the Internet make us stupid, but I will counter his personal, anecdote-driven conclusions with one of my own: when I am deep in search for knowledge on the web, jumping from link to link, reading deeply in one moment, skimming hundreds of links the next, when I am pulling back to formulate and reformulate queries and devouring new connections as quickly as Google and the Web can serve them up, when I am performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am “feeling” my brain light up, I and “feeling” like I’m getting smarter. A lot smarter, and in a way that only a human can be smarter.”

But, like I said, very little of this debate interests me since so much of it was link-baiting sensationalism. One piece of the Britannica forum did catch my fancy, though. Larry Sanger, the guy who sorta invented Wikipedia, has a response entitled “In Defense of… the Individual Thinker” where he references a paper he wrote about scientific collaboration. Sanger’s essay did devolve into an almost embarrassing personal critique of Clay Shirky and much of the thoughtfulness was lost amidst his sarcasm.

There is, though, an interesting point to be made:

“some of us read popular science books written by Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Steven Pinker because of the specific, individual perspectives they bring to their subjects.”

The tendency isn’t limited to science: for a long time, I made a habit of reading nearly everything Larry Lessig had to say. I valued his opinion, knowledge and insight into the topic of interest we shared, copyright. Plenty of people follow Jon Stewart because of the same reasons. Sanger seems to think that we have to read someone’s writings at length to understand them, but, then again, I would have never read Lessig’s three books or watched his lengthy speeches if he did not have a compelling Twitter-sized summary. The same goes for Sanger and his beloved Tolstoy.

If an idea is of worth, it will be consumed in full. Worthy ideas break down into bite sized pitches, so even in a world of links and tweets, people will still find War and Peace (a clear statistical outlier, as far as book lengths go).

And, as for the importance of individual thinkers, well, I don’t think it should be overstated. While Lessig or Hawkings break intellectual ground, they stand on the shoulder of giants. The individual thinkers who both Sanger and I value are only incremental improvements in a vast field of knowledge. And it is that vast field of knowledge which truly propels humanity forward.

Update: Just stumbled upon some thoughts by Cory Doctorow on a medium’s “cognitive style” - the type of use it induces.

Tim Lee, who blogs at the great group blog the Technology Liberation Front, has a review of James Bessen and Michael Meurer’s new book, “Patent Failure.” The conclusions:

• For large, publicly traded firms, patent portfolios are net losers. To defend a corporation’s patents typically costs more for non-pharmaceutical patents than the intellectual property makes.
• This disincentive for innovation has risen sharply since the 1990s when courts loosened restrictions on patent granting and litigation.
• Patents suffer from the lack of notice they offer. It often isn’t clear until costly litigation occurs what the patent covers (in contrast to both real property and trademarks and copyrights).
• A number of proposed fixes could help the excruciatingly complicated task of reforming the patent system including raising patent fees, increasing stringency of granting patents, providing a safe-harbor for good-faith, accidental infringement and ending software patents.

Secondly, via White African, a New York Times article on the Kenya technology scene provides a glimpse into the burgeoning technical industries in Africa. Although the article develops into a discussion about Google opening an office in Nairobi, it provides an insightful look at the ingenuity which is required to innovate in a city where Internet is slow and expensive, people cannot afford the most advanced gadgets and mobile phones are the primary means of connection.

[Photo via NYT]

Continuing through Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media,” his explanation of the growth of the motion picture industry included an in-depth description of the political disputes over the new medium. Facing strong opposition from the self-appointed guardians of morality, the movie makers created internal guidelines of censorship. However, they didn’t always follow them to the level of Puritanical morality which some wanted. In addition, the Supreme Court had created legal precedents which weakened the level of First Amendment protection offered to movies as opposed to newspapers and other print media.

“The differences in outcomes between print and screen reflected the different legal and economic conditions of the two media. Not only did the Constitution and the courts afford stronger protection to the press; the far more fragmented publishing industry had no central organization comparable to the Hays Office that could have carried out a neocorporatist form of censorship. The movies became the target of Catholic pressure in the 1930s because key figures in the movement understood that the industry was vulnerable to pressure and because moral reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, had come to believe that the movies were singularly important as a destructive influence.”

Is today’s media environment more like print or screen? An explosion of online publication and distribution may serve to counteract mainstream media consolidation, but do new media sources really mirror the fragmentation of nineteenth-century news? With the oligopolistic market status of ISPs, no. In fact, Usenet might once have been thought to be fragmented and resilient to censorship, but in recent weeks, it has been severely filtered. The source of control: ISPs who are “voluntarily” censoring Usenet to stop certain child pornographers, just like the Hays Office which was heavy handed and overbearing.

[Other posts in this series here and here.]