Archive for April, 2010

Studying for a evolutionary biology test, I read:

“Scientists discovered the first antibiotics, made by bacteria and fungi, in the mid-1900s, and they soon ushered in a new chapter in the history of medicine. Infections that once almost certainly would have been lethal simply disappeared in a matter of days. Some optimists declared that infectious diseases would soon be a thing of the past. But not long after antibiotics first became available, doctors began reporting that they sometimes failed. In the 1950s, Japanese doctors used antibiotics to battle outbreaks of dysentery caused by E. coli, only to watch the bacteria develop resistance to one drug after another.”

Compare to Evgeny Morozov writing in Foreign Policy:

“In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village… But just as earlier generations were disappointed to see that neither the telegraph nor the radio delivered on the world-changing promises made by their most ardent cheerleaders, we haven’t seen an Internet-powered rise in global peace, love, and liberty. And we’re not likely to. Many of the transnational networks fostered by the Internet arguably worsen — rather than improve — the world as we know it… Sadly enough, a networked world is not inherently a more just world.”

Yet, unlike with the Interwebs, we have clear-cut case of successful strategic use of technology and tactics to fight microbial infections: Norway.

Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked.

The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.

Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.

Throwing more of something – money, technology or rhetoric – at a problem rarely solves it; instead, strategic, tactical responses are needed. What are those to realize the hopes of digital utopians?

This post originally appeared on Techdirt.

Much has been made about the iPad as a consumptive, rather than creative, device. Some, including law professor Tim Wu at a recent New America event, have voiced concern that it heralds the end of a golden era of user-generated content. But to truly understand the importance and impact of user-generated content – including on the traditional media that Clay Shirky has recently argued are fatally too complex to survive – we must have better measurement of the phenomenon. Without reliable data and sensible comparative metrics, it is impossible to say if we have even experienced a golden age of open creative possibility.

For example, nearly two years ago in response to Shirky, Nick Carr bristled at the idea that the Web was the necessary component for creative production, participation and sharing. According to Carr, the people he knew back before the Web were also creating – writing, photographing, drawing, constructing and volunteering. This is undoubtedly true, but because technology did not enable the inexpensive recording, archiving, sharing and finding of this creativity, it went largely unnoticed. Of course, cheaper technology almost certainly does enable more creative production, but how much is hard to say.

When Shirky notes that an amateur video of two children has garnered more views than American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and the Superbowl combined, it is comparing apples and oranges. A minute video hardly competes with the Superbowl for eyeballs; certainly the Internet has opened opportunities to competitors to the Superbowl, but let’s compare those. The problem is, we don’t currently have the categories and metrics necessary to make sense of the rise (and potential fall) of creation. Some people are trying to create quantify the impact of blogs on the news cycle, but in regards to other media types, we seem to be ignoring the problem and living off anecdotes. So, how can we move ahead with better metrics for user-generated content and what should those metrics be?