What's Next? Can Senators Ban Stupidity While Driving?

from the legislating-while-grandstanding dept

A whole bunch of people have been submitting the story that some US Senators are now pushing a law that would effectively ban texting while driving across the country. Now, you may note that this is a state issue, rather than a federal issue, so the Senators have a sneaky way around that: they basically say that if states don't pass such a law, they'll withhold federal highway money. Now, let's be very clear here: texting while driving is moronic. It's obviously incredibly stupid and dangerous and you would have to be an idiot to do it. There was a recent study that wasn't even worth mentioning because of course trying to type a message on your phone while you're driving is going to massively diminish your driving skills and put everyone around you in danger.

That said, it's unclear what good a "ban" on this does. It's like trying to ban stupidity. There are a bunch of driver distractions, and people will continue to do them with or without a "ban." The real answer is a combination of (a) education and (b) potentially technological solutions (voice control with voice-to-text?). Perhaps you could make the argument that a regulatory ban would serve to educate, but it seems like there should be more effective ways to teach people that it's incredibly dumb to try to type out a text message while driving.

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No, The Internet Is Not Bad For Science; Bad Research Is Bad For Science

from the watch-where-you-place-that-blame dept

Wired has an article discussing the assertion published in the journal Science (not online at the moment) claiming that the internet is bad for science, because researchers just do some searches online and get the most popular hits or the most recent hits, and fail to dig deeper or look at older research. Of course, that's placing the blame on the wrong party. The problem isn't the internet: it's people who do bad research on the internet. If you use the internet as one tool of many in doing your research, and make sure to follow up on reading the actual research and following through on the citations, then the internet can be quite useful. I know I've found that in doing some recent economics research. Being able to search online, in addition to through some print journals, resulted in finding some additional useful research I wouldn't have come across otherwise. Of course, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that a journal whose history is paper-based would push out an article trashing the internet for research.

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Back In My Day, We Didn't Have These Young Whippersnappers With Their Facebooks And Their Googles

from the where's-my-sliderule? dept

It looks like Nick Carr is actually a bit late to the game in blaming the internet for making people dumb these days. Someone else is coming out with an entire book called The Dumbest Generation, which claims that today's kids are totally screwed up thanks to the internet. This book has received enthusiastic reviews from folks, such as a Chicago Sun Times columnist, trotting out the modern version of the "those young whippersnappers" lines. The evidence? The fact that kids use the internet more to communicate with others, rather than to suck at the teat of the established "authoritative" media.

Romenesko, however, points us to a fantastic response from another reporter, Steve Rhodes, who points out how dumb it is to call this generation dumb thanks to the internet. In fact, he makes the point quite clear, by noting that the idea that the established media, such as the Chicago Sun Times, is somehow a bastion of intelligence is easily debunked:

And I'm not sure where a Sun-Times columnist gets off complaining that the Internet is dumbing down America while the paper is running a "Which Team's Fans Are Hotter?" contest.

As for all that communication going on? That helps make people smarter:

I'm a Facebook fan. It's very powerful, and I've hardly begun to exploit all of its capabilities.... I feel smarter after spending time on Facebook; I feel dumber after reading the local newspapers....

He then gets the other columnist to admit that he's never even seen Facebook, despite bashing it as being a terrible thing for kids to be using all the time.

I'm not trying to pick on Lazare - well, actually I am - but he's emblematic of a newspaper creature that is just beyond me. See, he didn't want to know what he was talking about. He just didn't want to know....

But newspapers went off the rails at just the moment the Internet flourished as an even better place to do journalism and communicate with people. It should have been a glorious melding of the minds for a better, more creative and fun and civically inspired tomorrow, but all newspaper people could see was the threat, not the opportunity.

So, again, just as with every generation, there will be a group of folks who complain that today is somehow worse, and "back in my day" things were somehow better. None of it's true. Things change, the world adapts -- and if you choose not to, things may seem worse, but it isn't in any real objective sense. But, in the meantime, for those folks who are scared of change and afraid of actually recognizing how the changing world is full of opportunities, it means there's an opportunity to sell silly books with provocative headlines. Moral outrage ahead! The kids are using Facebook rather than flipping baseball cards and throwing jacks!

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There's Stupidity Somewhere Here, But It's Not Coming From Google...

from the provocative-titles dept

Matt Asay writes about Nick Carr's article in the July issue of The Atlantic, "Is Google making us stupid?" I'm not so sure that you can make such a generalization, but something certainly seems to be messing with Nick Carr's reasoning ability. With such a provocative title, I was expecting a little more evidence with a lot less storytelling and speculation -- but I was seriously disappointed.

There are some valid concerns nested in there, but the tone is attention-seeking and hyperbolic. More importantly, Carr seems to be jumping to the wrong conclusions, as appears to be typical. In the article, Carr writes:

[S]cholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

I'm sorry, but how is this "chilling" (as Radar Online claims)? Carr doesn't explain why skimming is problematic, aside from worrying that we're becoming "mere decoders of information," like computers. Did paper cause people to become mere transmitters of information? We aren't deprived of our ability to reflect or think deeply by using Google's search engine or by skimming through blog posts.

I don't understand why this is even considered a problem. I skim a ton of stuff online and often make quick judgments as to whether or not its worth my time. There's a lot of crap in the long tail. But there are also a lot of worthwhile things. Skimming is human filtering, it's a necessary and useful part of processing the vast amount of information available online. I'm not going to read everything I find on the web. Most articles I will scan quickly, but there are many other things that I read in detail and at length.

What's wrong with skimming?

And then there's Matt's attack on Twitter:

Speaking of Twitter, am I the only one who views it as further evidence of a soundbite culture that struggles even to think beyond 140-character blips?

Come on! It's a medium! What about the famous quote? "I've written you a long letter because I haven't had time to write a short one." (paraphrased - usually attributed to Mark Twain, but it appears it may be Blaise Pascal). It's harder to be concise. Regardless, Twitter is a medium, it's micro-blogging. Just because you make use of a different medium doesn't mean that it controls your thinking or prevents you from using other mediums. Did telegrams make people stupid? I use the Internet to update my Facebook status and to write 2500 word emails to stay in touch with close friends.

Twitter doesn't make people stupid.

Nor does Google or Wikipedia or anything else. People are just stupid irrespective of technology. Myself included. I don't do stupid things because of technology, I do stupid things because sometimes I do stupid things. We may see stupidity manifested in different ways on different mediums, but I have a hard time believing that the medium is to blame.

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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You Can't Legislate Stupidity Away... But Can You Automate It Away?

from the someone's-trying dept

For years, we've pointed out that, as much as politicians try, you simply cannot legislate stupidity away. However, could you automate it away? Apparently that's what some programmers are working on, trying to come up with a spam filter-like system to automatically detect and quarantine "stupid" comments in forums and blog comments. As someone who spends way too much time reading the comments around here, there is some appeal in the concept of such a thing. But, the reality is that it's unlikely to work. Stupidity will no doubt route around any such filters pretty quickly. Besides, it sounds like it would really only catch the blindingly obvious stupid comments anyway, rather than the more frustrating and more common variety: which are comments from people who read what they want something to say, rather than what it actually says. What we really need is not a stupidity filter, but a comment troll filter -- or perhaps just a great big lesson in reading comprehension.

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