#somecomms Conference, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester - 3rd March 2011

Notes

Rob Brown / @robbrown
• Ideas are borrowed and shared
• The social media revolution is as significant as the arrival of the printing press
• Social media in the UK is now mainstream: as of yesterday more than half the UK population is on Facebook
• Average Twitter user is 39 years old / Average Facebook user is 38
• If something is interesting it *will* be on Twitter
• The vital ingredients for a great social media campaign: strong news appeal, sharability, tapping into current national mood, speed of response, challenging convention

Mark Jennings / Fresh Networks / @markofrespect
• Location-based: Checking into a store/football stadium/whatever says something about you• Checking in around London, get people to chase the Choos• Social media campaign picked up by traditional media – important that this happens because it gets the attention of the people who you didn’t reach with your social media campaign• Good for brand-awareness – engage people in something fun• Audience – For people who don’t know much about location-based, Facebook Places will be the first place they’ll try it and when that happens it will be huge

Steve Waddington / Speed / @wadds• Blogging – high praise for Wordpress• Blogs give a website more dynamism, energy, keeps it fresh, sharable content and makes it better for SEO• 40+ employees at Speed have blogging written into their job spec. As a result of this, blogging is second nature to Speed staff• Critical thing about blogging – be authentic• Don’t blog if: there are legal issues around being too transparent, e.g., pharmaceuticals companies, or if you haven’t got your tone of voice right

Facebook vs. Twitter: a breakdown of 2010 social demographics

Click for full-size image

Not For Profit Summit '10: Technology For Good

On Monday I was lucky enough to be at an extraordinarily good conference on social media for social good.  Here are my notes from the conference.  They are rough but I thought they might be useful.  I'll add some of the relevant links as soon as I have time.

Please be aware that these are my notes and my interpretations - not quotes.

The higher education system is midleading

After I graduated last year I found it extremely difficult to find a job and subsequently struggled for the rest of the year. I was taking painting and decorating jobs (which I liked) while working part-time as a waiter (which I hated). I felt very bitter about the amount of debt I was not being given the opportunity to repay and this was exacerbated by the feeling that I was letting down various family members that helped me through university. The problem is when you graduate, you expect to be able to get a better job than you could have done before and this is not necessarily the case.


As an article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian today points out:


A couple of years ago, two economists at the University of Kent crunched through data from 1992 up to 2006 on how graduates fared in the jobs market. It was a big exercise, going through thousands of career paths, and it was carefully done. Francis Green and Yu Zhu took into account that it can take a while for graduates to find the right job (or, as their parents might more precisely refer to it, to switch off E4). Yet they still found a third of graduates were "overqualified" for their jobs. Many were "formally overqualified", in positions that wouldn't usually require a university degree; but one in 10 were what Green and Zhu called "really overqualified" – their jobs barely utilised their expensively acquired skills.


I don’t regret going to university for a moment. In terms of the personal development it enabled, I don’t think I would recognise my undergraduate self. I would recommend it to everyone based on this alone.


But it costs an enormous amount of money.  Joe Baden, Head of Open Book at Goldsmiths University of London works to enable everyone to reach their academic potential, regardless of their background. In a Guardian podcast recorded at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas in 2009, Baden champions education for education’s sake - rather than a means to enable social mobility. He doesn’t see anything wrong with people with Ph.D’s having to take cleaning jobs because those low-paid, low-status jobs are currently undertaken by people without the means to do anything else. I wholeheartedly agree with this. I think we need to change attitudes surrounding higher education. Everyone has a right to the same opportunities and higher education is invaluable for personal as well as professional development.


If this had been made clear to me before I applied it would have effected what I chose to study and what I expected to get out of it.

Social media as a campaign tool: 'Online protest: power to the people?' at the Frontline Club

Last night I ventured for the first time to the Frontline Club in Paddington for what turned out to be a very good talk. Online protest: power to the people?  It was concerned with how social media is used for political purposes, its advantages over traditional media and its limitations.  Of the many issues raised and points made I'd like to list a few here that are particularly interesting to me. 

The role social media plays in the decline in empathy

Read an interesting article by Peggy Orenstein in New York Times Magazine.  She describes a wonderful moment with her daughter in which she felt all the joys of being a mother and which was interrupted by urge to tweet about it.

She wonders to what extent she shapes her Twitter persona to what extent it shapes her. 

Back in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand. Twitter has extended that metaphor to include aspects of our experience that used to be considered off-set: eating pizza in bed, reading a book in the tub, thinking a thought anywhere, flossing. Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.

David Cameron on Raul Moat

I was watching the news last night reporting on the various reactions to Raul Moat's death.  Suddenly David Cameron pops up condemning the public show of sympathy for him - flowers outside his house, etc.  He says Moat was a murderer and a monster (or words to that effect), that sympathy should be with his victims and that he [Cameron] cannot understand any sympathy for Moat.


This pissed me off for a number of reasons.  How dare Cameron condemn the public for showing sympathy when someone (anyone) has died! Moat did terrible things and sympathy should be with the victims as well but he wasn't Osama bin Laden (or George W. Bush) he was a disturbed man who told the authorities HIMSELF that he needed help, long before he lost it.   When Moat killed people, he became a murderer, a criminal.  This suddenly legitimises a whole wave of condemnation and he becomes something less than human, a symbol.  If he had gone to an authority - one that listened - before his killing spree and told them that he wants to kill people and that he's worried he might actually do it, he would have been considered mentally unstable and in need of help.  Which he obviously was.  But he wouldn't have been considered a criminal for it.  In an unstable mind I would suggest that there is a fine line between wanting to kill people and going ahead with it.  If authorities have ignored a man who thinks himself unwell and tells them so, then they have let down the people they are there to help.


What's more, every night on the news for a week we were all in Northumberland with the police, following their search for Raul Moat.  It was a drama, a serial, a story and the fact that it was real made it more compelling.  When we're watching any serial TV program, one develops the illusion of a relationship with the characters.  We've been given reality TV to do exactly that with.  So of course people are going to sympathise with Moat - they've devoted a week of their lives to following his.  Like Big Brother.  Forget The Running Man, forget The Contenders Series 7, we've got the 6 o'clock news.


Condemn hero-worship of people like Raul Moat but not sympathy.  Especially since we're only reacting to the media in the ways we've been taught to.

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

Nicholas Christakis explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact.

We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know.

Gated communities are a social ill

Paranoia is the reason we gate our streets and homes yet the more we cut ourselves off from one another the more it spreads.  

Article by Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian

Free v Paid online content

What is lacking from the debate about free versus paid-for content is the important point that you can't share paid-for content.

One of the sectors hit hardest by the Digital Revolution is publishing - particularly newspapers.  The Guardian online offers their content for free along with the opportunity to share articles, blogs, etc. using Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, et al.  Visit The Times website and you are treated to a moment of free content and then prompted to sign in / register to pay.  The Times and other online paid-for newspapers are not realising the full extent of the shift between paper and digital press.  One of the great advantages of digital content is that it can be easily shared among an infinite number of people which surely increases readership.  In denying readers this option, online paid-for press ignores the most fundamental aspect of the Digital Revolution: democracy.  

The defining feature of Digital is that it is accessible to everyone, sharable and infinitely replicable.  Paid-for content is not conducive with the most basic digital ideals.

Ken Robinson on education

TED Talks Sir Ken Robinson makes an funny and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. 20 minute talk.  Click here for direct link.
 


If you liked that one...

JRF interview with creator of Channel 4 Documentary 'Rich Kid Poor Kid'

Found an interesting interview with the creator of Channel 4's 'Rich Kid Poor Kid', a documentary which examined the attitudes of two young girls living in neighbouring areas but who were worlds apart in terms of economic circumstances.

Reporting poverty - Rich Kid Poor Kid, perspective of the producer from Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Vimeo.

Clear ideas about tablet publishing

At last, someone who sounds like they might know what they're talking about is discussing tablets and offering up a few clear ideas about the future of publishing...

During the opening speech of the Oxford Tablet Summit Juan Senor and Juan Antonio Giner from Innovation Media Group explained the necessity for newsmedia companies of taking tablets into consideration in their expansion strategies. Read about the future of newspapers and the newspapers of the future in the following post.

Many people think tablets are a savior to the newspapers. But publishers should think about the reality. And they are facing few options nowadays:

• exit the marketbe sold or taken over
• cut cut cut until the cow bleeds to death
• re-invent the business focusing on ‘profit audiences’

The only chance to survive? It is the last option of the above.

Is technology good for us? (and why it probably doesn't matter)

I was reading an article today (actually a book review) that discussed the effect that digital technology was having on  kids in particular with regards to language.  It includes a number of arguments that suggest SMS and IM messaging encourages young people to write in a conversational style, that new technology is learning them bad English lol.


With every new technology that lands itself in society there is always a dust cloud of debate about whether it is bad for us.  Mobile phones were going to give us all head cancer.  MP3s were going to be the death of music.  Arguments against it generally quieten down as the new technology takes root and everyone begins to wonder, 'how did we ever manage before?'


Those opposed to a new technology are always bombarded with examples of technological advances that we now find hard to imagine life without.   I'm sure there is, as usual some truth to each side of the story but I wonder, given how quickly and graciously technology is naturalized, whether we would even realize if a technology really did have a negative effect?  We still don't know whether mobile phones give you head cancer but they are so ingrained within the fabric of our lives that no-one dares ask again.


The lament of old people that life was better way back when is a tiresome dirge but it transcends generations.  Apparently everyone who reaches a certain age begins to believe that the world has gone to pot.  But what if one of the generations was right?  Would we know?  We can't possibly understand 'how life was' before the inception of a technology that we depend upon on a daily basis.  Once something has been invented it can't then be un-invented.. Sorry, we were wrong - it is bad for you after all.  Can we have it back please?  It doesn't happen.


My grandfather is in his 80s and he is pretty well up to date with digital technology.  I speak to him on Skype, he is on Facebook, he uses BBC iPlayer and sends me text messages but he complains that life is not what it was in the days before these things.  What bugs him most is the lost sense of community in the village where he has lived all his life.  No-one says good morning when he is out to pick up a newspaper and he doesn't know anyone anymore.  Obviously the reasons for this are numerous; it's not wholly due to technological development but it is due to progress and that is the drive behind and the argument for new technology.


Progress is sort of a password.  If something is pursued in the name of progress then it is legitimate.  We are naturally wary of something that is new or different but curiosity overrides this.  We didn't need to invent space flight but we did because we could and it was exciting.  It's an achievement, isn't it?  And because we can do that, we now have mobile phones and GPS and various other forms of satellite communication.


But are we better off?  In some ways, yes but in another way we've always lost something.  More often than not, new technology promises us an easier way of doing something.  It can't explain or explore all the possible ripple effects it could have on us so we take the easier option in good faith.  In the name of progress.


We are programmed to pursue progress in every way and rather blindly because we are curious and ambitious.  I think the question of whether any given technology is 'good' or 'bad' for us is hypothetical because it's always going to happen anyway.  It is our version of evolution.  All we can do is commentate.

Photographs are the new GPS.... but more accurate

GPS isn't accurate enough anymore according to Michael Leibhold of Institute for the Future.  In a 5 minute video interview  for GigaOM he explains that photographs could be the new media through which we will be globally positioned (tagged?) accurate to the millimetre.  This technology will be combined with augmented reality making the world, as Leibhold explains, 'self-explanatory'.

I can appreciate the exciting prospects that augmented reality offers but if we are going about our day with our phones giving us information about every detail of our surroundings it is going to drastically alter our perception of the world and how we experience it.  I'm not sure I want to be given so much information - surely the whole point of  doing anything is to learn about it first hand, and in turn learn about yourself?  Where's the risk if you're briefed about everything in advance?  A self-explanatory world... Where is the fun in that?

Erasing David

David Bond is 38 and lives with his wife and children in London.  In 2007 he was among thousands of UK residents who received a letter from the government apologising for the loss of two discs containing their personal information including bank details.  In his new documentary Erasing David the film-maker attempts to 'disappear' for a month while private investigators track him down using basic surveillance and information that is readily available or given.  David's aim is to reveal just how much of our personal information is stored by the government and private companies and urges us to consider the implications.


Unsurprisingly, we discover that the amount of information stored about each of us is vast.  From the moment we are born details of our lives are written down and stored in government databases (medical records, school records, bank details, tax records, job history, criminal records... ) and increasingly, private companies are gathering, storing and selling as much information about us as possible in order to market goods and services more effectively.  Erasing David reveals how readily available our personal information is for anyone who is determined to collect it.  David interviews individuals who have had their personal information misused by fraudsters and through government mistakes and these people have found that once something is recorded it tends to plague them forever after even though it is unfounded.  Unfortunate though they are, these are very isolated cases and do little to discredit the information-obsessed culture that David is attacking.


The real revelation of the film is somewhat unwitting and pertains to a lax general attitude toward disclosure of personal information.  The private investigators easily find out where David lives, where he was born, went to school and information about his family.  They do not use CCTV or any of the research or tracking methods that would be available to government agents. On the whole, their methods are simple and would be effective for anyone who is willing to steal bags of household waste and who has access to the Internet and a phone.  They discover information about David's whereabouts from blogs and details about his family that he himself has disclosed on Facebook.  They find out hospital appointment times and locations by ringing receptionists under the pretext that David has forgotten his appointment details, which are then willingly given.


The premier of the film last night was followed by a debate about civil liberties and surveillance.  It was mediated by the director David Bond and the panel members were former MP David Davis (who resigned over extended detention laws for terror suspects), director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti, Phil Booth of NO2ID, and author and journalist Will Self.  The former three panellists avidly discussed infringement on our privacy by government and private companies and congratulated David Bond on raising awareness with his film.  Will Self suggested that it is ridiculous for 'an affluent white middle-class man' to claim that his civil liberties are being violated when 'black boys in Brixton' are being continually stopped, searched and arrested by police and having their personal information and DNA stored regardless of whether or not they are charged.


The film is interesting and thought-provoking but falls short of addressing the real issue which is why we are all so willingly open with our personal details.  Neither does it discuss the issue of ID cards for the UK or why large-scale DNA databases won't work.  Nevertheless Erasing David is worth watching and will be shown on More 4 at 10pm on Tuesday 4th May.


Trailer

Erasing David trailer from Green Lions on Vimeo.

Links 27/04/10

The disappointment of things
Buying objects is disappointing

There's value in obscurity
Some of the best ideas in history were forged by weirdos and outcasts

Want to know a secret?
Of course you do

Links 24/03/2010

What you loved doing when you were nine or ten years old is what you should be doing now...

Read on..

Charlie Brooker on mephedrone

Just read Charlie Brooker's latest blog post on the media panic surrounding methedrone.  As per usual, he is spot on in his analysis of the situation, explaining what is wrong with the media coverage far more eloquently and articulately than I can. So here's the link.

Links 16/03/10

swissmiss - if home appliances were inhabited

How genetically flawed am I?

Ever seen the film Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)?  


It’s set in ‘the not too distant future’ and explores a society where your DNA testing is quick and easy and social status is dictated genetically.  Prospective parents have a child designed for them by a doctor who eliminates susceptibility to diseases and undesirable predispositions such as alcoholism and violence.  He also engineers the sex and physical characteristics (eye and hair colour, skin tone, etc.).  People conceived in what we would call the natural way are now at a disadvantage.  They are known as ‘invalids’ and regarded as a liability for schools, employers, insurance companies and so on.  The invalids are society’s lowest of the low, unable to get decent employment or make a meaningful mark on society.


‘Of course it’s illegal to discriminate but nobody takes the law seriously’ ~ Jerome Morrow, Gattaca


DNA testing is becoming cheaper and easier all the time.  You can now send off a DNA sample and have it analysed.  You are then sent your results which detail your chances of developing Alzheimer’s, prostate cancer and a whole list of other illnesses.  As this technology becomes more widely available and accepted I wonder how prophetic Gattaca might turn out to be?


There is an interesting video about this from the Australian TV show Hungry Beast (ABC):

Google.. in two minutes and forty-six seconds

The future of digital technology.. from a gamer's point of view

At the Dice 2010 conference last week in Las Vegas, Jesse Schell, founder of Schell Games and former creative director at the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, gave a talk not so much about the future of gaming but about the future of digital technology and the psychological uses of gaming in everyday life.

He starts off talking about Facebook and how huge that is and how unbelievably popular Facebook games have become.  He explains some of the psychological tricks they use to get us hooked on them.  He talks about how the most popular games (in various formats) last year were games that are  routed in or linked to reality.  This is big because games have traditionally been about fantasy and about escaping reality.  He examines some of the most popular games which require an actual physical thing to interact with them, for example, Guitar Hero for the Wii (requires you buy an additional thing shaped like a guitar to play it).  He talks about the proliferation of disposable technology and sensors.  From here, he paints a picture of a typical day in the future taking into account the way digital technology is starting to use  games to encourage certain behaviour, which is really quite amazing.

What is amazing is first, what he is suggesting; and second, how plausible it is.  A  video of the talk is available on YouTube in 3 parts.  Each part is less than 10 minutes long and the last one is where it really gets going.  So go watch it.  But watch the first two parts first!  Obviously.

Russell Davies has posted an article on his excellent blog about a trendy device that you wear round your wrist and which measures how active you are on a daily basis.  If you've been sufficiently active, it displays a code for you.  You can use this code on a website to download various rewards for your activity.  For anyone who doubts what Jesse Schell suggests in the third part of the Dice talk, check this out - it's already happening!

As anonymous video wins respected journalism award, the digital beast slowly becomes more autonomous

The Guardian published an article yesterday on the anonymous video of Neda Aghan-Soltan's death that won one of the most important annual journalism prizes, the George Polk Award.

This is an amateur video taken on a mobile phone of a woman dying during the 2009 Iranian election protests.  It was posted on Facebook and YouTube and within hours was broadcast on CNN news.  This is the first time the award has been given to something produced anonymously.  It has also prompted the introduction of a new videography category for the award.

In The New York Times, John Darnton, curator of the Polk Awards said 'This video footage was seen by millions and became an iconic image of the Iranian resistance.  We don't know who took it or who uploaded it but we do know it have news value.  This is this award celebrates the fact that, in today's world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news.'

I thought this was interesting because it is an example of how the idea of the 'original' and 'authorship' is being challenged in the Digital Age.  When everyone is a contributor no-one is the author.  Stuff appears on the Net and is used in other media in any number of ways.  Since it is a digital video each copy is exactly the same, with no loss of quality and so there is no 'original'.  It belongs to everyone.

I do wonder though as more and more media is made by multiple contributors, who then is responsible?  Who is accountable?  The answer is either no-one or more likely everyone.

What's the point of a blog?

On Forever Becoming, Leigh Pearson has offered a wonderful explanation of why we blog and what purpose it serves:


'It seems that everyone has a platform these days: a website, a blog, a twitter.

On the surface, much blogging may appear to be a pointless endeavour: if the information is already out there then why reiterate or regurgitate it? Do we really need someone else to tell us the same thing again?'  Read on...

Augmented reality is on its way

(From The Guardian's Digital Content Blog)


'Augmented reality is a lively creative mess. Now that smartphones have relieved us from unstylish fantasies of goggles, the technology is finally getting real. In 2010, the world is becoming subtitled and your future will be augmented.

Augmented reality applications enable users to see additional layers of data when they view normal objects through smartphones or webcams. In fact, in the near future you will find more and more barcodes around, and parts of your visual world will be readable for machines and not anymore for humans.

Since programming an augmented reality application is easier than ever, even a computer student can develop augmented software for a smartphone. Very many of them are. These days, applications mushroom everywhere a bit of augmentable content is to be found.'

Read on...




Related links:
Do you care about privacy?
Mobile augmented reality set for boom time

Link to article 'Should automobile software be open-sourced?' and addition to post on Google Wave

Read an interesting article on Clive Thompson's excellent blog about whether automobile software should be open-sourced to reduce bugs in the system that cause car crashes.  He says something interesting about open-sourced software that's relevant to my post about Google Wave:


"Once software grows really huge, its creators are often unable to vouchsafe that it’s bug-free — that it’ll work as intended in all situations... it’s practically a law of nature that when code gets huge, bugs multiply; the software becomes such a sprawling ecosystem that no single person can ever visualize how it works and what might go wrong. Worse, it’s even harder to guarantee a system’s behavior when it’s in the hands of millions of users, all behaving in idiosyncratic ways. They are the infinite monkeys bashing at the keyboard..."

How humans and machines work together

I thought this was interesting. It's an article by Clive Thompson who writes for the New York Times Magazine on how humans and machines work together, taken from collisiondetention.net.

Back in 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov played against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, and lost. At the time it was widely regarded as a huge victory for artificial intelligence. But as Kasparov points out — in a fantastic new essay about computer chess in the New York Review of Books — experts had long predicted that a computer would eventually beat a human at chess.

That’s because chess software doesn’t need to analyze the game the way a human does. It just needs to do a “brute force” attack: It calculates all the possible games several moves out, finds the one that’s most advantageous to itself, and makes that play. Human grandmasters don’t work that way. They do not necessarily “see” the game several moves out. Indeed, they can’t — as Kasparov points out, chess is so complex that “a player looking eight moves ahead [faces] as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy.”

Instead, people who are truly great at chess use the peculiarly human qualities of understanding, insight and intuition: They study oodles of games, encode that knowledge deeply in their brains, and practice incessantly. “As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees,” as Kasparov concludes, the real answer is: “Just one, the best one.” We like to think that artificial intelligence is replicating human smarts, but in reality it does something quite different. One doesn’t learn much about human intelligence by examining the way computers play chess, just as one doesn’t learn much about computer intelligence by examining the way humans play chess. They are fundamentally dissimilar processes.

But this gave Kasparov a fascinating idea. What if, instead of playing against one another, a computer and a human played together — as part of a team? If humans and computers think in very different ways, perhaps they’d be complementary. So in 1998 Kasparov put together an event called “Advanced Chess”, where humans played against one another, but each was allowed to also use a PC with the best available chess software. The chess players would enter positions into the machine, see what the computer thought was a good move, and use this to inform their own human analysis of the board. Cyborg chess!

The results? As Kasparov writes:

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

This stuff really fascinates me, because so much of our everyday lives now transpire in precisely this fashion: We work as cyborgs, using machine intelligence to augment our human smarts. Google amplifies our ability to find information, or even to remember it (I often use it to resolve “tip of the tongue” moments — i.e. to locate the name of a person or concept I know but can’t quite put my finger on). Social-networking software gives us an ESP-level awareness of what’s going on in the lives of people we care about. Tools like Mint help us spot invisible patterns in how we’re spending, or blowing, our hard-earned cash. None of these tools replace human intelligence, or even work the way that human intelligence works. Indeed, they’re often cognitively quite alien processes — which is precisely why they can be so unsettling to some people, and why we’re still sort of figuring out how, and when, to use them. The arguments that currently rage about the social impact of Facebook and Google are, in a sense, arguments about what sort of cyborgs we want — or don’t want — to be.

What I love about Kasparov’s algorithm — “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and … superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process” — is that it suggests serious rewards accrue to those who figure out the best way to use thought-enhancing software. (Or rather, those who figure out a way that’s best for them; people always use tools in slightly different, idiosyncratic ways.) The process matters as much as the software itself. How often do you check it? When do you trust the help it’s offering, and when do you ignore it?


(That photo above is by Elke Wetzig, and released for use under the GNU Free Documentation License!)