Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Review: You Are Not a Gadget
After reading an interesting New York Times review of Jaron Lanier’s book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, I decided to pick up a copy.
You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
The title of the book is a bit misleading; it contains a collection of thought-provoking essays rather than a coherent statement of principle. But it’s worth reading closely because it’s an insightful critique of current techno-culture made by a prominent technologist that helped to create that culture.
Jaron Lanier is one of the pioneers of virtual reality technology. He’s worked on human computer interface research and design in Silicon Valley for decades. When he discusses the dark side of social media, social software, and the Web 2.0 ethos, he does it with an insider’s eye and enthusiast’s attention to detail.
If you’re looking for a thinker to challenge the current techno-centric zeitgeist championed by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Clay Shirky, Jaron Lanier is your man.
Lanier touches on many different topics relating to culture and technology in this series of essays. But if I had to pick three themes that captured my imagination, these would be:
- How collective or collaborative Web 2.0 designs devalue individual contributions
- How social software cheapens interpersonal relationships
- How the pursuit of artificial intelligence undermines our appreciation of human intelligence
To understand fully the arguments Lanier is making, you’ll need to read the book itself. But I’ll try to summarize the key points here, partly as a reminder to myself.
Emphasizing collective ownership harms individual initiative
One of Lanier’s central themes is that the ethos of anonymous social production devalues the contributions of creative individuals. Contributing ideas and artifacts anonymously often means that the significant contributions to knowledge and culture made by individuals go unacknowledged.
If people aren’t rewarded for their efforts somehow, most will stop participating. Only the tiny minority that find the act of creating new music or books or software intrinsically rewarding will continue to do so. But these can be expensive hobbies. How will those individuals pay their bills?
And if fewer folks make original contributions to culture or knowledge, then online culture might degenerate into nothing more than remixing or repeating previous material.
Social software reduces relationships
The praise lavished upon the current crop of social media and social software tools must be galling for a researcher that has spent his entire career inventing technologies to deepen human interactions on the Internet.
Lanier provides many examples of how these “social” systems dumb-down human thought and opinion, and eliminate any nuance in relationships.
What does it mean to boil down all interpersonal connections to the single act of “friendling” or “following”? This reduces human relationships to the equivalent of a second-grader’s hastily scribbled “Do you like me? Check this box!” note.
Other means of social or collaborative filtering are just as primitive. The advantage of simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating systems is that the results can be easily aggregated and calculated by computers. The results might help gauge popularity, but lack the depth and context that human reviews provide.
Many of these tools, with their profiles and avatars, make self-definition a conscious and deliberate act. In the past, only public figures and celebrities needed to manage their identities carefully. Now we all do.
Worse, these constructed identities tell us much more about our tools than they do about ourselves. We stuff our resumes with keywords so that search engines can find them. We tailor our public profiles, leaving out gender or age or location, so we won’t be deluged with advertising. It’s not about who we are. It’s not even about how we want other people to understand us. It’s about how we want our computers to see us.
Artificial intelligence undermines our appreciation of human intelligence
Lanier devotes several large sections of You Are Not a Gadget to deconstructing the idea of computationalism. There are several strands to this belief, the primary tenet of which is that the human brain processes information like an ideal Turing Machine would.
If human thought is computable, then it is only a matter of time before computers become humanly intelligent.
This goal has become the holy grail of the Artificial Intelligence community. But Lanier points out that today’s hardware and software have limitations that cause them to deviate from an ideal Turing Machine. (It’s not physically possible to construct one, so it’s less a real “machine” than a thought experiment carried out by Alan Turing, for which it is named.)
But even if you could work around the technical limitations, it’s not clear that human intelligence is computable at all. The brain-as-computer analogy might be completely false. Despite the fact that processing power is getting faster and cheaper all the time, it could be that machine intelligence is a very different thing than human intelligence. Computers will never catch up to people; they are running a different race.
Lanier notes that despite a few well-publicized successes, progress in artificial intelligence has been slow, and its definition of success has shifted over time. Yet it’s still an article of faith in Silicon Valley. It is the motivating philosophy behind Google and hundreds of other companies there, and it infuses the culture of the technology industry in general.
He worries that the drive to create artificial intelligence harms our understanding of the human kind. In the tech industry’s rush to build and promote machine intelligence, it could accidentally create solutions that constrain individual creativity, thought and judgment.
Worse, the notion of computationalism contributes to the sense that computers and people are interchangeable. If you only had a big enough server farm in the cloud, the thinking goes, you could replace most of what people do with their brains. And the bits that computers can’t calculate or simulate could be gathered or harvested by aggregating the actions of billions of anonymous users online. Humans become just another input device to the computing cloud.
Conclusion
While the idea that an individual is just one component of the vast collective consciousness of the Internet might be appealing to some, it’s a horrifying proposition for humanists that celebrate individual creativity and initiative.
Lanier reminds us that our technologies have cultural implications. We shape our tools, but they also shape us. We should be mindful of the effects that these tools will have on the way we think and interact.
We are not gadgets, he says, and we should be skeptical of technologies that treat us that way.
Review: Making Things Happen
I really enjoyed reading the Myths of Innovation. So when I read that Scott Berkun had also written a book about project management (via this Joel on Software post), I decided to check it out.
Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun
Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management is the title of Scott Berkun’s revised second-edition book on project management. It contains the lessons distilled from a career in getting a team of people to work together to achieve common goals.
The book doesn’t spend time on any particular methodology. Instead, the focus is on the practical skills you’ll need to determine priorities, manage tasks, and lead teams. There’s no grand theories here; just things that have been proven to work.
If you’re an accomplished project manager, you’ll probably find the book a bit basic. But for someone like me, who accidentally finds himself in charge of teams from time to time, it contains down-to-earth descriptions of the essential tools and skills you’ll need to get things done.
The book is organized well, with clear section headers, lists and diagrams. It makes it easy to find the sections you need. The revised edition also contains discussion questions and what-if scenarios, which I found useful for putting the advice in context.
I really appreciated Scott’s focus on pragmatism and real-world issues. If it’s more complicated than making prioritized lists or checking in with the members of your team regularly, you won’t find it here. But those simple reminders are just the sort of advice many of us occasional project managers need to keep things on track.
Review: Ambient Findability
In my review of Keeping Found Things Found, I mentioned that I might want to check out some of the sources cited. Ambient Findability by Peter Morville was one of those books that appeared often in the footnotes, so I thought I’d check it out.
Ambient Findability is a brief and entertaining survey of search technologies and information architecture. In seven chapters, the author describes the current state of the art in fields of decision science, interaction design, and information architecture. He also speculates on where some of these technologies might take us in the future.
The central idea of the book is that we now live in an information-soaked environment. Advances in communications and information technology allow us to store and share far more information than in the past. As our tools and techniques for dealing with this flood of information improve, revolutionary new applications will emerge.
Most of these applications will enable near-instant access to volumes of information from wherever we are: Ambient Findability.
Both Evolution and Revolution
In the three decades since the invention of the personal computer, we’ve seen some amazing new products and services come into existence. Some of these are incremental improvements over existing technology. Shopping via the Internet is really just an improved version of shopping via mail-order catalog, for example. But some of these have led to completely new ways of doing things.
The best parts of Ambient Findability trace the evolution of these technologies to the current state of the art. You can read about early experiments, failed approaches, and the innovations that seem to have lasting power. This is the bulk of the book, so it’s definitely a worthy edition to your shelf if you’re interested in these topics.
The places where the author gets into trouble is where he tries to extrapolate from the current state of the art into the types of things we might see in the future. It’s these parts where Peter’s enthusiasm for the technologies lets him get carried away.
Sure, GPS is becoming a standard feature on our cell phones. And yes, it’s possible to implant GPS chips into our pets. And smart phones get smaller and more energy efficient every year. But I can’t imagine that I would want to go through surgery to embed a PDA-like device under my skin.
Then again, I can’t imagine getting a tattoo either, so maybe I’m just not cut out to be a cyborg.
Keeping our Heads Above Water
One thing is for certain: the coming years will bring a lot of experimentation. We’ll slowly find out, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t. It’ll take a while before we figure out the best ways to surf the information superhighway. (And maybe even longer to come up with sensible metaphors to describe the experience!)
Flights of fancy aside, Peter makes a great case that the Information Age is a technological revolution. It will profoundly change society, just like the Industrial Revolution did. And while the revolution thunders on, it’s anyone’s guess as to what the future will bring.
Review: Keeping Found Things Found
I recently finished Keeping Found Things Found by William Jones. It’s subtitled “The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management” but I think it ought to read “The Study of a Practice…”
The book is intended as a broad survey of information management practices and principles that individuals use to manage information. This is not a how-to manual or a self-help guide. It’s written in the style of an introductory textbook, which is not surprising given that much of the content was developed as part of the Keeping Found Things Found Project, run by the Information School at the University of Washington.
The academic style of the writing might appeal to some, but I found it a slow read. The footnotes and citations often got in my way as I was trying to absorb the material. Each chapter begins with a lengthy introduction and ends with a point-by-point recapitulation of key messages. These are probably useful for a semester-long course, but it’s overkill for anyone wanting tips and tricks.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I’m not the target audience for a book like this. If you want a primer on the personal information management field, Keeping Found Things Found is a decent place to start.
Key messages
We live in a world awash with information. Some of it is useful to us, but much of it isn’t. The point of information management is to keep the useful information easily accessible while ignoring the unhelpful bits.
This is an extremely challenging task, because we use information in a variety of different ways depending on our current situation. It also requires us to make some guesses about the future. How likely is it that we will need to recall or retrieve the information again? Is it worth memorizing it? Writing it down? Saving a hyperlink or adding a bookmark to our browser? We can’t predict our future needs exactly, so we often wind up storing more information than we need.
And that leads us to develop strategies for organizing it, indexing it, and searching it. And because we’re all different, there are almost as many different methods for keeping found things found as there are people. Some of the strategies — like the post-it notes stuck to your monitor — are obvious. Others are subtle, like keeping a mental list of go-to people that are experts in a particular topic so that you can ask questions as needed.
How this relates to Infovark
Having recently worked at a firm making records management software, I was familiar with much of the material in the book. The main reason for reading it was that records management focuses on large-scale organizational methods used by government and corporations to store, track, manage and dispose of information. I wanted to find out whether there were specific strategies that work well for individuals or small teams. Were there methods or tools that might help us refine Infovark’s design?
Well, I didn’t spot any, though some of the sources cited in the book might be worth checking out.
One of the book’s themes that connected with me was that we are really operating in a different age. The amount of information available to people is orders of magnitude greater today than in the past. Many of us now have music collections on our iPods that would have put independent record shops a few decades ago to shame. We have vast amounts of movies, television, and other video available to us on DVDs and streamed across the Internet. And then there’s the mountains of text and reams of financial data. All this content means that we’ve outgrown many of the concepts that guided us and tools we used in the past.
Gordon and I saw this clearly in our old job. It seemed silly — ridiculous, even — to expect a large organization to get a handle on its information when most of its employees have difficulty dealing with their own email inboxes. And companies can’t afford to train all their staff in the ways of research librarians so that they can manage the stuff on the corporate intranet. We need new approaches.
And we’ll keep reading, and talking with people, and attending conferences, and scouring the Internet, until we find them.
