Some of the article meshes in interesting ways with what I was thinking about in my last few posts. I enjoyed reading what he had to say, so I felt like commenting on it. For example,

“And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It’s our collective stream of consciousness.”

It does feel intuitively right to me that something will emerge on top of the Web but I don’t really think the Web emerged on top of the Internet in an equivalent way. I think of the Web as a conscientiously designed markup language, protocols, and interfaces (browsers) that “resided” on the Internet as their medium. The result of all that was the huge variety we see today. Whereas the stream, also residing on the Internet medium, does not have an analogue in terms of the Web programming I just mentioned. The stream seems to be a lot of different applications or meta-applications that serves various purposes. Some use common protocols or other standards but many might also be considered rivulets within larger streams. So if we want to say there is a stream as something emerging on top of the Web, I think we have to envision it wholly differently than the Web that emerged on top of the Internet. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to think of the stream is an emergent property of the Web?

I’ve been dissecting this stream idea without even saying what it is. Spivack calls out an example in microblogging, of sites like Twitter he says “…they are literally streams of thinking and conversation…” And later he points out that “The Stream is a world of even shorter attention spans, online viral sensations, instant fame, sudden trends, and intense volatility. It is also a world of extremly short-term conversations and thinking.”

That may touch on the same phenomenon I was thinking about when I claimed that people now have short attention spans by necessity. To acquire knowledge people have to pull together many shallow atoms. Spivack’s article recognizes a problem with inexorable onslaught of the stream. So many streams of information, constantly streaming away, how can we cope? The answer seems to be that we’ll need tools to aggregate, filter, and manage our streams for us. [update 14 May: after posting this I read a great post on the Emergent Chaos blog about this very issue... twitter bankruptcy]

But I wonder, we’ve had “constant now” technology for a long time in the form of a telephone. Phone conversations are essentially immediate. There are reasons that we do not stay constantly connected with the now of the phone. What is compelling us to think that we should attempt that with the Web? Just because the Internet is accessible constantly, the Web is updateable immediately, and a computer device can open access to innumerable streams, do I want to be exposed and engaged with that? Increasingly, people seem to be saying yes. I don’t know that that will continue but this is worth exploring more. Nevertheless, because we can transmit information so rapidly I don’t think it means we necessarily will start focusing on the Web for what is happening as opposed to what happened. It may be the case that all of this access, these streams are valuable to us because they keep us rapidly up-to-date with what just happened not what is happening.

“Just as the Web is not any one particular site or service, the Stream is not any one site or service — it’s the collective movement that is taking place across them all.”

I get why it’s so tempting to compare the Stream to streams of consciousness. On the whole, you seem to get a constantly flowing array of stuff with all sorts of lateral connections. Maybe if we place ourselves way above the Internet, and think of it as a mind, these things taken as a whole, would indeed seem fluid like a stream of consciousness. But if we were to focus any one particular person’s Twitter stream for example, it’s much more like an archive than a fluid stream. People select bits of their thoughts and convey them to Twitter, where they appear and remain. Spivack recognizes this because he goes on to discuss the linear nature of most streamlike services. He also states that

“The transition from a slow Web to a fast-moving Stream is happening quickly. And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our ‘now’ is getting shorter.”

What’s the value in an RSS feed or following a microblog? I think it may be, at least in part, the fact that it is conveying, not the now, but a constant archive of the now. It’s value is that we can look on what has passed, very easily, in a sequential or somehow ordered context and still communicate with it in our own now. Perhaps what we want from the stream is not to be engaged in the now but to be engaged at our own command, with the recently passed. That’s all very unlike a telephone. In this, I don’t see a fluid now like a stream of conscious, but something more like a conveyor of discrete selections.

Search engines initially answered our question of “How or where can I find the information I want?” but in indexing the content of the Internet and providing access, they created a much more troubling problem. That question tends to overshadow another question, which is equally if not more important, “How do I assemble knowledge from the information I find?” That question will be solved by computer-assisted shallow atom assembly, which I think may be a new significant stage of Internet-related development.

Let me open up the problem a bit more.

The ubquity of “search” (whether through an Internet search engine, individual site search, etc.) has given us a more burdensome onus to seek out and gather the right shallow atoms for the knowledge we need. Search engines both enable and testify to this. Although they haven’t come close to solving my second question they’ve become slightly more sensitive to it: search results are not simply lists pointing to likely sources of information sought. Search engines offer more context for the results. They encourage things like voting on relevance, they offer information related to the results but tangential, for example searching for a company’s name will often also offer news about the company, stock symbols, addresses, display ads about related products and services, etc.

Search engines increased the pressure on individuals to find and assemble shallow atoms of information into the knowledge message or narrative answering their need for knowledge. Search engines provided us with functional access to the immense universe of discourse that is the Internet but it’s all based on the unadulterated results of computation. We thus lack intelligent authors to assemble a structured knowledge for acquisition from the content of the Internet. The search engine should morph or augment itself into something that will provide that or come close to providing that (or else be usurped by an alternate application). That will be a great advance.

The Continuum

I’ve been saying that we have a more shallow atoms now and have adapted our attention spans suitably for the labour we must undertake to acquire knowledge. Here’s what I mean.

Although we’ve always had, more or less, shallow atoms for knowledge acquisition, I think that the availability of these has increased in our Internet-oriented era. I see the deep unit and shallow atoms as points on a continuum of methods for knowledge acquisition. Event without electronic means, we have shallow atoms. For example, a poster plastered to a construction site might announce a rally for a political cause. It would likely contain just a few words or phrases about the cause with some pertinent information on the time and place of the rally. Someone seeing this atom would still need to acquire information from other sources in order to develop sufficient knowledge for understanding the issue. Magazine articles too, these lie in a more middle ground of the continuum. They’re relatively short like an atom but they’re structured more closely to a unit.

Virtually, we’ve created so many new types of shallow atoms, not to mention facsimiles of the physical ones I just mentioned. Take the Web concept of linking, which just encourages the shallow atom mode of defining information. Because we can include a link within one shallow atom to another, there is no need to deepen the individual atom. An atom that references something requiring more information includes a link to one or more atoms to satisfy that requirement (and those atoms may include links as well).

Considering this continuum is essential to considering the changes in our methods of knowledge acquisition. Whereas I’m asserting we’ve had various forms of knowledge from the continuum for a long time, I also think that the technology of the Internet and that which branches from it have immensely increased the quantity, forms, and occurances of shallow atoms. The impact on people acquiring knowledge is that while perhaps we maintained a certain type of balance in terms of analysing, interpreting, and synthesizing our information in the past, we’re now taking on a much greater synthesis role before we can engage in the other activities. We lack the authors that formerly acquired, designed, and assembled the knowledge message.

The Onus of Labour

The increase in shallow atoms proportionally requires that we spend more of our knowledge acquisition activities in designing and assembling the knowledge we seek prior to considering it as a whole. We must do more of our own authoring before analyzing and understanding. Previously, with a deep unit, we could accept the assembled whole (I refered to this as the author’s message in my last post), consider it, analyze it, and synthesize our understanding together. The big difference is that analyzing a unit is quite different than analyzing atoms. Synthesizing the knowledge of the unit feels very different from synthesizing that of the atoms, which have to be selected first. I think it is for this reason that search engines must work much harder to help us answer the second question if the companies operating them wish to continue dominating our knowledge acquisition activities.

Consider many of the new technologies being offered on the market. Gadgets like GPS devices do not simply enable mapping and direction giving knowledge, they’re increasingly used within the context of revealing restaurants, stores, etc. I’ve read about technologies being tested to visually superimpose meta information on objects of everyday life: ingredients on food in stores for example. In my own neighbourhood, there were a number of old houses on some streets that had plaques identifying them in a special way that let people know they could dial a number on their mobile phone as they passed to hear historical information about that area. These technologies offering context-relevent atoms, seem to exist in recognition of the need for assistance in assembling knowledge from the quantity of shallow atoms flooding us.

I’m not convinced that what is called “Web 2.0″ advanced our interaction within our world much (it just formalized some of it better). However computer-assisted shallow atom assembly could significantly advance our interaction through substantial knowledge acquisition, on top of the massive problem search engines created on the shoulders of the Internet.

Aside from basic needs satisfied from an atom or two, will search engines cease being simply search engines and instead truly assist users in substantial knowledge acquisition needs? They’re not doing this now but the seeds are already being planted (intentionally or not). Google has seen the need to insert related context links in much of the results it presents and is collecting more intelligent sorts of feedback from its users. Steps in the right direction, sure. Additionally, Google’s push of its OS to mobile devices says something about the need for a search engine to be constantly assisting our lives. Our handy pocket search. But that had better become something that assists me with the multitude of shallow atoms rather than just present me with more of them in an increasing quantity of contextual situations. Facebook with its multitude of information streams (or other current social networks) are early, lucky, symptoms of the desire for what is needed ahead.

A crude example is that search engines could capture the amount of time someone spends reading a page of search results. They could capture the time over the course of multiple “next, next, next” button pushes in a set of results. Each search could be a category within a hierarchy of a knowledge narrative. The search result links prioritized and selected from (for example) Google’s algorithms for page rank and relevence. After several sequential searches, or searches with related topics, the engine could display a page of introduction, body content, and conclusion, that provides a comprehensive knowledge narrative the seeker could acquire.

That system might present a body of shallow atoms in a wholistic message as if by an intelligent author, yet it results as a sympathetic mirror of the user/seeker’s activities. But as I said, that’s a crude example-I’ve neglected many problems and details with how something like that could work. I’m sure there are much more sophisticated things that could be (and must be) done to develop computer-assisted shallow atom assembly.

[side note: after writing this last week, I came across an article about an exciting new application, Wolfram|Alpha that may be a step in the direction I've been describing. Got to go try it out]

Let me delineate a few parameters. I do not intend to make a value judgement on any method of acquiring knowledge. My main interest is to examine current changes in our popular methods of knowledge acquisition and what these mean for our understanding. I’m not thinking of experts in a domain of research (though there are some interesting challenges). Rather, I’m considering the everyday person that wants to learn something substantial about a subject or issue in his or her world.

Prior to the Internet if someone wanted to learn about a subject to any non-superficial degree, one would probably read a book. Documentary films could also provide some solid depth of information (or sometimes television shows, though these may also move us away from the deeper end of the continuum). Each of these examples is a single, self-contained, deep unit covering the necessary amount of information for the layperson to learn a satisfactory bulk of what he needs on the desired subject.

I call something a deep unit if it is a self-contained gathering of information related to a specific subject. A book that explains the history of Canada, a documentary on the social structure of ant colonies, a television magazine that devotes an episode to the unsafe build quality of a famous auto manufacturer, these are all examples of units about a topic that, anyone familiar with these mediums will recognize provide a well-focused gathering of information structured in a way that the person apprehending the media will be able to learn a relatively deep amount of knowledge about their subjects.

In contrast to the deep unit, consider the shallow atom. I call something a shallow atom when it provides a, discrete quantity of information in a concise scope. Consider an online encyclopedia (for example Wikipedia) entry about Canada, while it will provide some history it will not be sufficient in itself to provide the deeper knowledge the book does.

Consider a scientist’s blog talking about her day-to-day research insights on her observations of ant colonies. Each individual blog post will provide some information but it won’t provide the wholistic depth of a documentary on the subject. Consider, a consumer web site that allows its visitors to vote on the quality of different cars, it may indicate a low rating for a particular car but it won’t identify the systematic administrative cover-ups of safety violations the manufacturer engaged in, it won’t reveal tests confirming the safety problems. These are all examples of shallow atoms.

I would like to emphasize that although I’ve set up what seems to be a comparison between deep units and shallow atoms, it is not a comparison of the value or capacity. Rather I want to identify distinguishing examples. If my theory is right it won’t be because a shallow atom is equivalent or better than a deep unit but because a great, enmeshed quantity of shallow atoms can provide equivalent knowledge as an individual deep unit.

Design and Assembly

There is both a significant qualitative difference and a difference in apprehension, in virtue of the design and assembly of deep units versus shallow atoms. The deep unit is designed by one or more individuals to have a certain continuity of structure. Its entire quantity of information is conveyed via a predesigned (meaning not left to the person acquiring it) conceptual skeleton. The shallow atom, on the other hand is but a bone within the conceptual skeleton and requires that the person acquiring it design his or her own conceptual skeleton for assembling the required information.

To return to my example of the documentary piece on the subject of ant colonies’ social structures. A team of people no doubt developed a well-defined and edited structure for how they’d convey the information to their audience. The documentary would likely have some sort of introduction teasing peoples’ interests as well as providing an overview of the show’s topic. Later the documentary would go further and further in-depth about the issue, probably interviewing different researchers, explaining scientific analyses, connecting commentary to provide a more extensive context to the point. It may discuss parallels with human behaviour or technological innovations, and ultimately it would wrap up with a conclusion and some sort of summary of the its contents. The point is, there is a directed message in the deep unit that those producing it attempt to convey.

Compare that with the scientist publishing a blog about her research on ant colonies. She may post daily, a new observation she’s made while studying her colony. One post might identify a certain behaviour between worker ants and their queen. Another post might discuss the food storage strategy of the colony. These posts would continue for so long as she’s doing her research. It might be tempting to argue that the entire blog, covering the topic of ant colony research is a deep unit but I don’t think it is. Aside from the overarching topic of the blog, it is not a unit assembled along a structure that has been defined to convey a unit of knowledge. In fact, if it were, it would lose its value as a blog.

Each blog post is a more-or-less self-contained entity-an atom. The blog post contains usually, a bit of information about something which encourages people to comment on it or link to it (also a form of interactive commentary). Blogs are designed to encourage conversation. If the blog post was instead a whole book, the threshold for commentary would be much greater. That is, to comment, people would have to invest much more time and effort to read it. However, the blog post’s appeal and success at developing conversation lies in large part with the fact that it has a relatively low threshold to acquire. Someone can read it without fear that he or she is not getting the full picture by not reading the rest of the blog posts. That enables each post to be commented on, as its own discrete unit. It also means each post is only likely to deliver a small portion of information, so if someone wants to acquire knowledge, say about ants, he’ll only get a bit from the blog post. He’ll have to follow its links to videos of the colony, other scholarly publications, perhaps a government-funded research site from some other country, to round out the full scope of knowledge he wants to acquire. Of course, before the widespread existence of all these information media that scope of knowledge would likely have come from a deep unit, like a book.

But what does that mean to the person acquiring knowledge? It means he or she has a lot of additional work to do. There is no one author or group that has designed and assembled the appropriate information into a deep unit ready for knowledge acquisition. I can easily think of a number of tasks the knowledge acquirer will have to do, there are probably many others.

1. must validate the trustworthiness of each atom
2. must decide upon the utility of each atom
3. must select which atoms to pursue for further related information
4. must seek the right sources to use for discovering atoms

What about the message of the deep unit’s author? Is that another thing that the knowledge acquirer must take upon him or herself to develop? I’d argue that any person wanting to acquire some knowledge has a responsibility to do some critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, etc. regardless of whether information comes in the form of a deep unit or a shallow atom. Still, I feel that in the case of the deep unit, the author’s design and build, implicit with its message, is an added value in virtue of the perspective provided by the author. It might also be argued that that muddies the waters for the knowledge acquirer. Now, with all the new methods for communication we’ve developed, that perspective might also be obtained through later discussion.

In any case, the design and assembly of the knowledge acquired through shallow atoms is a very different thing (structure, quality, onus of labour, etc.) from that acquired through deep units.

Have you noticed how those belonging to the generation labeled “millenials” are often accused of having short attention spans? They’re always connected for social and information acquiring reasons. They use mobile phones, Web search engines, type short frequent text messages, maintain instant messenger windows on their computer screens, worship metadata (though not always consciously), use blogs, microblogs, social networks, view short video clips online as opposed to television, mix music in collage fashion from small clips of other sounds, etc. The items I just listed provide instantaneous access to shallow atoms of knowledge.

If we think of how the millenials acquire knowledge with these media, then they have short attention spans by necessity. In order to acquire the knowledge they seek on a subject, they have to pull together many shallow atoms.

Imagining ways of knowledge acquisition along a continuum from the very deep, dense sources to the manifold shallow, smaller sources reveals that people not only are taking advantage of newer technologies and media but also are changing their behaviours in response.

I have more to post about this subject in the next little bit. The implications of how we’re changing our methods for acquiring knowledge extend to information archival, opinion making, our responses to news, certain social interactions, and as I’d like to talk about in another post, the next most important change for the Internet. Search engines accomplished their job. And they created a big problem in helping us find all the shallow atoms we want. But there is an incredible, unexploited opportunity for search engines to evolve into something new, solving the problem they created.

I’m thinking about this in relation to Shirky’s insightful commentary on the notion of a cognitive surplus, which our era is just starting to come to grips with. He proposes this value that it’s better to do something than nothing. I don’t think I’m comfortable with that. His post highlights some of the ways that people use their time to collaborate on projects through Internet technologies and social media types of applications. The idea is that after the industrial revolution we live in an era with a significant amount of “free time” (I guess that essentially refers to time not spent in the context of a job). For a good portion of when this free time became available to us as a society, we’ve chosen to occupy it by watching television shows. Shirky, if I understood correctly, calls this doing nothing. Now, we’re waking up to the potential of this “free time” and we’re employing it in an active way–that is, doing something. Examples include writing wikipedia pages, contributing to group mapping projects, developing free and open source software, etc.

Actually, I don’t think watching TV is doing nothing. It’s doing something, passively. You let the program come to you and you don’t really direct your intentions onto anything in the world. You don’t act upon anything to produce some sort of an outcome. Since you at least have some perceptions and thinking or whatnot while you’ve positioned yourself in front of a TV, you’ve at a minimum passively-doing. So Instead I’ll refer to this as passive-doing instead of Shirky’s doing nothing, and in contrast to active-doing something (which would be the equivalent to Shirky’s doing something).

It so happens that I don’t watch much TV. I know, that sentence raises an irresistible temptation to stereotype me as one of those people who gloat and speak in a pedantic voice about how they never watch TV. That’s not what I’m aiming for here. I like a bit of TV and think it serves an important role (don’t want to get into that in this post though). Nevertheless people often identify excessive TV-watching as problematic. In my case, TV just rarely is my thing, and not because of what I’m doing through the Internet (though I definitely occupy myself that way too). I tend to have other activities or projects that I do (a lot of the time they don’t even involve electricity, like sometimes I’ll write with pen to paper. Sorry, did that support the stereotype?). Active-doing something and passive-doing are not doing nothing.

What’s wrong with doing nothing? Sometimes, I just sit, without a TV, and let my thoughts wander but I don’t do anything in particular. I don’t produce something or bring about some sort of change in the world (in the common sense). In fact these days I feel like I don’t do nothing often enough. I’m sure I’m not the only one as I can’t help but notice there appears to be an increasing interest in meditation–talk about doing nothing. I tend to think, as a society we’re very concerned with maintaining states of constant occupation.

This notion of a cognitive surplus points to the cultural phenomenon exploding via digital technologies. We’re waking up to what we’ve begun, socially, to do to ourselves with the Internet. And it’s amazing. Shirky’s idea seems to be that we’re just now starting to figure out how to handle all this free time. Why is it a “surplus”? Can we have such a surplus?

Surplus leads me toward supply and demand, production and resources; it feels rooted in commerce. The television watcher that Shirky implies was doing nothing (passive-doing) was a consumer of free time. But according to Shirky this has changed, now this same person can be doing something, in other words producing something via the Internet and social applications, or else some other modicum of digital living. Shirky says

“And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, ‘If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.’”

I ask, why is it better to do something than to do nothing? Why should that be a general principle? Why the grounds for how we occupy our free time?

What about an evening occupied at a playhouse? In a sense this is quite similar to TV. Except we tend to consider the play an art that is outside the realm of television. It’s still essentially as passive, in the sense of doing, as watching TV. Some plays involve audience participation but these are hardly the norm–perhaps there is a reason participatory plays aren’t more popular. Sometimes we need to not occupy ourselves with producing. With being “on” and actively involved, our intentions trained on doing.

If the regular consumer of free time shifts his consumption from one of TV watching (passive-doing) to one of researching, debating, and writing Wikipedia entries (active-doing something) then doesn’t he become a producer? He’s consuming his free time by producing (intentions and energy trained at doing something), which is exactly what so many Web 2.0/social media enterprises are hoping will make their business models successful. Shirky is right in more ways than one to make his industrial revolution/gin stupor comparison to our current day digital tech & Internet/TV situation.

I wonder if we’re losing our ability to develop the mental dexterity which enables us to wander through an open-ended forest of perspectives on what we do do. The notion of reflection could be lost. If we always occupy our free time by doing something, we’re occupying ourselves out of time we might otherwise occupy in, for example, meditation. If using the cognitive surplus means we take up the value that doing something is better than doing nothing, I fear we may create a problem as unhealthy as the excess in passive-doing known as watching TV.