Posts Tagged ‘internet’
Is the internet making us stupid?
Over at my humble podcast, I interview “Is Google Making Us Stupid” author Nick Carr about his new book, The Shallows, and what the internet is doing to our brains. Nothing good, he argues.
Carr’s publicist deserves a gold medal because the NYT today is running a series of articles on the “trend” that Americans are coming to the conclusion that gadgets and always-on connectivity is turning their brains to mush (one, two, and three). What’s more, on its Bits blog, the NYT is asking for volunteers to unplug from the internet and then report on their experience. And Carr had op-eds in the WSJ on Saturday and the WaPo yesterday.
So this is all to say, listen to my podcast. But also to ask, do you feel more distracted, unfocused and forgetful since the rise of the internet? For some of us “before the internet” is a meaningless distinction. Do you find it hard to concentrate on deep reading? Do you read as much as you used to?
Interdisciplinary survey of Chatroulette
The award for academic entrepreneurialism goes to Alex Leavitt & Tim Hwang who earlier this week release the paper “Chatroulette: An Initial Surey.” Conducted over two days, the study “sampled 201 ChatRoulette sessions, noting characteristics such as group size and gender.”
They find that Chatroulette is “a probabilistic community: a community shaped by a platform which mediates the encounters between its users by eliminating lasting connections between them.” Uh-huh. I think it’s just easier to say that it’s a microcosm of the larger (and earlier) Internet–exhibitionists of the world, meet the voyeurs.
Putting the sample size aside, they found some interesting stats. Males accounted for 87% of their sessions, and 5% of chatters were exposing their genitals. While those two figures are probably related, “This suggests that–in spite of common assumptions–that the large majority of ChatRoulette users do not utilize the platform for sexual purposes.”
They finally make some interesting predictions about where Chatroulette, as a probabilistic community, will head.
After ChatRoulette users become more acquainted with the system (ie., do not browse solely to explore), we predict a decrease in explicit content, an increase in the consolidation of content genres, and an increase in the formation of celebrity figures.
Anyhow, this is all by way of making an excuse to link to this short video I made of persons on Chatroulette reacting to seeing Numa Numa Kid presented as their chat partner. Enjoy.
Sam Anderson has the best ‘trend piece’ I’ve seen about ChatRoulette
The median age seems to hover around 20, and males outnumber females probably twenty to one. Sex is ever-present, whether insinuated or enacted. (My wife sat in front of the webcam for a while, and it was suddenly, disturbingly, a much friendlier world.) People are endlessly soliciting nudity, both in person and via signs (“FLASH TITS FOR HAITI,” etc.). Roughly one out of every ten chatters is a naked masturbating man, and even they will usually hang up on you, one-handedly, before you can click away. The default interaction on ChatRoulette is roughly three seconds long: assessment, micro-interaction, “next.”
He argues that it’s a throwback to the web’s early days. We forget how much of the web’s past was random uncurated stuff. It’s probably also obvious to say that anonymity is central ChatRoulette’s success. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” with a big twist.
