Next month I have the pleasure of attending VMware’s VMworld conference in San Francisco. Not only is it an important conference for virtualization, but the storage, networking and compute ecosystems are all strongly represented. I expect to be pulled in many directions between sessions, analyst meetings, and video (it looks like “The Cube” will be coming to VMworld). Most of my content from the conference will go on the Wikibon site (where you can find all of my “day job” blogs and research). The theme of the conference is “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.” and just as the conference message is about converting messaging to reality, I look forward to taking many of my online interactions to real life discussions.
John Troyer of VMware created a wiki document of Social Media contributors for the conference. If you are attending, make sure to put in your Twitter and blog information. I took the people that have signed up and created a TweepML list (and I will update this list as people update the wiki). If you’re not familiar with the tool, it allows Twitter users to follow everyone on the list with a single click (it will authenticate your account). I’ve seen some really good TweepML lists for virtualization and cloud, and thought that one for VMworld could be useful. The easy subscription seems more useful than Twitter Lists or Listorious, what do you think?
If you will be at the conference, I hope to meet you there – send me a note on Twitter (I’m @stu). If you won’t be able to attend in person, check out this TweepML list, check out the Wikibon site and blog for content and feel free to contact me if there are any questions that you would like me to raise at the event.
If Nicholas Carr is correct in his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, you will not read this entire blog post. The main idea of the book is that the internet causes our brains to be easily distracted and also makes us less able to learn deep ideas as we skim more and read deeply less. The book digs into the science of how the human brain learns. The brain has “plasticity” – meaning that it will adjust to the activities that it does often, similar to what our muscles do. Carr lays out the history of communication from the first written world, through the mass production of books, to the internet age and analyzes the impact that these technologies have on society and the human brain. As he points out in the book, for every new technology, there have been those that have said that it will doom the way that we think or take away the very things that make us human. But this time, according to Carr, there are real issues.
The Internet Distracts People with…SQUIRREL
Like the dog Dug in the movie Up! (SQUIRREL!) – internet users can find it hard to stay focused. While I agree that almost any repetitive activity can potentially become addictive, I believe that most people can take control of the tools that they use for communication rather than letting them control you. Even in pre-internet days, the draw of interrupting technologies was there – do you finish the task that you’re working on, or answer the ringing phone or watch TV (or even read a book)? The brain can get so used to a stimulus that it will make you crave it when it’s not there – this even affected Dilbert back in 1996.
The difference with the internet is that it is everywhere and people can become like a mouse pressing a lever for a pellet by constantly checking email, RSS, Facebook, or Twitter. These activities can be properly worked into the flow of the workday rather than as a distraction from getting things done. Personally I know that I have a tendency to want to stay connected and respond rapidly to messages. (Disclosure: Hi, I’m Stu and I’m an internet addict, see me on Twitter) The more we allow ourselves to be interrupt driven, the more our brains will see that as “normal” and it will become harder to stay focused for longer periods of time. Recent studies (including some in the book) show that the cost of context switching is larger than any gains for multitasking. You have the power to take control of your environment: finish conversations without interruption, check messages when you’re done with a task, not when an alarm tells you that it comes in.
Reading vs. Skimming
If you’ve read this far, congratulations! In the age of the internet, most people skim rather than read. The book describes that people read in an “F” shape, that is that they read the first line or two, then partial lines and eventually just start scanning down the page. As a blogger, I try and keep my posts short (500 words for most posts or 1000 for a deeper discussion) and also try and break up the text visually with some bolding, italics, headers and photos. Carr also says that even the basic web format with hyperlinks is very distracting. Each hyperlink that you reach makes you think about clicking it and if you do will you ever get back to where you started (for this article, I put some links at the bottom rather than throughout the text). There is fascinating research in the book which explains how memories are created and the science behind short term and long term memory.
“How do users read on the web?”…”They don’t”
While in general I feel that Carr is a bit of a pessimist about technology, I do believe that he is correctly raising an alarm on this topic. The argument in the book is that as we skim more and rely on the internet to store information rather than our brains that our brains will have less context for problem solving or deep thoughts and that we become shallower. Mass production of books brought learning to everyone, the internet increases information flow, but potentially we understand and internalize less.
There are a few ways that we can still absorb information in the internet age. Of course the first is to read deeply – I’d recommend picking up The Shallows if you’ve found this discussion interesting (I think that it should be required reading at colleges). Another way is to write; the process of organizing your thoughts and translating them into words helps your memory and critical thinking. A third way is to have deep discussions with friends and family – nothing like a lively debate to get the brain going. A final way is just to give yourself some free time to think – where new information isn’t flooding in so that you can sort and process what you’ve brought in.
I consider myself a pragmatic optimist on the new technologies. Like some of the optimists in the articles listed below, I believe that the internet age brings proliferation of information and opportunity for a globally connected community. It’s the core of the company that I work at now.
Where do you stand? Are you an internet optimist? Do you believe that there is validity in Carr’s positions? Will the internet turn people into shallow shells that can’t function without computers?
Here are some related articles that I’d recommend:
The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer or any of the companies that I work with.
Posted by Stuart Miniman 
If Nicholas Carr is correct in his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, you will not read this entire blog post. The main idea of the book is that the internet causes our brains to be easily distracted and also makes us less able to learn deep ideas as we skim more and read deeply less. The book digs into the science of how the human brain learns. The brain has “plasticity” – meaning that it will adjust to the activities that it does often, similar to what our muscles do. Carr lays out the history of communication from the first written world, through the mass production of books, to the internet age and analyzes the impact that these technologies have on society and the human brain. As he points out in the book, for every new technology, there have been those that have said that it will doom the way that we think or take away the very things that make us human. But this time, according to Carr, there are real issues.
Blog Stu - Stuart Miniman 