Before getting into the nitty-gritty, I want to say that I have adored this book so far (currently only half-way through, but will hopefully finish by class on Monday). I've always been a sucker for near-future Sci-Fi novels and short stories because it's so much easier for me to imagine the changes they envision taking place, and that makes it possible to view modern society through the lens of the authors and hypothesize about the effects such technology would have.
Before I even started reading Rainbows End, what I knew of the story made me think of Neal Stephenson's Sci-Fi masterpiece (in my opinion, at least), Snow Crash. Like Vinge, Stephenson uses his novel to imagine how technology will shape early 21st century America, and there are great differences between the two worlds the authors create.
The most significant technology in Stephenson's future America is the Metaverse, a virtual successor to the internet and paramount to social interactions in the 21st century. The Metaverse is a collective online virtual reality that can be accessed by everyone, through either public terminals or personal goggle displays and terminals. Users implement virtual models (avatars) to represent themselves in this 3D world, and it is nearly infinitely moddable by users. In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is used to communicate with friends, attend business meetings, and duel warriors from the other side of the world. Second Life was released seven years after the publication of Snow Crash and is the best modern-day analogy to Stephenson's Metaverse.
Vinge has the benefit of writing his novel fourteen years after the first publication of Snow Crash (2006 and 1992, respectively). Not surprisingly, his vision of the future incorporates augmented reality over virtual reality, which seems to correspond with the declining interest in augmented reality through the 2000's. (http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/06/augmented-reality-vs-virtual-reality/). Augmented reality is much more practical (in that it primarily serves as a means to transfer information) and relevant to human experience (in that it incorporates the context of the user's environment) than virtual reality. Similar to the VR goggles worn by some of Stephenson's characters, the characters in Rainbows End 'wear' smart clothing and contact lenses that allow them to always be connected to the rest of the world. Again, Vinge's vision of the future is more practical than Stephenson's because of the relative innocuous nature of clothing, compared to the heavy goggles and terminals that the 'Gargoyles' (so named for their grotesque appearance) of Snow Crash must wear to maintain that persistent connection.
The technology in Vinge's Rainbows End also carries with it a burden of learning. This learning barrier is one of the main ways that the younger generation in the novel is separate from the older generation. The younger generation (mainly Juan and Miri) have grown up using augmented reality and are much more proficient at it than the older generation (Robert and Xiu), but the older generation has skills that seem to be virtually nonexistent in the youth, such as writing. Robert refers to Juan as being 'paraliterate' because of his finesse with Epiphany (AR) technology and his ignorance of the art of writing
The near-disappearance of books in Rainbows End suggests a generation that is largely illiterate in the traditional sense, though after wondering how AR data is relayed to users, text still seems to be the fastest and most convenient form for information to take, so this generation must still be capable of reading. Additionally, information still requires a certain level of understanding to make use of it, so its not fair or accurate to say that the younger generation in Rainbows End is comprised of stupid literates. They are merely the products of having grown up in a world of digital, AR literacy, and unsurprisingly, their text literacy has probably suffered to a degree.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
Responding to Responses to 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?'
Of the many blog posts and articles I read over the weekend that examined, analyzed, and otherwise responded to the Carr-Shirkey "debate" on the effects digital media has and will have on nature of thought (though Carr's article was meant as a standalone piece, it's hard for me to disassociate Shirkey's response to it) , the most convincing comments on the issue came from W. Daniel Hillis on The Edge.
In the post, Hillis tackles some of the same points that Shirkey made in his original response, but he elucidates some of Shirkey's more contentious statements and does so in a way that makes it difficult to disagree with him. In his response to Carr, Shirkey uses the the example of the novel War and Peace to question the value of the kind of thinking Carr is worried will soon be lost. He uses an assumed low perception of the novel among modern-day readers — "It's too long, and not so interesting" — to challenge the idea that lengthy written works (which makes sustained critical reading necessary) are intrinsically more valuable to society, which Carr seems to promote.
Hillis aptly reworks this argument by saying that it is not the value of the novel's content which should be questioned, but the medium through which the novel is delivered. A self-proclaimed bibliophile and fan of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Hillis wonders if the novel's themes of "power, fate, and personal responsibility" are more valid than "a season of The Wire", a television drama that is likely much more familiar to most people than War and Peace. War and Peace may be well-known as a very long Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy, but what more does the average person know about it? That's assuming that a majority of literate people know of the book's existence, which may be a bit generous on my part.
An important question to ask is whether long, sustained concentration is superior to short-term, dynamic thinking. Do we get a better return on long pieces of work for our investment? Shirkey says no, that reading War and Peace is ultimately a waste of time. Hillis, though, only says maybe. While not outright decrying the novel as Shirkey does, he admits that "as much as I liked War and Peace, I probably got more out of The Wire." Though it may seem odd to focus so much on a novel when Carr's article claims to be about more than reading, about the ability for modern humans to think critically, his article only approaches it from a literary standpoint. Shirkey seems to rightly point out that Carr appears more worried about the death of the hyper-literate intellectual than anything else.
Carr says that he sees an intellectual change among many of his friends and colleagues, but he also says that they are mostly "literary types". But just because they are suffering under new changes doesn't mean everyone is; new platforms for knowledge like Wikipedia (which embodies the hyper-linking style that promotes what Carr might call "shallow reading") have been a boon to scientists, programmers, and various other technical thinkers. And as a commenter (whose name I can't seem to find) said, new tools like Google are the product of considerable amounts of concentration and critical thinking. The book and lengthy response may lose their place in modern society, but that doesn't mean they won't continue to exist in other forms.
I think Carr's piece suffers because of the assumption it makes in the title: divergent thinking is not the same thing as being 'stoopid'. It's (relatively) new, yes, but change always accompanies the adoption of new technology.
Finally, it's hard for me to get away from one question that has nagged me since my first reading of Is Google Making Us Stoopid?; what if Carr and co. are having difficulty staying focused because they're getting older?
In the post, Hillis tackles some of the same points that Shirkey made in his original response, but he elucidates some of Shirkey's more contentious statements and does so in a way that makes it difficult to disagree with him. In his response to Carr, Shirkey uses the the example of the novel War and Peace to question the value of the kind of thinking Carr is worried will soon be lost. He uses an assumed low perception of the novel among modern-day readers — "It's too long, and not so interesting" — to challenge the idea that lengthy written works (which makes sustained critical reading necessary) are intrinsically more valuable to society, which Carr seems to promote.
Hillis aptly reworks this argument by saying that it is not the value of the novel's content which should be questioned, but the medium through which the novel is delivered. A self-proclaimed bibliophile and fan of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Hillis wonders if the novel's themes of "power, fate, and personal responsibility" are more valid than "a season of The Wire", a television drama that is likely much more familiar to most people than War and Peace. War and Peace may be well-known as a very long Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy, but what more does the average person know about it? That's assuming that a majority of literate people know of the book's existence, which may be a bit generous on my part.
An important question to ask is whether long, sustained concentration is superior to short-term, dynamic thinking. Do we get a better return on long pieces of work for our investment? Shirkey says no, that reading War and Peace is ultimately a waste of time. Hillis, though, only says maybe. While not outright decrying the novel as Shirkey does, he admits that "as much as I liked War and Peace, I probably got more out of The Wire." Though it may seem odd to focus so much on a novel when Carr's article claims to be about more than reading, about the ability for modern humans to think critically, his article only approaches it from a literary standpoint. Shirkey seems to rightly point out that Carr appears more worried about the death of the hyper-literate intellectual than anything else.
Carr says that he sees an intellectual change among many of his friends and colleagues, but he also says that they are mostly "literary types". But just because they are suffering under new changes doesn't mean everyone is; new platforms for knowledge like Wikipedia (which embodies the hyper-linking style that promotes what Carr might call "shallow reading") have been a boon to scientists, programmers, and various other technical thinkers. And as a commenter (whose name I can't seem to find) said, new tools like Google are the product of considerable amounts of concentration and critical thinking. The book and lengthy response may lose their place in modern society, but that doesn't mean they won't continue to exist in other forms.
I think Carr's piece suffers because of the assumption it makes in the title: divergent thinking is not the same thing as being 'stoopid'. It's (relatively) new, yes, but change always accompanies the adoption of new technology.
Finally, it's hard for me to get away from one question that has nagged me since my first reading of Is Google Making Us Stoopid?; what if Carr and co. are having difficulty staying focused because they're getting older?
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