Monthly Archive for January, 2012

Pat Kane, The Independent

Asking 150 contemporary scientists, intellectuals and artists how the internet changes the way they think is a bit like giving the Large Hadron Collider an extra four notches on its speed-dial. You know they’re going to use it to the max, smashing up ideas and generating spin-offs, though perhaps picking up a few radiation-burns along the way. Thus it proves with this book on “the net’s impact on our minds and future” – regularly illuminating, but sometimes intriguingly conservative, in response to the crisply formulated question.

Edge.org, the site which yearly generates these billowing steam-clouds, is itself worth a critical query or two. Its founder, John Brockman, is a counter-cultural hustler turned literary agent to the science elites. Many of the Edge participants are clients of his, so there’s a faint whiff of the performing don to many of these short essays as they tap out routines that will wow the TED crowd or close the literary deal. But this pecuniary tang makes Edge.org a bona-fide marketplace of ideas, and thus a good data-set from which to assess the intellectual climate of the North and the West of the planet.

What’s surprising is the significant minority of “Distractionistas” here: those who believe that the internet’s compelling, always-on nature is shallowing and hollowing our capacity for reflection, extended argument, even the seat of our consciousness. Brian Knutsen and Thomas Metzinger claim our ability to maintain our attention is the core of selfhood. The way the net pulverises our focus turns us into “Public Dreamers”, displaying “dementia, intoxication, infantilisation”. More…

By N.V., from The Economist

WHILE the panoramic view of ocean, mountains and city never ceases to enthrall, living half way up a hillside, over three miles (five kilometres) from the nearest telephone exchange, means putting up with a pretty awful DSL internet connection. Even in the still of the night, download speeds rarely top 700 kilobits a second. Yes, cable television snakes its way through the hillside community. But, no, swapping excellent satellite television for abysmal cable—just to get faster broadband—would be the worst of all possible deals. Fibre-to-the-kerb? If only.

Indeed, having waited fruitlessly for years for Verizon to lay its long-promised FiOS optical fibre to his front door, your correspondent finally abandoned all hope last year. When tackled, an engineer servicing a neighbour’s telephone confided that the carrier had ceased rolling out fibre, other than in a handful of inner-city areas where it was under contract to do so. In other words, DSL users beyond the suburbs were on their own.

The admission was half expected. Ever since the world’s larger carriers followed the lead set by NTT DoCoMo in Japan, it had become clear that the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless standard was going to be the wave of the future—and not just for mobile communications. More…

Image from The Economist

T.C., The Economist

CALLING “World of Warcraft” (WoW) a mere video game is seriously underselling it. The virtual world, in which millions of players cooperate to conduct quests, delve into dungeons and slay dragons, is both a commercial and cultural phenomenon.

Released in 2004, the game has now more than 10m active players, each of whom pays a monthly fee ($13-15 in America). Industry analysts estimate that Activision-Blizzard, the game’s publisher, rakes in annual revenues of well over $1 billion from WoW alone. On top of that are sales of “expansion packs” for the game, which come out roughly every two years.

But WoW is not just about playing online. An annual convention in Anaheim, California, called “BlizzCon”, attracts tens of thousands of WoW fans. There are popular sidelines in novelisations, comic books and card games. Occasionally, there is even talk of a film.

To Read More…

Image via The Economist