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From Angus McCullough, 3 Quarks Daily

Tetris is a video game about clearing away what is unnecessary in the best possible way, accessible on almost every gaming console imaginable, on cellular phones and for free on the Internet.  Perhaps you played it once on an ancient game system in your youth or maybe you play it whenever you’re sitting at your desk at work. Alexei Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, calls it the first “casual game”, meaning that it is timeless in just such a way: it is the same every time you play, without plot or characters to follow. The first time you played it in middle school is the same game that is probably programmed into your phone today. To compare Tetris to any other game is somehow wrong – it is a masterful test of how our brains function while trying to balance instinctual and intellectual challenges in real time. The major difference between Tetris and other games is the simplicity of its construction and complexity of play. Most importantly, it is a game that does not have a goal or end. There is no castle to storm or high score to achieve – the only way to end your game is to lose. The result of this simple and mildly daunting setup is that Tetris affords the user a repetitive task every time he or she picks it up: to play better than the last time. It has also been shown to have beneficial effects outside the game itself, making it a powerful tool for personal development, mirroring certain aspects of Confucian ritual.

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From Evgeny Morozov, Boston Review

In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned “Drunken Pirate,” on MySpace. The photo showed Snyder wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, and the university accused her of promoting underage drinking. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story in his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Snyder lost control over the photo when it was indexed by Google and other search engines: “the Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have forgotten.”

Snyder’s story, and others like it, motivate Delete’s plea for “digital forgetting” (though it turned out that the university had other reasons to deny Snyder her certificate, including poor performance). According to Mayer-Schönberger, we have committed too much information to “external memory,” thus abandoning control over our personal records to “unknown others.” Thanks to this reckless abandonment, these others gain new ways to dictate our behavior. Moreover, as we store more of what we say for posterity, we are likely to become more conservative, to censor ourselves and err on the side of saying nothing.

For people like Snyder, Mayer-Schönberger proposes a creative remedy: enable users to set auto-expiry dates on information. Thus, Snyder’s “drunken pirate” photo could disappear from the Internet in time for her to receive the teaching certificate. Even if a third-party discovered the photo, Snyder could adjust its expiration date and destroy all digital copies—including those cached by search engines—with a few clicks. Were she to appear in someone else’s photo, Snyder would be able to negotiate the proper expiration date for this photo with the photographer.

Image from The Smoking Gun

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From John W. Mayo, Marius Schwartz, Bruce Owen, Robert Shapiro, Lawrence J. White and Glenn Woroc, The New York Times

Transparency is non-negotiable,” declared Europe’s new commissioner for digital issues, Neelie Kroes, in a speech last week laying out her thoughts on net neutrality. “In a complex system like the Internet, it must be crystal-clear what the practices of operators controlling the network mean for all users.”

Ms. Kroes’s comments reflect the decision made by the European Union in November to avoid any of the more extreme regulations that could stifle the innovation that has been the hallmark of the Internet. Instead, the union chose a more measured approach that emphasizes transparency.

This at odds with the Federal Communications Commission, which is currently considering versions of net neutrality regulation that would severely restrict firms’ business models and pricing flexibility. Before the commission embraces regulation, it should take another look at the European model and focus on a policy built on transparency.

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From Manisha Verma, 3 Quarks Daily

The first Web 2.0 Conference held in San Francisco in October 2004 , shortly after Google’s initial public offering - the biggest IPO of a technology firm since the second dotcom boom, had created a stir. Google’s IPO did not just announce Silicon Valley’s return to Wall Street. It also unveiled a new business model. When Google at last revealed just how much money it was making by placing small, targeted text advertisements next to search results, jaws dropped. Overnight, every entrepreneur had learnt a new one-word pitch to venture capitalists: advertising.

Indeed, Web 2.0 today still seems to have only one business model - advertising, and the Valley needs to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) has proved that the model really works. Google’s search dominance made CPC based advertising the de-facto monetization standard on the web. Yahoo and AOL also did their best to grab a piece of the action. In this pursuit of “eyeballs”, a series of new internet stars emerged: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Each provided a free service in order to attract a large audience that would then—at some unspecified point in the future—supposedly attract large amounts of advertising revenue. It had worked for Google, after all, and ought to work for the others. But the reality, it turns out, is that the number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising is much smaller than many people thought. Not one of them has really become an advertising success in its own right.

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From The Edge

Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge …

Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?

Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we’d been emptily praising all these years. “What’s so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?

Science historian George Dyson asks “what if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?” He wonders “will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?”.

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