No. Just...No.

Was anyone else extremely freaked out by the whole chip thing?  It seems like the start of a dystopian civilization.  Like one of those things you read about in science fiction books but that never actually happen, at least not overtly in a way to cause widespread panic. But maybe we're just getting a little sharper as the years pass and we attend college.  I keep hearing the idea that Huxley was right and Orwell wasn't, but this chip stuff, tracking all your movements and killing you if you disobey....it seems a little 1984...okay, a lot. So I'm beginning to think they're both right. So..what do you think? Is it useless to resist? Or should we try to somehow stop this total control that our government is starting to try to exert over us as people with free will?

Powerpoint in the Wrong Hands

First off, I would like to say Tufte is a pompous bastard. Second of all, maybe I've been privileged while he's been living under a rock, but I've never made a PowerPoint without creating documents to go with it—even in high school. PowerPoint is not meant to be a document in itself, it is a visual aid. In college, I have never made a PowerPoint presentation without having a handout with more concrete information with paragraphs and fleshed out ideas. What does Tufte expect people in meetings to do with sheets of block text? "Okay guys, take the next 10 minutes to read over the handout and then I'm going to make a presentation covering the same exact thing that is written in the handout. Any questions?" I'm all for having handouts with PowerPoint, but I assume that's for you to look at after the presentation (or before) in case you don't remember everything they talked about in the meeting. PowerPoint is an outline for the speaker to make sure they don't go off track and to point out the important POINTS of the speech, which the speaker will then flesh out in his or her words. There are plenty of teachers I wish would have an outline for their classes without wasting my time on pointless rambles.

Tufte acts as if PowerPoint is used as the basis for all meetings etc. For example, he complains that students are using PowerPoint in school instead of writing a report (not true, by the way) and that "students would be better off if schools closed down on PP days and everyone went to The Exploratorium" (7). I feel like I shouldn't be qualified to say this since I'm only a lowly college student talking about a well-established whatever-he-is, but my God he is dense.

I agree with Tufte that NASA was being lazy in using PowerPoint in place of actual documents, but half of his points on the subject had nothing to do with PowerPoint. On page 9 Tufte shoots his mouth (or keyboard) off criticizing their PowerPoint and how skeletal it is for a presentation. Was he present for the presentation? Did he hear them make the presentation? I'm sure they didn't just read off the bullet points (granted, some college students do that) but used them as reference guides to show their audience the core findings in their research. Tufte also gets enraged on page 11 that the people who made the slide used 3 different ways in showing the same unit of measurement. How is that PowerPoint's fault? Sounds to me like it is the people who made the PowerPoint screwed up. On that note, backtracking to page 9, Tufte criticizes PowerPoint (and basically blames PowerPoint for the destruction of the shuttle) because the pros were in bigger letters near the beginning of the PP and the cons were in smaller font at the end of the PP. Again, how is that the fault of PP? Sure, try to blame technology, but we as humans are the ones who put this all together. The people who made the presentation are the ones who decided the order of their presentation. Even if they hadn't skewed it on PP, they probably would have done the same thing on paper by placing the more optimistic information at the beginning of the paper and the negative things at the end. We love to hide things that makes us look bad.

I do agree with Tufte that it is often annoying that everything is so disjointed on PowerPoint, but you can shrink the text and do comparisons with more than two graphs or texts with a little extra effort.

Another sentence I found amusing was on page 12 when Tufte said "The choice of headings, arrangement of information, and size of bullets on the key chart served to highlight what management already believed" (emphasis mine). Answer me this, Tufte: Who decides what to put as the heading? Who arranges the information on a slide? Who can control the size of bullet points? Let me answer it for you: The people who made the slides, not PowerPoint.

If what Tufte is saying is true about PowerPoint being used as the sole source of information, I understand his worry about misinformation or not being able to write a competent report, white paper or analysis. At the moment, I'm finding it hard to believe that most companies don't use detailed reports in addition to PowerPoints at meetings, which would be sad and pathetic.

On page 15 Tufte is grasping at straws in his attempt to tear down PowerPoint. It's pretty pathetic. He thinks that "thin visual content prompts suspicions: 'What are they leaving out? Is that all they know? Does the speaker think we're stupid?' 'what are they hiding?'" Let me just clarify by saying I've never had any of these thoughts, nor do I know anyone who thinks this way about PowerPoint. Everyone knows (but apparently not Tufte) that the meat of the topic is not in PowerPoint, but in what the speaker is talking about. They use their words (and hopefully handouts) to show us what they know. It's proven that we can only learn so much in one sitting, so by using PowerPoint it just helps us focus on the key points we should remember, not some random point we thought was more important than it actually was.

His spoof on Abraham Lincoln's address was also a joke. That speech was not meant to inform people, but to encourage them. PowerPoints are used for informational purposes, not to help make pep-talks. That's like a football coach using a PowerPoint slide on giving his team a pep-talk before a game.

I had a hard time taking Tufte seriously. I am one of those kids who grew up on PowerPoint who dusn't. kno How; to write: a fuLL grummaticl sentince w/ a sbject n’ a verb. What do I know?

Rethinking Advertising

In terms of talking about information retrieval and this difference between description and discrimination, it makes me completely rethink the way I view my internet experience.

Without thinking about it, we are constantly bombarded with advertisements of all kinds, sometimes without even realizing it. Banner ads at the tops of web pages. We might not actively click on them, but we see them, and although we don't actually contemplate consuming products, the image is in our mind, and subliminally, we will remember it if the need should ever arrive.

Not all spam gets filtered in to the spam folder on our email accounts, so we have to manually go into the inbox and delete them, often times without opening them. But we still see the subject line before we hit the delete button and even though we don't contemplate, just like that banner ad, that thought is implanted in our minds. This is why so much thought and psychology goes into advertising, because they know that they have all of two seconds to get the attention of the consumer, to implant that idea of that thought in their head.

When the internet came along, a whole new plane was created for advertising. Before, products were advertised via radio and television, which had already been developed into a science after thirty years. Now, with the internet, there are so many other factors that come into play. Like newspapers, the advertisement doesn't have to fit into a fifteen second time slot. There's time for a consumer to take in all the information at their own pace and digest the benefits of this product. However, unlike newspapers, now one-hundred times as many ads are being seen by that single consumer than with print sources.

People concern themselves with how internet advertising will impact us as a culture, but I think that it will do no more than radio and television advertising has done for us. Sure, everyone wants your money, but the responsibility lies with the consumer to decide where that money goes.

References In My Literature Class

Once again, themes from this class have come up in another class of mine. SO many coincidences.  In my literature class, we were assigned to read about different theories of literary analysis and the idea of the inability to separate form from content was mentioned.  Even the phrase "The medium is the message" was used! I was amazed and knew I was going to write about it. SOOOO many things relate to this class. I think it might be one of the most relevant classes I've ever taken!

I've also been thinking about the idea that we are not only findable with everything we do technologically, but we are expected and even REQUIRED to be.  It's a bit disruptive to our enjoyment of life to be constantly on call (or text or e-mail).

A Problem with Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are probably one of the greatest innovations to come out of internet media that wasn't offered by any other media. (I say "wasn't" because now it seems that my digital satellite service now displays a box saying "Press Select for [blank]" occasionally during commercials for Pay Per View content.) However, there is one problem that I like to call Wikipedia Syndrome, as demonstrated by the following illustration from xkcd.


As a creative writer, I often have this problem when browsing the website TV Tropes, which is a collection of cliches and often used plot elements that was also featured by xkcd. One moment I'm reading about villains changing their ways, and the next I'll be reading the about the plot elements in Schindler's List. While reading that I'll open tabs to bittersweet endings, honor before reason, and troubled sympathetic bigots. When I'm done with Schindler and move on to those bittersweet endings, I'll be lucky if I don't open even more tabs!

Point being: Our tendency to click on hyperlinks in this new form of media can overwhelm us and trap us in distracting sites like TV Tropes. It's hard to resist, which is why TV Tropes is one of the sites that I use LeechBlock on in order to keep myself away from that pitfall.

Also, I hope I didn't ruin anyone's productivity with my own hyperlinks.

Eeny Meeny Miny Moe

Peanut butter is next on my grocery list. I cross out soup and move on to the peanut butter aisle. I stop, craning my neck to see the entire selection stretching over my head and to either side. I inspect a few labels of the peanuts at eye-level, but the the nutrition facts are pretty much identical. I step back, scan the rows one more time as if the peanut butter will jump out at me, then fall back onto the process of selecting I learned back in kindergarten. "Eeny... meeny.. miny... moe.. catch a tiger by his toe, if he hollers let him go my mom said to pick the best one and it. is. you." My fingers hover over Skippy. I toss it in my cart and continue down the aisle.

Was it the best process? No. Was it harmful to me? No. If I had spent 20 minutes trying to figure out which peanut butter is best for my needs, it would have wasted my time and I honestly didn't care that much. In the grocery store I often select whatever is at eye level, whatever brand I recognize or whatever is the cheapest.

What about in other aspects in my life? Is there too much information? When I read Morville's section on Information Overload (ironically the same title as my last blog, although I hadn't read this section yet), I smiled at the diagram that mapped out how a certain amount of information leads to optimized decisions, but anymore information would lead to a rapid decline in decision-making.

I was keenly aware of this dilemma when writing a research paper for my grad class. Our teacher told us we only needed to read 15 or so articles for our literature review, but I got so sucked into finding more information about the topic and worrying about which ones were the most important to my argument that I ended up with over SIXTY articles. Even at that point I had to stop myself from researching further. I still wonder what I would have found if I kept searching. What if reading two more articles lead me to the one that most supported my argument? What if? What if?

Information is good to some extent, but our human tendency when we receive too much information is to shut down. We decide it's not worth it and pick whatever seems most convenient at the time. How many times have we been searching for the "perfect" present for a friend/loved one, felt so overwhelmed that we ended up giving them a gift card?

With so much information spread out on the internet, it's easy to get lost. How will we know when we've found exactly what we are looking for without wasting our time? Will we get so frustrated and intimidated by the information that we make poorer decisions than we did before?

"Easier"

"On the Web, these prophets claim that artificial intelligence will make it easy for us to find what we need."

What does "easier" even mean, anymore? All the time, the world of technology is constantly changing, being altered, being updated. Its the thing to have the latest technology, to be completely up to date on the options that are available to us out there. For years now, the only Apple product I've opted for is the iPod, because I love music and I love the entertainment that the apps can provide for those small little spaces of unoccupied time, such as taking the bus to the grocery store or waiting in the dentist's office. And the iPod can't change much from here on out without becoming another device that Apple already manufactures. You can't make it a phone, because then it's an iPhone. You can't make it bigger, because then it's an iPad, making the need to buy the new model completely null.

iPhones and iPads are constantly being changed and altered with new models and software coming out every couple of months. I'm scared to death that if I purchase an iPhone, two weeks later, there's going to be a better one out on the market that I'll wish I had waited to purchase. Now granted, there is a certain amount of responsibility that lies with the consumer. My TCOM teacher last semester had a saying he was fond of: Caveat emptor, which is latin for BUYER BEWARE. This would involve doing some research about products before you buy, reading customer testimonials and researching if there will be any new models coming out in the near future.

This idea of things becoming "easier" is changing just as often as the technology itself. When the idea of what would be easier is realized, it is no longer the standard for what would be easier, because now, there is an even easier way to do it. It just hasn't been realized or enacted yet. As technology continues to progress, I fear that it is dumbing down the masses, whether intentionally or not. I am a big fan of editing software for video and music and I remember when I got Windows 7 and saw how completely elementary they had made the video editor that had come preinstalled. It was easy for me to teach myself to use the old software with practice, but the software had become so inane that I was literally "too smart" to figure out how to use it. It was far too simple. I had to purchase a higher end software so I could understand it.

So now the question I pose to you is: When does "easier" become unnecessary? When will the human race finally be content with how simplistic things are in this world of Google and automated teller machines. Will they ever be? Or are we facing the slow decline of our world as we know it?

Even More Things From My Life That Fit This Class

In my fiction class, we have been reading each other's short stories. One person wrote his story from the perspective of an alien sent here to warn us about another alien race that was planning to attack Earth.  This was twenty or thirty years in the future. He decided that since humans were so overly occupied with technology, that he would get the word out in the form of a blog, so the story was written in blog posts. 

Well, when he tried to talk to humans face-to-face, it didn't work. He HAD to use things like social media or no one would listen to him.  It was our preoccupation with technology, multiplied by ten.   Since no one EVER voted, he was the only one who did, and ended up being president because he, the only voter, voted for himself.  As a conclusion to the story, he ended up sending the other alien race iPhones, and they were so endlessly distracted that they forgot all about attacking Earth.

Also, I was on Tumblr last night and saw a pretty long (and, I think, valid) rant about how the person writing it hated "Western culture", because of the very issues about technology that we discuss in our class.  I actually think the term "amusing ourselves to death" was used, and the whole idea that "Orwell was wrong; Huxley was right", and a comic illustrating this point.  The final panels said, "In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."  I thought the person had some very interesting and valid points.

Information Overload

The internet is still such a marvel that not many people give thought to the information that is being compiled at an exponential rate. In a few years, how are we supposed to know what information is credible and what isn't?

I used to think the first results that popped up on Google search were credible. Now that I know about web crawlers and SEO, I realize the possibility of the information I really want is being buried under other things that may not be as credible. The only reason one person would get their website higher up on a search engine is if they know how to take advantage of web crawlers. While this is not the sole way for users to find their information, this still creates a problem of too much information that has not yet been sifted.

I don't remember what article it was from that we read (it might have been from my 431 class, I'm not sure) but in the article it talked about the overreaction of the internet and that "useless" things on the internet is to be expected. Along with the printing press came lots of crappy books we all wish were never printed and the article argued that's how things work when something is given access to a wide variety of people.

My reservation about this viewpoint is the anonymity of the internet. It's often hard to find what is credible and who is posting what online. For example, a large corporate website often post articles without any author on them. How do I know their information is accurate? How do I know that person is actually knowledgeable in that subject? I suppose books faced a similar problem with the use of pseudonyms, but the internet is so widespread and ever growing and manifesting itself in our lives that it becomes important to know where and who we get our information from.

I don't have an answer to my question, which is why I would like to offer up the question: With so much information, how do we sift through it to find the best answer? Who will organize the data? I know that the web 2.0 video said we have to organize it, but that's a no brainer. Of course we have to, we are the ones who program and control computers. The bigger question is, how do we organize it?

Stay Informed

I've blogged before about the informational power of the internet. Anybody has the power to post any opinion or idea for the world to see as a matter of letting their voice be heard. An idea is extremely powerful, but it is completely useless if the world is ignorant to it.

Most recently, the informational power of the internet has been utilized to spread the word about a dangerous war criminal named Joseph Kony. Now, regardless of what your personal opinion is of the cause or the organization spearheading the effort is irrelevant in this context. What is truly remarkable is how an entire planet went from being completely ignorant of the history of his crimes to mobilizing and putting up posters to further raise awareness to those who were on the wrong side of the digital divide. Without the use of the internet and social media, the organization that is funding the cause to bring Kony to justice would be almost powerless without the awareness they have raised via the internet. This extraordinary power has also been used to mobilize people in smaller countries who want to rebel against their tyrannical governments. The Twitter Revolution and other movements would never have been made possible by the internet.

It is fortunate that young people are as connected to the web as they are. Young people who do not regularly watch the news might not be aware of cultural events and conflicts that have an impact on their country and their planet. However, with news via the internet, teens are more likely to stay informed about the world around them and form intelligent, informed opinions about them.

Why I Do Not Have A Facebook

There are several reasons I don't use Facebook. I started using it in its early days, but never did much for a few reasons. One, I had dial-up Internet that barely functioned, and two, it wasn't very user-friendly at all. It felt like almost everything I clicked on led to some app it wanted you to use that didn't even really accomplish anything. So I never really deleted it, I just kind of stopped using it. Eventually, in the first semester of last year, I was pressured into using it because everyone else did.  This lasted from October 2010 to March 2011--I shut down my second attempt at Facebook nearly a year ago.

I did this for several reasons. For one, the structure of Facebook itself discourages privacy and encourages people to be far too occupied with what everyone else is doing.  It seems one can't perform a bodily function without it being plastered all over Facebook and Twitter (which I don't have either, and never have).  Now, you might say that this is the fault of the user, and if you don't do that, then it isn't a problem.  But the very structure of Facebook itself encourages this kind of thing.  Nearly everything you click on is proclaimed to every one of your "friends".  You are fed information by them that you may not want to know or that might even upset you.  This happened to me, and it was a source of negativity in my life that I wanted to rid myself of.

People are surprised when I tell them I don't have a Facebook.  They tell me that if it upsets me, I should just block the people who are being negative. But that's not even the point. What I don't like is the site itself, and its structure. I just don't like it, and probably the only way I'll ever get Facebook again is if I need it for a job or organization.