3. Internet cambierà tutto?

Difficile misurare la produttività di internet.

Molti dilettanti in giro. In fondo anche Mark Zuckerberg è un dilettante. In questo c'è un collegamento con la vecchia di rivoluzione industriale.

Buona per curiosi annoiati. Meno per i lavoratori.

Avete notato che tutto è gratis. Ciò significa che si guadagna poco.

Produzione mentale. Un Tweet ha un valore mentale. Ci si arricchisce livello di gioia, emozioni, suspans. Dimensione mentale non materiale.

Dobbiamo essere ottimisti quando parliamo di felicità e pessimisti quando parliamo di fatturato. L'innovazione non è cessata ma ha preso nuove forme.

Ci sono anche i canali tradizionali di ricavo come per esempio la pubblicità la vendita dei libri di Amazon il riciclo di beni di ebay.

La qualità pubblicitaria è migliore poiché mirata.

Non ci condiziona moltissimo e ci sfrutta economicamente pochissimo.

I benefici di Internet sono distribuite in base alle nostre capacità cognitive. Internet di un bene pubblico ma non tutti possono valorizzarlo.

Navigare sul web diminuisce pil. Molti lavoratori perdono. Così.

I tradizionali settori dell'economia ad alto valore aggiunto stanno subendo un declino.

Non genera molto lavoro. Almeno in confronto alle precedenti rivoluzioni tecnologiche.

Posto di lavoro su internet è gratuito il lavoro è fatto degli utenti.

Tutti Sanno cos'è Twitter ma pochi lo usano.

Livelli occupazionali. Google 20000
Facebook 1700. / 2400. Twitter 300

Molto lavoro è svolto della le macchine e non  da essere umani.

Una delle ragioni per la jobless recovery

Sul mercato del lavoro si realizza uno spiazzamento delle competenze.

Sintesi: più divertimento, meno fatturato. Lavori meno pagati ma più interessanti

Fuga dal materialismo.

La decrescita felice l'ha realizzata il web: più divertimento, meno fatturato e fuga dal materialismo.

Livelli occupazionali dei colossi di internet:

Google 20.000

Facebook 1700

EBay 16400

Twitter 300.

Chiamali colossi !!

Più che altro lavorano le macchine e  - gratis - gli  utenti.

Il punto sulla rete

1. la rete ci rende accessibile tonnellate di informazioni e in questo modo mina l'autorità di chiunque ... The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority DI Martin Gurri  Chapter 3 My Thesis

• I’m not a visionary prophesying doom.......
• .If I describe the present accurately, I will have achieved my goal.
• If, after all these admissions, you were to ask me why you should read on, I would respond:   because the world I’ll describe is probably very different from the one you think you’re living in.example
• because we still think in categories forged during the industrial age –liberal and conservative, for , or professional and amateur –our minds are blind
• A War of the Worlds, Deduced From the Devil’s Excrement
• My thesis is a simple one.   We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born.   Given the character of the forces of change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture.
• Many features we prized about the old world are also threatened: for example, liberal democracy and economic stability.
• public discussion, may also warp or break from the immoveable resistance of the established order.
• Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old... the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest.
• The perturbing agent between authority and the public is information.
• The industrial age insisted on portentous-sounding names of great seriousness..“Bank of America,”“National Broadcasting Corporation,”“New York Times. ”
• The digital age loves self-mocking names... “Yahoo,”“Google,”“Twitter,”“reddit,”“Flickr,”“Photobucket,”“Bitcoin.”
• I feel reasonably sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company “National Search Engine Corporation”and Mark Zuckerman of Facebook never felt tempted by “Social Connections Center of America.”  It wasn’t the style. The names of two popular political blogs from the early days of blogging, Glenn Reynolds’Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, poked fun at the pretentiousness of the news business.
• The names asserted non-authoritativeness. They created a conscious divide between the old order and the new.
• Hierarchy has ruled the world since the human race attained meaningful numbers.... From the era of Rameses to that of Hosni Mubarak,
• Against this citadel of the status quo, the Fifth Wave has raised the network: that is, the public in revolt,
• Wael Ghonim’s passionate insistence on being an ordinary Egyptian rather than a political leader was an expression of digital culture.
• If hierarchy worships the established order, the network nurtures a streak of nihilism.
• The Center Cannot Hold And the Border Has No Clue What To Do About It
• Another way to characterize the collision of the two worlds is as an episode in the primordial contest between the Center and the Border.
• Making a program is a center strategy; attacking center programs on behalf of nature, God, or the world is border strategy.
• Government lost control of its own classified documents.   Book publishers and the TV and movie industries, still very profitable today, depend on technical and copyright regimes which could be breached at any moment.
• On 9/ 11, a miniscule network of violent men slaughtered thousands of Americans..... Obama, propelled by online networks which generated funds, volunteers, and an effective anti-Center message,
• sectarian advances have been reversed.   My suspicion is that they must be reversed, if sects –the public in revolt –truly have no interest in governing and possess no capacity for exercising power.
• The result is paralysis by distrust. The Border, it is already clear, can neutralize but not replace the Center. Networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.
• The closest historical parallel to our time may have been the wars of religion of the seventeenth century. I say this not necessarily because of the chaos and bloodshed of the period, but because every principle was contested.... “Who won – Catholics or Protestants?”... Neither won.
• My great concern as a citizen is for the future of liberal democracy.... That democracy became hierarchical, organizational, an institution of the Center... Many aspects of representative democracy have become less democratic, and are so perceived by the public.
• How it changes may depend on the aggregated decisions of individual citizens –in other words:   on us –no less than on procedural reforms.
• Cyber-Utopians, Cyber-Skeptics, Cyber-Pessimists, And How All Their Sound and Fury Signifies Very Little
• A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings.
• 3 modelli
• 1 do I, in my condition as a member of the public, accept all the mediators’ information, and act accordingly?... Lippmann argued... Propaganda, on this account, injected new opinions and actions directly into the gullible brains of the public.
• 2 I accept none of the mediators’information, because my moral and political beliefs were formed by “strong”social bonds, like church and family, rather than “weak”links like reading a newspaper?   That also has been proposed, most recently by Malcolm Gladwell
• 2 bis do I engage in a “two-step”process, in which I first absorb the opinions of a strong personal connection, like a trusted friend or minister, and only then accept certain mediated information?
• 3 Or is it the case that mediators have no power to control how I think or act, but can command my attention to those public issues... Roland Schatz,
• Some writers saw in digital media a boost to human collaboration and democracy.   Critics dubbed this tribe cyber-utopians.   Others found in the internet all manner of ills –the corruption of our culture, for example, or an invitation for governments to spy on their citizens.   These were the cyber-pessimists.   A third, much smaller group wondered whether anything important had really changed:   call them cyber-skeptics.
• Malcolm Gladwell... compared the strong personal ties of the civil rights activists in the 1960s with the weak ties between participants in online causes like the Save Darfur Coalition.   Only strong ties, argued Gladwell, made possible the informal coordination... real politics happened among comrades..Gladwell is a thinker of the Center, a mind of the industrial age.... He explicitly identified strong ties with hierarchy,
• Clay Shirky has noted that a committed activist with strong personal ties to others also can expand his reach by becoming a Facebook warrior.
• Gladwell at least grounded his skepticism on a traditional conception of power:   hard trumped soft, scissors always cut paper.   I find it harder to make sense of the warnings of the cyber-pessimists.   pessimists hover somewhere between pointless and trivially true.
• The favorite goat of cyber-skeptics and cyber-pessimists has been Clay Shirky, whose 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, was described by Gladwell as “the bible of the social media movement”...Shirky walks on the sunny side of the street,... His message was that the new digital platforms made it easy for groups to “self-assemble,”and that the rise of such spontaneous groups was bound to lead, sooner or later, to social and political change.
• Ancora la tesi. power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage.   That is the non-utopian thesis of this book.
• Homo Informaticus, Or How Choice Can Bring Down Governments
• This anxiety to control information in those who already controlled the guns should alert us that political power may be less “hard,”and more intangible, than supposed.
• Power....a matter of trust, faith, and fear,
• the potential influence of information over political power flows more from its fit into stories of legitimacy than from, say, investigative reporting
• the rise of a restless, disruptive organism, which I have taken the bold step to name Homo informaticus... products of....the spread of education, expanded levels of wealth and security, and improved means of communication.
• Unmediated Man lacked access to any media.   He was likely to be illiterate, and had neither the means nor the interest to travel very far.   His only channels of information were the people around him...... the typical Egyptian of 1980,
• Il regime.... To impose its will on Unmediated Man, it had to find a way to convey the particulars to him, in the context of a persuasive justifying story.......for the regime to communicate and interact with Unmediated Man in terms advantageous to its story of legitimacy, it needed only to control the community... regime appointed the local authorities
• Unmediated Man....may have protested, even violently, against local conditions, but he could never seek to overthrow the political system.
• Homo informaticus is a differently-endowed member of the public: he’s literate, and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, TV. He has been exposed to a larger world beyond the immediate community..... conceives of an alternative form of government
• To cover the threat, the regime must deploy a costly and elaborate state media apparatus.... control, the means of mass communication: newspapers, radio, TV, books, cinema, etc.
• regime’s story of legitimacy are gone forever.   Under these conditions, the best outcome for the regime is acceptance by the public that the world is too complex to be understood
• we can say with confidence that it won’t be triggered unless the public is shown a differently-ordered world:   a choice.
• A trivial example would be a TV commercial for a new, improved dishwasher detergent. A political example was the jolt of hope experienced by the Egyptian opposition after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia.
• If H. informaticus were to try to absorb this mass, his head would explode.   This is not what transpires.   He will pick and choose.   So will other members of the public.   By that very selectivity, that freedom to choose its channels of information, the public breaks the power of the mediator class created by mass media, and, under authoritarian rule, controlled by the regime.
• An accurate representation based on volume would show state media to be microscopic, invisible,
• The regime accumulates pain points: police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures...... In essence, government failure now sets the agenda.
• At this stage, the public, clustered around networked communities
• hypotheses sulla relazione info-potere
• 1 Information influences politics because it is indigestible by a government’s justifying story.
• 2 The greater the diffusion of information to the public, the more illegitimate any political status quo will appear.
• 3 Homo informaticus, networked builder and wielder of the information sphere, poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of every government he encounters.
1. Jonahatan Haidt: la rete ci isola e ci rende più sensibili, da qui le rivendicazioni di trigger warnings

2. Narcisismo. “A cosa stai pensando?” mi chiede la scritta sulla finestrella di Facebook.
   
   Ecco il segreto di questo social network: sdogana il narcisismo. Nessuno oserebbe mai importunare il prossimo comunicandogli “quel che pensa” anche se non richiesto. Ma qui il problema della richiesta è superato di slancio: ci pensa il quel Grande Amico che è il Grande Fratello a servirla su un vassoio d’ argento. Una volta liberati da questo fardello ci si puo’ scatenare senza freni inibitori.

3. facebook genera conflitti? Qualcuno ha detto che senza un buon "cattivo" non puo' nascere una storia interessante. Prendiamolo per vero. Analogia: senza un disaccordo non puo' nascere una discussione e chi ama le discussioni è attirato dai disaccordi. Ma poi capita che si trovi a cavalcare una tigre. Nelle discussioni tradizionali buona norma vuole che si ripetano con cura gli argomenti dell'interlocutore evidenziando le concordanze con i nostri ed elogiando l'esplicativa esposizione che l'altro ha fatto. Quanto ci ritroviamo nelle sue parole! Poi, finalmente, si isola il punto di disaccordo e su quello si fa partire la vera e propria discussione. Ma su Facebook come su qualsiasi social è difficile riprodurre la noiosa ma salutare manfrina, cosicché si parte in quarta con la sostanza, ovvero con i disaccordi e la discussione. concentrandosi solo sul disaccordo e parlando sempre e solo di quelli, le parti, potenzialmente vicine, cominciano a sentirsi estranee l'una all'altra, il che puo' facilmente degenerare in aperto conflitto, basta una parolina sbagliata e l'equivoco esplode.

1. Facebook ci rende stupidi? In parte sì poichè induce reazioni immediate e spesso poco meditate. La cosa migliore consisterebbe nel far decantare almeno per un giorno i propri post al fine di poter rettificarli prima dell'invio. Tornare sui propri passi poi è difficile, l'istinto prevalente ci porta a difendere la posizione presa.
   
   Certo che difendere posi
   zioni stupide resta un buon allenamento per la nostra intelligenza.
2. Più info più problemi... ... se non hai un modello per filtrarle.
   
   Perché? Due motivi:
   
   1) più caos in cui perdersi;
   2) più materiale per puntellare i propri pregiudizi.
   
   Interessante il secondo motivo e le sue conseguenze: quando l' informazione esplode esplode anche il settarismo. Oltretutto esplode anche la possibilità di fare proseliti.
   
   Con l' invenzione della stampa le eresie (che ci sono sempre state) si sono rafforzate e diffuse conducendo lentamente alle guerre di religione del 600, uno dei secoli più terribili.
   
   Quando poi arrivano i modelli i progressi sono spettacolari. Probabilmente la rivoluzione industriale è il frutto proprio della più facile circolazione delle informazioni: gli uomini di sapere potevano connettersi tra loro anziché restare isolati.
3. FUTURE IMPERFECT di David D. Friedman - open source 9  NINE Reactionary Progress - Amateur Scholars and Open Source
   
   
• Splendidi dilettanti: Malthus and Darwin were clergymen, Mendel a monk, Smith a mining engineer, Hutton a gentleman farmer, Mill a clerk and writer, Ricardo a retired stock market prodigy. Of the names I have listed, only Newton was a university professor
• In the twentieth century, on the other hand, most of the major figures in all branches of scholarship have been professional academics.
• Why did things change? One possible answer is the enormous increase in knowledge. When fields were new, most scholars did not need access to vast libraries.
• The Web, while not a complete substitute for a library, makes enormous amounts of information readily available
• An alternative explanation... downward spread of education. In the eighteenth century, someone sufficiently well educated to invent a new science was likely to be a member of the upper class, and hence had a good chance of not needing to work for a living.
• most educated people today are rich - rich enough to make a tolerable living and still have time and effort left to devote to their hobbies.
• These arguments suggest that, having shifted from a world of amateur scholars to a world of professionals, we may now be shifting back.
• Two examples: Robin Hanson... His hobby was inventing institutions. His ideas - in particular an ingenious proposal to design markets to generate information - were sufficiently novel and well thought out to make corresponding with him more interesting than corresponding with most of my fellow economists.
• Esempio 2. One of my hobbies for the past thirty years has been cooking from very early cookbooks... When I started... There were no translations of early cookbooks in print and very few in libraries... The situation has changed enormously over the past thirty years... the biggest change is that there are now at least seven English translations of early cookbooks on the Web, freely available to anyone interested... Most of the translations were done by amateurs for the fun of it.
• The professionals, on average, know much more than the amateurs do, but there are a lot more amateurs and some of them know quite a lot.
• amateurs have access not only to information but to each other, as well as to any professional
• OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
• rising incomes and improved communication technology make it easier to produce things for fun.
• The best-known example is Linux... graduate student named Linus Torvalds.
• The mechanics of open source are simple. Someone comes up with a first version of the software. He publishes the source code. Other people interested in the program modify it - which they are able to do because they have the source code - and send their modifications to him. Modifications that he accepts go into the code base,
• Eric Raymond: open source has its own set of norms and property rights.
• Linus Torvalds owns Linux. Eric Raymond owns Fetchmail. A committee mittee owns Apache... anyone is free to modify... provided that he makes the source code to his modified version public... each can take advantage of improvements made by the others.
• such ownership is controlled by rules similar to the common law rules. Torvalds: If he loses interest he can transfer ownership to someone else.
• There is a second form of ownership in open source - credit for your work. Each project is accompanied by a file identifying the authors.
• open source movement is simply a new variation on the system under which most of modern science was created. ated. Programmers create software; scholars create ideas.
• Scientific theories do not have owners in quite the sense that open source projects do, but at any given time in most fields there is considerable able agreement as to what the orthodox body of theory is.
• JIMMY WALES'S IMPOSSIBLE SUCCESS
• Few projects seem less suited to the open source approach than writing an encyclopedia. For it to be a success readers must rely on it, so a mistake in one article casts doubt on others.
• In 2001, Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia
• Open source radicale. With rare exceptions, any article can be edited anytime by anyone.
• More often than one might expect, the article evolves to a consensus, a statement of differing views that both sides can agree on.
• MARKET AND HIERARCHY
• firms themselves are miniature socialist states... There is one crucial difference between Microsoft and Stalin's Russia. Microsoft's interactions with the rest of us are voluntary.
• The easier it is for a dispersed group of individuals to coordinate their activities, ities, the larger we would expect the role of decentralized coordination, market rather than hierarchy, in the overall mix... the existence of the Internet had shifted the balance between center and periphery.
• Eli Lilly had decided to subcontract part of its chemical research to the world at large... according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, they had gotten "about 1,000 scientists from India, China, and elsewhere in the world"
• Problema: lavoro occulto: Consider a chemist hired to work in an area related to one of the problems on the list. He has an obvious temptation to slant... A chemist paid by firm A while working for firm B
• INFORMATION WARFARE
• Internet supports decentralized forms of cooperation. It supports decentralized forms of conflict as well.
• Una brutta storia con scambi di identità e furti di password
• Case 1: The Tale of the Four Little Pigs
• The year is 1995, the place Cornell University. Four freshmen have compiled piled a collection of misogynist jokes entitled "75 Reasons Why Women (Bitches) Should Not Have Freedom of Speech" and sent copies to their friends.
• The central question is whether creating such a list and using email to transmit it is an offense that ought to be punished or a protected exercise of free speech.
• La preside ipicrita:     the students have offered to do the following: Each of them will attend the "Sex at 7:00" program... the students have offered to do the following: Each of them will attend the "Sex at 7:00" program... Each of them has committed to perform 50 hours of community service.
• There are at least two ways to interpret that outcome. One is that Ms. Krause is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - Cornell imposed no penalty on the students, they imposed an entirely voluntary penalty. Molto syranom
• The alternative interpretation starts with the observation that university sity administrators have a lot of ways of making life difficult for students.
• Risultato: They publicly maintained their commitment to free speech while covertly punishing students for what they said.
• Someone who preferred the second interpretation thought up a novel way of supporting it. An email went out: Now that we have had time to evaluate the media response, I think we can congratulate ourselves on a strategy that was not only successful cessful in defusing the scandal, but has actually ally enhanced the reputation of the university as a sanctuary for those who believe that "free speech"... Yours sincerely Barbara L. Krause...
• The letter was not, of course, actually written by Barbara Krause... It was written, and sent, by an anonymous group calling themselves OFFAL - Online Freedom Fighters Anarchist Liberation. The letter was a satire,
• unattractive picture of what its authors suspected Ms. Krause's real views were.
• Email is not only easily distributed, it is easily answered.
• OFFAL produced a second email, containing the original forgery, an explanation of what they were doing,
• Their summary: We believe that ridicule is a more powerful ful weapon than bombs or death threats. And we believe that the Internet is the most powerful ful system ever invented for channeling grassroots roots
• The correct point was that Cornell's actions could plausibly be interpreted preted as hypocritical - attacking free speech while pretending to support it.
• What I find interesting about the incident is that it demonstrates a form of information warfare made practical by the nature of the net - very low transaction costs, anonymity, no face-to-face contact.
• Some years ago on a Usenet group, I read the following message: I believe that it is okay to have sex before marriage unlike some people... Please write me and give me your thoughts on this. You can also tell me about some of your ways to excite a woman because I have not yet found the right man to satisfy me....
• It occurred to me that what I was observing might be a commercial variant of the OFFAL tactic.
• that form of information warfare has been used frequently enough online to have acquired its own nickname: "Joe job."
• A Sad Story
• Furto d'identità e di password. Tizio finisce dentro xchè qlcn accede alla sua mail.
• For my present purposes what is interesting is not which side was guilty but the fact that either side could have been, and the problems that fact raises for the world that they were, and we will be, living in.
• solution is some way of knowing who sent what message.... One possible solution is the use of biometrics, identification linked to physical characteristics such as fingerprints or retinal patterns.
• digital signatures,
• OPEN SOURCE CRIME CONTROL
• Fregato su ebay reagisce: online private investigator who, from the buyer's cell phone number, was able to get his real name and landline phone number. Attempts to interest the Chicago police department, the FBI, and the Secret Service were unsuccessful... "not large enough to interest us"
• Finta asta. decided on a little private entrapment, set up an auction on eBay of the same computer under his girlfriend's name... Markham police... arrested the criminal with more than $10,000 in bogus checks in his possession.10
• The reason I know about it is that, when looking for material for this part of the chapter, I put a post on my blog asking for examples of open source crime control. The next day I had responses with links to several stories, including Jason's. I found his story the same way he found his criminal.
4. Future Imperfect di DAVID D. FRIEDMAN - realtà virtuale - TWENTY All in Your Mind
   
   

   • Videonferenza. what I see is not what is in front of me but what they draw... The image from my video camera is processed by my computer before being sent on to everyone in my audience. That gives me an opportunity to improve it a little first, to replace my bathrobe with a suit and tie, give me a badly needed shave, remove a decade or so of aging.
• Video games are our most familiar form of virtual reality.
• However good our screens, this sort of virtual reality suffers from a serious limitation: It only fools two senses... Want to hear things? Vibrate air in the ear. Want to see things? Beam photons at the retina. Applying that approach to the remaining senses is harder.
• TODAY AND TOMORROW: THE WORLD OF PRIMITIVE VR
• Ostacoli alla VR. We all, automatically and routinely, judge the people around us not only by what they say but by how they say it - tone of voice, facial expression, gestures.
• con men. They are people who, through talent or training, have mastered the ability to divorce what they are actually... on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog. Or a woman. Or a twelve year old. Or crippled. In virtual reality, once we have the real-time editing software worked out properly, you can be anything you can imagine... Giochi di gruppo: Have participants write and post physical descriptions of other participants they had never met. I gained almost nine inches. In virtual reality I never have to be short again.
• My Contribution to Corpore Sano
• One objection to video games is that they remove one of the few incentives modern people have to exercise.
• If what you want is exercise, the obvious solution is bigger joysticks... you only notice how tired you are after you have won or lost.
• Dance Dance Revolution, already exist.'
• Altra funzione videogiochi. to do dangerous things while only getting virtually killed... Mariana trench... the lunar case,
• DEEP VR - BEYOND THE DREAMING PROBLEM
• Suppose we succeed in cracking the dreaming problem, figuring out enough about how the brain works so that we too can create full sense illusions.
• a useful first step is to distinguish between information transactions and material transactions.
• The book is a physical object. But reading an illusion of a book, with the same words on the virtual pages, would do just as well... For a material transaction, consider growing wheat.
• A sufficiently advanced form of virtual reality can provide for all information transactions. It might assist with some material transactions; the wheat harvester could be run by an operator located somewhere else, giving real instructions to a real machine.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty
• Cosa conta? Why do I want to visit my friends? To see them, to feel them, to hear them, to do things with them. Unless one of the things is building a house or planting a garden that really has to be built or planted, the whole visit is an information transaction... consider a phone call.
• Future Fiction
• Fantasia depauperata? My daughter has so far refused to see the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring because she prefers the product of her imagination to the product of the director's imagination.
• Consider in contrast a symphony. It corresponds to nothing in nature. The composer has taken one sense, hearing, and used it to create an aesthetic experience
• Fantasy: Substitute or Complement
• Su WW nn c'è distinzione tra sessi, la violenza è anche sulle donne. That raises an obvious question: Having routinely punched out virtual females online, will he be more willing to punch out real females in the real world?
• George Orwell, writing more than sixty years ago, worried about the corrupting effect on readers of the routine brutality of American crime fiction... Later writers worried about the effect of television. The latest concern is the effect of Internet porn.
• Is virtual sex and violence a complement to or a substitute for real sex and violence?
• Tod Kendall.' Correlate growth of access to the Internet, by state, with changes in the frequency of rape. It turned out that the correlation was negative;
• What Matters
• Mondo materiale. Stuff must be produced for real, but human beings do not need much stuff to stay alive. To check that for food, price the cheapest bulk flour, oil, and lentils you can find. Calculate how much 2,000 calories a day of each of them would cost... Viewed in realspace, it is not much of a world. Everyone is eating the cheapest food that will keep a human body in good condition, living in the human equivalent of coin-operated airport storage, exercising by moving against resistance machines, perhaps as part of virtual reality games...
• Mondo virtuale. All women are beautiful, and enough are willing. All men are handsome. Everyone lives in a mansion that he can redecorate at will, gold-plated if he so desires.'
• Which is true - slum or paradise? It depends on what matters. If all that matters is sensation, what you perceive, it is a paradise,
• As evidence against, consider a very old form of virtual sex: masturbation. tion. In your mind you can be making love to the woman of your dreams, at least if you have a good enough imagination.
• Having someone read a book I wrote, enjoy and be persuaded by my ideas, pleases me... But what about only thinking someone read my book?
• Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, put the question in terms of an imaginary experience machine, his version of VR.'
• You will have to decide for yourself.
5. Avoid News Towards a Healthy News Diet By Rolf Dobelli
   
   
• Il problema: We are so well informed and yet we know so little. Why?
• In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to shift our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body.
• Un'esperienza personale. I have now gone without news for a year, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first hand: less disruption, more time, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more insights.
• No 1 –News misleads us
• systematically News reports do not represent the real world. Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking,
• Esempio. Take the following event. A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? On the car. On the person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). What kind of person he is (was). But –that is all completely irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.
• •Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated. •The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated. •Astronauts are overrated. Nurses are underrated. •Britney Spears is overrated. IPCC reports are underrated. •Airplane crashes are overrated. Resistance to antibiotics is underrated.
• No 2 –News is irrelevant
• Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that –because you consumed it –allowed you to make a better decision
• At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.
• Esempio. In 1914, the news story about the assassination in Sarajevo dwarfed all other reports in terms of its global significance.
• The first Internet browser debuted in 1995. The public birth of this hugely relevant piece of software barely made it into the press despite its vast future impact.
• No 3 – News limits understanding
• News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes.
• Il difetto di ciò che conta. The important stories are non-stories:
• No evidence exists to indicate that information junkies are better decision makers.
• No 4 –News is toxic to your body
• Stress cronico. News constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocordicoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. 
• No 5 –News massively increases cognitive errors
• News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. We automatically, systematically filter out evidence that contradicts our preconceptions
• exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense”– even if they don’t correspond to reality.
• This reminds me of high school. My history textbook specified seven reasons (not six, not eight) why the French Revolution erupted. The fact is, we don’t know why the French Revolution broke out.
• No 6 –News inhibits thinking
• Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking.
• In a 2001 study1 two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increase.
• No 7 –News changes the structure of your brain
• News works like a drug. As stories develop, we naturally want to know how they continue.
• The human brain is highly plastic. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the consumption of news, we end up with a different brain. Adaptation to news occurs at a biological level. News reprograms us. Most news consumers –even if they used to be avid book readers –have lost the ability to read and absorb lengthy articles or books.
• Michael Merzenich (University of California, San Francisco), a pioneer in the field of neuroplasticity: “We are training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
• No 8 – News is costly
• News taxes productivity three ways:
• First, count the consumption-time that news demands.
• Second, tally up the refocusing time – or switching cost.
• Third, news distracts us even hours after we’ve digested today’s hot items. News stories and images may pop into your mind hours, sometimes days later,
• No 9 – News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
• Fame is misleading because generally people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives.
• No 10 – News is produced by journalists
• My estimate: fewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative.
• No 11 – Reported facts are sometimes wrong,
• Today, the fact checker is an endangered species at most news companies
• No 12 – News is manipulative
• Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions.
• Stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers (advertising bias) or the owners of the media (corporate bias), and each media outlet has a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone (mainstream bias).
• No 13 –News makes us passive
• News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world.
• Una teoria della depressione. Viewed on a timeline, the spread of depression coincides almost perfectly with the growth and maturity of the mass media.
• 14 –News gives us the illusion of caring
• “We may want to believe that we are still concerned. We sing “We Are the World”
• No 15 – News kills creativity
• Things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age.
• Fatti. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.
• Policy. What to do instead Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey. glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Go for magazines that connect the dots
• Morale. Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is relevant in any society.
6. Automation Makes Us Dumb By Nicholas Carr
   
   
• già la prima ondata: de-skilling... i premitori do bottoni
• piloti dottori architetti
• se la prima ondata ha eroso le skill degli operai la seconda erode quelle dei professionisti
• le virtù di un software grezzo
• solo l allenamento regolare forma e mantiene le abilità
• soluzione: free style automatoon: il pc che corregge suggerisce interpreta
• Mmmmmmm
• Artificial intelligence has arrived.
• Worrisome evidence suggests that our own intelligence is withering as we become more dependent
• La prima automazione. James Bright went into the field to study automation’s actual effects. An automated milling machine, for example, didn’t transform the metalworker into a more creative artisan; it turned him into a pusher of buttons. “de-skill” workers rather than to “up-skill” them.
• Il pc oggi. Pilots rely on computers to fly planes; doctors consult them in diagnosing ailments; architects use them to design buildings.
• Even the smartest software lacks the common sense,
• the British aviation researcher Matthew Ebbatson calls “skill fade.” our skills get sharper only through practice,
• Una soluzione possibile. tasks using either rudimentary software that provided no assistance or sophisticated software that offered a great deal of aid. The researchers found that the people using the simple software developed better strategies, made fewer mistakes and developed a deeper aptitude for the work.
• With the rise of electronic health records, physicians increasingly rely on software templates. medicine more routinized
• Timothy Hoff interviewed more than 75 primary-care physicians who had adopted computerized systems. The doctors felt that the software was impoverishing their understanding
• Harvard Medical School professor Beth Lown, in a 2012 journal article written with her student Dayron Rodriquez, warned that when doctors become “screen-driven,”following a computer’s prompts rather than “the patient’s narrative thread,”their thinking can become constricted.
• Computer-aided design has helped architects to construct buildings with unusual shapes and materials,
• In his book “The Thinking Hand,”the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa argues that overreliance on computers makes it harder for designers to appreciate the subtlest, most human qualities of their buildings.
• Jacob Brillhart wrote in a 2011 paper, modern computer systems can translate sets of dimensions into precise 3-D renderings with incredible speed, but they also breed “more banal, lazy, and uneventful designs that are void of intellect, imagination and emotion.”
• Soluzioni. There is an alternative. In “human-centered automation,”. The technology becomes the expert’s partner, not the expert’s replacement.
• John Lee of the University of Iowa, “a less-automated approach, which places the automation in the role of critiquing the operator. human-focused approach is known as adaptive automation. It employs cutting-edge sensors and interpretive algorithms
7. Yes We Can di Tyler Cowen
• premessa: non siamo razionali, siamo diversi, siamo liberi. quindi? quindi che ognuno crei la sua via
• cap1 tag e stringhe: l' homo hordo
• autismo: l era dell'informazione rivaluta certi stili cognitivi (classificare, ordinare...)
• autismo: mix di debolezze e forze cognitive. forza: capacità organizzativa. erudizione di certi aut. debolezze disorientamento smarrimento manca un quadro generale
• autismo: casi patologici ma anche persone semplicemente diverse. esiste la diversità!
• autismo: introversione contatto oculare tono diretto tono impersonale ripetitività insistenza gusti difficili
• autismo: niente voglia di socializzazione o umorismo o solidarietà? No, solo incapacità a capire
• autismo: origine genetica. molti bambini e gli adulti? nn li notate: spesso sono persone molto competenti
• il caso di vernon smith simon baron cohen craig newmark
• sowell: teme diagnosi fallaci. nn afferra il problema: la diagnosi è corretta. è l autismo che ha anche punti di forza
• autistico: si sente sopraffatto dal mondo: troppa info da organizzare. la ns esp con la rete
• organizzare lo smartphone. la sorpresa programmata del shuffle
• qualità sonora: oggi secondaria. la selezione sulla quantità è primaria
• l investimento più produttivo: l'organizzazione del pensiero personale. saper produrre tag. saper produrre stringhe
• cultura: tag e stringhe. ovvero organizzazione mentale. siamo chiamati a diventare tutti un po' più autistici
• foto: una narrazione emotiva della famiglia
• imporre coerenza ad una massa di dati
• homo ordo
• vi piace ordinare, collezionare, organizzare... potreste avere successo
• cultura. oggi più disponibile
• cultura: oggi l' accesso è più autonomo
• cultura: molti si lamentano di quanto sia scadente
• oggi viaggiare è facile, tutto è a distanza di un click. conseguenze? la frammentazione: si privilegia la frammentarietà e la leggerezza. non un album ma una canzone.non una sinfonia ma un movimento. bocconcini assaggi da archiviare e riordinare secondo la vs creatività
• la scossa della novità. se manca vi rivolgete altrove
• ansia: consumiamo sapendo che a distanza di un clic c'è qualcosa di meglio
• si adora sia iniziare che finire i libri
• teorema alchian allen: se a due beni (es di alta e di bassa qualità) viene aggiunta una somma fissa il consumo del bene più qualitativo aumenta.
• oggi ci nutriamo di playlist ma il loro contenuto è su misura e qualitativamente superiore
• l accusa: deficit di attenzione: accusa costante: dal romanzo al fumetto al rock.
• google accorcia i ns archi di attenzione ma qs è una via verso la stupidità? nicholas carr pensa di sì
• controeffetto1: google amplia i ns archi di attenzione con il contatto con cose più interessanti
• controeffetto2: google stimola l'attenzione sul quadro generale: posso sempre seguire la storia che mi interessa
• conclusione: nn esiste sovrainformazione, esiste incapacità di fare ordine
• l autoassemblaggio: nell'opera del 7/800 c'era tutto: gioia, paura, morte... oggi non ci sono opere con tutto dentro. per avere tutto prendiamo un po' qui un po' lì e assembliamo. non latitano i capolavori perchè il capolavoro è un fai da te
• importante ieri: conoscere i classici. importante oggi: sapete assemblare il vostro capolavoro?
• capolavoro contemporaneo: si colloca nell interiorità, per qs molti non lo vedono negandone l'esistenza
• similitudine. cultura del passato: rapporto con l'amante. cultura del presente: matrimonio.
• è costoso contattare l'amante, e quando lo fai pretendi che sia un esperienza memorabile. la moglie è sempre intorno a te e quel che conta è stabilire una quotidianità
• tesi: chi è felicemente sposato ha una vita interiore più ricca ed è mediamente più soddisfatta. ergo: la cultura ti attrae? nascere oggi è una fortuna.
• cap4 la comunicazione in rete
• tesi comune: la comunicazione virtuale  manca d'intimità. problema: in sè è oggettivamente più intima e sfumata rispetto a quella diretta.
• internet parifica: tutti hanno una chance. internet esalta l'interiorità (non è mera astrazione)
• sms e mail: ci si apre di più
• costruire la propria immagine, taroccandola anche un po', è importante per essere felici
• cass sunstein: il web estremizza le posizioni politiche. vero ma la politica nn è un tratto fondamentale per molti
• cap5 scuola e modernità
• scopo della scuola: farvi diventare un po' più autistici: più concentrati sul particolare
• nerd: ama imparare ma non ama la scuola considerando segnalatoria
• scuola segnalatoria: non s'impara granché ma si segnala il proprio valore. forse esagerano amplificando la propria esperienza personale?
• perchè non decolla la scuola online? la presenza fisica motiva così come l interazione con gli altri allievi. l istruzione è un po' un teatro. se tenete conto di qs fatto capite meglio l'essenza dell'educazione
• studiare l'effetto dell'istruzione: le medicine si paragonano ai placebo ma l'istruzione a cosa si paragona? ci vorrebbe una finta università
• cap6 storie e narrazioni
• se comprate una scarpa comprate la storia in essa incorporata: thomas schelling
• qs fatto mette in crisi l economia tradizionale: le motivazioni degli individui sono più complesse. perchè uno stoico vuole soffrire?
• nuova economia: le persone sono diverse, la cultura e le storie sono tutto (l incentivo complesso)
• per avere una storia che piace dovete avere un problema da risolvere. nota: nel metodo classico il problema era trovare la soluzione, ora è trovare un problema da risolvere
• una buona storia ordina la visione creando punti focali. la cultura è una storia condivisa. schelling
• autistici: non sanno condividere storie ma qs è un inconveniente relativo oggi che con tanta info possiamo parlare analiticamente senza bisogno di punti focali. es un autistico non sa quando l altro ha finito di parlare ma se comunica via social qs nn è un problema
• problema1: la storia semplifica e molte sorie sono troppo semplici
• problema2: spesso le storie realizzano unione per confliggere con più potenza
• problema3: una buona storia puo' ingannarci
• nozick: la realtà mantiene un suo primato sulle storie: vedi esperim della macchina dell esperienza. ma forse anche la mente è una macchina dei sogni.
• cap7 eroi autistici
• holmes
• cap8 la bellezza
• i gusti divergono. a volte perchè diverge il modo di pensare
• gusti diversi? di solito si guarda a cultura, istruzione... perché non guardare nei neuroni?
• sacks: musicophilia. un tipo colpito dal fulmine che comincia ad appassionarsi di musica
• musica e autismo sono abbastanza connessi
• molta musica atonale è apprezzata dai neurologicamente diversi. forse perchè organizzano diversamente i suoni che ascoltano
• le musiche atonali: una conseguenza dello specialismo. musica di nicchia
• Cap9 politica
• Progetto nerd: overcoming bias
• L aut nn è egocentrino nn ha effetto dotazione. Poù cosmopolita neno status seekers
• Le guerre spesso nascono da effetti dotaz
• Ait: etica semplice scheletrica. Astratta. Hayek apprezerebbe
• Aut: conosce xchè ordina. La mente ha un ruolo attivo. Kant apprezzrrebbe
• Propensione a considerare vere certe regole asyratte: la chiave del successo di certe nazioni. Russia e sudamerica: menti poco astratte
• L aut teme la vita sociale: il web una salvezza che lo rilassa
• Colpo di fortuna: primato dello scritto
• Altra fortuna: primato dei commerci. Lo scambio trasforma la diversitá in fortuna anzichè iattura. Ognuno ha una nicchia x primeggiare
• Tour: tokyo (passioni totalizzante) finlandia (nn incrociare gli occhi)
• Paradosso di fermi: xchè nn si fanno vivi? Perchè le civiltá avanzate vivono nell interiorità
• +++++++++++La vita culturale di ieri è un po’ come l’adulterio: estemporaneo, rischioso e con grandi picchi emozionali.
• Oggi assomiglia al matrimonio: stabile e ad intensità costante.
• Sono dell’idea che chi è sposato abbia una vita interiore più ricca e soddisfacente.
8. The evolution of everything di Matt Ridley - terzi
• tecnologia: lo sviluppo deriva dal contesto molto più che dall'eroismo solitario
• internet: ritardatata di dieci anni a causa del contesto statalista (le università) in cui è cresciuta.
• internet: esempio di tecnologia contestuale: la legge di moore non sarebbe stata possibile senza commercializzazione spinta
9. Does Digital Communication Encourage or Inhibit Spiritual Progress? Diane Winston
   Internet
   
   
• when Sister Catherine Wybourne’s Digitalnun [1] helped form a community of Benedictine nuns [2] in Oxfordshire, England, she knew they could not afford to pursue the order’s mission of hospitality.
• Wybourne, a former banker who is intrigued by technology, believed a virtual community could express traditional Benedictine hospitality in contemporary form [3].” The sisters launched a website that dispenses spiritual teachings via podcasts and videos, hosts conferences, sponsors online retreats, offers a prayer line, and allows participants to “converse” with the nuns.
• the nuns embrace a worldwide community, many of whom would not have come to the monastery.
• unprecedented opportunities for laypeople to study and learn.
• The ability to pick and choose religious teachings without reference to religious authority or community
• Overcoming Binaries
• basing worldviews on alternatives that admit no ambiguity is a zero sum game: If we’re not winning, we must be losing.
• The relationship between digital communication and spiritual progress is similarly a both/ and proposition.
• affords new possibilities for spiritual engagement.
• Spiritual Progress
• Spiritual progress entails moving toward a deeper experience and awareness
• Spiritual progress can result from education or from experience; it can be collective or individual.
• For others, spiritual progress is attained through study.
• Digital Communication
• The explosion of online resources offering seekers opportunities to experience nirvana, Enlightenment, transcendence,
• Occult knowledge is suddenly accessible, secret teachings clickable and esoteric teachings, formerly the province of trained masters, available to all.
• BeliefNet [10], Bible Gateway [11] and the Vatican website [12] are perennially popular.
• the first obstacle that digital communication poses to spiritual progress is selectivity.
• Stig Hjarvard’s argument that media have assumed a key role in social orientation and moral instruction: ‘In earlier societies, social institutions like family, school and church were the most important providers of information.Today, these institutions have lost some of their former authority
• Elizabeth Eisenstein’s classic The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change [15] chronicles the impact of Gutenberg’s invention on Western civilization, printing press made possible widespread literacy, religious reform and modern science.
• “logics” of digital communication—including individualization, commercialization and globalization—likewise
• Critici: Individualization corrodes social ties
• Risposta. Although scholars and religious leaders once wondered [16] if virtual religion would undermine real-life religious communities, the contrary is true: Practitioners supplement their real-world religious affiliations with virtual activities, including study, journaling and prayer.
• Commercializzazione. Mara Einstein argues in Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial age. Mormons [18], Methodists [19], and Scientologists [20] have all launched major online campaigns to make their “product”more user-friendly. Ironically, such campaigns have the potential to reach seekers hoping to deepen their spiritual lives
• The Digital Cosmos/ Chaos “We had the experience but missed the meaning”
-- T.S. Eliot,
• Caveat: Its democratic nature can reinforce individualization to the detriment of community. Its openness challenges religious authority. 
• commercialization creeps in, if not from providers than from users.
• Ottimisti. Jane Shilling’s, suggestion in The New Statesman [21] that digital access has transformed at least one aspect of spirituality -- self-examination -- from an essentially elitest pursuit to a democratic
• Pessimisti. Valerie Tarico’s belief that the Internet spells doom for organized religion [22]. Tarico argues that web content, highlighting the negative aspects of religious institutions, is a reason for diminishing numbers of adherents,
• La personalizzazione: Jim Gilliam's "The Internet is My Religion"
• Altrove la responsabilità della crisi. Internet is Not Killing Organized Religion [24] ,”Elizabeth Drescher writes, “At the end of the day, that is, it is not so much “the culture”—digital culture, secular culture—that is driving young people from churches, it is religious culture itself.”
• Tesi finale. The challenges that beset us in this realm are not, primarily technological. They are personal. spirituality is a heightened case of human activity, not a special class.
• Un'esperienza positiva: il diario del figlio sul padre morente. Madrigal explains: "The document became a shared diary of their relationship with their father and each other," he writes: "its tiny movements intimate, its arc gutting.”
• Sta a noi: Humans find ways to push meaning through the pipes."
10. Il bene arriva per mezzo di un altro – Amicizia e relazioni nell’epoca del web - incontro con Luigi Ballerini
    • appunti conferenza
    • INTRO
    • Il bene si riceve da un altro grazie ad un apertura.
    • BALLERINI
    • Ciorven e l isola dei gabbiani. Una bbina della lindgren
    • Il bambino adulto della l. C. è amica di un adulto. Alla pari.
    • Noi nn abbiamo qs rapporto alla pari. Alla mamma!
    • Componenti: Sensibilità motricità e pensiero. Il titto in un corpo.
    • L esperienza si fa col corpo.
    • Il pc esalta la vista.
    • La tecnologia riduce l'esperienza.
    • Il gruppo mamme s impiccia di tutto. Nn c è più privacy.
    • Promesse del web: puoi sempre essere altrove.
    • Seconda promessa: avrai degli ascoltatori automatici.
    • Terza promessa: nn sarai mai solo.
    • Generazione x: la più controllata e la più abbandonata.
    • La sfida nel virtuale si vince nel reale. Se ho un reale interessante userò bene il virtuale.
    • Allarme: il ritiro dal reale e l incupirsi.
    • Non punire togliendo il reale.
    • **(*****(**(***********I CONCETTI CHIAVE*********
    • - + Autorità. Cultura: matrimonio e amante
    • Bolla
    • - Conflitto. Pregiudizi puntellati. Polarizzazione. Populismo
    • - + Stringa. Homo ordo assemblaggio. Autismo
    • - Narcisismo
    • + Spiritualità interiorità. Intimità. Sfumature
    • - sensibilità. Avere un amico vero compensa.
    • - Stupidità. Bias. Scripta manent. Memoria poincarè. Pregiudizi puntellati. Polarizzazione
    • + Dilettantismo
    • + Collaborazione open source
    • + - Fake identità abito monaco. Autenticità alla nozick.
    • + Catarsi.
    • + - Fantasia. Memoria poincarè. Sinfonia. E ricerca scolastica.
    • Giornali
    • Mix strategy
    • - + Costo opportunità: ansia. Costo della scelta.
    • + Teorema di alchian
    • + - Attenzione merce rara.
    • - + Scuola online e teatro. Motivazione.
    continua
11. Preface - DOES THE INTERNET SUBVERT CULTURE? Jerome H. Barkow Donald J. Boudreaux Zeynep Tufekci Julian Sanchez

    • How the Internet Subverts Cultural Transmission by Jerome H. Barkow
    • He suggests that the Internet is creating the conditions for a potentially disastrous social breakdown: When youth no longer respect and emulate high-status transmitters of culture, cultural knowledge is lost.
    • The dramatic substitution of sports stars and entertainers for local authority
    • Like Matt Ridley, I Remain Rationally Optimistic by Donald J. Boudreaux
    • Material wealth has risen, he thinks, particularly because of rising knowledge
    • Like other forms of media that have gone before them, social media have allowed us to trade and combine good ideas and bits of useful local knowledge that otherwise might never have been put to use.
    • Kanye West, the Internet, and Cultural Evolution by Zeynep Tufekci
    • Internet.... for many of us, it’s not replacing traditional local elders - it’s replacing the homogeneous, carefully produced mass media of the twentieth century.
    • not just athletes, actors, and pop stars, but astrophysicists, philosophers,
    • In Today’s World, Cultural Stasis Isn’t an Option by Julian Sanchez
    • American teens nowadays seem remarkably well-behaved, and their online social activities mostly mirror their offline ones.

    continua
12. How the Internet Subverts Cultural Transmission By Jerome H. Barkow in  DOES THE INTERNET SUBVERT CULTURE?

    • How the Internet Subverts Cultural Transmission By Jerome H. Barkow
    • È l ambiente che si adatta a noi e nn viceversa. Siamo inici. We are alone because instead of evolving different species to adapt to different geographies and climates, we adapt through culture.
    • we are utterly dependent on vast bodies of stored, transmitted, and constantly edited and updated information, that is, on culture
    • it includes subsistence skills, forms of social organization that are reasonably compatible with our current environment and level of technology, all details of that technology, effective ways to procure food and other essentials, the belief systems that more-or-less support the way we are socially organized, how we communicate from spoken language to gestures
    • cultures are always changing,...Youth is a busy, busy time for members of Homo sapiens
    • In recent years, some evolutionists have begun to think of culture as an adaptive, evolving system and the participants of a culture not as blind copying machines but as editors and inventers of the knowledge of which a culture consists
    • This essay focuses on only one of our culture-editing mechanisms, the tendency to pay preferential attention to, and learn preferentially from, the high in status,
    • In adolescence we tend to become preoccupied by our own relative standing and that of the people and groups around us.... we are editing out the behavior and knowledge of the low-in-status, the “losers,”the ignored, from the culture’s information pool. In their place we are replicating versions of the information associated with the high-in-status....Second, we are positioning ourselves to acquire prestige
    • Esempio di collasso culturale. Cultural editing is not necessarily smooth. Even before the age of the Internet, preferential attention to the high in status could have unpredictable results. In my own work, during the 1970s, I lived among a people in Nigeria’s Middle Belt who called themselves the Migili (and whom the literature refers to as the “Koro”). Shortly before my arrival, a group of young Migili men had served in the Nigerian army. They had been astounded to learn that their revered elders were held in contempt by the surrounding Muslim, Hausa-speaking peoples, who thought of Migili as ignorant and dirty. The young men lost all respect for their elders and did the unthinkable: upon returning home they physically attacked some of the male elders.... Most people converted either to Evangelical Christianity or Catholicism, though some embraced Islam. The society changed thoroughly and irrevocably....
    • for a culture to be perpetuated, the young must respect their elders: at least in some crucial ways, they must want to be like them and therefore to attend to them and learn preferentially from them.
    • The Migili case gives us some insight into the impact of social media today. In part, the Migili social collapse resulted from a change in scale –from living in their own homogeneous town and having contact with outsiders....Modern social media represent a change in scale orders of magnitude greater,
    • Entertainers and athletes seem to be presented as being near the top of the status hierarchy....We often grow up wanting to be like them, and even when we consciously reject them, they influence us.
    • Bolla. Each online community develops its own prestige criteria and its own heroes,
    • Whether we are talking of books, films, television, or the Internet, modern mass media devalue the coin of local prestige. This devaluation results in what economists might term “opportunity cost.”
    • Everywhere, it seems, parents find themselves in the position of first generation immigrants whose children participate in a new and unfamiliar culture.
    • What happens when the extreme group can convince their targets that they represent the most prestigious and powerful individual in the universe, the monotheistic god?
    • “biology is destiny only if we ignore it” (Barkow 2003).
    • Il dolce. We evolved to seek the tastes of salt, fat, and sweetness because, in earlier environments, these were reliable guides to scarce and valuable nutrients –they were indicators of nutrition. Today, these evolved preferences are exploited by industry to produce profitable but often dangerously unhealthy products. As with preferential attention to the high in status, our own evolved psychology is being turned against us. In both cases, our immediate reaction is to use cultural, religious, and moral systems against those responsible, trying to use shame and the label of “evil”to in effect lower the relative standing of those exploiting our evolved psychology for their own ends.

    continua
13. social network e memoria. c'è davvero una perdita di memoria? e quanto incide? per rintracciare materiale che mi fosse utile sul tema ho dovuto farmi venire in mente tutte le  le tag e le stringhe più idonee per surfare senza spreco di tempo nelle mie banche dati, uno sforzo mnemonico non indifferente che deve anche tener conto delle scelte classificatorie fatte. da questa osservazione si capisce come io non pensi che agire sui social colpisca in modo profondo le nostre facoltà mnemoniche, anche se, questo è vero, è cambiato l'oggetto (prima dovevo piuttosto ricordarmi la posizione del libro in biblioteca e del capitolo dove si affrontava un certo tema, e prima ancora dovevo ricordarmi i contenuti specifici, inevitabilmente pochi). una volta al sicuro le facoltà mnemoniche di base, la memoria a lungo termine dovrebbe essere preservata.
14. 3 Does the Internet Change Everything? - The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton by Tyler Cowen  ---------------   larivoluzionedeicuriosi valorementaleottimapericuriosi tuttogratis piledrogaperfetta lavorailcliente ricavibassiepocolavoro pilgiù? twittermoltineparlanopochilousano skillmismatch fugadalmaterialismo
15. Derek Powazek. il male prevale sul bene: su 100 commenti ci ricordiamo l'unico negativo.
16. Derek Powazek. occhio alla mela marcia: la sciatteria infetta.
17. Derek Powazek. in rete manca lo sguardo umano, questo ci rende più cattivi...
18. Derek Powazek tre tipi da evitare: il cattivo, il pigro e il pessimista... necessità di un moderatore, di una grafica amichevole, del giudizio dei pari, di avatar con la faccia, parlare di sé (ci fa sentire in controllo)
19. Derek Powazek. internet ci bombarda di notizie facendoci perdere il controllo il che induce una modellizzazione improvvisata. contare fino a 10 non agiure senza solida base informativa. far durare le discussioni non cercarne sempre di nuove.