Tag Archives: digital

Meet the Broadband Preacher

February 22, 2016 Mike

This fascinating article follows Roberto Gallardo an extension professor at Mississippi State University as he works to bring digital literacy, the internet and other services of our 21st century electronic age to rural communities across the South. It’s an uphill struggle.

From Wired:

For a guy born and raised in Mexico, Roberto Gallardo has an exquisite knack for Southern manners. That’s one of the first things I notice about him when we meet up one recent morning at a deli in Starkville, Mississippi. Mostly it’s the way he punctuates his answers to my questions with a decorous “Yes sir” or “No sir”—a verbal tic I associate with my own Mississippi upbringing in the 1960s.

Gallardo is 36 years old, with a salt-and-pepper beard, oval glasses, and the faint remnant of a Latino accent. He came to Mississippi from Mexico a little more than a decade ago for a doctorate in public policy. Then he never left.

I’m here in Starkville, sitting in this booth, to learn about the work that has kept Gallardo in Mississippi all these years—work that seems increasingly vital to the future of my home state. I’m also here because Gallardo reminds me of my father.

Gallardo is affiliated with something called the Extension Service, an institution that dates back to the days when America was a nation of farmers. Its original purpose was to disseminate the latest agricultural know-how to all the homesteads scattered across the interior. Using land grant universities as bases of operations, each state’s extension service would deploy a network of experts and “county agents” to set up 4-H Clubs or instruct farmers in cultivation science or demonstrate how to can and freeze vegetables without poisoning yourself in your own kitchen.

State extension services still do all this, but Gallardo’s mission is a bit of an update. Rather than teach modern techniques of crop rotation, his job—as an extension professor at Mississippi State University—is to drive around the state in his silver 2013 Nissan Sentra and teach rural Mississippians the value of the Internet.

In sleepy public libraries, at Rotary breakfasts, and in town halls, he gives PowerPoint presentations that seem calculated to fill rural audiences with healthy awe for the technological sublime. Rather than go easy, he starts with a rapid-fire primer on heady concepts like the Internet of Things, the mobile revolution, cloud computing, digital disruption, and the perpetual increase of processing power. (“It’s exponential, folks. It’s just growing and growing.”) The upshot: If you don’t at least try to think digitally, the digital economy will disrupt you. It will drain your town of young people and leave your business in the dust.

Then he switches gears and tries to stiffen their spines with confidence. Start a website, he’ll say. Get on social media. See if the place where you live can finally get a high-speed broadband connection—a baseline point of entry into modern economic and civic life.

Even when he’s talking to me, Gallardo delivers this message with the straitlaced intensity of a traveling preacher. “Broadband is as essential to this country’s infrastructure as electricity was 110 years ago or the Interstate Highway System 50 years ago,” he says from his side of our booth at the deli, his voice rising high enough above the lunch-hour din that a man at a nearby table starts paying attention. “If you don’t have access to the technology, or if you don’t know how to use it, it’s similar to not being able to read and write.”

These issues of digital literacy, access, and isolation are especially pronounced here in the Magnolia State. Mississippi today ranks around the bottom of nearly every national tally of health and economic well-being. It has the lowest median household income and the highest rate of child mortality. It also ranks last in high-speed household Internet access. In human terms, that means more than a million Mississippians—over a third of the state’s population—lack access to fast wired broadband at home.

Gallardo doesn’t talk much about race or history, but that’s the broader context for his work in a state whose population has the largest percentage of African-Americans (38 percent) of any in the union. The most Gallardo will say on the subject is that he sees the Internet as a natural way to level out some of the persistent inequalities—between black and white, urban and rural—that threaten to turn parts of Mississippi into places of exile, left further and further behind the rest of the country.

And yet I can’t help but wonder how Gallardo’s work figures into the sweep of Mississippi’s history, which includes—looking back over just the past century—decades of lynchings, huge outward migrations, the fierce, sustained defense of Jim Crow, and now a period of unprecedented mass incarceration. My curiosity on this point is not merely journalistic. During the lead-up to the civil rights era, my father worked with the Extension Service in southern Mississippi as well. Because the service was segregated at the time, his title was “negro county agent.” As a very young child, I would travel from farm to farm with him. Now I’m here to travel around Mississippi with Gallardo, much as I did with my father. I want to see whether the deliberate isolation of the Jim Crow era—when Mississippi actively fought to keep itself apart from the main currents of American life—has any echoes in today’s digital divide.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Welcome to Mississippi. Courtesy of WebTV3.

Technica

Planned Obsolescence

November 28, 2015 Mike

Our digital technologies bring us many benefits: improved personal and organizational efficiency; enhanced communication and collaboration; increased access to knowledge, information, and all manner of products and services. Over the foreseeable future our technologies promise to re-shape our work-lives and our leisure time ever-more, for the better. Yet, for all the positives, our modern technology comes with an immense flaw. It’s called planned obsolescence. Those who make and sell us the next, great digital gizmo rely upon planned obsolescence, combined with our magpie-like desire for shiny new objects, to lock us into an unrelenting cycle of buy-and-replace, buy-and-replace.

Yet, if you are over 30, you may recall having fixed something. You had the tools (some possibly makeshift), you had the motivation (saving money), and you had enough skills and information to get it done. The item you fixed was pre-digital, a simple electrical device, or more likely mechanical — positively ancient by current standards. But, you breathed new life into it, avoided a new purchase, saved some cash and even learned something in the process. Our digital products make this kind of DIY repair almost impossible for all but the expert (the manufacturer or its licensed technician); in fact, should you attempt a fix, you are more likely to render the product in worse shape than before.

Our digital products are just too complex to fix. And, therein lies the paradox of our digital progress — our technologies have advanced tremendously but our ability to repair them has withered. Even many of our supposedly simpler household devices, such as the lowly toaster, blender, or refrigerator have at their heart a digital something-or-other, making repair exorbitantly expensive or impossible.

As a kid, I recall helping my parents fix an old television (the kind with vacuum tubes), mechanical cameras, a vacuum cleaner, darkroom enlarger, doorbell. Those were the days. Today, unfortunately, we’ve become conditioned to consign a broken product to a landfill and to do the same with our skills. It would be a step in the right direction for us to regain the ability to repair our products. But don’t expect any help from the product manufacturer.

From WSJ:

We don’t have to keep buying new gadgets. In fact, we should insist on the right to keep old ones running.

Who hasn’t experienced a situation like this? Halfway through a classic Jack Lemmon DVD, my colleague Shira’s 40-inch TV conked out. Nothing showed up on the screen when she pressed the power button. The TV just hiccupped, going, “Clip-clop. Clip-clop.”

This was a great excuse to dump her old Samsung and buy a shiny new TV, right? But before heading to Best Buy, Shira gave me a call hoping for a less expensive option, not to mention one that’s better for the environment.

We ended up with a project that changed my view on our shop-till-you-drop gadget culture. We’re more capable of fixing technology than we realize, but the electronics industry doesn’t want us to know that. In many ways, it’s obstructing us.

There’s a fight brewing between giant tech companies and tinkerers that could impact how we repair gadgets or choose the shop where we get it done by a pro.

At issue: Who owns the knowledge required to take apart and repair TVs, phones and other electronics?

Some manufacturers stop us by controlling repair plans and limiting access to parts. Others even employ digital software locks to keep us from making changes or repairs. This may not always be planned obsolescence, but it’s certainly intentional obfuscation.

Thankfully, the Internet is making it harder for them to get away with it.

My first stop with Shira’s TV, a 2008 model, was Samsung itself. On its website, I registered the TV and described what was broken.

Our TV problem wasn’t unique: Samsung was taken to court about this exact issue, caused by a busted component called a capacitor. With a little googling of the TV model, I found our problem wasn’t unique. Samsung settled in 2012 by agreeing to extend warranties for 18 months on certain TVs, including this one. It also kept repairing the problem at no cost for a while after.

But when a Samsung support rep called back, she said they’d no longer fix the problem free. She passed me to an authorized Samsung repair shop in my area. They said they’d charge $90 for an estimate, and at least $125 plus parts for a repair.

Buying a similar-size Samsung TV today costs $380. Why wouldn’t Shira just buy a new TV? She felt guilty. Old electronics don’t just go to the great scrapheap in the sky—even recycled e-waste can end up in toxic dumps in the developing world.

Enter Plan B: Searching the Web, I found a ton of people talking about this TV’s broken capacitors. There were even a few folks selling DIY repair kits. The parts cost…wait for it…$12.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Digital trash, Guiyu e-waste town, 2014. Courtesy of Mightyroy / Wikipedia. CC.

Technica

Digital Forensics and the Wayback Machine

September 19, 2015 Mike

Many of us see history — the school subject — as rather dull and boring. After all, how can the topic be made interesting when it’s usually taught by a coach who has other things on his or her mind [no joke, I have evidence of this from both sides of the Atlantic!].

Yet we also know that history’s lessons are essential to shaping our current world view and our vision for the future, in a myriad of ways. Since humans could speak and then write, our ancestors have recorded and transmitted their histories through oral storytelling, and then through books and assorted media.

Then came the internet. The explosion of content, media formats and related technologies over the last quarter-century has led to an immense challenge for archivists and historians intent on cataloging our digital stories. One facet of this challenge is the tremendous volume of information and its accelerating growth. Another is the dynamic nature of the content — much of it being constantly replaced and refreshed.

But, all is not lost. The Internet Archive founded in 1996 has been quietly archiving text, pages, images, audio and more recently entire web sites from the Tubes of the vast Internets. Currently the non-profit has archived around half a trillion web pages. It’s our modern day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria.

Please say hello to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and give it a try. The Wayback Machine took the screenshot above of Amazon.com in 1999, in case you’ve ever wondered what Amazon looked like before it swallowed or destroyed entire retail sectors.

From the New Yorker:

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 A.M. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The plane’s last radio contact was at 1:20 P.M. G.M.T. At 2:50 P.M. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane; it appears to be a Boeing 777.

Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet Archive’s subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on Shmelev’s list. “Strelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,” Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page “deserves to be recorded twice a day.”

On July 17th, at 3:22 P.M. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. Strelkov’s “We just downed a plane” post lasted barely two hours. It might seem, and it often feels, as though stuff on the Web lasts forever, for better and frequently for worse: the embarrassing photograph, the regretted blog (more usually regrettable not in the way the slaughter of civilians is regrettable but in the way that bad hair is regrettable). No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that “if it’s on the Web it must be true,” but a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t. In 2006, David Cameron gave a speech in which he said that Google was democratizing the world, because “making more information available to more people” was providing “the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power.” Seven years later, Britain’s Conservative Party scrubbed from its Web site ten years’ worth of Tory speeches, including that one. Last year, BuzzFeed deleted more than four thousand of its staff writers’ early posts, apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider. Social media, public records, junk: in the end, everything goes.

Web pages don’t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts. When MySpace, GeoCities, and Friendster were reconfigured or sold, millions of accounts vanished. (Some of those companies may have notified users, but Jason Scott, who started an outfit called Archive Team—its motto is “We are going to rescue your shit”—says that such notification is usually purely notional: “They were sending e-mail to dead e-mail addresses, saying, ‘Hello, Arthur Dent, your house is going to be crushed.’ ”) Facebook has been around for only a decade; it won’t be around forever. Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress. In 2010, after the announcement, Andy Borowitz tweeted, “Library of Congress to acquire entire Twitter archive—will rename itself Museum of Crap.” Not long after that, Borowitz abandoned that Twitter account. You might, one day, be able to find his old tweets at the Library of Congress, but not anytime soon: the Twitter Archive is not yet open for research. Meanwhile, on the Web, if you click on a link to Borowitz’s tweet about the Museum of Crap, you get this message: “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.

The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?

The day after Strelkov’s “We just downed a plane” post was deposited into the Wayback Machine, Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told the U.N. Security Council, in New York, that Ukrainian separatist leaders had “boasted on social media about shooting down a plane, but later deleted these messages.” In San Francisco, the people who run the Wayback Machine posted on the Internet Archive’s Facebook page, “Here’s why we exist.”

Read the entire story here.

Image: Wayback Machine’s screenshot of Amazon.com’s home page, August 1999.

Idea Soup

Those 25,000 Unread Emails

August 13, 2014 Mike

It may not be you. You may not be the person who has tens of thousands of unread emails scattered across various email accounts. However, you know someone just like this — buried in a virtual avalanche of unopened text, unable to extricate herself (or him) and with no pragmatic plan to tackle the digital morass.

Washington Post writer Brigid Schulte has some ideas to help your friend (or you of course — your secret is safe with us).

From the Washington Post:

I was drowning in e-mail. Overwhelmed. Overloaded. Spending hours a day, it seemed, roiling in an unending onslaught of info turds and falling further and further behind. The day I returned from a two-week break, I had 23,768 messages in my inbox. And 14,460 of them were unread.

I had to do something. I kept missing stuff. Forgetting stuff. Apologizing. And getting miffed and increasingly angry e-mails from friends and others who wondered why I was ignoring them. It wasn’t just vacation that put me so far behind. I’d been behind for more than a year. Vacation only made it worse. Every time I thought of my inbox, I’d start to hyperventilate.

I’d tried tackling it before: One night a few months ago, I was determined to stay at my desk until I’d powered through all the unread e-mails. At dawn, I was still powering through and nowhere near the end. And before long, the inbox was just as crammed as it had been before I lost that entire night’s sleep.

On the advice of a friend, I’d even hired a Virtual Assistant to help me with the backlog. But I had no idea how to use one. And though I’d read about people declaring e-mail bankruptcy when their inbox was overflowing — deleting everything and starting over from scratch — I was positive there were gems somewhere in that junk, and I couldn’t bear to lose them.

I knew I wasn’t alone. I’d get automatic response messages saying someone was on vacation and the only way they could relax was by telling me they’d never, ever look at my e-mail, so please send it again when they returned. My friend, Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, often sends out this auto response: “My inbox looks like Pompeii, post-volcano. Will respond as soon as I have time to excavate.” And another friend, whenever an e-mail is longer than one or two lines, sends a short note, “This sounds like a conversation,” and she won’t respond unless you call her.

E-mail made the late writer Nora Ephron’s list of the 22 things she won’t miss in life. Twice. In 2013, more than 182 billion e-mails were sent every day, no doubt clogging up millions of inboxes around the globe.

Bordering on despair, I sought help from four productivity gurus. And, following their advice, in two weeks of obsession-bordering-on-compulsion, my inbox was down to zero.

Here’s how.

*CREATE A SYSTEM. Julie Gray, a time coach who helps people dig out of e-mail overload all the time, said the first thing I had to change was my mind.

“This is such a pervasive problem. People think, ‘What am I doing wrong? They think they don’t have discipline or focus or that there’s some huge character flaw and they’re beating themselves up all the time. Which only makes it worse,” she said.

“So I first start changing their e-mail mindset from ‘This is an example of my failure,’ to ‘This just means I haven’t found the right system for me yet.’ It’s really all about finding your own path through the craziness.”

Do not spend another minute on e-mail, she admonished me, until you’ve begun to figure out a system. Otherwise, she said, I’d never dig out.

So we talked systems. It soon became clear that I’d created a really great e-mail system for when I was writing my book — ironically enough, on being overwhelmed — spending most of my time not at all overwhelmed in yoga pants in my home office working on my iMac. I was a follower of Randy Pausch who wrote, in “The Last Lecture,” to keep your e-mail inbox down to one page and religiously file everything once you’ve handled it. And I had for a couple years.

But now that I was traveling around the country to talk about the book, and back at work at The Washington Post, using my laptop, iPhone and iPad, that system was completely broken. I had six different e-mail accounts. And my main Verizon e-mail that I’d used for years and the Mac Mail inbox with meticulous file folders that I loved on my iMac didn’t sync across any of them.

Gray asked: “If everything just blew up today, and you had to start over, how would you set up your system?”

I wanted one inbox. One e-mail account. And I wanted the same inbox on all my devices. If I deleted an e-mail on my laptop, I wanted it deleted on my iMac. If I put an e-mail into a folder on my iMac, I wanted that same folder on my laptop.

So I decided to use Gmail, which does sync, as my main account. I set up an auto responder on my Verizon e-mail saying I was no longer using it and directing people to my Gmail account. I updated all my accounts to send to Gmail. And I spent hours on the phone with Apple one Sunday (thank you, Chazz,) to get my Gmail account set up in my beloved Mac mail inbox that would sync. Then I transferred old files and created new ones on Gmail. I had to keep my Washington Post account separate, but that wasn’t the real problem.

All systems go.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Literature, Technica

Paper is the Next Big Thing

May 7, 2014 Mike

Luddites and technophobes rejoice, paper-bound books may be with us for quite some time. And, there may be some genuinely scientific reasons why physical books will remain. Recent research shows that people learn more effectively when reading from paper versus its digital offspring.

From Wired:

Paper books were supposed to be dead by now. For years, information theorists, marketers, and early adopters have told us their demise was imminent. Ikea even redesigned a bookshelf to hold something other than books. Yet in a world of screen ubiquity, many people still prefer to do their serious reading on paper.

Count me among them. When I need to read deeply—when I want to lose myself in a story or an intellectual journey, when focus and comprehension are paramount—I still turn to paper. Something just feels fundamentally richer about reading on it. And researchers are starting to think there’s something to this feeling.

To those who see dead tree editions as successors to scrolls and clay tablets in history’s remainder bin, this might seem like literary Luddism. But I e-read often: when I need to copy text for research or don’t want to carry a small library with me. There’s something especially delicious about late-night sci-fi by the light of a Kindle Paperwhite.

What I’ve read on screen seems slippery, though. When I later recall it, the text is slightly translucent in my mind’s eye. It’s as if my brain better absorbs what’s presented on paper. Pixels just don’t seem to stick. And often I’ve found myself wondering, why might that be?

The usual explanation is that internet devices foster distraction, or that my late-thirty-something brain isn’t that of a true digital native, accustomed to screens since infancy. But I have the same feeling when I am reading a screen that’s not connected to the internet and Twitter or online Boggle can’t get in the way. And research finds that kids these days consistently prefer their textbooks in print rather than pixels. Whatever the answer, it’s not just about habit.

Another explanation, expressed in a recent Washington Post article on the decline of deep reading, blames a sweeping change in our lifestyles: We’re all so multitasked and attention-fragmented that our brains are losing the ability to focus on long, linear texts. I certainly feel this way, but if I don’t read deeply as often or easily as I used to, it does still happen. It just doesn’t happen on screen, and not even on devices designed specifically for that experience.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking of paper and screens another way: not as an old technology and its inevitable replacement, but as different and complementary interfaces, each stimulating particular modes of thinking. Maybe paper is a technology uniquely suited for imbibing novels and essays and complex narratives, just as screens are for browsing and scanning.

“Reading is human-technology interaction,” says literacy professor Anne Mangen of Norway’s University of Stavenger. “Perhaps the tactility and physical permanence of paper yields a different cognitive and emotional experience.” This is especially true, she says, for “reading that can’t be done in snippets, scanning here and there, but requires sustained attention.”

Mangen is among a small group of researchers who study how people read on different media. It’s a field that goes back several decades, but yields no easy conclusions. People tended to read slowly and somewhat inaccurately on early screens. The technology, particularly e-paper, has improved dramatically, to the point where speed and accuracy aren’t now problems, but deeper issues of memory and comprehension are not yet well-characterized.

Complicating the scientific story further, there are many types of reading. Most experiments involve short passages read by students in an academic setting, and for this sort of reading, some studies have found no obvious differences between screens and paper. Those don’t necessarily capture the dynamics of deep reading, though, and nobody’s yet run the sort of experiment, involving thousands of readers in real-world conditions who are tracked for years on a battery of cognitive and psychological measures, that might fully illuminate the matter.

In the meantime, other research does suggest possible differences. A 2004 study found that students more fully remembered what they’d read on paper. Those results were echoed by an experiment that looked specifically at e-books, and another by psychologist Erik Wästlund at Sweden’s Karlstad University, who found that students learned better when reading from paper.

Wästlund followed up that study with one designed to investigate screen reading dynamics in more detail. He presented students with a variety of on-screen document formats. The most influential factor, he found, was whether they could see pages in their entirety. When they had to scroll, their performance suffered.

According to Wästlund, scrolling had two impacts, the most basic being distraction. Even the slight effort required to drag a mouse or swipe a finger requires a small but significant investment of attention, one that’s higher than flipping a page. Text flowing up and down a page also disrupts a reader’s visual attention, forcing eyes to search for a new starting point and re-focus.

Read the entire electronic article here.

Image: Leicester or Hammer Codex, by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Courtesy of Wikipedia / Public domain.

Idea Soup, Technica

The Persistent Self

February 21, 2014 Mike

Many of us strive for persistence beyond the realm of our natural life-spans. Some seek to be remembered through monuments, buildings and other physical objects. Others seek permanence through literary and artistic works. Still others aim for remembrance through less lasting, but noble deeds: social programs, health initiatives, charitable foundations and so on. And yet others wish to be preserved in frozen stasis for later thawing and re-awakening. It is safe to say, that many of us would seek to live for ever.

So, it comes as no surprise to see internet startups exploring the market to preserve us or facsimiles of us — digitally — after death. Introducing Eterni.me — your avatar to a virtual eternity.

From Wired (UK):

“We don’t try to replace humans or give false hopes to people grieving.” Romanian design consultant Marius Ursache, cofounder of Eterni.me, needs to clear this up quickly. Because when you’re building a fledgling artificial intelligence company that promises to bring back the dead — or at least, their memories and character, as preserved in their digital footprint — for virtual chats with loved ones, expect a lot of flack.

“It is going to really suck — think Cleverbot with weird out-of-place references to things from that person’s life, masquerading as that person,” wrote one Redditor on the thread “Become Virtually Immortal (In the creepiest way possible)”, which immediately appeared after Eterni.me’s launch was announced last week. Retorts ranged from the bemused — “Now that is some scary f’d up s**t right there. WTF!?” — to the amusing: “Imagine a world where drunk you has to reason with sober AI you before you’re allowed to drunk dial every single person you ever dated or saw naked. So many awkward moments avoided.” But the resounding consensus seems to be that everyone wants to know more.

The site launched with the look of any other Silicon Valley internet startup, but a definitively new take on an old message. While social media companies want you to share and create the story of you while you’re alive, and lifelogging company Memoto promises to capture “meaningful [and shareable] moments”, Eterni.me wants to wrap that all up for those you leave behind into a cohesive AI they can chat with.

Three thousand people registered to the service within the first four days of the site going live, despite there being zero product to make use of (a beta version is slated for 2015). So with a year to ponder your own mortality, why the excitement for a technology that is, at this moment, merely a proof of concept?

“We got very mixed reactions, from ecstatic congratulations to hate mail. And it’s normal — it’s a very polarising topic. But one thing was constant: almost everybody we’ve interacted with truly believes this will be a reality someday. The only question is when it will be a reality and who will make it a reality,” Ursache tells us.

Popular culture and the somewhat innate human need to believe we are impervious, has well prepared us for the concept. Ray Kurzweil wants us to upload our brains to computers and develop synthetic neocortexes, and AI has featured prominently on film and TV for decades, including in this month’s Valentine’s Day release of a human-virtual assistant love story. In series two of British future-focused drama Black Mirror Hayley Atwell reconnects with her diseased lover using a system comparable to what Eterni.me is trying to achieve — though Ursache calls it a “creepier” version, and tells us “we’re trying to stay away from that idea”, the concept that it’s a way for grieving loved ones to stall moving on.

Sigmund Freud called our relationship with the concept of immortality the “real secret of heroism” — that we carry out heroic feats is only down to a perpetual and inherent belief that our consciousness is permanent. He writes in Reflections on War and Death: “We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality… Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.”

This is why Eterni.me is not just about loved ones signing up after the event, but individuals signing up to have their own character preserved, under their watchful eye while still alive.

The company’s motto is “it’s like a Skype chat from the past,” but it’s still very much about crafting how the world sees you — or remembers you, in this case — just as you might pause and ponder on hitting Facebook’s post button, wondering till the last if your spaghetti dinner photo/comment really gets the right message across. On its more troubling side, the site plays on the fear that you can no longer control your identity after you’re gone; that you are in fact a mere mortal. “The moments and emotions in our lifetime define how we are seen by our family and friends. All these slowly fade away after we die — until one day… we are all forgotten,” it says in its opening lines — scroll down and it provides the answer to all your problems: “Simply Become Immortal”. Part of the reason we might identify as being immortal — at least unconsciously, as Freud describes it — is because we craft a life we believe will be memorable, or have children we believe our legacy will live on in. Eterni.me’s comment shatters that illusion and could be seen as opportunistic on the founders’ part. The site also goes on to promise a “virtual YOU” that can “offer information and advice to your family and friends after you pass away”, a comfort to anyone worried about leaving behind a spouse or children.

In contrast to this rather dramatic claim, Ursache says: “We’re trying to make it clear that it’s not replacing a person, but trying to preserve as much of the information one generates, and offering asynchronous access to it.”

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Image: Eterni.me screenshot. Courtesy of Eterni.