So last night I spent over an hour (I was multi-tasking, waiting for a remote CD install to finish…) writing and editing a blog on this topic. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough (I should really know better by now!) to try and do it directly in Blogger (i.e. in IE). Generally that works okay since I write for a couple of minutes and hit post just to make sure it’s saved.

But I had no idea how long this one was going to become when I started it and I had written way too much without posting it. So when it was all done I hit post but it probably went directly to /dev/null since I lost all of it. Anyhow, so this is an attempt to try and recall from memory what I wrote last night and recreate it. Always an uneasy task since you’re never really sure if it’s quite exactly the same. Who knows, it may just be better. Of course this time I am being more intelligent about it and writing it in a real editor (if you must know, my weapon of choice for HTML is HomeSite or plain old GNU Emacs).

So anyhow, I think the entry from yesterday went something like this…

Earlier this week, I had dinner with a friend and somehow we got to talking about the affect of the Internet on people. The hypothesis we were discussing was that the Internet makes people narrowminded — since it makes it too easy to filter the information we receive via the Internet. Now I agree with that to some extent since I do filter what information I consume and am probably especially guilty of it since for the past 6 or more years, my only “reading” was stuff that came into my email inbox. But granted, I was spending between 2-4 hours a day keeping up with the information that would be coming into my mailbox. It’s just easier that carting around newspapers and magazines.

So, I can — at a superficial level — agree that the Internet may have a contributing hand in making it too easy for us to choose what information we want to get access to. My friend mentioned a book which talked about this called republic.com by Cass A. Sunstein. So yesterday, I just happened to go across to Amazon to check out the book and that got me thinking some more about it. The review on amazon states that, the author, a University of Chicago law professor (oh oh… maybe I should be afraid, be very afraid…) who argues that in the Internet age letting people “consume” only the news they want actually imperils the republic.

Now, before I go any further, I should make it very clear that I have not read this book. Honestly, I’m not sure if it is worth my time to read this book yet. But that’s a decision for which I’ll reserve my final answer for a future time. I did peruse the Editorial Reviews for this book and would highly recommend that you do the same before reading further. Also, since I have not read this book, I am not responding to what may or may not be in the book or directly to the author’s opinions. Having recently read a few books which did a good job of supporting only one point of view and not addressing the other at all made me think that there may be a faction of people who truly believe that the Internet makes us more narrowminded. And it is that which I am responding to.

However, in order for you to know what got me down this path in the first place it is important for you to get some idea of what the book desription said, so I’m going to take the liberty of quoting it in here (To Amazon and the author, I’ve given you more than enough links to your site already, so chill 😉 )…

Book Description

See only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read. In cyberspace, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. Tomorrow, our power to filter promises to increase exponentially. With the advent of the Daily Me, you see only the sports highlights that concern your teams, read about only the issues that interest you, encounter in the op-ed pages only the opinions with which you agree. In all of the applause for this remarkable ascendance of personalized information, Cass Sunstein asks the questions, Is it good for democracy? Is it healthy for the republic? What does this mean for freedom of speech?

In evaluating the consequences of new communications technologies for democracy and free speech, Sunstein argues the question is not whether to regulate the Net (it’s already regulated), but how; proves that freedom of speech is not an absolute; and underscores the enormous potential of the Internet to promote freedom as well as its potential to promote “cybercascades” of like-minded opinions that foster and enflame hate groups. The book ends by suggesting a range of potential reforms to correct current misconceptions and to improve deliberative democracy and the health of the American republic.

Okay, so here is where I stand on this…

The Internet is a medium. That’s all it is. We have always had the means to chose what information we expose ourselves to and assimilate. That how you have people with different points of view and different belief systems. Some of which are so far out there that makes others wonder, what are these people smoking! The Internet is purely a more efficient medium.

I do filter what information I receive and it isn’t because I’m narrowminded (well, at least I’d like to think so… opinionated maybe…) but it is because of what Herb Simon called Information Overload. There is simply too much information out there for our feeble minds to be able to asssimilate and so we need to filter the information we receive.

The book description above talks about newspapers and broadcasters having helped to create a shared culture? A shared culture? Whatever happened to celebrating diversity and differences? I grew up in India. And having spent the first two-thirds of my life in what the westerner’s consider a third world country, my view is that shared culture is a debatable term. India and probably a lot of the other countries like it have also in recent years been exposed to the “programming” by the Westerm newspapers and broadcasters (Ted Turner is no fool!). And you know what there is a damn good reason it’s called “programming”. Because that is precisely what it is doing! Pop-culture in India is just as much about the type of stuff you get to see on MTV or in the daily soaps as it is here in the US.

What the shared culture has achieved is a polarized effect. All the negative values of the Western world are what have been assimilated into the culture of other countries. The positive values never seems to permeate through the selctively semi-permeable membrance of the mass media. Western culture has some very positive aspects which people in India and other countries like it really need… to start with, a strong work ethic, honesty, punctuality and efficiency.

Human knowledge is advanced not by creating drones who all have the same shared culture or information, but more so by being willing, ready and able to dig into the depths of certain topics and then sharing that information with others. I definitely do not claim to be an expert on everything, but at the same time there are something that I can hope to become an expert at and help in the advancement of the overall state of knowledge for humanity.

The very premise of a Ph.D. in any subject area is to develop a depth of knowledge, which my definition is narrow. If you think that the Internet makes us narrowminded, then why not start with getting rid of Ph.Ds since they seems to be generating the highest number of people with highly specialized knowledge in a relatively narrow area! (Wait, isn’t the author of that book a Ph.D?)

In the nine plus years that I have been on the Internet for lets just say more than several hours per day, I have used the Net to do all kinds of stuff. I’ve used it to get information specific to my business, my industry my field. I’ve used it for humor, entertainment, zany news stories ranging from square watermelons in Japan to make them fit better in refrigerators to conjoint twin crocodiles (sorry, couldn’t find the link to this one!) to the word “Doh!” (cnn) being added in the Oxford English dictionary! I’ve used it to make friends, meet people, I’ve used it to communicate with people all over the world. My sites have at one point or the other had hits from practically every country that has Internet access… and I’m not exaggerating, I have the logs to prove it.

Take a very simple example of where the mass media failed miserably and the Internet came to the rescue… the 2000 Olympics. NBCs decision to insert the artificial delay in their broadcast of the Olympics so that they could show the games in “prime-time” in the United States has got to be the most stupid decision I’ve seen in a long time. Get with it people. We’re in the Information Age. Information is power, but in order for it to be power, you need to be able to get to it first. Reminds me of the quote I put in the quotes file back in 1993 from the movie Sneakers…

There is a war out there… and it’s not about bullets…

… it’s about the information, the bits and bytes, the zeroes and ones.

So what happened with the Olympics? People who had a clue, got on the Net and found the information they were looking for. And if it wasn’t on the site of the US broadcasters companion websites, it was on the official Olympics website or even on the sites originating in other countries. The Internet made it possible.

In fact the perfect example of the impact of the Internet on making it posible for people to not only find, but express their different points of view is right under your nose. You’re reading it! It’s called a blog! And all of those thousands of people out there who take the time and put in the effort to write what they think are contributing to the different points of view on the Internet, which no newspapers, no mass media, no broadcast medium could ever dream of achieving. (I guess I should plug things like aortal here..)

Honestly, saying that the Internet makes us more narrowminded is not doing justice to he human ability to excercise their own independent decision and free will to choose what they want to read, what they want to learn. If I want to be a narrowminded redneck/hick (well, that would be really hard for me, but hypothetically speaking…) I could do that with or without the Internet. The examples of people who have been duped by polarized information are abundant. In my opinion you don’t need to look further than things like Nazi Germany to organized religion and belief systems. Mind control exists. And it’s been around a whole lot longer than the Internet!

You know, there are still some of us out there, myself included, who would like to believe that we have our own good sense and discretion to choose what information we need to be exposed to and to make those judgements in a way that makes us the types of individuals we want to be, instead of the drones of a shared culture. Darwinism isn’t dead yet. And as my high school motto said… “Perfection cannot be achieved by the weak”.

So just let the people be. Let the Net be. Because what makes the Net, is the people….

I wrote this huge entry… took nearly over an hour over it and when I tried to post it, I get a cool little 500 Internal Server Error and a cloud of smoke…. puf!

Oh well, don’t have the patience to write it over yet… it’s never the same the second time around. So maybe later.

Well, since installing software over a remote CD mount is a slow affair at best, I guess I’ll use the time to complete my document my thoughts from this morning…

Blogger is a very interesting tool. It has a lot of possibilities. I still remember the first time I heard about it and about the folks at Pyra Labs (I feel a instant affinity with them thanks to their use of Labs in their company name! 😉 )…. it was when they were out of money and couldn’t afford to keep their service running. They did something which is very unique and IMHO honorable. They told their users what their state was. I loved the fact the the bloggers all over the place contributed whatever amounts they could in order to help the folks at Pyra get a new server to keep the service running. If that isn’t a show of user loyalty I don’t know what is!

Pyra/Blogger has one problem. Which is a revenue model. It is one thing to build a service while thousands of users dig and like. It’s another thing to convert it into a business. I haven’t spent enough time in evaluating how and what they’re doing for this, but it’s the kind of thing I like to think about — building something which lots and lots of people like a lot and at the same time doing it in a way which is a viable business. There have been more than enough cool applications which came out in the past few years which got the first part right, but they failed on the second part. I sincerely hope the folks at Blogger get it right. I see the potential, but the potential sources of revenue are indirect at best, but still viable IMHO.

I have lots of ideas for feature creep into a tool like blogger. I’m sure other people have thought of them already, but some of them are worth mentioning. Starting with obviously adding the comments feature into blogger by default rather than people having to tie it in through third party add-ons or configurations. Providing the ability to backdate entries, an integrated search tool, a more feature rich template for the power-users and just more simple customizable templates for the not-so-power-users.

One which would be way cool, and is the topic of this blog, is having a blogger version for the Palm. Like yesterday at dinner, we were talking about something and I remember saying that one of the things we talked about would make it to my quotes file…. but by the time I got to a computer, I’d already forgotten what it was. And it’s been bugging me all day. If only there was a Blogger version for the Palm, which would allow me to write a blog entry on the road. Then I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to post!

Now there are two ways this could work. For those people who have a wireless connection to their Palm device, the entry could be posted and published immediately. That seems really easy to do as long as they can already use abrowser on their handheld. However, I still maintain that wireless access on Palm devices is primitive at best. It’s just not there yet. And besides, my guess is that bloggers despite being early adopters and technophiles would still be a rather price-sensitive demographic which realize that wireless access from Palm’s just doesn’t deliver the bang for the buck yet. So the other approach would be to write a conduit which allows the blog entries on the Palm to get posted when doing a HotSync. Technically feasible. Easy to write to I guess, except I doubt I’ll be doing that anytime soon… so if anyone wants to take that idea and run with it and make it available to the blogger population… more power to you! (or course this would require that Blogger allow the user to backdate posts by specifying the time stamp for the post instead of Blogger assigning the timestamp…)

So who’s going to write the Blogger client for the Palm!??

So after my drinking binge yesterday I got to thinking about alcohol and the activities that surround it. Why is it that drinking is such a popular past-time? What makes it so much fun? Honestly, I doubt it could be the taste of alcohol coz. I haven’t come across any alcohol that actually tastes good. Now, I’m sure lots of you will beg to differ. Especially all the beer-drinkers out there. I never really developed a palette for beer. Okay, so I’ll admit that some alcoholic drinks may taste better than others, but overall, they’re all somewhat bitter and burn going down (atleast the good ones do!). Even the ones which are supposed to be smooth are not really that smooth are they?

It’s truly remarkable to see the whole industries that have sprung up around alcohol. The beverage companies (beer, wine, hard liquor…) the bars, the clubs, all kinds of stuff…. a whole economy fueled by alcohol (literally!) People out in the evenings to drink and get drunk. But is their goal really to get drunk? Or is their goal something completely different? To escape boredom? To escape thinking about their current predicament? To escape loneliness? To run away from the problems that they cannot run away from? Or to try and ad some fun into an otherwise mundane and boring week?

So far in my experience, drinking has never really been because I genuinely like the taste of alcohol… given a choice between alcohol and chocolate, my choice would be obvious. Chocolate wins anyday 🙂 The times that I have consumed alcohol it has been more for the effect of alcohol than the taste. Is it the light buzz which makes you feel like it’s okay to do stupid things which you woudn’t do otherwise? Or is it the complete incoherence and supposed loss of inihibitions? Alcohol has different effects on different people. Some people become exhuberant, vociferous and rumbunctious, others become more reticent, subdued and pensive. I haven’t been drunk often enough to know where on that scale I land when I’m hammered, but my wager would be closer to the latter camp though there may be occasional abberrations towards the former.

The popular belief is that people drink to lose their inhibitions or to forget things that they do not want to remember. I buy that. It works for short durations (tried it). But the effect of alcohol in achieving that result is transient at best. The plain truth is that alcohol is not a stimulant, but a depressant. At the end of it all, you’re back where you started from, if not worse off… worshipping the porcelain goddess or nursing a hangover.

I guess the lack of a real conclusion on this topic, simply calls for more experimentation to gather more empirical data… 😉