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I was trying to go through all the research that has been done on how to understand the internet recently, and I found a jem. A book called No Sense of Place, i
by mrwnmonm 4y ago
I was trying to go through all the research that has been done on how to understand the internet recently, and I found a jem. A book called No Sense of Place, it reads like Aristotle:) the way he was trying to correct the philosophers before him, but I still have a couple of chapters to finish.
(btw, something very important in order to understand that book and others before it, is to give up on that fancy abstract idea that the internet is just "flow of information", this idea appeal to programmers for obvious reasons, and it is the most silly way to look at the internet)
Alone Together is very good too, the way Turkle focuses on empathy is important I guess.
That all is being said, but some people on the internet deserve to be attacked, or proven wrong let's say, if I am in a good day that I think it won't exhaust my soul, I will do it.
"Maybe the web, BBSs, forums, mailing lists, and chat rooms were always like this."
Life is like that, has always been and will continue to be like that, get used to it.
- CuriousSkeptic 4y agoYou might be interested in adding Wealth of Networks to your list. At this point of time it may perhaps be more of a misunderstanding of things but it is a fascinating take on how things could have been understood before social media took over. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks (btw, thanks for the book tip)
- mrwnmonm 4y agoOh, thanks very much, any addition to this is precious for me. Hugs to you :)
- canadiantim 4y agoHow is the internet not just flow of information?
- mrwnmonm 4y agoBecause that view doesn't tell us anything.
- canadiantim 4y agoDebatable. It’s a helpful heuristic especially when looking at population level effects of information flow through the internet. There may also be other useful views but viewing the internet as flow of information is undoubtedly useful to some degree though it’s of course not a complete picture
- mrwnmonm 4y agoIt is like saying body organs are collections of cells. It is correct, but too abstract to tell anything.
- canadiantim 4y agoYeah that’s fair, though understanding our body organs as having cells as fundamental units is actually an insight that leads to a lot of other actionable intelligence we wouldn’t have if we weren’t able to ‘atomize’ them into smaller constituent parts. I get what you’re saying though and I do agree that in general it’s not radically helpful just thinking of the internet as information flow. But it depends on the problem set. For example when wondering how people or various communities get informed, identifying their news sources (and thus information flow) is invaluable in understanding their most likely held positions on things. That being said, this doesn’t just include the internet so I guess it goes back to your point of information flow, esp. just regarding the internet, is prly too abstract to be of much radical use without further differentiating it or incorporating other insights
- mrwnmonm 4y agoI agree, most books does this actually, they have different perspectives on how a specific kind of flow affects social behavior. But no one says it is just a flow of information, and that's it, bye bye, I solved it. I saw some programmers do exactly that before. Because we are addicted to abstraction.