Archive for January 26th, 2011

“Your Brain on the Internet”

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

You have to be somebody, before you can share yourself” Jaron Lanier

“140 karakter” (twitter) çağında blog yazılmaz, yazılsa da okunmaz. Okunsa da şanslıysanız bir iki satırı ya okunur ya okunmaz. İşte bu sebepledir ki ben diyeceğimi -ne olur olmaz diyerek- bir alıntı aracılığıyla ilk 68 karakterde dedim. Twitter nesli burada okumayı bırakıp başka bir gadget okumaya ya da başka mecralara akmaya başlayabilir, biz kalanlarla devam edelim.

-Dublinliler (James Joyce) ve Ses Sese Karşı (Aldous Huxley) okumalarına biraz ara verip 20.yy dan 21. yy kitaplarına (biraz araya çeşni olsun diye) zıplarken işte yukarıda alıntıladığım arkadaşın kitabına denk geliverdim: “You are not a Gadget“. Bilgi çağı ve onun insanları, internet, dijital devrim vs. İlginç bir kitap. Bu kitap hakkında ilk fırsatta birşeyler karalarız günlüğe. Ama zamanında bu kitaptan haberdar olmamı sağlayan New Yorker yazısından (This Is “Your Brain on the Internet” on the Internet) ilginç bulduğum kocaman bir alıntı yapıp, nokta koyalım:

Here is how to tell whether your brain is on the Internet:

  • Rather than daydreaming in your downtime, you hunt for the gadget in your pocket.
  • You can’t remember anything: networks of memory rely on periods of rest—sleep or awake downtime.
  • You’re unable to write, because to write something, Baker says, you have to feel like it’s the only thing in the world, that you’re isolated with it and in it.
  • Regular-size articles suddenly seem incredibly long, because you have click that little “next” button at the bottom of each page.
  • You’re spewing out garbage (“Garbage in, garbage out,” Lanier says).
  • You’re failing to create, even though you feel creative. This is because, Lanier says, people are trying to become more fully themselves, not simply “trying to create something.” And this can’t happen in the encapsulated world of the Internet. It’s like the closed system of the weather: you can get thunderstorms or hurricanes, but you won’t get a novel falling from the sky.
  • You feel very happy and excited because you’re running through books at the rate of fifty per minute on Google books.
  • You’re drowning in fragments of books, rather than reading the entire thing.
  • You’re writing better than you ever have, because you write more than you ever have and you have instant access to information.
  • You’re a college student, and thirty-eight per cent of the writing you do is outside of your schoolwork.
  • You’re making someone else very rich, and you don’t understand how.
  • You wonder where the time went.
  • Your face is in your iPhone instead of in the task at hand (driving, walking, thinking). If you do this most of your waking hours, your ability to concentrate is indeed a bit diminished.
  • You wonder, with Lanier, why we must choose between the mushy mob of the Internet vs. the clean world of Apple and the iPad, which is neat but “isolated for the elite—neither is acceptable.”
  • You crave the conversation about “Inception” more than the movie itself.
  • You quickly and anonymously dismiss something (in a comment) that was very hard to do. This is “hurtful,”
  • You’re reading this right now.

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