Posts Tagged Under ‘Technology’

Is The Internet Rewiring My Brain?

As someone who once spent three weeks as a copy-edit intern, and thus as someone highly qualified to pass judgment on any copy-editing decision ever made, the following are my issues with the Atlantic headline “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

1. The web is much bigger than Google;
2. While it is mentioned several times, the article is not about Google itself;
3. “Stupid” is a value judgment, and thus an inaccurate headline for an article that instead focuses mostly on the value-neutral, meta-thought-process changes wrought by the web.

On to the substance of Nicholas Carr’s piece: some yes, and also no.

I was reading a response to the article that notes how few of the piece’s critics will cop to having had a, “Hey, that’s cool, I’ll read this thing I found … oh wait, that looks cooler … what was I originally reading again?” experience. I will more than cop to that, as it happens to me almost every day. In one hour today I bounced between Newsweek, The A.V. Club, Rotten Tomatoes and several friends’ sites, to the point that it took me an average of 20 minutes to get through each article that would have taken five minutes without the distraction of the others. So yes, I do an incredibly greater amount of skimming online than I would in print.

But–always a but. Skimming online doesn’t mean I avoid skimming the newspaper, or even skimming the library. Back in the day I used to sit in this great, undisturbed backroom at the Carnegie Library picking out books on World War I or II, leafing through each one until a passage caught my eye and then putting the book back before moving on to another. (Lest you worry too much for my back-in-the-day social life, I did do plenty of things that didn’t entail sitting alone in libraries. But then I do have a strong nerd side, so it wasn’t an insignificant amount of reading.) The reality is that briefly glancing over things to find the meaty parts didn’t come along with the web.

And on the book tip, I think this paragraph is especially strange:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

I do appreciate the link to Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0, which is right up my professional alley and which I hadn’t read before. But really, no more books and in-depth tomes? In the past two weeks I made it through Generation Kill and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I can safely say that my experience of each was in no way harmed by my Internet reading habits. A book is just a different experience: when I want wide-ranging and cursory, I’ll read online. (I’d say this brief familiarity with so many topics is more useful in a hugely varietal world than knowing just a few topics very well.) When I do want that informed look at just one topic, I pick up a book. I don’t think a failure to pick up a book is all that widespread among people who are reading a lot otherwise online; so many of the cultural touchstones for intelligent online readers of, say, The Atlantic continue to come from books. If you’re hung up on the printed format, we now have Kindle to bring books up to speed with other electronic publishing.

So yes, the web is restructuring how we consume media, and probably even restructuring our thought processes. It doesn’t mean older formats are going to be erased and crowded out. I think Carr makes this point himself in the last few paragraphs when he talks about the advent of writing, and of the printing press. Oral communication didn’t die with writing, nor will in-depth thought on a single topic die with the web.

The more forms of information that come along, the better.

More From Slate: Political Ringtones

I’ll tout another piece of the site on which I recently worked, the new political ringtones we launched this week. We don’t yet have Verizon support–annoying for me since I have Verizon service–but anyone else can download these and annoy your friends with the Hillary laugh:

It’s 3 a.m. What’s Your Ringtone?

I’m New to the Job Thing and Into Web Media. What Systems Should I Learn?

I feel like I’ve run into iterations of this question a few times lately, so here go some words of whizzzdum.

If I were some 21-year-old dude again, but my 21-year-old self was transported to 2008 and I was looking for a job in media websites, I’d pick up some books on the following languages at SBX. I could stop in during my next trip to EV-1 for a Busch Light 30-cube. ($10.99, readers. But that was in 2001 prices. I imagine with the surge in grain prices, it’s gone all the way up to 46 cents per beer or so.)

The geek glasses know

First, I’d learn Flash. Front-end developers can do really well with this, even though I think it’s a really bad idea to use Flash for basic page templating. Instead, Flash is awesome for news graphics, such as the popular delegate calculator we rocked at Slate. It’s really portable for things like embedded video players and widgets (see the Bushisms widget), it can do great visual effects that DHTML still can’t do with ease (or at all), and it’s a lot less dangerous than Javascript for site stability. If your swf file is f’d, it’ll take down your movie but likely not your site performance. (Unless it’s way huge and you’re seeing too many downloads, but file size is a problem for anything.)

Second, I’d get really good at CSS. It’s the best way to control page display, so clearly it’s mad useful. The HTML part is fairly simple; you’re just wrapping things in divs of different class and ID. Then the CSS comes into play and keeps your site looking tight.

Third, I’d learn object-oriented programming. It’s the basis of Javascript behaviors and used in back-end programming as well, and that’s across all platforms. ASP.NET, Java or PHP, you’ll want to know the underlying structures. And that’s once you know basic programming stuff like loops, conditionals and database connectivity; if not, learn that first.

Assuming you already have the media knowledge down — journalism and such — you’d be representin’ for an entry-level producer or front-end developer job. Other useful technologies include Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress (for the occasional print thing), IIS or Apache server admin, and database structure. That last one is obviously useful in general web development, but I’m assuming you’re looking for a job with a media company big enough to have its own DBAs.

As far as the PHP / open-source question, I definitely advise people to learn it, but I say that with the knowledge that you probably won’t be using it working for a media company in the next few years. PHP is great and I love all the innovation around it, but most companies are still running legacy systems in ASP.NET, Java or other technologies and will bust out some criticism about scalability and support issues if you suggest moving to PHP / MySQL. (Facebook apparently not being large-scale and uptime-critical enough.) So, while PHP is great if you want to set up a site from scratch and will be useful when it becomes more supported with big sites, you probably won’t need it on a day-to-day job basis.

Apologies to any non-code people who were bored stiff on this one.

Firefox

Though I’m a huge Firefox booster, lately version 2.0.0.11 has been eating up virtual memory like a fat dude at a Louisiana Chinese buffet. And that’s both on my home PC (which is mad old) and work PC (which is still sorta old but faster, like Bruce Smith in his waning days.) Version 3.0, now in beta development, is supposed to fix the memory leaks, but if you use version 2.0, be sure you close firefox.exe from the Windows Task Manager now and then.

And if you use a Mac, you should probably be visiting condescendinghipstercult.com instead. At the moment, nobody’s registered that. Now’s your shot to create the web’s most accurately named Mac community!