“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”.

Wow. I can’t remember when was the last time I’ve read something that resonated so strongly with my personal experience. I was reading these lines and my heart started going faster and faster… yes! thats exactly how i feel! I’m not alone in my increasingly severe ADD!

In this thoughts provoking article, Nicholas Carr goes on to recall Marshall McLuhan brilliant observation that media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

Luckily I can still get lost and immerse myself in a good fiction. But I find it difficult to consume non-fiction literature whether business or scientific books. The web’s way of reading somehow killed my ability to concentrate and delve deeper into something. The frantic browsing, scanning and skimming of information on the web – articles, blog posts, links, videos and feeds – all with constant interruptions have indeed alter my way of thinking for the worse.

But there’s a bit of conspiracy theory tone in the article that i find hard to accept:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

It’s an interesting point but I’m not sure I buy into that. It’s not (just) google that making us stupid. For me it’s the great paradox of abundance of information beautifully epitomise in ‘drinking from the media firehose’ metaphor that alter our minds and the way we read and think.

It’s the combination of (1) the extreme abundance of content that generated constant minor anxiety that we’re missing something, (2) the RSS culture that made it so easy to become feed-junkies and generated the scanning, skimming and hopping patterns of our excessive, yet shallow reading and (3) de.licio.us that gives us the illusion that ‘you know what you store’ or that if you park a half-read article you will come back to it later when you have the time or when you ‘really’ need it.

But if I’m honest with myself, my de.licio.us is just a massive bin for half-read information that I’ll never actually read or get back to because I’m too busy skimming through and saving other stuff…

We need better discipline and more tools to help us switch off and restore our ability to concentrate, contemplate and process information. It’s easy to blame google but at the end of the day, it’s us feed-narcotics that add 5 more feeds to our RSS reader everyday. It’s us neurotically checking our emails every 2min. It’s us skimming and hopping from one link to the other repressing the fact that the process of real learning diminished.

I strongly resist any kind of Andrew-Keenian doomsayers rhetoric. The web is us and what we do with it. And I strongly believe that the blessings to the human society and culture are by far greater than the dumbing down of individuals. Just as books and Rock ‘n’ Roll and TV in the past, google and the web do not make us stupid as a society.

But we surely need to find better ways to deal with that abundance of content/information. So far we invented productivity tools like RSS readers to help us handle massive amounts of information, which might be effective on one level but are totally ineffective on another. We now need tools to help us realise we don’t really need 500 feeds…or tools that will scans the 500 feeds for us and automatically delete/reduce the overlaps and redundant chatter.

But no such tools better than ourselves to know our limits and what good or bad for us, so at the end of the day it’s really us and our self discipline that will have to overcome that childish anxiety that we’re always missing on something. We will have to learn to curb our obsession with feeds and to re-learn our mental and intellectual boundaries.

nuf said

I always wished I had more time to read his stuff and until yesterday I don’t think I ever saw a video of him (he died in 1981). It surely was a delightful find to see the man in what looks like a practice of a lecture (but it’s not) where he passionately, yet incomprehensibly argues with his friend and enemy – Sigmond fraud about love and the unconscious. A gem.

Following this I’ve been invited to participate in a short podcast done by international journalism students at City University for Guardian Unlimited. It’s a quick look at City University’s Olive Tree project, where 12 Israeli & Palestinian students come to the UK to take undergrad’ studies and to spend some time together.

1119studentnews.mp3

* [The person who will solve the problem of my-voice-on-audio-sounds-oh-my-god-so-horrific should be rich and famous.]

This is just great.

Thanks Sandra, Poke, Ant, Faris, Charles and Simeon

Read more here

Communities are for Mead whole organisms and are viewed not only in terms of mutual dependence with the individuals that constitute them but also as naturally continuous and even analogous to them, with ongoing feedback and change processes between individuals and the social. Whereas the individual has character or personality, the group or society has institutions, and Mead perceives these institutions as natural extensions of the human organism.

He writes:

“the institutions of society, [the libraries, systems of transportation, the complex interrelationship of individuals reached in political organisations], are nothing but ways of throwing on the social screen in enlarged fashion the complexities existing inside of the central nervous system, and they must express functionally the operation of this system”

Now, in Mead’s time there was no Internet but I’m sure he’d say something similar in relation to the web. Take a look at these two visualizations – one of the human brain and other of the Internet and you start to get the point.

The human brain:

The Internet:

I really need your input on this one (and I’ll try to make a long story short….)

I might have an opportunity (and a budget) to finally do something online with my PhD thesis. I’ve been shortlisted for an EU prize that aim to help young researchers to publish/communicate their work to a wider public (beyond academic publications) and, hopefully, to make an impact beyond academic circles.

In short, in my research I dealt with children in protracted conflict and the ways in which they are able or unable to take the perspective of the other, or to see the world (the conflict) through the eyes of their enemy. While I was working with Israeli and Palestinian children the challenge is to design a platform that would be relevant and applicable for any children stuck in a conflict like in northern Ireland, kashmir and others.

So I really need your help with brainstorming this:

• How can we use social media to get children who could not be in contact because of a conflict to talk to each other?

• What kind of experience can we design to facilitates self-expression, communication, and dialogue among children?

• How can digital help in seeing other people beyond the stereotyped members of group, race, religion, nationality etc. ?

• How can we create a safe and welcoming platform/environment for children to tell their personal stories?

any input, thought or idea are very welcome – please give it a moment.

many many thanks for any contribution.

Palestinian child (left) as depicted by Israeli child.

I’ve submitted my PhD thesis about a year and a half ago. And for various reasons, the moment I was done I moved on with my life and immersed myself in marketing comms, planning, blogging and stuff. In a nutshell, towards the end of it, I was quite fed up with inter-group conflicts, prejudice, self & other, hatred and other social issues of high importance and wanted to have some fun.

My work was about “taking the perspective of the other” – that is, our ability to step out of our shoes and into another’s, or the ability to see the world through the eyes of the other. It is extremely interesting concept as it interlinked biology, psychology and culture. And it has endless applications – from intergroup conflict, to empathy (the ability to “feel with the other”) to understanding consumers and putting ourselves in their place etc. In my (empirical) case, I tried to understand how and why, growing in a conflictual reality like the Israel-Palestinian conflict hinder children’s ability to take the perspective of their “enemy”. I wanted to show that perspective taking is not an internally developed individualistic cognitive ability and that there’s a lot of ideology & culture involved in the concept of perspective taking than previously theorised.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to publish anything as I immediately moved on to do other stuff. Besides, since I decided not to pursue academic career, the idea of working my ass on publishing in some academic paper that 15 other people read wasn’t very appealing. [What I really want is to have the time to actually turned this work into a book, as I still think there's pretty important stuff there]

Anyways, last week I got a short email from my supervisor:

“I am so happy to tell you that you have just been awarded the Robert McKenzie prize for outstanding performance in your PhD.”

And I didn’t even know that I was nominated…Now, don’t try to google Robert McKenzie prize cause all you’ll get is academics’ CVs, but today I got an envelope from the LSE and there it was, a sweet £500 cheque.

So drinks on me!

And if you want to know whats it all about you can have a read here.