In 1998, my collaborator Tony Greenwald and I decided it was time to develop a version of the test—called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT—for the Web. There were no models for doing this; there were no such experiments by behavioral scientists at the time. But we had talent and grit in the person of Brian Nosek, a graduate student at Yale; a visionary in Phil Long, Yale’s main IT overseer; and a scrupulous and effective Internal Review Board that worked through the ethical details of such a presence on the Web.
We went live on September 29, 1998, agreeing that our main purpose for placing the IAT on the Internet was not research as much as it was education. We believed that the method we had developed could provide a moment of self-reflection and learning. That if we did it right, we could engage thousands, even millions, in the task of asking where the stuff in their heads comes from, in what form it sits there, and what they may want to do about it if they don’t approve of it.
In the very first days, a large news network placed a link to our site, and there was no looking back. Hundreds of people visited, sampled the IAT, and fired off their responses at us. Interactions with them about technical issues, but even more so about their reactions to the experience, forced us to write new language and modify our presentation. By the end of the first month, we were the stunned recipients of 40,000 completed IATs. We couldn’t have learned what we did in that month in half a lifetime had we stayed with the traditional platform for research.
This site, whose primary purpose was educational, changed the research enterprise itself. A research question involving an alternative hypothesis posed on day one could be answered by day two because of the amount of data that flowed in. The very nature of research changed—in the collaborations that mushroomed, in the diversity of the people who participated, in the sheer amount we were able to learn and know at high speed.
The Internet has changed the quality of what we know and increased our confidence in our assessments of what we know. It has changed our notion of what it means to be in constant public dialog about our science. It has changed our relationships with project participants, with whom there can be a real discussion, sometimes many months after the initial interaction. It has also changed our relationship with the media, whose practitioners became research subjects themselves before communicating about the work. Most surprising was the discovery that the vast majority of visitors to the site were willing to entertain the notion that they might not know themselves. Without the Internet, we might have believed that this was the limited privilege of the intellectual elite. Now we know better.
Of course, this science will always require other forms of gathering data besides the Internet. Of course, there are serious limits to what can be done to understand the human mind using the vehicle of the Internet. But it is safe to say that the Internet allowed us to perform the first large-scale study of an aspect of social cognition. Today we have more than 11 million pieces of IAT data from implicit.harvard.edu and its predecessor site. The topics cover what the site is best known for (automatic attitudes toward age, race/ethnicity, sexuality, skin color, religion, automatic stereotypes of foreignness, math/science, career/home) as well as political attitudes in the last three presidential elections and dozens of matters concerning health, mental health, consumer behavior, politics, medical practice, business practice, legal matters, and educational interests. Any person with access to the Net and a desire to spend a few minutes locked in battle with the IAT is a potential participant in the project. Teachers and professors, corporations and nonprofits all over the world use the site for their own educational purposes.
The site yields 20,000 completed IATs per week and involves specialized sites for thirty-three countries in twenty-two languages. There are no advertisements. Somehow, people find it, and stay. They stay, we think, for the simple reason that they want to understand themselves better.
Sandbars and Portages
Tim O’Reilly
Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Many years ago, I began my career in technology as a technical writer, landing my first job writing a computer manual on the same day I saw my first computer. The only skill I had to rely on was one I acquired in my years as a reader and my university training in Greek and Latin classics: the ability to follow the bread-crumb trail of words back to their meaning.
Unfamiliar with the technology I was asked to document, I had to recognize landmarks and connect the dots—to say, “These things go together.” I would read a specification written by an engineer over and over until I could read it like a map and put the concepts in the right order, even if I didn’t yet fully understand them. That understanding would come only when I followed the map to its destination.
Over the years, I honed this skill, and when I launched my publishing business the skill I had developed as an editor was that of seeing patterns: “Something is missing here”; “These two things are really the same thing, seen from different points of view”; “These steps are in the wrong order”; “In order for X to make sense, you first have to understand Y.” Paula Ferguson, one of the editors I hired, once wrote that “all editing is pattern matching.” You study a document, and you study what the document is talking about, and you work on the document until the map matches the territory.
In those early years of trying to understand the industry I’d been thrust into, I read voraciously, and it was precisely because I didn’t understand everything I read that I became skilled at recognizing patterns. I learned not as you are taught in school, with a curriculum and a syllabus, but as a child explores and composes a worldview bit by bit out of the stuff of everyday life.
When you learn in this way, you draw your own map. When my co-worker Dale Dougherty created GNN—the Global Network Navigator, the first commercial Web portal—in 1993, he named it after The Navigator, a nineteenth-century handbook that documented the shifting sandbars of the Mississippi River. My own company has been a mapmaker in the world of technology—spotting trends, documenting them, and telling stories about where the sandbars lie and where the portages that cut miles off the journey are, along with the romance of travel and the glories of the destination. In telling stories to explain what we’ve learned and encouraging others to follow us into the West, we’ve become not just mapmakers but meme makers. Open source, Web 2.0, the Maker movement, government as a platform—all are stories we’ve had a role in telling.
It used to be the case that there was a canon, a body of knowledge shared by all educated men and women. Now we need the skills of a scout: the ability to learn, to follow a trail, to make sense out of faint clues, to recognize the way forward through the thickets. We need a sense of direction that carries us onward despite our twists and turns. We need “soft eyes” that take in everything we see, not just what we are looking for.
The information river rushes by. Usenet, e-mail, the World Wide Web, RSS, Twitter—each generation carrying us faster than the one before.
But patterns remain. You can map a river as well as you can map a mountain or a wood. You just need to remember, the next time you come by, that the sandbars may have moved.
No One Is Immune to the Storms That Shake the World
Raqs Media Collective
Artists, media practitioners, curators, editors, and catalysts of cultural processes
We are a collective of three people who began thinking together almost twenty years ago, before any of us ever touched a computer or logged on to the Internet.
In those dark days of disconnect, in the early years of the final decade of the last century in Delhi, we plugged into each other’s nervous systems by passing a book from one hand to another, by writing in each other’s notebooks. Connectedness meant conversation. A great deal of conversation. We became each other’s databases and servers, leaning on each other’s memories, multiplying, amplifying, and anchoring the things we could imagine by sharing our dreams, our speculations, and our curiosities.
At the simplest level, the
Internet expanded our already capacious, triangulated nervous system to touch the nerves and synapses of a changing and chaotic world. It transformed our collective ability to forage for the nourishment of our imaginations and our curiosities. The libraries and archives we had only dreamed of were now literally at our fingertips. The Internet brought with it the exhilaration and abundance of a frontierless commons, along with the fractious and debilitating intensity of depersonalized disputes in electronic discussion lists. It demonstrated the possibilities of extraordinary feats of electronic generosity and altruism, with people sharing enormous quantities of information on peer-to-peer networks, and at the same time it provided early exposure to, and warnings about, the relentless narcissism of vanity blogging. It changed the ways in which the world became present to us and the ways in which we became present to the world, forever.
The Internet expands the horizon of every utterance or expressive act to a potentially planetary level. This makes it impossible to imagine a purely local context or public for anything that anyone creates today. It also decenters the idea of the global from any privileged location. No place is any more or less the center of the world than any other anymore. As people who once sensed that they inhabited the intellectual margins of the contemporary world simply because of the nature of geopolitical arrangements, we know that nothing can be quite as debilitating as the constant production of proof of one’s significance. The Internet has changed this one fact comprehensively. The significance, worth, and import of one’s statements are no longer automatically tied to the physical fact of one’s location on a still unequal geopolitical map.
Although this does not mean that, as artists, intellectuals, and creative practitioners, we stop considering or attending to our anchorage in specific coordinates of actual physical locations, it does mean we understand that the concrete fact of our physical place in the world is striated by the location’s transmitting and receiving capacities, which turn everything we choose to create into either a weak signal or a strong one. We are aware that these signals go out not just to those we know and who know us but to the rest of the world, through possibly endless relays and loops.
This changes our understanding of the public for our work. We cannot view our public any longer as being arrayed along familiar and predictable lines. The public for our work—for any work that positions itself anywhere vis-à-vis the global digital commons—is now a set of concentric and overlapping circles, arranged along the ripples produced by pebbles thrown into the fluid mass of the Internet. Artists have to think differently about their work in the time of the Internet, because artistic work resonates differently and at different amplitudes. More often than not, we are talking to strangers on intimate terms, even when we are not aware of the actual instances of communication.
This process also has its mirror: We are listening to strangers all the time as well. Nothing that takes place anywhere in the world and is communicated on the Internet is at a remove any longer. Just as everyone on the Internet is a potential recipient and transmitter of our signals, we, too, are stations for the reception and relay of other people’s messages. This constancy of connection to the nervous systems of billions of others comes with its own consequences.
No one can be immune to the storms that shake the world today. What happens down our streets becomes as present in our lives as what happens down our modems. This makes us present in vital and existential ways to what might be happening at a great distance, but it also brings with it the possibility of a disconnect with what is happening around us or near us if it happens not to be online.
This is especially true of things and people who drop out, or are forced to drop out, of the network, or who are in any way compelled not to be present online. This foreshortening (and occasional magnification) of distances and compression of time compels us to think in a more nuanced way about attention. Attention is no longer a simple function of things that are available for the regard of our senses. With everything that comes to our attention, we have to now ask, “What obstacles did it have to cross to traverse the threshold of our considerations?” and while asking this, we have to understand that obstacles to attention are no longer a function of distance.
The Internet also alters our perception of duration. Sometimes, when working on an obstinately analog process, such as the actual fabrication of an object, the internalized shadow of fleeting Internet time in our consciousness makes us perceive how the inevitable delays inherent in the fashioning of things (in all their messy “thingness”) cause us to appreciate the rhythms of the real world. In this way, the Internet’s pervasive co-presence with real-world processes ends up reminding us of the fact that our experience of duration is now a layered thing. We now have more than one clock, running in more than one direction, at more than one speed.
The simultaneous availability of different registers of time, made manifest by the Internet, also creates a continuous archive of our online presences and inscriptions. A message is archived as soon as it is sent. The everyday generation of an internal archive of our work and the public archive of our utterances (on online discussion lists and on Facebook) means that nothing is a throwaway observation anymore, not even a throwaway observation. We are all accountable to, and for, the things we have written in e-mails or posted on online fora. We have yet to get a full sense of what this actually implies in the long term. The automatic generation of a chronicle and a history colors the destiny of all statements. Nothing can be consigned to amnesia, even though it may appear insignificant. Conversely, no matter how important a statement may have seemed when it was first uttered, its significance is compromised by the fact that it is ultimately filed away as just another datum, a pebble in a growing mountain range.
Whoever maintains an archive of his practice online is aware of the fact that he alters the terms of his visibility. Earlier, one assumed invisibility to be the default mode of life and practice. Today visibility is the default mode, and one has to make a special effort to withhold any aspect of one’s practice from visibility. This changes the way we think about the relationship between the private memory of a practice and its public presence. It is not a matter of whether this leads to a loss of privacy or an erosion of spaces for intimacy; it is just that issues such as privacy, intimacy, publicity, inclusion, and seclusion are now inflected very differently.
Finally, the Internet changes the way we think about information. The fact that we do not know something that exists in the extant expansive commons of human knowledge can no longer intimidate us into reticence. If we do not know something, someone else does, and there are enough ways around the commons of the Internet that enable us to get to sources of the known. The unknown is no longer that which is unavailable, because whatever is present is available on the network and so can be known, at least nominally if not substantively. A bearer of knowledge is no longer armed with secret weapons. We have always been autodidacts, and knowing that we can touch what we do not yet know and make it our own makes working with knowledge immensely playful and pleasurable. Sometimes a surprise is only a click away.
Dowsing Through Data
Xeni Jardin
Tech culture journalist; partner, contributor, coeditor, Boing Boing; executive producer, host, Boing Boing Video
I travel regularly to places with bad connectivity: small villages, marginalized communities, indigenous lands in remote spots around the globe. Even when it costs me dearly, as with a spendy satphone or gold-plated roaming charges, my search itch, my tweet twitch, my e-mail toggle—those acquired instincts—now persist.
The impulse to grab my iPhone or pivot to the laptop is now automatic when I’m in a corner my wetware can’t get me out of. The instinct to reach online is so familiar now, I can’t remember the daily routine of creative churn without it.
The constant connectivity I enjoy back home means never reaching a dead end. There are no unknowable answers, no stupid questions. The most intimate or not-quite-formed thought is always
seconds away from acknowledgment by the great “out there.”
The shared mind that is the Internet is a comfort to me. I feel it most strongly when I’m in those faraway places, tweeting about tortillas or volcanoes or vodoun kings, but only because in those places so little else is familiar. But the comfort of connectivity is an important part of my life when I’m back on more familiar ground and take it for granted.
The smartphone in my pocket yields more nimble answers than an entire paper library, grand and worthy as the library may be. The paper library doesn’t move with me throughout the world. The knowledge you carry with you is worth more than the same knowledge when it takes more minutes, more miles, more action steps to access. A tweet query, a Wikipedia entry, a Googled text string, all are extensions of the internal folding and unfolding I used to call my own thought. But the thought process that was once mine is now ours, even while in progress, even before it yields a finished work.
That’s how the Internet changed the way I think. I used to think of thought as the wobbly, undulating trail I follow to arrive at a final, solid, completed work. The steps you take to the stone marker at the end. But when the end itself is digital, what’s to stop the work from continuing to undulate, pulsate, and update, just like the thought that brought you there?
I often think now in short bursts of thought, parsed out 140 characters at a time, or blogged in rough short form. I think aloud and online more, because the call and response is a comfort to me. I’m spoiled now, spoiled in the luxury of knowing there’s always a ready response out there, always an inevitable ping back. Even when the ping back is sour or critical, it comforts me. It says, “You are not alone.”
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Page 35
