Intarwebs changes our minds

I was reading the most recent edition of Wired Magazine that landed on my doorstep this week.  There’s an interesting piece written by Clive Thompson using research from the Stanford Study of Writing organized by Professor Andrea Lunsford.

The argument is that we write more than we ever have despite as critics bemoaning that the the internet ruins students’ writing skills.  We’re probably vastly different (and more participatory) writers than humans have ever been.

Old-school reference material

That got me thinking. What else does the intarwebs change about us? I’ve noticed that people in my program at school who are also working in jobs where they are online the most are also the people who are most likely to cite internet sources, or cite sources at all.  Does the internet make us better referencers? Are we all becoming librarians of a type?

And what about kids with mobile phones that access the internet? Are they more social than we’ve ever been? Teens have always been highly social animals, but the opportunity for constant connectivity wasn’t there before; at some point you had to go home and try to sneak privileges to the corded phone. No longer. In another Wired story (apparently my source of choice today!), it’s explained that texting in the company of others isn’t rude – “texting those who couldn’t be there lets everyone feel they’re part of a larger social network.” This was according to research by Mimi Ito, a well-recognized researcher in the electronic culture of Japanese teens.

Another point made by Ito, this one to the New York Times, is that this persistent use of social technologies is not (as many adults would see it) a waste of time, but rather training for the future digital literacy that we’ll all need to get through our lives.  Ito’s point reflects much of what Henry Jenkins argues in his book ‘Convergence Culture’.  All of these new toys and games are really a practice grounds for generative tools that will become part of our social and economic fabric – it’s just that in human culture, those things that become important innovations often start as ‘novelties,’ widely seen as objects of fun or play but not ’serious’ value.

So the next time I walk around quoting websites like a librarian quotes books – you’ll know why.  My brains are being changed by the intarwebs!

Web Technology Basics – My Primer

I’m realizing that I’ve promised my friends and colleagues exciting, new information here on this blog.  While many of the things I’ve written about have been, in fact, new, I relate frequently to things that anyone who’s a general student of social media might have come across or found someone to help them tackle.  Be assured we are covering things of much greater depth in classes (which I why I’m paying so much money for them – I think…) but they’re generally difficult topics for me to address (novice that I am) in great enough clarify with the sort of brevity that a blog requires.

It did occur to me, however, that one class that is probably quite unfamiliar to most of my friends/colleagues working in communications would be the information we cover on technology or web design.

Here, then, is my very brief primer on keywords to learn and resources to consult:

1. HTML – Hyper-text Markup Language: Most people think they know what HTML is – I challenge that assumption.  If you can’t open the page source on a web-site and read a few tags, then you don’t know what it is.  The ultimate resource on HTML and XHTML is the World-Wide Web Consortium or WC3.  The WC3 gathers together many influential people in the Internet world to help set standards for mark-up languages.
2. XML – Extensible Mark-up Language: The mark-up language that is the parent of XHTML, the WC3’s choice for most recent standard mark-up language.  It’s role in building a website is to let the creator separate the information from the appearance (important because if you want to change the way something looked before XML, you had to re-create much of what you’d done before, now you just change your style sheets).  Check out XML at xml.com.
3. CSS – Cascading Style Sheets: I haven’t learned much about these personally, because our classes don’t delve into the actual process of designing a site’s appearance.  However, this is the most commonly accepted tool for coding the appearance of site (which you’ve separated from the data using XML).  Learn more about CSS from the W3 Schools.
4. HTTP – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol: This can get way more technical than I’m equipped to explain, but basically, this is the standard for how browsers (on individual computers) get web-page information from servers.  There’s a request sent which follows the rules of the protocol and information is returned to the requesting side.  If you want to get all geeked out on learning about HTML look at Wikipedia.
5. API – Application Programming Interface: API’s have been the big buzz lately; they’re the reason that new social sites like Facebook and Twitter have so many private people building applications related to those sites.  Basically, API’s are a library of information about how the owners of the original website built that website.  Other people can use this information to build programs that draw information from the original website based on what they’ve learned.  Get way more in-depth info on API’s at Wikipedia or check out a list of available API’s at Programmable Web.
6. Client-side or Server-side: This describes where the ‘work’ on a website gets done.  Many applications read all of the X/HTML in the browser on your computer (the work is done ‘client-side’) while others need some special help that can only be done in the server (’server-side’).  Most anything in XHTML or what’s called Javascript works on the client side, while the less publicly-recognizable programs (Ruby on Rails, Perl, C++, Java) get done on the server-side.  Here’s a bit of a dry (but well-explained) video on the concept.

I think 6 concepts is good for the time being, but I’ll be back in a few months with the low-down for you on design approaches and terms like “agile development” and “wire-framing”.    In the mean-time, you could also check out the blog of my Technology course teacher, Andrew Schrock (smart guy, that Andrew).

Straight, No Browser

The question of a new internet brought us to an interesting aside in my tech class the other evening; if the internet is revamped, what will that mean for the existing framework that we’re used to using?

While a new internet doesn’t HAVE to mean a new interface, why shouldn’t it? The web browser is becoming many people’s primary purpose for computer use (especially if cloud computing continues to grow and people stop saving to a desktop and start saving to a web space), so why should we have to open an extra window to access it?

For example, I use the widgets on my Mac increasingly and most are internet based tools. Maybe I won’t have to open a browser in the future – maybe I’ll be unboxed, set free, connected in any application I use and able to roll it seamlessly into everything I do on my computer.

Building a better Internet

Connecting the World...

I read a very interesting editorial by John Markoff in the New York Times today that reveals plans by academics and government types to try and re-make the Internet.  Now, lots of people probably read a phrase like that and say “But the Internet is a huge connection of computers and information worldwide; how could you possibly rebuild it?”

As it’s recently been clarified for me, I’ll pass along some of my understanding on the topic a brief moment.  When most people think of the Internet, they actually think of the World Wide Web (the Internet’s biggest, baddest application).  The web is (in a very simplistic description) how you access the information that lives on computers within the networks upon networks of computers that make up the Internet.  I think that’s the basic guts of the explanation; and from what I understand of the article, it’s the interface BETWEEN networks and in how individual users access these networks that they’re aiming to change.  For more info on the logistics of the Internet, check this out or lookup ‘Internet‘ or ‘World Wide Web‘ on Wikipedia.

The argument for a new Internet is based on security questions.  This all stems from the fact that people can access the Internet anonymously.  We don’t have to sign in (you may sign in to your browser, but not the Internet), we don’t have to prove our identities or provide our name or location to access the network of connections.  You may have to sign in or provide that information to individual sites, but not the Internet as a whole.

I don’t know how I feel about redesigning the Internet, however.  It sounds to me a lot like what we heard when the Patriot Act was passed – “It’s for your own security!  We promise we won’t monitor YOU, just the other bad people around you.  You won’t notice it, honest!”

If we’re going to take away anonymity, it’s gone from everyone, despite what their purposes might be.  Rebellious bloggers in African countries writing about the atrocities they see in their daily lives that aren’t communicated because the corrupt governments own the media?  They”ll be just as subject to these new laws in code as the scammer who’s been “fishing” for your bank account with fake e-mail messages.

Personally, I think I come down on the side of freedom as opposed to protection.  I believe in the value of a free and open dialogue – a dialogue that is oftentimes facilitated by the opportunity for anonymity.

If you’re looking for other opinions and responses to the article, check out these resources:

1. Slashdot
2. Blog called Threat Chaos
3. David Akin – Referenced in Slashdot
4. Repost of the article on CNET with reader comments