There may be only 39 working days until I deliver the Untangling the Web book manuscript, but I’m still looking for contributions, stories, links and ideas on a few topics to produce the five exclusive chapters that will join the extended Untangling the Web columns
This week, I’m looking at addiction - one of the many evils levelled against the Web. To what extent can people become hooked on this technology, and is there something about it that makes it more or less compelling than other media?
Internet Addiction Clinics have opened up around the world - including one in the UK - and there is some evidence in the literature that the interactivity of the experience can draw us in, suggesting that different parts of our neuroanatomy is activated in the brains of “addicts” than “non-addicts”.
And it’s not just games that have proven “addictive”, although those are the regularly-cited culprits. The terrible tragedy of the Facebook Mom (used as a case study out every time there’s a story on this, like the one in The Independent a couple of weeks ago) highlights that the rest of the web is a potentially dangerous place to be.
But how much of this is unfounded, and what is the real evidence? Send your comments to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk, or tweet me @aleksk.
Death, a Tarot card interpreter might say, isn’t an end; it’s just a transition. However, the physical fact is that this transition from being into not being is a meatspace phenomenon. Yet we the living dress it up in all kinds of ritual garb and mourn our losses as if they - the ones who’ve departed - are paying attention. A powerful psychological coping mechanism, this has naturally manifested in the digital space as well.
The web has, naturally, transformed the death experience. From live expiration to global dissemination to eternal memorialisation, we can now live on for as long as the technology that houses the bits and the bytes that we leave behind doesn’t become obsolete.
As we advance inevitably towards the biggest death day in the annual calendar, Untangling the Web pauses to reflect on how much has happened in the web’s lifetime, and how our own corporeal moments on this mortal coil is really only just the beginning.
If you have a digital death experience or would like to share your thoughts, send an email to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or tweet me @aleksk with #uttw and #death.
Our creative economy currently operates within a system that was established in 1701, when the Statute of Anne introduced in the very first copyright.
That legislation, the first of its kind in the world, was propelled into practice because Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionised the concept of ownership and intellectual property.
Now we live in a digital world, where creativity can be infinitely replicated. Artists, writers, musicians and others are struggling to cope with the new challenges this brings to their livelihoods, as people download their output for free, with little fear of consequence.
Government and business have struggled to cope in this new era, but beyond the attempts at regulation and the high-profile lawsuits, how has the web transformed our beliefs about ownership?
This fortnight, I try to condense this enormous issue into 900 words for The Observer’s Untangling the Web column. You can expect a whole lot more here!
And if you’re in London on Monday 31 October, join The Guardian’s Tech Weekly team for their Intellectual Property debate with Ed Vaizey MP; (Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries) and Prof Ian Hargreaves (author of the government-commissioned Intellectual Property and Growth Report, 2011), the last their live events in the first Tech City Talks series.
Keep an eye on the eventbrite page for details.
If you would like to comment on this topic, email aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or catch me @aleksk on Twitter.
This weekend’s Untangling the Web column explodes the concept of “home”: difficult to define but easy to recognise, “home” is as different from “house” as “space” is different from “place”.
More than just semantics, environmental psychologists have been trying to define the nuances between the emotionally warm and fuzzy concept as distinct from the pragmatic, physical structure since the end of WWII. And interaction designers have spent twenty years trying to get us to make their websites our “homes” online.
How have the last two decades of the Web transformed what we think and feel about the concept of “home”? Global migration and near-ubiquitous connectivity (in most major metropolises, at least) has helped to differentiate between the physical structure and the emotional component, but as Kat Jungnickel and Genevieve Bell ask in this research paper (abstract only), is home really where the hub is?
Send your thoughts and home experiences to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or tweet @aleksk with #home and #uttw.
This Sunday’s Untangling the Web Observer column calculates the psycho-social age of the 21-year old Web. How has it matured since it first arrived online? Is it still running around in diapers or is it in the throes of a mid-life crisis? Are the debates about Internet regulation working through the balance between self-expression and responsibility that we seek in early childhood, or are they part of an adolescent strop?
I’ll be delving into my old Developmental Psychology course notes for this one, dusting the cognitive (and literal) cobwebs off theorists like Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget, and others.
If you have any ideas, send them to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or tweet me @aleksk with #uttw and #lifestages
It’s the first day of school and you’re ready for a new academic year: you’ve got all your supplies jammed into your new school rucksack: the pens and notebooks, coloured pencils and stapler, three-ring binders and textbooks.
Now add your laptop or tablet, a wifi connection, a list of usernames and passwords, account details for blogging platforms, social networks, photo sharing sites, cloud-based research resources, collaboration tools and digital 3D learning environments.
That’s one heavy bag.
The Web is the ultimate distributed network of information, so how has it transformed the learning process in the last twenty years? For this fortnight’s Untangling the Web, I’m dissecting the beating heart of today’s education system to discover how people are using the web in classrooms, at home and in libraries, from nursery to university, and whether it’s helping or hindering the education process.
It’s an enormous topic, with many vested interests. I’ll be focussing on pedagogical theories, online education enablers, novel learning techniques and approaches that the web affords rather than focussing on the following themes (which demand their own columns):
- games and learning
- education regulation and policy
- key stages and Internet safety/citizenship
- disinformation
- specific classroom technologies
Do you have a digital education story to share? Send an email to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk. You can also tweet me @aleksk.
This has been cross posted from The Guardian’s Technology blog.
Serendipity, the enigmatic process that’s been credited with producing everything from penicillin to the chocolate chip cookie, is the almost-magical convergence of a (happy) accident and the sagacity of knowing what to do with it.
The web has been described by some pundits as “the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture”, and commercial companies - like Google - are looking to harvest your enormous cloud of data to deliver serendipitous experiences before you even know what to search for.
But other pundits have decried the web’s filtering mechanics for reducing serendipity, and potentially stifling innovation rather than creating it.
So who’s right? Is the web a serendipity machine or a tool for cultural homogenisation? Or is it, like so many things, not nearly so black and white?
This fortnight, I tackle a pet topic: what is the web doing for (or against) serendipity.
Send your thoughts to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or @ me on Twitter @aleksk. I look forward to being inspired.
Over the next two months, I’ll be untangling the effects of the World Wide Web from six more human social phenomena, documenting findings from the academic research and interviews with experts here and in the fortnightly columns in The Observer.
I’ve already looked at a whole host of topics including social change, love, hate, sex, health, family, religion, disability and Britishness - among many others. You can read the research on each of these topics by clicking on their tags at the bottom of this post.
Looking forward, I’ll be asking how digital media has - or hasn’t - transformed the experiences and functions of serendipity and discovery, education, life stages (from birth to old age), home, intellectual property and death.
Send your thoughts on these topics to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or to @aleksk, and I’ll try to include your responses on the blog and in the column.
Once upon a time, media told stories in a linear way by leading readers/listeners/viewers from the beginning to the end via the bits in the middle. There was a build up, a climax and a denouement. The end.
Now things are different. The web has had its wicked way with stories, allowing tellers to mash up, mix up and generally mess around with formats and functions.
But are new media storytellers really doing anything different than what’s come before, or are previously marginalised ways of telling stories now mainstream? What impact has the disjointed, participatory and multi-media environment had on the way we consume stories in other media? For this fortnight’s Untangling the Web, I’ll ask a few sages their advice before crossing the proverbial Joseph Campbell bridge and heading into the woods of self-actualisation (on my own) to find out.
Spin me a yarn at aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or on Twitter, @aleksk (#uttw #storytelling)
The Web is a cold, technologically-mediated communication device that serves to connect people with information and with one another. But in transforming our interactions into binary 1s and 0s, have we lost something essentially human about our interpersonal relationships?
What has the Web done to friendship, a feature of functioning society that both keeps us accountable to one another and provides us with the emotional support we psychologically need? Are we devaluing our close friends by widening our social circles out to hundreds of “friends” on social networks? Can the Web serve as a replacement mechanic for the bonding that happens with face-to-face experience? Or does it connect us with people we’d never have met otherwise?
This fortnight’s Untangling the Web topic delves into the function of friendship, and the form it takes online. Have you unexpectedly made a bff online, or has a social network left you with emotional anemia?
Send your thoughts and stories to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or ping me on twitter @aleksk.
