Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Heather Madrone]

Tomasz Rola wrote on 1/5/19 10:44 AM January 5, 2019:

On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 12:15:03PM -0800, Heather Madrone wrote:
[...]

I don't know much about the radio generation or the telephone
generation or even the early automobile generation.


Me neither, but when I look at writers fed with radios as children,
they were titans of imagination (MHO).

Of those known widely (for a liberal definition of "widely"),
Stanislaw Lem, Philip Kindred Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut come
to my mind almost immediately. They were not alone - there were a
number of less known writers (as well as more known mainstream
i.e. non-sf writers), whom I am not going to mention here, and there
were a number of non-writers, who likewise had been risen on radio
waves and good quality paper. They have, for one example, put a man on
a Moon, multiple times (but not the same man, mind you) with the help
of a pencil and logarithmic scale (and plenty of screwdrivers). Those
same people banged out ideas which are being recycled nowadays as if
they came in afresh (I cannot serve the canonical list of such ideas,
but from time to time I come upon one or another, and think "yeah,
thirty/sixty years went, how much a world had changed, hohoho").


The great creative minds of our day might not be writing prose. We might 
be more likely to see their work in video games, on these little screens 
we all carry around. They write code, or they plot out games, or they 
design systems for directing our eyeballs to their advertisements.



Of course, there were plenty of idiots in both eras, most of them
forgotten, some left papers, some not. On the other hand, I wonder if
future generations will recognise any such titanic writer-philosopher
figures from this era of cells.


I've read some tremendous books written in the past decade. I read one 
last week about a young woman whose OCD takes the form of extreme 
anxiety about the health of her microbiota, and whether she had any 
identity apart from the microbes that teemed inside her. She's always 
getting out her phone to research, for example, how eating or kissing 
affects the composition of the microbiome.


(John Green's _Turtles All the Way Down_)


[...]

Young people will lose some of what we had because they have gained
so many things we didn't have. They have their mix of environmental
conditions, and they do the best they possibly can with them.


I am afraid (but) I have to ask: what have they gained? It may look
like they have plenty of things I had not access to, but then they
also seem to be haunted by small daemons and deficiences of their
own.


There is much to mourn in what we lose as technology changes. I 
particularly miss the beautiful fresnel lenses in lighthouses and a 
number of traditional Japanese arts. We preserve the memory of these 
things, and a few examples, but they're no longer going concerns. No one 
trods those paths, and their perspective is now lost to us.


People will say, but look, GPS and modern communication prevent more 
ship loss than lighthouses, and those Japanese crafts you so love are so 
labor-intensive that countless women lived as slaves so that they could 
be created. We are better off with the newer methods, and it's only your 
romanticized vision that mourns those particular pasts.


My geneticist daughter works for a firm that supplies machines that 
genetically categorize disease strains by type. Hospitals with these 
machines can precisely identify a disease organism with an in-house test 
that takes half an hour. Listening her talk about her work gives me new 
hope that seasonal flu might become a thing of the past and that 
humanity might be able to get a handle on many of the diseases that have 
seemed hopeless.


At her age, I could have done none of the chemistry and biology she does 
on a daily basis. The technology didn't exist, nor did most of the 
research that supports it.


(She also wishes to inform this list that, although she is not keen on 
writing, she has to document everything that she does, so she writes 
reams. (My kids won't give me information unless I tell them how I'm 
using it, and then they want to stick their 2 cents in.))


So that's one area, biology and medicine, where young people have gained 
a great deal that we didn't have. They have also lived in a steady 
stream of images from the Hubbell, and know things about space that were 
unimaginable 50 years ago. They have access to tools and inventions that 
didn't exist before their births.


That little supercomputer that each of them carries in their pockets is 
also better at taking photographs and videos than any previous consumer 
product, and so they can share details of their existence in more depth 
than we had any hope of doing.


So yes, I think they've gained an amazing trove of knowledge and 
technology. Whether they use it wisely or not is another matter, but 
we're all so very human.



[...]

I am of the pre-graphics computer generation back to the

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 12:15:03PM -0800, Heather Madrone wrote:
[...]
> The question recurs for me. Sometimes I wonder if it's environmental
> pollution in the form of plastics, hormones, antibiotics, and other
> chemicals. Is human sexuality being altered the same way certain
> types of pollution change the sexes of fish?

I think that slight and inevitable (in our times) changes to
ingredients in potable water is going to be recognized one day as one
of the most dangerous factor. Just think about the hectolitres of
water ingested over the year by a human, about water role in embryo
development, about dissapearance (or mutations) of the frogs and
smaller birds and bees.

I have no idea if there is any kind of research trying to sum this
up.

[...]
> I don't know much about the radio generation or the telephone
> generation or even the early automobile generation.

Me neither, but when I look at writers fed with radios as children,
they were titans of imagination (MHO).

Of those known widely (for a liberal definition of "widely"),
Stanislaw Lem, Philip Kindred Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut come
to my mind almost immediately. They were not alone - there were a
number of less known writers (as well as more known mainstream
i.e. non-sf writers), whom I am not going to mention here, and there
were a number of non-writers, who likewise had been risen on radio
waves and good quality paper. They have, for one example, put a man on
a Moon, multiple times (but not the same man, mind you) with the help
of a pencil and logarithmic scale (and plenty of screwdrivers). Those
same people banged out ideas which are being recycled nowadays as if
they came in afresh (I cannot serve the canonical list of such ideas,
but from time to time I come upon one or another, and think "yeah,
thirty/sixty years went, how much a world had changed, hohoho").

Similarly, I can scratch my head a bit and give some names for
talegraph era writers-philosophers, like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Jack
London, H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Of course, there were plenty of idiots in both eras, most of them
forgotten, some left papers, some not. On the other hand, I wonder if
future generations will recognise any such titanic writer-philosopher
figures from this era of cells.

[...]
> Young people will lose some of what we had because they have gained
> so many things we didn't have. They have their mix of environmental
> conditions, and they do the best they possibly can with them.

I am afraid (but) I have to ask: what have they gained? It may look
like they have plenty of things I had not access to, but then they
also seem to be haunted by small daemons and deficiences of their
own.

[...]
> I am of the pre-graphics computer generationback to the days of
> having to spell out the UUCP path. It's text all the way, baby. I
> can construct entire universes out of ASCII characters. I don't need
> no stinking images, no movies, no audio. The Internet was better
> when it was a non-commercial sea of plain text, she says with a
> curmudgeonly snort.
> 
> That day is gone, the day of Usenet and mailing lists, and it's not
> coming back.

Perhaps it is the other kind of thing. There were always very few
people on Usenet and very few email users (i.e. long form writers). It
is just that this other part of humanity finally has got their toys,
too. Looking from this perspective, there was never going to be an
upgrade for them into textual world, because their preferences are so
much different and text is so alien to them.

[...]
> Email programs continue to get worse. The color of my text changed
> somewhere mid-email, and some update got rid of all of the menu
> options to change the appearance of text in email. A judicious
> copy-paste fixed it, but I wonder what functionality will go next.

Some (not me) are installing a whole virtual environment on their
Android smartphone, consisting of Debian (or maybe some other Linux)
base, plus any software that one might want to choose from sixty or
ninety thousands of readymade packages. There, one can have any decent
terminal emulator with any decent email software known to text-based
humanity.

But I would rather get a used laptop and install anything, even if
only a text console (this should work even if L*x/*BSD cannot do X
windows on said hardware). There are (or were) models smaller than
what passes as a phone nowadays (I mean _Pad with 11'' display is a
phone, right?).

> Not only do I get to look forward to the loss of functionality in my
> human body, but I also get to experience it in my virtual life.

I dare to say you had not lived if you had not seen a "word processor
for handwriting":

http://www.styluslabs.com/

(source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858641 )

They take a two kilobytes of text and blow it up to two megabytes by
replacing each handwritten letter by a multiple lines of Javascript
whose purpose is to render a line on a canvas object. Looks like
Post

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Udhay Shankar N]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 4:52 PM Peter Griffin 
wrote:

Anecdotal, but I'm also hearing about these young ones, and many older ones
> too, getting their learning-new-things stuff off podcasts (played speeded
> up, something I think I first heard of from Krish Ashok).
>

I do this, but if I am trying to learn something new via this method, it
works only if I write it down immediately. Make of that what you will.

Udhay
-- 

((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Peter Griffin]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 4:29 PM Udhay Shankar N  wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 1:45 AM Heather Madrone 
> wrote:
>
> This is the Internet generation, though, and the Internet does a
> > wonderful job of transmitting ideas.
>
>
> Aren't these ideas typically transmitted via relatively longform text, at
> least until now? What will replace relatively longform text as a means of,
> say explaining an idea from scratch? (I realise that Khan Academy etc is
> one way, but any others?)
>
> I remember a Google event last year, where they presented some research.
One of the findings that made me sit up straighter was that many young
Indians were increasingly bypassing Google and going straight to YouTube
for their searches. So, yeah, Khan Academy et al.
Anecdotal, but I'm also hearing about these young ones, and many older ones
too, getting their learning-new-things stuff off podcasts (played speeded
up, something I think I first heard of from Krish Ashok). I haven't been
able to get into this much, as I tend to need text I can go back and forth
on, and visuals I can spend time on, to properly understand things I'm
trying to understand.

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Udhay Shankar N]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 1:45 AM Heather Madrone  wrote:

This is the Internet generation, though, and the Internet does a
> wonderful job of transmitting ideas.


Aren't these ideas typically transmitted via relatively longform text, at
least until now? What will replace relatively longform text as a means of,
say explaining an idea from scratch? (I realise that Khan Academy etc is
one way, but any others?)

Udhay

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Venkatesh H R]

I just think the act of writing one's thoughts down, or even sharing
photographs for that matter (except on Instagram) has even less space than
ever before. Not necessarily because younger generations than mine (I'm 40)
don't want to think critically. It's because they're blasted with all kinds
of information from all sides relentlessly. By 'information', I mean
*everything:* knowledge, media, entertainment, phone apps, Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, etc. Unless we teach ourselves and our kids to
carve out time away from all inputs, we won't learn to think and by
extension, learn to write stuff down.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 12:45 PM Thaths  wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:15 AM Heather Madrone 
> wrote:
>
> > I asked my daughter to send me a recipe out of a cookbook I'd
> > passed on to her. She texted a photo of the recipe to me instead of
> > typing it into an email.
> >
>
> This resonated with me as an illustration of the up and coming generations
> using technology smartly.
>
> I remember writing long letters to my friends and family back in my college
> days (early 90's). While I had access to email, a huge proportion of my
> family and friends did not at that time. I remember, for example, taking
> paragraphs to describe my first Pink Floyd concert to a friend in India I
> was writing to. If I had had access to the technologies of today, I would
> have taken short videos and photos and shared them with my friend, instead
> of recalling the concert in my mind's eye, finding the words to describe
> it, forming them and editing them in-memory to form coherent sentences and
> writing them down.
>
> Thaths
> --
> Homer: Hey, what does this job pay?
> Carl:  Nuthin'.
> Homer: D'oh!
> Carl:  Unless you're crooked.
> Homer: Woo-hoo!
>


-- 
H R Venkatesh
JSK Journalism Fellow 2018-19, Stanford University
Building a Coalition Against Disinformation

Co-organiser, Hacks/Hackers New Delhi
Ph: +91 9811824503
Twitter: @hrvenkatesh

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Thaths]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:15 AM Heather Madrone  wrote:

> I asked my daughter to send me a recipe out of a cookbook I'd
> passed on to her. She texted a photo of the recipe to me instead of
> typing it into an email.
>

This resonated with me as an illustration of the up and coming generations
using technology smartly.

I remember writing long letters to my friends and family back in my college
days (early 90's). While I had access to email, a huge proportion of my
family and friends did not at that time. I remember, for example, taking
paragraphs to describe my first Pink Floyd concert to a friend in India I
was writing to. If I had had access to the technologies of today, I would
have taken short videos and photos and shared them with my friend, instead
of recalling the concert in my mind's eye, finding the words to describe
it, forming them and editing them in-memory to form coherent sentences and
writing them down.

Thaths
-- 
Homer: Hey, what does this job pay?
Carl:  Nuthin'.
Homer: D'oh!
Carl:  Unless you're crooked.
Homer: Woo-hoo!

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Heather Madrone]

Deepa Agashe wrote on 1/4/19 2:01 AM January 4, 2019:

So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just
don’t write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of
interesting views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to
expound on them. A century from now, can historians piece together our
narratives from the shards of twitter?


I've been thinking a lot recently about the effects of technology on 
generations, particularly the Millennials and the Zedheads (Generation 
Z). The Millennials are the Internet generation, in that they've always 
had access to the Internet, while the Zedheads are the cellular generation.


My own current crop (3 Millennials and a Zedhead) contains 3 writers and 
one non-writer. They rarely post to social media, preferring smaller, 
more private venues like texts, game boards, shared interest forums, and 
blogs. They also spend a fair amount of time in private chat rooms 
(Discord, Slack), which might be the place for those mid-size thoughts 
that our generation (ahem) would expound upon in email.


They use email for school or work. Rarely for sending documents. While I 
was composing this email, my Millennial son sent me a document via 
Discord. I asked my daughter to send me a recipe out of a cookbook I'd 
passed on to her. She texted a photo of the recipe to me instead of 
typing it into an email.


It is possible to transmit longer thoughts via text or chat or Twitter, 
but they come in staccato bursts. They feel telegraphic to me. There's 
an increased immediacy to them. The reader has a greater responsibility 
to piece them together.


Some months ago, a friend asked me why I think so many Millennials are 
transgender.


"Because they can!" I replied at the time, "It's an option for them in a 
way it wasn't for us."


The question recurs for me. Sometimes I wonder if it's environmental 
pollution in the form of plastics, hormones, antibiotics, and other 
chemicals. Is human sexuality being altered the same way certain types 
of pollution change the sexes of fish?


This is the Internet generation, though, and the Internet does a 
wonderful job of transmitting ideas. A young transgender person of my 
day was an oddball who had to wing it. A young transgender Millennial 
can go online and find endless descriptions and flavors of gender 
experience and expression.


The Boomers were the television generation. I've often wondered why the 
tumult of the 60s isn't more often explained by the driving technology 
of the time. TV offers a strict timetable, a limited range of choices, 
and broad appeal. Boomers are really good at changing the channel when 
they don't like the reality that's playing, but they lack imagination. 
They're passive and they live inside the box.


I don't know much about the radio generation or the telephone generation 
or even the early automobile generation.


In many ways, the Zedheads remind me of the telegraph generation. Their 
communication is limited by the tiny boxes they hold in their hands. 
They communicate with images (hello SnapChat) and short cryptic 
messages. (Just try typing an essay on a standard phone). Friend circles 
overlay semantics on words and emojis, so the messages are public, but 
the communication is private.


The early telegraph operators did it all with dots and dashes. They got 
so good at Morse code that they could tap out messages to one another at 
conversation speed even when they were in the same room. They'd go to a 
boring family event and tap private messages to one another on the arms 
of their chairs.


The Millennials might use the same tiny boxes, but they were shaped by 
the Internet on computers. Their vision is more expansive, and they are 
interested in categories, textures, communities. They are native to the 
balkanized Internet, and they surf it with ease. They broadcast more 
than Zedheads do, and they use more words to express themselves.


(My Zedhead is a prolific writer; he churns out novel- and 
screenplay-length works weekly. On a good day, he writes 140 pages of 
text. After I checked his written output totals with him, he asked about 
this conversation and then immediately reported on it to his friend 
circle on SnapChat. It took him 10 seconds, max, to report on the 
adorable doings of the dolties.)


I was going somewhere when I started this email, but writing often takes 
me in unexpected directions.


Technology does that. Humans create these new technologies and then are 
astonished at where they take people. Could Gutenberg have predicted 
that the printing press would break the Church's monopoly on 
information? (And yet the Catholic church is still by far the wealthiest 
organization on the planet, all these hundreds of years later.)


Young people will lose some of what we had because they have gained so 
many things we didn't have. They have their mix of environmental 
conditions, and they do the best they possibly can with them.


When

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Shenoy N]

I think the observation that people have stopped writing longform might
have a little bit of observation bias (basing this on my observations :p)
Back when I was in engineering college, 1982-86, the only means of
communication, at least in Manipal, which was the boondocks back then, was
letter writing. Parents expected weekly letters from their kids and the
lack of these would often result in the unwillingness of the parents to
loosen the purse strings when unexpected expenditure -rock concerts, hostel
parties, things like that -arose.
The thing was, nearly every one absolutely hated to write those letters
home. I had a decent business going where I wrote letters for people in
return for payment usually in kind - cigarettes, a beer, books - and there
were several like me. We all had more business than we could handle.
Sometimes a parent or two would get suspicious - "your handwriting has
improved!" and the occassional, flattering to the letter writer,
observation that "your English seems to gotten a lot better"
So my sense is that while it's undeniable that the explosion of social
media has rendered longform writing a body blow, a great majority of people
were probably there long ago. We just didn't notice it because the writing
types would sort of cluster together and the non writing types would be
quite invisible to them
Thanks and regards

Narendra Shenoy



On Fri, 4 Jan 2019 at 18:24, Nandkumar Saravade  wrote:

> I wrote a small piece yesterday on a similar problem.
> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conundrum-professional-learning-nandkumar-saravade
>
> We have to deal with shorter attention spans.
>
> Regards,
> Nandkumar
>
> > On 04-Jan-2019, at 3:31 PM, Deepa Agashe  wrote:
> >
> > Interesting to hear all your perspectives on this.
> >
> > I’ve now had multiple debates with my PhD students, who keep trying to
> convince me to set up a twitter account for our lab. And I continue to
> resist because I find it very distracting, and counter to the idea of
> developing scholarship (which to me requires time, solitude, and space, all
> of which seem very limited in the fora in vogue). My students are happy to
> have long and deep verbal discussions, but when I solicit opinions or
> perspectives by starting an email thread for the lab, there is almost no
> response.
> >
> > So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just
> don’t write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of
> interesting views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to
> expound on them. A century from now, can historians piece together our
> narratives from the shards of twitter?
> >
> >
> >
> >> On 04-Jan-2019, at 15:13, Nishant Shah  wrote:
> >>
> >> Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising
> to
> >> see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a
> lot
> >> of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it
> serves
> >> different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud
> storage,
> >> and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a
> >> trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls
> this
> >> an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used
> to
> >> direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of
> >> where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is
> >> that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts,
> it
> >> is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple
> >> platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating
> >> drivers that stitch them all together.
> >>
> >> I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that
> >> scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of
> brevity
> >> and ramble at will.
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes  >
> >> wrote:
> >>
>  On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths  wrote:
> 
>  On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long 
> wrote:
> 
> >> These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.
> > Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to
> > convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too
> >>> short
> > for blog posts?
> >
> 
>  Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not
>  qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in
> >>> the
>  way of offering my opinions? :-)
> 
>  I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts
> in
>  through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up
>  photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One
>  mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the
> world
>  (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp
> >>> and
>  similar mes

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Nandkumar Saravade]

I wrote a small piece yesterday on a similar problem. 
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conundrum-professional-learning-nandkumar-saravade

We have to deal with shorter attention spans. 

Regards, 
Nandkumar 

> On 04-Jan-2019, at 3:31 PM, Deepa Agashe  wrote:
> 
> Interesting to hear all your perspectives on this. 
> 
> I’ve now had multiple debates with my PhD students, who keep trying to 
> convince me to set up a twitter account for our lab. And I continue to resist 
> because I find it very distracting, and counter to the idea of developing 
> scholarship (which to me requires time, solitude, and space, all of which 
> seem very limited in the fora in vogue). My students are happy to have long 
> and deep verbal discussions, but when I solicit opinions or perspectives by 
> starting an email thread for the lab, there is almost no response. 
> 
> So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just don’t 
> write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting 
> views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them. 
> A century from now, can historians piece together our narratives from the 
> shards of twitter? 
> 
> 
> 
>> On 04-Jan-2019, at 15:13, Nishant Shah  wrote:
>> 
>> Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising to
>> see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a lot
>> of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it serves
>> different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud storage,
>> and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a
>> trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls this
>> an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used to
>> direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of
>> where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is
>> that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts, it
>> is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple
>> platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating
>> drivers that stitch them all together.
>> 
>> I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that
>> scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of brevity
>> and ramble at will.
>> 
>> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes 
>> wrote:
>> 
 On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths  wrote:
 
 On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long  wrote:
 
>> These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.
> Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to
> convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too
>>> short
> for blog posts?
> 
 
 Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not
 qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in
>>> the
 way of offering my opinions? :-)
 
 I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in
 through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up
 photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One
 mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world
 (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp
>>> and
 similar messaging apps.
 
>>> 
>>> It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave was
>>> asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog
>>> posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating?
>>> 
>>> -- Charles
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.)
>> Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India (
>> www.cis-india.org )
>> International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg,
>> Germany
>> # +49-0176-841-660-87
>> http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah
>> http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah
> 
> 

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019, 3:31 PM Deepa Agashe 
Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting views will be
> lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them.
>

Societal progress optimises for quantity, not quality.

Though we can travel half way around the world in 20 hours, we don't often
have the interesting adventures or the important reasons to travel as the
great travelers -  Marco Polo or Hyuen Tsang.

Though we have more food choices than an ancient king - any day of the week
-  on any food delivery app, we rarely remember the meal after a day or
two. Even while growing up, wedding banquets in the family were talked
about for years.

Though all the music in the world is available to stream on our phones,
none of the music composed today lasts until tomorrow, let alone hundreds
of years.

Instant and plentiful love in the Tinder age isn't like the love of old.
Most will simply see no reason to march to Lanka to fetch Sita or launch a
thousand ships to fetch Helen when you can simply keep swiping. I think one
popular site is actually called plenty of fish.

In language and literature the kind of fun they had with words in ancient
tongues is simply not to be found today. The puns and word play in Sanskrit
literature is endless, nearly every Indian epic or religious Sutra has
multiple interpretations and profundity unmatched by modern authors.

I have no doubt a lot more data will be consumed and generated in times to
come, but there will be a lot fewer interesting ideas.

Technology allows for harvesting data, searching it, and doing a whole lot
of analytics, which lends itself to short bursty communication.

No surprise then that Twitter is essentially a bursty packet network.

If I want to look up a snippet from a book on my shelf, it's much easier to
search the online version. In doing so I miss out on the opportunity to
browse and refresh my memory of the book, and make accidental discoveries.
However I do get more things done.

To arrive at quality has become a conscious choice made only by a few.
Societal trends can't provide this. One has to make the conscious sacrifice
of time.

There's a 16 year old girl who sailed solo around the world recently. There
are all sorts of singular achievers who break away from the normative to
achieve quality.

If one wishes to be the next Marco Polo or Shakespeare there's never been a
better time. It's about the choices we make.

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Nishant Shah]

" Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting views will
be lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them. A century
from now, can historians piece together our narratives from the shards of
twitter?"
>From what I am learning from them, it seems that it is more that they write
a long-form that is distributed over time, sites, and platforms. So their
indexing is different. The young people I work with in the research do a
huge amount of content production but this content is distributed and
modular, and they keep on finding ways of stitching it together - through
things like twitter streams for instance. And surprisingly, email.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 11:01 AM Deepa Agashe  wrote:

> Interesting to hear all your perspectives on this.
>
> I’ve now had multiple debates with my PhD students, who keep trying to
> convince me to set up a twitter account for our lab. And I continue to
> resist because I find it very distracting, and counter to the idea of
> developing scholarship (which to me requires time, solitude, and space, all
> of which seem very limited in the fora in vogue). My students are happy to
> have long and deep verbal discussions, but when I solicit opinions or
> perspectives by starting an email thread for the lab, there is almost no
> response.
>
> So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just
> don’t write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of
> interesting views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to
> expound on them. A century from now, can historians piece together our
> narratives from the shards of twitter?
>
>
>
> > On 04-Jan-2019, at 15:13, Nishant Shah  wrote:
> >
> > Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising to
> > see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a lot
> > of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it
> serves
> > different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud
> storage,
> > and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a
> > trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls
> this
> > an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used to
> > direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of
> > where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is
> > that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts,
> it
> > is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple
> > platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating
> > drivers that stitch them all together.
> >
> > I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that
> > scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of
> brevity
> > and ramble at will.
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes 
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths  wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long  wrote:
> >>>
> > These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.
>  Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to
>  convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too
> >> short
>  for blog posts?
> 
> >>>
> >>> Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not
> >>> qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in
> >> the
> >>> way of offering my opinions? :-)
> >>>
> >>> I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in
> >>> through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up
> >>> photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One
> >>> mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the
> world
> >>> (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp
> >> and
> >>> similar messaging apps.
> >>>
> >>
> >> It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave
> was
> >> asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog
> >> posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating?
> >>
> >> -- Charles
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.)
> > Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India (
> > www.cis-india.org )
> > International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg,
> > Germany
> > # +49-0176-841-660-87
> > http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah
> > http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah
>
>
>

-- 
Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.)
Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India (
www.cis-india.org )
International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg,
Germany
# +49-0176-841-660-87
http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah
http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Deepa Agashe]

Interesting to hear all your perspectives on this. 

I’ve now had multiple debates with my PhD students, who keep trying to convince 
me to set up a twitter account for our lab. And I continue to resist because I 
find it very distracting, and counter to the idea of developing scholarship 
(which to me requires time, solitude, and space, all of which seem very limited 
in the fora in vogue). My students are happy to have long and deep verbal 
discussions, but when I solicit opinions or perspectives by starting an email 
thread for the lab, there is almost no response. 

So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just don’t 
write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting 
views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them. A 
century from now, can historians piece together our narratives from the shards 
of twitter? 



> On 04-Jan-2019, at 15:13, Nishant Shah  wrote:
> 
> Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising to
> see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a lot
> of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it serves
> different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud storage,
> and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a
> trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls this
> an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used to
> direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of
> where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is
> that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts, it
> is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple
> platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating
> drivers that stitch them all together.
> 
> I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that
> scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of brevity
> and ramble at will.
> 
> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes 
> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths  wrote:
>> 
>>> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long  wrote:
>>> 
> These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.
 Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to
 convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too
>> short
 for blog posts?
 
>>> 
>>> Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not
>>> qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in
>> the
>>> way of offering my opinions? :-)
>>> 
>>> I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in
>>> through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up
>>> photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One
>>> mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world
>>> (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp
>> and
>>> similar messaging apps.
>>> 
>> 
>> It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave was
>> asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog
>> posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating?
>> 
>> -- Charles
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.)
> Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India (
> www.cis-india.org )
> International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg,
> Germany
> # +49-0176-841-660-87
> http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah
> http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Nishant Shah]

Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising to
see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a lot
of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it serves
different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud storage,
and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a
trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls this
an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used to
direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of
where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is
that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts, it
is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple
platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating
drivers that stitch them all together.

I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that
scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of brevity
and ramble at will.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes 
wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths  wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long  wrote:
> >
> > > > These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.
> > > Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to
> > > convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too
> short
> > > for blog posts?
> > >
> >
> > Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not
> > qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in
> the
> > way of offering my opinions? :-)
> >
> > I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in
> > through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up
> > photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One
> > mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world
> > (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp
> and
> > similar messaging apps.
> >
>
> It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave was
> asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog
> posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating?
>
> -- Charles
>


-- 
Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.)
Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India (
www.cis-india.org )
International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg,
Germany
# +49-0176-841-660-87
http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah
http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Charles Haynes]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths  wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long  wrote:
>
> > > These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.
> > Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to
> > convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too short
> > for blog posts?
> >
>
> Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not
> qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in the
> way of offering my opinions? :-)
>
> I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in
> through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up
> photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One
> mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world
> (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp and
> similar messaging apps.
>

It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave was
asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog
posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating?

-- Charles

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Thaths]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long  wrote:

> > These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.
> Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to
> convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too short
> for blog posts?
>

Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not
qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in the
way of offering my opinions? :-)

I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in
through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up
photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One
mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world
(and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp and
similar messaging apps.

Thaths
-- 
Homer: Hey, what does this job pay?
Carl:  Nuthin'.
Homer: D'oh!
Carl:  Unless you're crooked.
Homer: Woo-hoo!

Re: [silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Heather Madrone]

Dave Long wrote on 1/3/19 2:47 PM January 3, 2019:



These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.


Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to convey 
thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too short for blog 
posts?

-Dave


They post them to fanfic forums.

--
Heather Madrone  (heat...@madrone.com)
http://www.knitfitter.com/category/personal/

The Goddess moves mountains -- bring a shovel.

[silk] it may not be well-done; is it becoming rare?

[Dave Long]

> These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies.

Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to convey 
thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too short for blog 
posts?

-Dave