Gleick invited everyone to participate in the discussion, and while he managed everything smoothly, the mindset gap between the lecturer and the audience was easy to notice.

Referring to his experience working as a science reporter for the New York Times, Gleick contrasted the old media world and its leading newspapers and journalists with the new googlized world and its drowned-in-information citizens.

If you haven’t had a chance to read his book on Information, reading his article titled How Google Dominates Us will give you a grasp of his ideas on this topic.

Although various points were discussed in that highly interactive session, I just want to draw your attention to one of the issues discussed there: the concept of serendipity.

Definition of Serendipity

The Oxford Dictionary has defined serendipity as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity from the Persian word Sarandib, referring to the old Persian fairy tale about three Sarandib princes who were always making accidental discoveries (Sarandib was Persian word for Sri Lanka).

The happy accident of discovery is another general description used for the word serendipity.

But in the context of the information and media, it’s easier and more helpful to consider serendipity as finding information which you were not looking for.

Referring to the old newspaper-age, Gleick provides a simple example of serendipity:

while reading the newspaper page by page, you see a short article about an event in a far country. You were not looking for such an article and never thought that it could be interesting for you, but now you are engaged with the article and may find it helpful or insightful.

Serendipity in the Digital Age

Because of their nature, serendipities were a common incident in the traditional media. Reading, watching and listening was linear and you had no other choice except following the content from the beginning to the end.

However, with the current digital tools and technologies, the user/audience has much more power in managing the inflow of information.

Most of search algorithms are proud of customized search results. Social media platforms filter the information and present you a handpicked set of the most relevant published content.

Filter bubble and echo chamber are coined to describe the situations where there is no chance of confronting with the serendipities.

As it is discussed in the video, someone may argue that the duty of the search engines is not to provide the user with the experience of serendipities. Users of the search engines, reach them with a specific question and expect to get the most relevant answer as fast as possible. Therefore, it’s the duty of the other institutions, such as universities and magazines, to make serendipities for their audience.

In his party controversial discussion, Gleick says that many users of the search engines, do not have a specific question in mind. They just start with a keyword and there’s still some room for providing unexpected answers for them (or at least consider a few serendipities in the search engine results page). But one of the attendees told him that usually, user refines its query and Google considers this back and forth communication as a dialogue. Therefore there’s no reason to derail such a purposeful conversation with irrelevant information called serendipity or whatsoever.

A Book about the Concept of Serendipity

While searching the web for the concept of serendipity, I learned that there’s a book dedicated to serendipity: Accidental Information Discovery.

I’ve just read a few pages of the book, but it seems to me that there are many fantastic ideas about the serendipity concept for anyone interested in this topic. The book is published in 2016, five years after the discussion of Gleick and Googlers in Mountain View.

The post Search Engines and the Future of Serendipity appeared first on webmindset.

I do acknowledge that I’m a bit pessimistic about the technology, but he seemed naively optimistic about it.

Anyway, he is a journalist, as he emphasizes everywhere; and a journalist is not supposed to be a deep strategic thinker. He is supposed to report what’s already happening and not what’s going to be happening.

When you have not a very positive attitude about a book, it’s not expected that an interview with the author changes your mind. However, it did happen.

Lawrence Ampofo on Digital Mindfulness has done a fascinating interview with Clive Thompson about his book, “Smarter than you think.”

There I learned that my judgment was biased about his work and now I’m going to read the book for the third time.

Here you can listen to the interview or download its file for listening later:

There are many insightful ideas discussed in the file. But I do recommend to pay extra attention to the following points:

• The role of journalists contrasted with theoretical thinkers
• The ambient awareness concept
• Social media is not supposed to be a substitute for our thinking; it’s a new communication tool for increasing our awareness. As Thompson notes, it’s fairer to compare social media with the eye-blink communications in a room, instead of criticizing its weakness as a deep-thinking discussion tool.
• Role of smileys and emoticons and animated gifs in our current communication style and comparing it to our original pre-Gutenberg style of writing.

The post An interview with Clive Thompson about his book, “Smarter than you think” appeared first on webmindset.

Morozov, a  Visiting Professor at the Stanford University, has focused his writings and speeches on the political and social implications of technology.

He dubbed solutionism for his most famous critic of the technology culture and Silicon Valley as one of its most vocal proponents.

He has written two books about this concern. The first one, titled “The Net Delusion” published in 2011 was describing the dark side of internet freedom and the new generation of values promoted in digital life.

Four years later he published his second book on the same concern. The book was titled “To save everything click here.” However, instead of aiming at policymakers, this time he focused on the technologists who believe that there can be an app for solving every single problem.

Here you can see a 20 minutes video in which he describes his idea about technological solutionism. This speech is delivered in DLD, an annual conference held in Munich exploring the ways digital technology changes our life.

The post Evgeny Morozov on political consequences of technological solutionism appeared first on webmindset.

The terms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, social networks and online communities are often used interchangeably by most of the people without any thinking about the attributes of each one and the subtle yet significant differences between them. By Overlooking these differences, we are in danger of living with the people we were not looking for or leaving the people we have been always craving.

It’s not possible to prepare a list of differences between Social Networks and Communities which everybody agrees on. However, I’ve made a list of the points that I believe are helpful in differentiating them:

Ties vs. Goals

Social networks are made of nodes and ties. Every person is a node, and every relationship is a tie. Social networks are designed in such a way that you feel the compulsion to promote yourself and make more ties.

So I’m connected to my friend and, therefore, have a connection to my friend’s friend, and sooner or later, the social platform will recommend me or my posts to the friend of my friend’s friend.

In contrast to social networks, communities are built around common goals, targets and values. So we can have a community of bookworms or an online community for freelancers. However, a social network is much more general and always takes a neutral position regarding goals and values: Facebook tries to provide the same space for book-haters as well as book-lovers and the same access for liberals as well as conservatives. This is the policy that a community will not tolerate.

More connections vs. Stronger Connections

Even if you claim that you have a private profile for close friends, still it makes you happier to have one more follower at least in your limited target space. Social networks are empires of numbers. Everything is finally translated into likes and follows. But a deeper and stronger relationship is preferred in communities.

Therefore, most of the people consider social networks as an opportunity for more friends and relationships but the communities for a few but deeper ones.

Commitment to the nodes vs. Commitment to the whole entity

Compare these two sentences:

I have a facebook profile vs. I am a member of our local health community.

The former is about ownership, but the latter is about identity. This is a difference that no one can ignore. In a social network, we are committed to our friends and in a community, we are committed to the community itself.

This is the reason that when you are deactivating your Facebook profile, you receive a message stating that your friends will miss you. Would be nonsense if the message says: Facebook will miss you.

The above list can be much longer, but it’s enough for the purpose I have in mind: Although there’s neither a pure social network nor a pure online community on the web, it’s too optimistic if we think one can be a perfect substitute for the other.

As being present in each of these spaces has different costs and benefits, every individual and every business has to make a tough decision about its online presence and considering this two different entities as one can be a fatal mistake for anyone who is considering the web as a part of its future.

The post Social networks are not communities and they’ve never been! appeared first on webmindset.

As they tell us, there’s only one barrier on the way to the technology paradise: There are still so many disconnected people and societies all around the globe. This is the reason that Zuckerberg, Schmidt, Musk and other leaders of technology, always talk about universal access to the web as one of the fundamental human rights in the digital age.

As a technology-lover but a non-believer in these too-optimistic views, I was never convinced the technology itself can be a liberating tool for human.

I’ve always considered the technology at its best as a new evolutionary tool. Every evolutionary tool will provide us with new possibilities. But as evolution is blind in its nature, it bundles construction and destruction together to find the best way toward the next stage of the development.

With all these pre-assumptions, sure it was delightful for me to see the Andrew Keen‘s new book titled: The Internet Is Not The Answer.

His book could be considered in the category of the other internet critics like Nicholas Carr and Ethan Zuckerman. But reading the book, felt like talking with a traditional left-winger economist.

Besides discussing so many facets of the new digital era such as user tracking and data collection and behavioral analysis, the main emphasis of the book is about the effects of this new wave on the current economy. The spirit of the book would remind you of the times when the first robots were installed in the factories and many analysts and futurists were talking about a robotic apocalypse and the future world with no room for the jobless workers.

Yes. As he states many times in his book, an open decentralized technology will not be naturally translated into a less hierarchical or unequal society. But this equal classless society has never been our expectation from the digital technology and the web.

Here’s the main statement of Andrew Keen: The internet is not the answer to our problems. It’s even cause of many of them.

I still like the title of his book: The internet is not the answer. But it’s not even the central question. It’s a tool. It’s a very small mutation for human gene and now as John Perry Barlow says humans are able to experience a real spiritual experience without the necessity of sacrificing their hearts and souls for the old age temples.

Every advancement of the technology, including internet, are just extensions of the hands and minds of the humans and nothing more.

There’s no inherent positive promise or negative consequence in the web or any other technology. Sure there are always extremist ideas about every new tool or technology. Some will try to convince us that we are on the road to hell and some others will promise us the paradise.

But as there is no target point to reach for, every new tool would help our species to adapt itself to the environment better than before and nothing more. Although this adaptation would not be free and painless.

The post Book Review: The Internet is not the answer by Andrew Keen appeared first on webmindset.

It’s not an easy question. So many journals and articles just describe John Perry Barlow as a poet and essayist!

No matter what we call him and how we call him, it’s not so easy to talk about the future of technology and the role of humans in the future world, without considering his ideas and statements.

He is the man who companies like apple and Microsoft pay him five-figure sums to evaluate their business plan considering the online culture and other human related aspects.

I love him because of the term meatspace which he has coined to contrast cyberspace. Meatspace refers to the physical world. The world we live in. The world we meet each other face to face. The world we are able to hug each other there.

But coining the term meatspace and caring about humans and their physical needs and affairs, doesn’t mean that he is not a believer in cyberspace. He is even trying to build a better human community in the cyberspace.

Sure he is not content with the physical world or the meatspace as he calls. The world of politics, governments, borders and borderlines. These are the points which he emphasises whenever he has a chance to talk about. This may be the reason that cyberspace is his dreamland to build the ideal world we were not able to build in the meatspace.

Besides all of the debates and frictions and conflicts between advocates of the meatspace and believers of cyberspace, John Perry Barlow has a clear position in this regard. He is not comparing meatspace and cyberspace. He just compares information and experience:

I understand the difference between information and experience and vastly prefer the latter.

But this statement doesn’t mean that he favors meatspace to the cyberspace because of the possibility of the physical experience. As he clearly states, for him the cyberspace is not a web of wire. It’s a social space which develops capabilities of humans and could transcend humanity and therefore will be able to provide us with real tangible fruitful experiences.

Barlow is too optimistic about future of the cyberspace. But he has two hard pre-conditions. In order to reach to the maximum capabilities of the cyberspace, two main aspects of the old meatspace shall be profoundly changed in the new cyberspace:

• The government, should not interfere in the cyberspace. If there is necessary to have any legal rights and protections, cyberspace has to make it by itself without interference of the politicians and the governments.
• Information has to be and needs to be free. So the copyright laws and the traditional mindset of ownership shall be changed. In his point of view, current intellectual property laws are based on the traditional ownership laws and the new age, won’t stick to such rules.

Although sometimes, his expectations look far from reality, but we have to wait and see the future trends. As Barlow believes in the cyberspace as our first experience of non-fictional and non-superstitious spirituality.

You may find some time to read the conversation of John Perry Barlow with Edward Snowden published by MIT center for CIVIC Media.

The post John Perry Barlow, Cyberspace vs. Meatspace! appeared first on webmindset.

After industrial revolution, technologists moved to the factories. Then, the future of technology found a new meaning: Thinking about future factories and fully-automated production lines operated by mechanical robots.

After development of the electronic technology and invention of semiconductors, discussions about the future of technology inclined toward smaller and smarter gadgets (e.g. computers, mobile devices, watches, home control systems). This approach is still the dominant trend in predicting the future of the technology.

But something missed in the middle of these amazing imaginative discussions about future. We are reaching the singularity as it is neatly described by Ray Kurzweil in his book titled the singularity is near. Future is not the fast-paced-past. It’s the time to expect radical changes. Not only in the devices we use but also in ourselves as one of the most powerful species ever emerged on the planet.

Many people may think it’s nonsense to think about the future in this sense. But there’s one thing for sure. If we want to have some contribution in building the future, we need to think about this singularity and its consequences.

The best point to start is following the people who are already on the edge. The ones who’ve helped us to reach here and the ones who are not content with the current stage of the human development.

Here’s a short list of the people I believe they belong to the future. Their concerns are not limited to the near future: the next year or the next decade. They think about and talk about the future of humanity and transhumanism.

This list is still under development and I will add more names to it:

Eric Schmidt

He has always been in my people-of-future list. Not as executive chairman of google, but as someone who is interested in future of humanity and the developing path of the digital age.

His book about the new digital age is one of the most popular books about this topic enriched with many contemporary practical and political examples (Here‘s my review of the book).

He also has an active twitter account.

Raymond Kurzweil

He works as director of engineering at google and has been involved in the development of some of the influential technologies we know today (e.g. optical character recognition, speech recognition, text to speech synthesis).

He has a very active and up-to-date website reporting or republishing his articles in other media. Also don’t miss his book titled Singularity is near on the subject of singularity.

Marvin Minsky

As co-founder of MIT’s AI laboratory, he has been engaged with the concept of intelligence for decades. He doesn’t have a very active presence in the online world and is not so interested in social networks or blogging (Marvin Minsky is his official MIT page). But would be nice if you could view his TED talk on health and the human mind.

He has some influential books and articles about future of the technology which I think The Emotion Machine would be a good starting point.

Jeff Hawkins

The gadget world knows him as inventor of the Palm Pilot. But he has many other things to tell us about ourselves. Jeff has dedicated his time on research about neuroscience and developing a general theory about the function of the brain.

He has a very simple yet deep book on intelligence and an amazing TED talk about the way brain science will change computing.

Peter Thiel

You will understate him if call him as co-founder of paypal or first outside-investor of facebook. He is a modern business philosopher with some hands on rich and famous technology-based businesses. His book titled Zero to One is a good starting point to know him more.

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom envisioned a future enriched with machine intelligence long before it became the dominant point of view. His website is a good place to start if you want to know him and his book titled superintelligence is an effective tool if you want to understand him!

The post Leading thinkers of the technology (Futurist Minds) appeared first on webmindset.

I was full of hope and happiness. a little more privacy can make life sweeter and enjoyable. But my hope turned into despair just after a few minutes.

I received more than 100 welcome messages from people in my contact list just in 10 minutes. Then I learned that telegram informs everyone else that you have joined the network and even offers them to send you a welcome message.

Can  I consider it a privacy infringement case? I don’t think so. Telegram has not announced my phone number in public TV or on outdoor billboards. This application has looked for the persons who already have my phone number and just informed them that I’ve also joined the network now.

Even without telegram message, everyone could be able to know whether I am on this network or not. It costs a few seconds of time to send me a message and check for delivery note.

This is not limited to Telegram. Similar cases happen with Viber and WhatsApp applications. WhatsApp encourages you to pull the curtains and receive more information from the others in return: If you give me permission to show your online status to the others, then I will tell you about real status of the others too! Or if you let me tell the others that you have read their messages, then I will tell you whether your recipient has read your message or not.

Seems kind of fair agreement. I can call it Mutual Information Disclosure Agreement or MIDA. But can we call every mutual and bidirectional agreement as a fair one? Can we call a duel game a fair agreement? As there’s a mutual agreement between parties and each one gave permission to the other one to kill him if he could?

Nowadays, privacy is a real concern for most of us. But it seems that the privacy concept is somehow limited to explicit information and not implicit information derived from our behavior.

If I hear that Google has sold the content of my mailbox to someone, sure I will file it as information abuse and privacy infringement. But what if google just makes it public that when I have checked my emails for the last time? I believe that most of us would not take the latter case as serious as the former case.

Facebook activity feed changes as fast as the closing credits scrolls at the end of a film. Instagram shows the behavior of the people you follow. Pages they have visited and photos they have liked. Even a very simple blog shows the last commentators.

Sure there are possibilities to limit this exposure. Although most of us don’t care so much and in many cases like WhatsApp taking any action to make your environment more private means a breach of MIDA. So you will also lose some of your privileges. Seems fair enough.

Besides all formal nice quotes and happy mission statements, digital applications and social networks are a business and not a charity. So they must have a feasible business plan.

Also in tight breath-taking competition between digital applications and service providers, there’s virtually no way to increase the price of the services or even hold them in future. Every digital service has to get cheaper or has to die in this zero marginal cost society.

But becoming cheaper or free, doesn’t mean that costs are vanished. It just means that there are other people or organizations who are ready to pay for the costs. As advertisers pay costs of the TV programs and we have privilege to watch them for free.

The same story holds true in the digital age. Amazon turns our behavior report into a valuable information. Facebook uses our behavior to customize advertisements for us. Everything seems fair. There’s no free lunch. I let you watch me and you give me money directly or indirectly by giving me permission to use your service for free. Just as a naked girl dances in front of the others in a peep show and gets paid for that. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem as bitter as prostitution!

It’s not easy to define a clear border between your explicit information and implicit information derived from your behavior. By the way, it’s not always costly or dangerous to share your behavior with others. Sometimes it even helps providers to render a customized service for you. Although I have already mentioned possible dangers in some cases like google blindness.

Sure I am not against digital technology and social networks. Bitter or sweet, it’s a fact that every advantage has a price to be paid. But it makes me worried that in my current point of view, the behavior of the users can never absolutely considered as private. Because behavior monitoring and even reporting is the core element of most online business models and the basic building block of gamification: the inevitable powerful technic behind most applications in the digital age.

Shall we omit the word privacy from our dictionaries within ten or twenty years? Will it be limited to bed activities? I am even more pessimistic. Sooner or later, apple will promote an application for its famous smartwatch which suggests you the best time for intercourse based on your tossing and turnings in the bed!

Let’s wait and see.

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Your clients are already around. Couple of email notifications waiting on your mobile screen to be managed. Some text messages waiting to be answered.

Your team members engage you with your work even before you leave the bed. Seems that your office is somehow open!

The borders got disappeared. There’s no line between your private life and public life anymore. The line between your life and work is blurred.

Some people call it digital age. Some others call it computer age. The others use the term media age. But from my point of view, information age would be much closer to the nature of the current age.

Abundant information provided by billions of people, hosted by clouds of storage systems and selected and republished by close-to-free media owned by every individual now.

Information age, radically changed the governing paradigms in many disciplines. From ethics to economics. From science to humanities. From individuals to families.

Beside all these changes and challenges reflect on our role in this new structure. A member of this society, what kind of contribution is supposed to be provided by me? What can be called a contribution? How it can be measured?

Information age changed every metric around us. From just in 15 minutes to just in 15 Megabytes. From billboards to banners.

From context to content. From mass production to mass customization. From fixed working hours to flexitime plans. From meetings to sessions. From visits to clicks. From credit to rank.

The new world is emerging with totally different concepts: availability, agility, acceleration, consumerization, distributedness, connectedness and emergence to name a few.

Seems that it would be so hard to survive in this world overheated with information without being equipped with a whole new mindset.  The one which I call it webmindset.

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