technology/unit11/They’re Watching YOU1111.html
Module 9 Assignments
What do I need to do to get the most out of this module?
Reading
Chapter 4 of James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed, “Matter of Fact”
You can download it here.
The growth of information in print is linked together with reading, at least it used to be. This video will explore the future of reading:
http://ctcproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=http://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=19667&xtid=42295
Quizzes
Module 9 quiz due Friday, March 10 at 11:59AM All assignments are due at 11:59 in the morning.
Discussion
Do new ways of distributing Information have impacts similar to the printing press? Burke talks about how much moveable type and the printing press changed the world. Can the wider distribution of information and ideas really change the world and can you see similar changes happening as a result of new communication, data management, and storage technologies? In short, compare the changes that the printing press made possible to changes you see today as a result of new technologies being implemented today. Is this a new kind of industrial revolution. Do new technologies impact how we read, what we read and why we read it? Does reading even matter anymore? Due Monday, March 13 at 11:59AM
I want to introduce Information Technology as a concept distinct from mechanical technology. It follows different rules and when Information Technology and Mechanical Technology come together in the form of Information Machines such as clocks and computers, magical and terrible things can happen.
It’s no secret that the turning point in (some people argue the beginning of) the development of information technologies was the invention of moveable type. But whether moveable type took a long time in coming or turned out to be a revolution in information technology, one thing is certain. It didn’t happen because people needed the technology. It happened because people needed the information. The printing press is not a very complicated piece of machinery. In Europe printing presses had been used for a very long time already printing block items like playing cards. Versions of what became the Gutenberg press existed in China and Korea in the twelfth century. So why didn’t the Chinese or Koreans start printing books by the bushel full like the Europeans eventually did, and why did the Europeans take so long to start doing it themselves?
The reason is simple. The technology was there but the need wasn’t. Information was used differently than it is today and spreading it around to as many people as possible wasn’t one of the things that made it useful. As a matter of fact, it was quite the opposite.
Let’s talk briefly about the Chinese. The Chinese alphabet is graphical in that characters do not represent sounds. They represent meanings. Consider the name of one of the books that most influenced Chinese culture and the characters that make up the title – Dao De Jing.
The Dao De Jing explains how all things come together successfully when they follow a predefined path. If people choose to live in keeping with this direction, everything goes smoothly. When they go against it, things go bad. Each of the characters in this title represents a word in which the etymology is already built in. In other words, it’s a picture of a word and the picture gives a clue as to the meaning of the word. Each of the elements of the picture contributes to the meaning. It’s a very complex process that results in an alphabet of 40,000 characters. That’s a lot of movablemoveable type to keep track of.
When you arrange the letters used in western languages into words, the appearance of the resulting word on the page has nothing to do with its meaning. It has to do with its sound. The word “god” on the printed page is the same as “dog” except the letters are arranged differently to make a word that sounds differently. That’s when it takes on meaning. It takes a lot fewer letters to represent every sound a person can make than it does to represent every idea a person can have, which is what Chinese does.
So why didn’t those in the Orient who used object based writing not create a new alphabet? They did in Korea. But the people who could use it already had all the information they needed and they didn’t want anyone else to have any. Social status was largely dependent on education which required a mastery of this very complicated system of writing and most of the good stuff was still in Chinese. No one wanted to give that up and everyone who could read and write was very concerned about what would happen if they lost their written language or if others could learn how to use it.
The same thing happened in Europe. The power of the church depended on controlling the flow of information and two things changed all that – the need for a skilled workforce after the Black Death, and the Reformation.
technology/burke/The Day The Universe Changed – Matter of Fact
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Reading – Where does it come from.html
The invention of moveable type did a number of things for the creation, management, storage and distribution of information. It:
standardized vocabulary and grammar making it possible for more people to communicate with each other.
duplicated content exactly, making multiple identical copies of a document reducing forgeries and creating, in a sense, the idea of a fact.
dramatically reduced the cost of books making it possible for ideas to get into the hands of people who would otherwise not have access to them.
created the idea of indexing so people could easily find and retrieve information but also cross reference material so that connections they would otherwise never encounter became clear and context was readily available.
In other words, the printing press made literacy, as we have known it for hundreds of years, normal. Of course, it also ruined out memories, stored information untouched for years so that later it could misinterpreted and used out of context, and spread inane and dangerous ideas causing war and revolutions.
The insides of a Z3 – the first programmable computer built in 1941
Now we are more than 500 years into this information revolution and the benefits are becoming clear. Being able to read and write is not only considered normal but considered a basic human right even in culture that never had a written language, never mind movable type. But the limitations and costs to this revolution as well. The video The Future of Reading touches on some of these costs. There are mountains of printed texts that can’t be properly maintained. We have become so dependent on printed documents, we have no way of knowing anything without referring to them. They are not as permanent as we thought they would be and some that we depend on are disappearing. We no longer trust information without proper paper documentation.
Now we are in the midst of a new revolution in information and some argue that information stored digitally is not only very different from what was printed on paper; it actually marks a reversal of what the printing press did in the 15th century. Consider the four points above. Digitally stored data:
pays little attention to standard language. Twitter, texting, social media and word processing all use different syntaxes and that doesn’t even consider the many languages used on the internet.
content is endlessly edited so the same piece of information can be copied, pasted, altered, excerpted and reinserted to turn a fact into almost anything but what it originally meant.
reduces the cost of duplicating data to near zero but increases the cost of the infrastructure to the point of being out of reach of many people.
makes it possible to find anything with a query so finely tuned as to return no context at all.
Some would say that your news and information can be so completely personalized that it’s possible to never encounter and idea that you don’t already agree with or that you have never heard of before.
And this brings us to a really strange set of circumstances in which the truth is distinct from the facts, and the likelihood that you can ascertain either in the traditional ways you might have when the printing press made literacy possible seems less certain. For example, if you usually go to CNN for your news, try reading only Fox News for two weeks. And if you usually go to Fox news, try CNN exclusively for two weeks. You’ll start to wonder what planet you’re on.
And here’s an irony that we will explore in the next module. Artificially intelligence, which governs so much of our decision-making, requires a steady flow of facts. It can’t function on anything else. For example, China has no credit bureaus, so each loan is evaluated individually by an algorithm that considers 5000 personal data points in eight seconds. As we will see next module, data is the new oil. The world runs on data.
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Instructions on writing discussion post
How to write a good initial discussion post:
1. The purpose of writing a discussion post is to reflect on what you have learned from the assigned material. How does it support what you already thought? How does it challenge conventional wisdom? Where it conflicts with your understanding of the world, does it convince you? Where it agrees, what further understandings does it imply?
2. Your initial discussion post must include at least 300 words of your own material. Repeating the question, titles, quotations, paraphrases and other additions are not counted as your own material. Any discussion that does not meet the 300 word minimum will receive a grade of 0.
3. Refer to at least two of the assigned resources. You need to give some thought to what’s presented in the assigned material. For example, you might write: The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy explains Locke’s understanding of the relationship between simple and complex ideas this way: “Once the mind has a store of simple ideas, it can combine them into complex ideas of a variety of kinds” (
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/)
. Don’t make the class guess at the reference. We have to be able to find it. So it needs to be relevant and specific. People get busy and time is sometimes short, so it may be tempting at times to excerpt something from readings you haven’t considered carefully and stick it in your post to meet this requirement. Try not to do this. See point 5 on why. There is no need to use an MLA style citation to the end of a post. We need to read the quotation, and we need to know what in the material helped you arrive at the conclusions you arrived at and where we can find it. That means you need to include an author and a page number if it’s a printed resource, or a title reference for audio and video resources. Points will be deducted if the location of the reference isn’t obvious. To earn full points for your discussion, you need to refer to more than one of the assigned resources in the module if more are available. The resources work together.
4. Any discussion that includes sufficiently poor grammar or spelling to suggest that the posting was not proof-read and spell checked will receive a grade of 0.
5. The best way to meet the requirement to reference the readings is to quote them directly. But please do not quote lengthy sections of the readings. I am looking for your ideas concerning the readings and classes. See point 3. for a good example. Quotations are not considered part of the 300 word minimum.
6. Remember that you are reflecting on the material presented in the module and taking an informed position on the topic. It doesn’t help to simply repeat facts from the module. What do they mean? Use your existing opinion wisely. The distinction between research and opinion is an artificial distinction we don’t want to make in this class. Criticism is useful but only if it’s thoughtful and reasonable. If, at the end of every unit, you think exactly the same way you did when you started the unit, something has gone wrong.
8. You will need to post your own initial post before you can read the responses from others. It makes for a much more diverse conversation. After you have posted your initial post, I hope you will consider other ideas as well and comment on them. There is no grade-sensitive requirement to comment on other posts but, needless to say, your ideas on others’ thinking is the best way for all of us to learn. And feel free to respond to my comments on your post.
Chapter 4 of James Burke’s
The Day the Universe Changed, “Matter of Fact”
You can download it here.
The growth of information in print is linked together with reading, at least it used to be. This video will explore the future of reading:
http://ctcproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=http://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=19667&xtid=42295
Discussions
Do new ways of distributing Information have impacts similar to the printing press? Burke talks about how much moveable type and the printing press changed the world. Can the wider distribution of information and ideas really change the world and can you see similar changes happening as a result of new communication, data management, and storage technologies? In short, compare the changes that the printing press made possible to changes you see today as a result of new technologies being implemented today. Is this a new kind of industrial revolution. Do new technologies impact how we read, what we read and why we read it? Does reading even matter anymore?
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