This talk puts the eccentric absent-minded professor stereotype to rest once and for all.
youtube.com
youtube.com
All my professors are just super smart and busy all the time. No time for absentmindedness for them.
It's the public speaking equivalent of using headlines and layout and typography to create a good reading experience.
Teachers (and comedians) do stuff like this all the time. His presenting style is pretty well developed, especially for being so loose :)
When you do something the first time, its science.
When you do it the second time, its engineering.
When you do it the third time, its technology.
Brilliant.
Also, listen to him and pay no heed to his ideas about the future; he wrote a book about why the internet was going to be a dismal failure.
That's not what Stoll said and wrote.
His articles and books (there are several books, all good reading) were written in response to the brainless hype that was so prevalent then. This was right in the middle of the dot-com bubble.
He said that pure technology won't solve human problems, and that we shouldn't assume more benefits than we can prove. He wrote that the internet doesn't do magic.
And Stoll didn't say "Hey, the internet sucks because I say so and I am me". He did some research and discovered that people have said the exact same stupid stuff about television, and about radio.
TV and radio did cause societal changes, but they never came close to living up to the grandiose claims made when they were new.
Stoll said "hey, maybe the hype about the internet isn't all entirely true either".
And he didn't try to tear down the whole internet as worthless. He tried to find some examples of things it couldn't do. Not just any things, but major things - things that if you screw them up, you really regret it.
Specifically, he claimed:
1) The internet can't teach kids to read and write.
2) Some types of human interaction don't work over the internet. And these happen to be some of the really important kinds of interaction.
That's about it.
If there's one thing I think Stoll may not be considering, it's the ability for human society and culture to evolve and accommodate.
I guess we'll see about that.
Right now, it's pretty hard to disprove the fairly narrow claims he makes.
Does the internet really bring us together ... or does it isolate us from each other?
Suppose the network replaces newspapers, books, libraries, and teachers. Is that a good thing?
Who is hurt by computing & networks? (it's not who you think!)
Do computers and networks really belong in the classroom?
Why does the network promise so much, yet deliver so little?
Source: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/silicon_snake_oil.html
http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
There's a specific claim here too: baloney to people buying books on the internet
I am not saying he's an Andrew Keen or a James Glassman, but he is a pretty middling futurist, which is to say he is no better than a coin flipper.
As for the idea that similar grand claims were made about television and radio and they did not pan out, well they weren't democratic media that allowed equal participation. This of course doesn't mean that the internet is the second coming of a virtual Jesus, but basing predictions on few archaic data in a dynamic environment doesn't make you a futurist, it makes you a bad historian.
The main shortcomings in his predictions seemed to be underestimating our ability to solve what looked like (to him) impossible problems: search and secure transactions. He did, however, have some good insights about the negative social changes the web (and other technology [1]) has introduced.
Physical human interaction is a powerful means to evoke empathy and understanding towards others. It's much too easy to look at text on the screen and forget the person behind it. As we spend more time interacting in such media, we spend less time interacting physically. Will we reach a point of extremely limited physical interaction, or will we eventually lose interest in spending our time reading text from a screen?
[1] I have considered a few times how different it must have been to hang out in libraries or walk across campus before the invention of iPods (actually, I guess before tape player + headphones). These days, it is rare to talk to a stranger that you happen to run into because they are typically immersed in their own audio world. I suspect that may be one reason we don't see student activism on the level of the Vietnam riots these days: there aren't as many diverse individuals interacting and sharing ideas.
if you put your thoughts on the line, you risk being wrong sometimes. It doesn't invalidate all your other thoughts.
My definition for a futurist is someone who is a standard deviation better or reasoned in his/her predictions than the median. Let us say that I am no good at presaging, so of course you shouldn't give much credence to any predictions I might make. However, predictions aren't what I am offering here. It is a critique of his ideas and the generative process behind them.
The reason may be a case of game theory. If I cannot immediately find the information online then my choices are to search harder, find an expert, derive the answer myself or buy a book. Of course, when anyone takes the latter option, it discourages said information from becoming freely available in the near future in its entirity.
My grade 8 science teacher didn't know the difference between microwaves and radioactivity (true story).