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Live Journal is Clearly dying.
What's sadder is that it's facebook and twitter that's killing it. What makes it sad is that this is about attention spans.
People's attention spans are shrinking and one cannot help but think it's a function of operant conditioning. One editor says that book chapters are getting shorter and that publishers are putting the pressure on authors to shorten their books. That's frightening. If I thought we were becoming more lucid as a society, I might be less concerned, but instead, it seems that people simply are unwilling to delve into very intricate and complicated ideas. They're unwilling to deal with cases where there is a tremendous amount of nuance and detail. People want it simple.
The world, however, is not simple. People believe that because one set of British Scientists tried to present ecological change in a particular light, all the research must, per se, be biased. Such a belief is utter rot. There is no smoking gun for establishing that industrial production is the single largest factor in climate change, but a methodical and careful study of all the available evidence by a person well versed in basic scientific technique and some ecological training shows a high amalgam of evidence, which when weighed in its preponderance will lead a reasoning person to conclude that we're the biggest factor causing our own environmental problems.
How many of you already glazed over the last few sentences? It's the very fact that people want it easy, fast, and cheap (when really, at best, you can choose two) that drives us to think that simpler is always better.
Climate Change, medicine, international relations, managing baseball, and architecture all require the ability to simultaneously see a great deal of detail and be able to spot in those details the patterns that determine what the big picture sees.
We are indeed dumbing ourselves down, and at our own peril. Peril you say? Look at the lingering financial crisis. People still don't understand it and think all the procedures involved are incredibly complicated. In fact, their very complexity has become, in many people's understanding, equivalent to their evil. It's as though people have figured out that complex systems let experts hide details within them so all complex systems must be bad.
This of course is syllogistically false: 'Some X are Y', 'Some Y are Z' cannot yield 'All X are Z'. Still, from English departments to rap producers, from sports teams to military exercises, evil's twin is called 'complexity'
Hence, the solutions being offered to people are binary decisions that require poor choices all the way round, in the case of the financial crisis have been staved off by the people who count of those short attention spans. The further we get from the crisis, the less concerned the average person is with preventing the same mistakes and so they begin anew.
And so we come back to Live Journal, Twitter, and Facebook. Twitter puts a premium on brevity in ways even Hemmingway would find revolting. You get 140 characters to explain all of life's mysteries. Facebook, while not as blatant is also laid out to transmit short messages and discourage long discussions.
Yet their ease of use; their ability to quickly translate 'facts' or 'updates' has rendered the longer discourse one would find in LiveJournal posts passe. In fact, the number of posts on Live Journal shrank from 1.4 million per day in 2005 to roughly 900,000 three years later. The users have migrated. Perhaps a few have gone to other blogging tools such as wordpress, but a majority seem to have moved on to twitter and facebook.
Along with this trend seem to be other aspects as well. Newspaper readership is dying. People are willing to read fewer words on the web than they are on paper. The number of people, who despite their easy availability, read primary sources is declining and it's hurt our economic and academic competitiveness.
It saddens and scares me. The trend is further compounded for me by the irony that the very person who so desperately wanted me to write on LiveJournal, has for all intents, abandoned it.
What's sadder is that it's facebook and twitter that's killing it. What makes it sad is that this is about attention spans.
People's attention spans are shrinking and one cannot help but think it's a function of operant conditioning. One editor says that book chapters are getting shorter and that publishers are putting the pressure on authors to shorten their books. That's frightening. If I thought we were becoming more lucid as a society, I might be less concerned, but instead, it seems that people simply are unwilling to delve into very intricate and complicated ideas. They're unwilling to deal with cases where there is a tremendous amount of nuance and detail. People want it simple.
The world, however, is not simple. People believe that because one set of British Scientists tried to present ecological change in a particular light, all the research must, per se, be biased. Such a belief is utter rot. There is no smoking gun for establishing that industrial production is the single largest factor in climate change, but a methodical and careful study of all the available evidence by a person well versed in basic scientific technique and some ecological training shows a high amalgam of evidence, which when weighed in its preponderance will lead a reasoning person to conclude that we're the biggest factor causing our own environmental problems.
How many of you already glazed over the last few sentences? It's the very fact that people want it easy, fast, and cheap (when really, at best, you can choose two) that drives us to think that simpler is always better.
Climate Change, medicine, international relations, managing baseball, and architecture all require the ability to simultaneously see a great deal of detail and be able to spot in those details the patterns that determine what the big picture sees.
We are indeed dumbing ourselves down, and at our own peril. Peril you say? Look at the lingering financial crisis. People still don't understand it and think all the procedures involved are incredibly complicated. In fact, their very complexity has become, in many people's understanding, equivalent to their evil. It's as though people have figured out that complex systems let experts hide details within them so all complex systems must be bad.
This of course is syllogistically false: 'Some X are Y', 'Some Y are Z' cannot yield 'All X are Z'. Still, from English departments to rap producers, from sports teams to military exercises, evil's twin is called 'complexity'
Hence, the solutions being offered to people are binary decisions that require poor choices all the way round, in the case of the financial crisis have been staved off by the people who count of those short attention spans. The further we get from the crisis, the less concerned the average person is with preventing the same mistakes and so they begin anew.
And so we come back to Live Journal, Twitter, and Facebook. Twitter puts a premium on brevity in ways even Hemmingway would find revolting. You get 140 characters to explain all of life's mysteries. Facebook, while not as blatant is also laid out to transmit short messages and discourage long discussions.
Yet their ease of use; their ability to quickly translate 'facts' or 'updates' has rendered the longer discourse one would find in LiveJournal posts passe. In fact, the number of posts on Live Journal shrank from 1.4 million per day in 2005 to roughly 900,000 three years later. The users have migrated. Perhaps a few have gone to other blogging tools such as wordpress, but a majority seem to have moved on to twitter and facebook.
Along with this trend seem to be other aspects as well. Newspaper readership is dying. People are willing to read fewer words on the web than they are on paper. The number of people, who despite their easy availability, read primary sources is declining and it's hurt our economic and academic competitiveness.
It saddens and scares me. The trend is further compounded for me by the irony that the very person who so desperately wanted me to write on LiveJournal, has for all intents, abandoned it.
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contemplative
annoyed
chipper
cold
mischievous
