Brainstorm in Progress: Internet

Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Sunday, June 03, 2012

France: Minitel and the Internet

Minitel, France, 1982. Wikipedia

I was just in Paris this month. How did I get to Paris? Fortunately for me, my car got stolen in October, and I decided to go to Paris instead of replacing it. We were a two car family but there are now only two of us. Two cars makes sense when we are both adjunct teachers teaching at three different colleges, but now that I am an administrator, it makes no sense to have two cars. I miss my non-descript Mazda Protege. So what did I do in Europe? I went on a long over-due vacation: I spent 8 days in Amsterdam researching Dutch art for a novel I am writing and spent 9 days in Paris just because I love Paris.

Paris, of course, was amazing. I was there 13 years ago and I never imagined it would take so long to get back. I love art, music, French literature, history, urban walks, and food, and Paris has all of that in spades. It is the most gorgeous, romantic city on earth and only San Francisco comes close. I have heard SF referred to as "Paris West" but interestingly enough, no one calls Paris "San Francisco East."

I inadvertently got unplugged in Europe. I had all of these great apps on my phone that were going to help me translate, navigate, mediate, and explicate my experiences in Europe, but Verizon charges Louis the XVIth era prices for international data and over-seas connections. The phone stayed home. I have a camera with the latest card format allowing me to take thousands of pictures and movies on my camera but my Ubuntu Linux netbook would not read the card. Neither would any internet cafe in Europe using Windows XP, which is most of them. On top of that, the budget hotels we were staying in were not exactly up to snuff with wireless. Wifi worked in the lobby and the first four floors, but after that, we were out of luck. Which is fine, we tend to stay in the kind of hotels that brag about "potable water." So I spent most of my vacation disconnected - I did not feel smarter; on the contrary, I would have loved to be able to talk to my people while traveling.

One of the headlines in Paris while I was there was "The second life of Minitel." Minitel was the bulletin board of the nation in the pre-internet age. It was their AOL. It has been around for 30 years and they are finally pulling the plug. They were going to stop the service last year but they gave in to pressure to wait for the 30th anniversary. But what exactly was Minitel? Minitel was a terminal-based service that used existing phone lines to let users access bulletin boards, make travel reservations, order from retail outlets, access databases, and telephone directories. The terminals were given away for free to 9 million people and the service is used by 25 million people because there is also a computer interface to the service. This was a lot like the bulletin board services in the United States.

According to Wikipedia, "Minitel was often considered as an impediment for a fast deployment of the Internet in France, since it already provided safe and easy online access for many useful services without requiring a personal computer. Indeed, it still has advantages over the Internet: it does not require subscribing to a service (except the phone service), buying and maintaining a personal computer..."

However the Minitel system got French people used to making purchases online and using online services for connecting to one another and communicating online. So it made the Internet possible in France. The people of France were familiar with all of the issues that we were only to meet up with later: the government did not intervene in pornographic bulletin boards, they said it was the parents responsibility.

In 1986, French students used the Minitel system to coordinate a national strike, demonstrating an early use of digital communication devices for "participatory technopolitical ends." This was a prelude to the Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe, Twitter, and the Arab Spring.

Friday, June 01, 2012

Is the Internet making us stupid?

Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is an article I wrote for the Times-Standard "Tech Beat" column:

Is the Internet making us stupid? Variations on this argument have been floating around since Nicolas Carr first wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic Monthly back in 2008. His idea is that the more we rely on computers to do our “thinking” for us, the weaker our brains become.

These arguments rely on a shallow definition of thinking. If I believe that the only way to express intelligence is through writing 20-page papers or consuming information in the same way that my grandparents did, then I am not that smart. Carr and others believe that if someone grows impatient with books, that person is experiencing some kind of cognitive deficit.

One problem with this argument comes from the fact that we really know little about cognition in the first place. Cognitive science is still in its relative infancy. This field is rapidly changing as technology advances, so making some kind of declaration on how we think and learn based on this new science is a bit premature.

And what if technology does change the way that we think? Is this necessarily a bad thing? Maybe that is how we evolve. We develop technologies to deal with problems in our environment, and as Marshall McLuhan says, “we shape tools and then our tools shape us.” He says that technology is just an extension of our natural faculties and abilities. We have the intelligence to invent fire and bicycles. Does this make us slower and weaker? Or did we invent stuff to make up for our weaknesses?

The Hansen Writing Ball, the first typewriter sold commercially, invented by Rasmus Malling-Hansen around 1865, first manufactured in 1870. This was a model from 1878. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Carr recounts the story of the philosopher Nietzsche's introduction to the typewriter, and he says that “under the machines' sway” Nietzsche's writing became more terse and “telegraphic.” I think this is a good thing. It is refreshing when a philosopher can get to the point. My uncle Ed, also a writer, once said to me that “the word processor is to words what the chainsaw is to wood.” I knew exactly what he meant because I wrote a book in 1990-91 using a typewriter. It was the last major project I did using a typewriter. The typewriter had me on the floor literally cutting and pasting pages and paragraphs together. I may have enjoyed the process at the time, but I would never go back.

Carr discusses McLuhan in his article: “Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” I agree with this. At various times in human history, our media, from the cave paintings of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc to the Internet, has gone from being an oral and visual culture to a written culture and now back into a visual medium of connections. We are connected to the information, connected to one another, and connected to the means of producing information.

We have to let go of the idea that there is some kind of privileged media. Socrates distrusted writing because it removes people from how he thought we really learn, by having conversations. Carr talks about “deep reading” and that somehow, with all of this access to information, our reading will become shallow and sporadic. He seems to forget the mountains of trash that have made it into print (novelizations of television shows, for instance). Someone can read books their entire life and not make it out of the shallows.

Thomas Claburn wrote an article in the Oct. 15 edition of Information Week called “Is Google Making Us Smarter?” where he cites a study showing that there may be some benefits to computer use, especially with older adults. The study involved 24 volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76, half of whom had prior Internet search experience. According to the article, “Participants' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while they conducted Internet searches and read books. The study participants showed similar brain activity when reading, but when searching online, those with prior Internet experience also showed activity in the frontal, the temporal, and the cingulate areas of the brain, areas associated with complex reasoning.”

We are in a new era. But despite the fear we may have of new media, according to publisher Timothy McSweeny, “... there isn't as much bad news as popularly assumed. ... Book sales are up, way up, from twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and circulation is at all-time high.”

The latest technologies include new definitions of what a book might be. They might not be in traditional print. They might come on Kindles, Nooks, iPhones and iPads, and the Internet itself. But people are reading. Between Harry Potter and all of the vampire novels, the future of literacy is assured.

Geoff Cain is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium and director of distance education at College of the Redwoods. Contact him at geoff-cain@redwoods.edu.

Friday, January 13, 2012

My Nigerian Millions

This is the Tech Beat article I wrote for the Times Standard:

By last count, I have made over $3.5 billion on the Internet since 1997. It has not come all at once; the money trickles in a few million dollars at a time. Every once in a while a whopping $100 million will just appear out of the blue. Apparently, I have a lot of friends in Nigeria: a widow of a former financial director, a rogue general or two, ex-managers of oil companies who need someone with my last name, and a couple of deposed dictators. All of them need me to contact them so I can collect untold millions.

Image by DonkeyHotey
The Nigerian Scam letter is one of the most persistent and successful con games on the Internet. ”While such an invitation impresses most law-abiding citizens as a laughable hoax, millions of dollars in losses are caused by these schemes annually,” the FBI's Internet fraud website reads. The website refers to it as one in a class of frauds called “advance fee fraud.” It is also called the “419” scam after the Nigerian penal code enacted against it.

In my study of these letters a few years back, I chose 400 letters at random from seemingly different sources and traced the IP, or Internet protocol, addresses of about 200 of them (yes, I had more time on my hands then). Although not fool proof because Internet addresses can be spoofed, the emails seemed to come from everywhere: Nigeria, other African countries, Italy, the Netherlands, South America and all around the Pacific Rim. It is difficult to determine if an email comes from a real or fake account. The difficulties are illustrated by the one email which I traced to the Netherlands, but it claimed to be from Africa and had an email account from England. I found four major variations of the scam: the son or daughter who needs help in claiming the inheritance; an aide to an official who needs to open a foreign account for over-invoiced money; a banker who finds an abandoned account and needs a foreigner to claim the money; and the widow of an official wgi has money for a foreign investor or to “do God's work.” But common to all is the required advance fee to access the money. The letters are a request for assistance in the transfer of millions of dollars to an overseas account, for which the victim is promised a percentage.

Many recipients of these emails think that the authors are trying to get bank account numbers -- it is far more insidious than that. If a potential victim responds to the email, then the culprits start asking for more and more legal fees and bribes. They will take the money until the victim starts to complain, and then the culprits typically move on to the next victim. Like many Internet scams, their success depends on volume. For every 10,000 emails they send out, they may get only a couple of responses, but that is all they need. Often, victims are asked to come to Nigeria. If that happens, the victim runs the risk of kidnapping or murder.

Two days after the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, I received an email from a man claiming to be an arms dealer who had money to buy weapons for the insurgency. Since Saddam had been captured and the war was essentially over, would I help him find an appropriate bank to deposit $22 million? The letters are often written with bad grammar, phonetic spelling and in dialect. This allows the reader to imagine a poor, naive foreigner who will surely be taken advantage of.
”Why shouldn't that person be me?” a potential victim might ask.

Some of the letters ask that the victim send assurances that they will deal with the author honestly. This is meant to give the victim a sense of shared risk. If the authors can convey the feeling that they have something to lose, then the victim is more likely to believe that he or she has something to gain.

Variations of this con have been around since at least the 1920s as a variation of the “Spanish Prisoner” scam, which involves collecting money for bribes to help release an aristocrat who is supposedly languishing in prison. If you help with the escape, you will be handsomely rewarded by the family.

Who would fall for such a blatant scam? How could anyone respond to one of these emails? The FBI warns us that we should not reply to these emails. The more economically desperate the times, the more desperate the possible measures. A small percentage of people is willing to believe anything if it will get them in the black and out of trouble, and another percentage is always willing to make that offer, solicited or not.

Geoff Cain is the director of Distance Learning at College of the Redwoods. He also serves on the board of directors for the Redwood Technology Consortium. Want to know more about technology and education? See Geoff's blog at http://www.geoffcain.com.