"Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to."
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"To the degree that education is about the transfer of the known between generations, it can be digitized, analyzed, optimized and bottled or posted on Twitter. To the degree that education is about the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain learns to invent itself. And that is beyond computation because it is beyond our comprehension. Learning at its truest is a leap into the unknown."
http://nyti.ms/blYydJ
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ReplyDeleteThe writer of this article brings up some interesting points about user control, but from what I see he has proved himself wrong. He keeps talking about the human element being taken out of people's lives due to the internet, but the web has been making people more active in there consumption of media than at any other point in history. He seems to be afraid of the collective intelligence of the internet rather than embracing the fact we now have access to all the information we have ever wanted and then some.
ReplyDeleteHis example of online radio I think discredits him completely, for the 'algorithm' he refers to was originally user generated reviews, meaning people determined the similarities between the songs and now those people can suggest music to you that you probably have never heard of extremely efficiently. Personally I would be much more bothered by a world where I would have to rely solely on whatever DJs decided to play for me. I think that it is much more 'romantic' to fall in love with a new, unknown band through a similar artist suggestion on internet radio than ignoring the website to declare that I 'still have my hand on my heart'. He forgets the almighty skip button, the one that shows that every user has a personality online.
We won't be products of the internet machine, because the internet doesn't shape us, we shape ourselves through the knowledge we choose to acquire from it.
I'm with you Charles. I think this article is glib and the author seems to miss the past where info was top down. Like when he says this: "Students spend a lot of time acting as trivialized relays in giant schemes designed for the purposes of advertising and other revenue-minded manipulations."
ReplyDeleteMost people who are paying attention know that people are doing much more than acting as relays for corporate generated content.