Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ pack rats. Even when it comes to digital memories that are depressing or disturbing, they opt to preserve them. While researching his PhD dissertation, Jason Zalinger—now a digital culture professor at the University of South Florida—got interested in Gmail, since it was the first e-mail program to actively encourage people to never delete any messages. In a sense, Gmail is the de facto lifelog for many of its users: e-mail can be quite personal, and it’s a lot easier to search than photos or videos. So what, Zalinger wondered, did people do with e-mails that were emotionally fraught?

      The majority kept everything.²⁰ Indeed, the more disastrous a relationship, the more likely they were to keep a record—and to go back and periodically read it. One woman, Sara, had kept everything from racy e-mails traded with a married boss (“I’m talking bondage references”) to e-mails from former boyfriends; she would occasionally hunt them down and reread them, as a sort of self-scrutiny. “I think I might have saved some of the painful e-mails because I wanted to show myself later, ‘Wow was this guy a dick.’” The saved e-mails also, she notes, “gave me texts to analyze … I just read and reread until I guess I hit the point that it either stopped hurting, or I stopped looking.” Another woman, Monica, explained how she’d saved all the e-mails from a partner who’d dumped her by abruptly showing up at a Starbucks with a pillowcase filled with her belongings. “I do read over those e-mails a lot,” she said, “just to kind of look back, and I guess still try to figure what exactly went wrong. I won’t ever get an answer, but it’s nice to have tangible proof that something did happen and made an impact on my life, you know? In the beginning it was painful to read, but now it’s kind of like a memory, you know?”

      One man that Zalinger interviewed, Winston, had gone through a divorce. Afterward, he was torn about what to do with the e-mails from his ex-wife. He didn’t necessarily want to look at them again; most divorced people, after all, want their organic memory to fade and soften the story. But he also figured, who knows? He might want to look at them someday, if he’s trying to remember a detail or make sense of his life. In fact, when Winston thought about it, he realized there were a lot of other e-mails from his life that fit into this odd category—stuff you don’t want to look at but don’t want to lose, either. So he took all these emotionally difficult messages and archived them in Gmail using an evocative label: “Forget.” Out of sight, out of mind, but retrievable.

      It’s a beautiful metaphor for the odd paradoxes and trade-offs we’ll live with in a world of infinite memory. Our ancestors learned how to remember; we’ll learn how to forget.

       Public Thinking_

      In 2003, Kenyan-born Ory Okolloh was a young law student who was studying in the United States but still obsessed with Kenyan politics. There was plenty to obsess over. Kenya was a cesspool of government corruption, ranking near the dismal bottom on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Okolloh spent hours and hours talking to her colleagues about it, until eventually one suggested the obvious: Why don’t you start a blog?

      Outside of essays for class, she’d never written anything for an audience. But she was game, so she set up a blog and faced the keyboard.

      “I had zero ideas about what to say,” she recalls.

      This turned out to be wrong. Over the next seven years, some of which she spent back in Kenya, Okolloh revealed a witty, passionate voice, keyed perfectly to online conversation. She wrote a steady stream of posts on politics and economics, including the “Anglo-leasing scandal,” in which the government paid hundreds of millions for services—like producing a new passport system for the country—that were never delivered. She posted snapshots like the bathtub-sized muddy potholes on the road to the airport. (“And our economy is supposed to be growing how exactly?”) Okolloh also wrote about daily life, posting pictures of her baby and discussing the joys of living in Nairobi, including cabdrivers so friendly they’d run errands for her. She gloated nakedly when the Pittsburgh Steelers, her favorite football team, won a game.

      After a few years, she’d built a devoted readership, including many Kenyans living in and out of the country. In the comments, they’d joke about childhood memories like the “packed lunch trauma” of low-income kids being sent to school with ghastly leftovers. Then in 2007, the ruling party rigged the national election and the country exploded in violence. Okolloh wrote anguished posts, incorporating as much hard information as she could get. The president imposed a media blackout, so the country’s patchy Internet service was now a crucial route for news. Her blog quickly became a clearinghouse for information on the crisis, as Okolloh posted into the evening hours after coming home from work.

      “I became very disciplined,” she tells me. “Knowing I had these people reading me, I was very self-conscious to build my arguments, back up what I wanted to say. It was very interesting; I got this sense of obligation.”

      Publishers took notice of her work and approached Okolloh to write a book about her life. She turned them down. The idea terrified her. A whole book? “I have a very introverted real personality,” she adds.

      Then one day a documentary team showed up to interview Okolloh for a film they were producing about female bloggers. They’d printed up all her blog posts on paper. When they handed her the stack of posts, it was the size of two telephone books.

      “It was huge! Humongous!” She laughs. “And I was like, oh my. That was the first time I had a sense of the volume of it.” Okolloh didn’t want to write a book, but in a sense, she already had.

      The Internet has produced a foaming Niagara of writing. Consider these current rough estimates:¹ Each day, we compose 154 billion e-mails, more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog posts and 1.3 million blog comments on WordPress alone. On Facebook, we write about 16 billion words per day. That’s just in the United States: in China, it’s 100 million updates each day on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblogging tool, and millions more on social networks in other languages worldwide, including Russia’s VK. Text messages are terse, but globally they’re our most frequent piece of writing: 12 billion per day.

      How much writing is that, precisely? Well, doing an extraordinarily crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, and sticking only to e-mail and utterances in social media, I calculate that we’re composing at least 3.6 trillion words daily, or the equivalent of 36 million books every day. The entire U.S. Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around about 35 million books.

      I’m not including dozens of other genres of online composition, each of which comprises entire subgalaxies of writing, because I’ve never been able to find a good estimate of their size. But the numbers are equally massive. There’s the world of fan fiction, the subculture in which fans write stories based on their favorite TV shows, novels, manga comics, or just about anything with a good story world and cast of characters. When I recently visited Fanfiction.net, a large repository of such writing, I calculated—again, using some equally crude napkin estimates—that there were about 325 million words’ worth of stories written about the popular young-adult novel The Hunger Games, with each story averaging around fourteen thousand words. That’s just for one book: there are thousands of other forums crammed full of writing, ranging from twenty-six thousand Star Wars stories to more than seventeen hundred pieces riffing off Shakespeare’s works. And on top of fan fiction, there are also all the discussion boards, talmudically winding comment threads on blogs and newspapers, sprawling wikis, meticulously reported recaps of TV shows, or blow-by-blow walk-through dissections of video games; some of the ones I’ve used weigh in at around forty thousand words. I would hazard we’re into the trillions now.

      Is any of this writing good? Well, that depends on your standards, of course. I personally enjoyed СКАЧАТЬ