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

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СКАЧАТЬ tending bar? A few years ago, three Internet writers and thinkers—Deb Schultz, Heather Gold, and Kevin Mark—brainstormed on what to label it. On the suggestion of Theresa Nielsen Hayden, a longtime host of online communities, they settled on a clever term: “tummeling,” derived from the Yiddish tummler, the person at a party responsible for keeping the crowd engaged and getting them dancing at a wedding. Tummlers are the social adepts of online conversation. “They’re catalysts and bridge builders,” Schultz tells me. “It’s not about technology. It’s about the human factor.” They know how to be empathetic, how to draw people out: “A good tummler reads the room,” Gold adds. “Quieter people have a disproportionately strong impact on conversational flow when drawn out and heard.”

      Look behind any high-functioning discussion forum online and you’ll find someone doing tummeling. Without it, you get chaos. That’s why YouTube is a comment cesspool; there is no culture of moderating comments. It’s why you frequently see newspaper Web pages filled with toxic comments. They haven’t assigned anyone to be the tummler.

      Newspapers and YouTube also have another problem, which is that they’re always trying to get bigger. But as Coates and others have found, conversation works best when it’s smaller. Only in a more tightly knit group can participants know each other. Newspapers, in contrast, work under the advertising logic of “more is better.” This produces unfocused, ad hoc, drive-by audiences that can never be corralled into community standards. Coates jokes about going to a major U.S. newspaper and seeing a link to the discussion threads—Come on in! We have 2,000 comments! “That’s a bar I don’t want to go into! They don’t have any security!” he says. These sites are trying for scale—but conversation doesn’t scale.

      There are other tools emerging to help manage threads, such as requiring real name identity, as with Facebook comments; removing anonymity can bring in accountability, since people are less likely to be abusive if their actual name is attached to the abuse. Mind you, Coates isn’t opposed per se to anonymity or to crazy, free-range places like Reddit. “Those environments catalyze a lot of rancor, sure, but also candor. The fact that places like that exist might make it even easier to do what I do,” he notes.

      Tummeling isn’t a total solution. It works only when you control the space and can kick out undesirables. Services like Twitter are more open and thus less manageable. But even in those spaces, tummeling is a digital-age skill that we will increasingly need to learn, even formally teach; if this aspect of modern civics became widespread enough, it could help reform more and more public spaces online. There’s a pessimistic view, too. You could argue that the first two decades of open speech have set dreadful global standards and that the downsides of requiring targeted groups—say, young women—to navigate so much hate online aren’t worth the upsides of public speech. That’s a reasonable caveat. When it comes to public thinking, you need to accept the bad with the good, but there’s a lot of bad to accept.

      What tools will create new forms of public thinking in the years to come? With mobile phones, our personal geography is becoming newly relevant in a new way. GPS turns your location into a fresh source of multiples, because it can figure out if there are other people nearby sharing your experience (say, at a concert or a park). An early success of this kind was Grindr, a phone app that lets gay men broadcast their location and status messages and locate other gay men nearby (proving again the technology truism that sex and pornography are always at the forefront of tech innovation).

      The ability of phones to broadcast their location has even weirder effects, because it can turn geography into a message board, with apps that embed conversations in specific physical spaces. For example, when the Occupy Wall Street movement flared in New York City, some of the activists began using a mobile app called Vibe⁴¹ that let them post anonymous messages that were tagged to physical locations around Wall Street: they’d discuss where police were about to crack down or leave notes describing events they’d seen. This is bleeding into everyday life, with services that let people embed photos and thoughts on maps and engage in location-based conversations. It’s the first stage of conversational “augmented reality”: public thinking woven into our real-world public space.

      I also suspect that as more forms of media become digital, they’ll become sites for public thinking—particularly digital books. Books have always propelled smart conversations; the historic, face-to-face book club has migrated rapidly online, joining the sprawling comments at sites like Goodreads. But the pages of e-books are themselves likely to become the sites of conversations. Already readers of many e-books—on the Kindle, the Nook, and other e-readers like Readmill or Social Book—share comments and highlights. Marginalia may become a new type of public thinking, with the smartest remarks from other readers becoming part of how we make sense of a book. (Bob Stein, head of the Institute for the Future of the Book, imagines a cadre of marginaliasts becoming so well liked⁴² that people pay to read their markups.) The truth is, whatever new digital tools come around, curious people are going to colonize them. We’re social creatures, so we think socially.

      But there’s one interesting kink. For most of this chapter I’ve been talking about one type of publishing—writing in text. It’s one of our oldest and most robust tools for recording and manipulating ideas. But the digital age is also producing a Cambrian explosion in different media that we’re using to talk, and think, with each other—including images, video, and data visualization. The difference is, while we’re taught in school how to write and read, our traditional literacy focuses less on these new modes of publishing. We’re working them out on our own for now and discovering just how powerful they can be.

       The New Literacies_

      How do you tackle a problem that affects the fabric of democracy but also happens to be, well, boring?

      Ask Costas Panagopoulos. A professor of political science at Fordham University in New York, Panagopolous is an expert on gerrymandering, the tawdry two-hundred-year-old political phenomenon by which politicians redraw the boundaries of their districts in order to exclude anyone who won’t vote for them. In theory, redistricting isn’t harmful; indeed, laws require the regular rejiggering of maps to make sure that as the population shifts, it’s adequately represented. But in practice, politicians manipulate this process in order to cement their own power. In the United States, Democrats try to herd liberal urbanites and blacks into their districts’ boundaries while pushing out gun-loving rural folk. Republicans do the reverse.

      Politicians worldwide love this trick, but in New York State they’ve made it an art form. In the last fifty years, they’ve redrawn their electoral districts in such nakedly self-serving ways it’s a statewide joke. (One district was redrawn so tortuously, a voting-rights advocate said that it looked like “Abraham Lincoln riding on a vacuum cleaner.”)¹ The result is a rigid, unchanging political terrain: once someone’s in office, they almost can’t be voted out. From 2002 to 2010, a slender 4 percent of incumbent² New York state politicians lost. In 2010, nearly one out of five politicians didn’t even have an opponent, because competitors realized there was no point. The game was thoroughly rigged.

      “When things get this bad, democracy gets hijacked,” Panagopoulos tells me. Indeed, New York has one of the most gridlocked and dysfunctional legislatures in the country, because rival parties have no incentive to cooperate. “It’s a hidden issue that no one talks about how to fix.”

      The reason no one talks about it is simple: gerrymandering is a monstrously complex subject. To fix it, you need to analyze what’s going on each city and suburb block, for hundreds of miles across an entire state, parsing an absolutely Olympian mountain of information (maps, databases, dense charts of voting data, and so on.) As a result, a professional class of map riggers has emerged, lushly compensated consultants hired by politicians to guarantee СКАЧАТЬ