I recently had one of those moments where a few disparate thoughts click into place, and I was left with an insight that seems obvious in retrospect. (Trouble is, you never know when those moments actually are obvious, and have occurred to everybody except you ages ago. Forgive me if this is one of those.)

It starts with the mobile “phone,” or whatever you want to call it. First, as has been widely remarked, half the world has one. Adoption rates exceed 100 percent in countries from Romania to New Zealand. Here in the US, it’s not hard to imagine a near future where smartphones with touchscreens are as ubiquitous as the Nokia bricks of yesteryear.

Here’s what strikes me about mobile phones: they correlate pretty well with actual people. To a degree unmatched by a computer and certainly by a landline, a cell phone is a personal device. Every member of a family is likely to have one. Not all that many people carry more than one. Between phone number portability and Google Voice, you can almost imagine a person’s phone number becoming an identifier almost as reliable as a Social Security number, certainly more stable than, say, a driver’s license ID.

This got me thinking about biometrics. The notion of your mobile phone touchscreen reading your fingerprint isn’t exactly new, and these devices are almost made for voice recognition, right? The point is, verifying identity with a mobile device seems like it should be easier and more accurate than it has typically been throughout the digital transition, yes?

We’re already paying for things with our cell phones. You can see the vast upsides to voting via cell phone. I’m already jonesing for my cell phone to interface with all my other electronic devices: “Desktop and air conditioner, Matt’s on his way home. Work it.”

The upshot of all this is that we’re hurtling towards a moment when your mobile telecommunications device is entangled with your identity in all sorts of curious ways. What does this mean? What does it mean to be that closely enmeshed with a computer?

And how does that enmeshment implicate our relationships with the telecom industry? It’s already squicky enough that I rely on T-Mobile for phone service. I am not at this moment OK with signing on to T-Mobile’s Identity™ service.

Perhaps this epiphany occurred much earlier to those of you with iPhones, but it felt novel enough to me to remark upon it. At any rate, “mobile phone” is not cutting it any more. If this thing really is becoming the prime representative of our digital identity, it needs a more accurate rebranding. Nominations?

Diana Kimball praises the campus computer lab:

Computer labs offer a combination of connectivity and escape at the same time: they provide a location, a destination, where all of the necessary technological tools are assembled and maintained. They also establish in student

Love this five-year remembrance of the birth of Gmail — still my favorite thing to use on the web, ever.

Lifehacker’s Top 10 Tools For A Free Online Education reminds me a little of the experience I had a year or so ago browsing The Pirate Bay’s top-seeded e-books; a lot of computer programming and software manuals, a handful of natural language lessons, and weird DIY hacks stuff, like instructions on how to build your own solar panels or break out of handcuffs.

Anyways, it strikes me that whether officially or unofficially, plenty of people are trying to learn things using the web, and plenty of other people are working, compiling, and disseminating information to try to help people learn. Some of this is raw information, but a surprising amount is explicitly pedagogical: tips, tutorials, how-tos, complete guides. Whether it’s how to beat a Zelda boss or how to get a web server working, people want to teach other, anonymous people how to do it.

I call this practice and this instinct digital humanism, and it is a big part of what the new liberal arts are all about.

I wonder: what do you try to learn online? Or more to the point, what DON’T you try to learn online? either because you don’t find what you’re looking for there, or because you don’t look? Have you ever taught someone how to do something? Prepared a guide, manual, or walkthrough? Do you have trusted sources, portals, and networks, or do you go straight to Google? What’s the value that you get from it? What, if anything, is missing?

Auugghh. Gavin at Wordwright links to more bittersweet news about my (and Robin’s) hometown:

Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University

We will rebuild America the same way we built the Brooklyn Bridge:

When Brooklyn and New York

There are a lot of things to recommend Amazon’s list of the 100 best indie rock albums ever, but the absence of any albums by The Smiths, Dinosaur Jr., or The Flaming Lips is not one of them.

Tim Harford at the Financial Times finds le mot juste — not grade inflation, but grade distortion:

Grade distortion is a serious affair. Students and their teachers are forced to switch to grey market transactions denominated in alternative currencies: the letter of recommendation, for example. Like most alternative currencies, these are a hassle.

Grade distortions, like price distortions, destroy information and oblige people to look in strange places for some signal amid the noise. Students are judged not on their strongest subjects

Josh Marshall on the paradox of electronic reading — even people who complain about the available technologies (like Josh Marshall) find themselves unconsciously drawn to them.

I’ve always been an inveterate collector of books. Not in the sense of collectibles, but in the sense that once I buy a book, I never let it go. As I made my way through adulthood it was while dragging a tail of several hundred books along with me.

Finally, only a few months ago, I purged a decent chunk of my collection. And most are now in storage. But in our living room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.

Don’t get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn’t realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more. The book is so tactile and personal and much less ephemeral than the sort of stuff we read online.

I hope it’s clear that I’m not of the attitude that this is a good thing or something I welcome. When I had the realization I described above it felt like a sock in the gut, if perhaps a fillip on the interior decorating front. All the business model and joblessnes stuff aside, that’s how I feel about physical newspapers too. There’s a lot I miss about print newspapers, particularly the serendipitous magic of finding stories adjacent to the one you’re reading, articles you’re deeply interested in but never would have known you were if it weren’t plopped down in front of you to pull you in through your peripheral vision. Yet at this point I probably read a print newspaper only a handful of times a year.

When I think about it I kind of miss it. In a way I regret not reading them. But I just don’t. I vote with my eyes. And I wonder whether I’ll soon say something similar about books.

It’s been a long, long time since a really OLD information technology went away. We’re used to a continual junkheap of stuff that used to be new. CDs and cassettes had about twenty years each, gramophone records and celluloid film about a century. Newspapers, at least as we’d recognize them now, aren’t too much older than that.

The book hasn’t stood apart from technological change; an industrially-produced paperback book has about the same relation to a Gutenberg Bible as a new SLR camera has to a daguerrotype. But books, even printed books, are still OLD; phenomenally old compared to most dead technologies.

Read more…

Metaphors, particularly of the “A is B” variety, are best when they can teach you something you didn’t know or fully recognize before — about either A or B. I think Noam Cohen’s “Wikipedia is a City” conceit does the job.

For instance, he tackles the anti-Wikipedia movement:

People don