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In her recently published book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century, Professor Susan Greenfield brings her considerable expertise as a neuroscientist to bear on the question of whether and how our current use of computers is changing the way our brains work.

Greenfield argues that the visual stimulus we get from screen-based information and entertainment differs so markedly from that available to previous generations that certain areas of the brain, specifically those areas that are older in evolutionary terms and retain the capacity to alter as a result of experience, may be affected in ways that express themselves a changes to personality and behaviour.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, and one that has the virtue of being experimentally testable, unlike many other claims about the effect of modern living on human psychology.

And it is a model that Nick Carr uses to support his rather broader viewpoint that our intellectual faculties are being damaged by the internet in his latest essay for the US-based Atlantic magazine.

Carr believes that the style of searching and exploration of links encouraged by search engines such as Google is changing the way heavy users think, reflecting that ‘over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think’.

He likens himself to HAL, the computer in Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, reverting to child-like singing as its memory banks are disonnected by astronaut Dave Bowman, and regretfully notes that ‘my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle’.

Although the piece has the attention-grabbing headline ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ Carr’s target is really the whole internet, where Facebook status updates and invitations compete with incoming Twitter posts, Friendfeed alerts and RSS feeds from hundreds of websites to overwhelm any attempt to pay careful attention to a well-ordered argument spread over thousands of words or hundreds of pages in a linear fashion.

Why read War and Peace, he seems to say, when you can get a text message from a friend to tell you what has happened to Pierre in only 160 characters, or cut it down to 140 for Twitter?

It’s a nice argument, and has succeeded in provoking a wide-ranging debate. John Battelle, for example, sees himself getting cleverer as he searches, follows links and absorbs information, arguing that when ‘performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am “feeling” my brain light up, I and “feeling” like I’m getting smarter. A lot smarter, and in a way that only a human can be smarter’.

Battelle may feel smarter, but he also accepts that the way of working online is different from that which prevailed when we were a print-based culture. He just thinks it is at least equal, if not superior, to what went before.

There does seem to be a difference between screen-based literacy and page-based literacy, and the reason may be that outlined by another participant in the debate, developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf.

In her new book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, she points out that reading is not an innate ability for humans but something we have to learn how to do, and there is no reason why different forms of literacy should not emerge as new technologies do.

After all, the ability to read a text is as much a learned behaviour as knowing how to use a mouse to control a cursor on screen, and it is claimed that the Venerable Bede, the monk who lived in Jarrow in the seventh century, was the first person to read without moving his lips.

Whether or not our brains are being fundamentally altered by the products of the Googleplex it is clear that the current generation of search tools are changing the ways we look for information and the navigational strategies we use to find our way from source to source, looking for data and insights.

Today’s internet presents information in bite-sized chunks, linked together into a rich tapestry where the connections often carry as much meaning as the words themselves.  The fact that a blog post recommended by one of the A-list bloggers may matter more than what it says; and often the accumulation of small references to a topic is vital to build up our understanding.

The impact does not have to reflect a change to neuroanatomy or a fundamental shift in our way of engaging with the world of words. It could just be that search engines, RSS feeds and Tweets are western culture’s informational drug of choice, the intellectual equivalent of LSD in the 60’s, cocaine in the 80’s and ecstasy in the 90’s, a temporary obsession.

Google and other search engines may satisfy us because they are less likely to take us into areas where our preconceptions are challenged.

One of the reasons I like my Twitter friends is that I’ve chosen to follow people I like, whose views and opinions I am more likely to find accceptable. If I am challenged by them then it is within severely proscribed limits – I’m not following Fox News, for example, because I’d just find it annoying.

The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described two processes that he believed lay behind the development of knowledge in children. The first is  assimilation, where new knowledge fits into existing conceptual frameworks. More challenging is accommodation, where the framework itself is modified to include the new information.

The current generation of ‘search engines’ seem to encourage a model of exploration that is disposed towards assimilative learning, finding sources, references and documents which can be slotted into existing frameworks, rather than providing material for deeper contemplation of the sort that could provoke accommodation and the extension, revision or even abandonment of views, opinions or even whole belief systems.

Perhaps the real danger posed by screen-based technologies is not that they are rewiring our brains but that the collection of search engines, news feeds and social tools encourages us to link to, follow and read only that which we can easily assimilate.
Time to start following Fox, I think, and take myself out of my online comfort zone.

Bill’s Links

Nick Carr’s piece in Atlantic:
John Battelle offers a rebuttal:
Susan Greenfield’s views on brain plasticity: Times review
Fox News on Twitter:

• Google: Making Nick Carr Stupid, But It's Made This Guy Smarter – John Battelle's Searchblog – John Battelle disagrees over the impact of Google…
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – Useful reflection from Nick Carr
• U2 manager: Ad-supported music is beneath musicians – Paul McGuiness shows yet again why the record industry deserves to disappear
• Staying Safe Online at TCS Innovations – My latest post on the TCS Innovations blog, about Site Security Policy

My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job search service, and it seems to be going very well.

One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had ‘outsourced his memory’ to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.

So far I’ve resisted the temptation to pay a team of hackers to break into his laptop and add ‘jump off a cliff’ as his 10am appointment on Thursday.

Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to ‘cloud computing’, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.

For a small but growing business it means that new storage and processing capacity can be added incrementally instead of having to buy a whole new server at a time.

And for a distributed company like WorkCircle, where the team all work from their own homes or offices, it makes coordination, document sharing and collaboration a lot easier.

The approach is growing in popularity, and Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the many large companies working on ways to attract users to their offerings, with Google Apps, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Amazon S3 all signing up customers as they try to figure out what works and what can turn a profit.

The technical obstacles to making distributed systems work are formidable, and while books like Nick Carr’s ‘The Big Switch’ talk optimistically about the potential for utility computing to be offered to homes and businesses just like electric power, building robust, reliable and scalable systems around these new models will tax our ingenuity.

As we become more reliant on the cloud any problems will become more severe, as we can see in the irritation that many users feel with Twitter at the moment because of constant outages, dropped messages and general flakiness as the company tries to cope with what was clearly an unanticipated growth in usage.

It would be a lot worse if your spreadsheets or presentations were inaccessible because of problems in the cloud, or rather because of problems with the physical computers or network connections that make cloud computing possible.

Because behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the ‘cloud’ is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and the every network interaction connects two locations in the real world.

It is often useful to conceptualise online activities as ‘cyberspace’, the place behind the screen, but the internet is firmly of the real world, and that is one of the greatest problems facing cloud computing today.

In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state. If your data hosting company gets a National Security Letter then not only do they have to hand over the information, they are forbidden from telling you or anyone else – apart from their lawyer – about it.

The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, over 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list.

Even encrypting the data stored in data centres won’t always work, as one of the benefits of Amazon’s S3 and other services is that they do remote processing too, and the data needs to be decrypted before that can happen.

This is not just a US issue, of course, although attention has focused on the US because that it where most of the ‘cloud’ data centres can be found. It applies just as much to the UK, where the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will allow the police or secret services to demand access to databases and servers. And other countries may lack even the thin veneer of democratic oversight that the USA and UK offer to the surveillance activities of their intelligence agencies.

Companies have no real choice but to comply with the law in countries where they operate, and I don’t expect a campaign of civil disobedience from the big hosting providers. Those of us who use the cloud just need to be clear about the realities of the situation – and not send or store anything on GoogleMail or HotMail that the US government might want to use against us.

Part of the attraction of the internet was always that it transcended geographic boundaries of all forms, whether political or physical. Communities grew because people shared interests or values, not because they lived in the same place or were under the same government. It was far from perfect, but it gave us a glimpse of a better world.

The push towards cloud computing may force us to be more realistic about the boundaries that have always existed. Perhaps it is time for the UN to consider a ‘cyberspace rights treaty’ that will outline what it’s acceptable to do when other people’s data comes into your jurisdiction.

Bill’s Links

Cloud computing:

Microsoft’s Live Mesh:

Big Switch:

Divisions in the Cloud:

Boundaries in Cyberspace:

National Security Letters:

However heavy sellers and those who make a substantial proportion of their income from the site care deeply about the reports they get from other buyers and sellers.

Their concerns about negative feedback are well-grounded: in 2002 Paul Resnick and his colleagues did a proper randomised control experiment to assess the value of an eBay reputation, looking to see how much people would bid for articles from sellers with different scores.  They found that sellers with established reputations can expect about 8 per cent more revenue than new sellers marketing the same goods.

Over the years the reputation system has received a lot of attention. Cheerleaders for crowdsourcing, hive minds and the wisdom of the crowds like to point to eBay as an example of a working online community where little intervention is needed,  a ‘self-governing nation-state’ that essentially manages itself, according to Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat.

Unfortunately, however, like many other communities that seem to be happy and relaxed but are in turmoil just beneath the surface, eBay is more like the fictional murder-prone village of Midsomer than the perfect market.

Buyers and sellers seem to be engaged in a war of attrition where negative feedback is one of the main weapons, and now eBay has announced that sellers will no longer be able to leave negative feedback on buyers, hoping that this will help to rebalance things.

Both sides in a transaction get to leave feedback on the site, but it seems that sellers are threatening to leave negative comments on buyers’ profiles if they say anything at all critical, knowing that this will make it harder for them to trade in future.

When Bill Cobb, eBay’s head of North American operations, announced the changes he admitted that ‘the biggest issue with the system is that buyers are more afraid than ever to leave honest, accurate feedback because of the threat of retaliation.’

The changes are deeply unpopular among the big power sellers on eBay. One survey of 1,640 readers of the AuctionBytes site found 90% opposed to them, and there are reports of a planned boycott by sellers, though the chances of concerted action by such a disparate group seem unlikely.

But eBay probably reckons that it can weather the storm and that its users will adapt to the new dispensation since the costs of setting up on another auction site are so high.

The move is being seen by some as a clear indication that the brave new world of online communities is faltering.  In the Financial Times Patti Waldmeir was sad that ‘the company has basically admitted that the cybersouk model does not work: buyers did not tell the truth about sellers, and sellers did not tell the truth about buyers. And in a market where traders lie, the trust that is so central to online commerce cannot flourish’

This seems to be an excessive response to the change, which is more about rebalancing the system than ditching the very idea of customer feedback.

eBay already relies strongly on external legal systems to support its business. The company’s ‘level of integration with and dependence on law enforcement is remarkable’, as Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu point out in their excellent book Who Rules the Internet, so taking some of the feedback elements away from the customers is not itself a radical shift.

Over time many communities find that they need to move from internal to external regulation, perhaps because the sheer number of members or the importance of the transactions between them grows. We could see the development of policing in the 18th century as a similar process, one that reinforces community bonds by taking certain sanctions away from individuals and vesting them in the group as a whole.

In this light eBay’s move marks a growing maturity, not a failure of nerve.  After all, as Nick Carr point out, no system managed by humans can be perfect or last forever. ‘Sometimes, we’re inspired by fellow-feeling’, he says. ‘Other times, we act selfishly or with prejudice or we try to game whatever system we’re part of. And the more times we’re confronted with other people acting selfishly, or fraudulently, the more we retreat into self-interest ourselves.’

eBay’s reputation system did well for many years, and even with the changes in place it is far from useless for sellers or buyers. Perhaps we should applaud the senior team for following Clinton, Obama and McCain, the front-runners for the US presidency, in being bold and embracing change instead of lambasting them for leaving a broken system in place just because they are afraid of the reaction.

Bill’s Links
eBay announces changes – and here
Wired comments:
Patti Waldmeir:
Nick Carr’s view:
Wu and Goldsmith:

If you’re ever asked to forecast the way computing will develop, offer to look three to five years ahead. It’s a good, safe time frame because if you’re right then people may just remember your prediction when you remind them how clever you are, and if you’re wrong it’s very unlikely anyone will think to point it out.

Trying to anticipate significant developments for the coming year is a lot harder, perhaps because the tendency is to overestimate the impact of the few obvious trends and miss the slow-burn developments that are on the verge of going mainstream and changing the way we see the world.

For example, last year I wrote “we are building our lives around the network and the things it makes possible, and 2006 marks the year in which this became a sensible and indeed rather normal thing to do rather than something that marked you out as a geek.” While it’s true that Facebook and other social network sites went mainstream, they are still not as widespread as the sometimes breathless coverage would make you think.

It’s the same with my prediction about phones, when I argued that “we’re going to see smartphones and mobile access finally come into their own, as the devices live up to the earlier promise and the networks finally realise that treating handsets as network nodes makes a lot more sense than acting like they are mobile phones with added data services.”

This has started to happen, but it’s going to take a long time before we’re all surfing the wireless web from smart mobiles. The iPhone has accelerated the process begun by Symbian, and the rollout of Google’s Android and open source phones like OpenMoko may help, but it will be a few years before the devices are completely freed from reliance on the network.

One facet of mobile internet access may change quite fast, however. Buying wifi by the hour in cafes or on trains is expensive and tedious, and the widespread availability of 3G data cards for laptops on fixed monthly rates could hasten the demise of the pay-per-use services.  It may force the operators to do more deals to offer free access like the one between The Cloud and McDonalds, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see free wireless in Starbucks by the middle of the year.

At home we’ll see faster broadband services being delivered over cable, and ADSL providers will try to keep up.  BT and the other telcos will complain loudly about not being able to afford the investment needed to upgrade the local loop between exchanges and homes, but if the government keeps its nerve and refuses them tax breaks I think we’ll find that the money is there after all. The potential revenue from fast broadband networks are just too great to pass on.

We’ll also see  better screens, and the multi-touch interface that Apple has built into the iPhone and the iPod Touch will be used on bigger devices, perhaps giving the tablet PC a new lease of life after years in which it has struggled to escape the taint of Microsoft’s over-enthusiastic marketing.

And there will be more and better location-based services.  The newest version of Google Maps for mobile does a pretty good job of figuring out where you are without GPS by using the cell network, and we may see this information used to tag photos and blog posts. No doubt Facebook will seize the opportunity to offer an “I’m here” map-based addition to your profile, whether you want it or not.

Together these changes amount to more of the same, offering us easier, simpler, cheaper and faster access to the network.  But next year’s real shift will be more subtle and have much greater long term impact.

At the moment most of the computing we do is local, and programs run on our laptops or desktops.  This is starting to change, and in 2008 we will see more and more processing moving away from the user and into large data centres which serve many different organisations.

The change is described in Nick Carr’s new book ‘The Big Switch’, where he argues that computing power is becoming a utility. He believes that instead of owning our own processors we will soon be renting time on large systems run by the likes of Google and Amazon, not just for storing data but also for running code.

Carr sees strong parallels between the way electricity generation shifted from local generators in factories to a national grid providing voltage differences where they are needed and the move from local to central processing. In the world Carr describes most processing takes place in ‘the cloud’, and the computers we actually use will manage the interface and the communications, but do little of the real work.

It is a compelling vision, though not without its problems. Computing is not a simple service like electricity, and it’s not clear that we can solve the administrative problems needed to have business-critical services hosted remotely.  Moving everything onto the network may appeal in the rich countries of the industrialised world but offers little to rural India or sub-Saharan African countries. And there are massive security and data management issues to be solved.

Even so, the potential benefits are too great to be ignored, and we’re likely to see a range of services go live next year that will, if successful, take us closer to the cloud computing model.  It will not be an overnight shift, but when we look back in a decade or so I think we’ll see 2008 as the year things started to change.

Bill’s Links

Google Android:
Openmoko:
Nick Carr’s The Big Switch: