This week over at Net Family News, my friend Anne Collier interviews Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist in Portland, Ore., who has worked with patients suffering from Internet or video game addiction. Dr. Block has developed this mnemonic to identify the ‘SIGNS’ that kids or adults may be on the road to Net or gaming addiction. “If one or more of these questions are answered ‘yes’ AND the person is having interpersonal problems, he/she is at risk,” says Dr. Block. Sadly, I find I am clearly suffering from several of these symptoms. Are you?
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S = Sleep cycle is consistently advanced. Goes to sleep later and wakes later or is tired in the morning.
I = Irritable when not on the computer. Preoccupied thinking about the computer and their activities there (sex, gaming, browsing, tuning the system up, etc.). Can become enraged if told to stop using.
G = Guilty about his/her computer use so tries to hide evidence of 1) game/porn purchases, 2) online activities (deletes cache, uses encryption/passwords, etc.), and 3) logs on secretly, etc.; 4) defensive when confronted.
N = Nightmares. Dreams about his or her gaming/computer use.
S = Social dropouts – people who become more isolated by their computer use. This is seen when there is a consistent pattern of sacrificing real-life relationships to preserve virtual ones. Alternatively, seems to prefer living in virtual worlds more than their real one. These people become NEETs: ‘Not in Employment, Education, or Training.’
I love these opening lines in Jose Antonio Vargas’s article this morning about the vigorous online conversation that has been taking place about race, Barack Obama, and the controversy regarding past remarks made by his friend, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
In the church of the Internet, call him the preacher heard all around our YouTubing world, where believers not only watch the videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial and racially charged sermons but also edit them, comment on them, pass them around. And make them their own.
Wright’s homilies — including the one where he says “God damn America” — have taken on a new life, opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it. It’s about race, Sen. Barack Obama, the presidential campaign, us.
Think about that line for a moment: “opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it.” In a few of my recent essays about the annual State of the News Media report as well as Andrew Keen’s rants against “amateur” media, I have argued that we should appreciate just how much better our deliberative democracy is today thanks to the Internet, new media technologies, and user-generated content. Some critics bemoan the fact that we no longer have a handful of media intermediaries moderating or filtering that conversation, but this Obama-Wright issue provides us with a wonderful case study about why that thinking is so utterly misguided. As Vargas suggests, a conversation about race and politics is a conversation about us as a people; as a society. Shouldn’t, therefore, “we the people” all be able to have our voices heard in that conversation in one way or another? The Internet enables that, and we are better off for it. Thirty years ago, 3 big networks and a few newspapers would have determined the confines and duration of this discussion. Today, we do.
Communications Daily reports that USTelecom has now rebranded itself as “The Broadband Association” (although apparently keeping the formal name USTelecom) . The group’s president, Walter McCormack, explained that the branding shift is simply “calling it what it is.” “The future of communications is in broadband”, he added.
The move is but the latest in a long series of name — and mission — changes for the group, which until the mid-1980s was known as the “US Independent Telephone Association,” and represented non-Bell System telephone providers.
USTelecom’s move mirrors a similar rebranding by CTIA — which was at various times the “Cellular Telephone Industry Association,” the “Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association,” and the “Cellular Telecommunications and Information Association.” Finally, a few years ago they decided it was all spinach, and started just calling themselves CTIA – The Wireless Association.
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There are some wonderful stats in this new IDC white paper “The Diverse & Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011.” For example:
The IDC research shows that the digital universe—information that is either created, captured, or replicated in digital form — was 281 exabytes in 2007. In 2011, the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 1,800 exabytes, or 10 times that produced in 2006. The compound annual growth rate between now and 2011 is expected to be almost 60%. The size of the digital universe in 2007 (and 2006) is bigger by 10% than we calculated last year, and the growth is slightly higher. This is a factor of faster-than-expected growth in higher resolution digital cameras, surveillance cameras — especially in places like China and major urban centers — and digital TVs and of improved methodology for estimating replication.
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Think again. Go2Web2.0 bills itself as “The Complete Web 2.0 Directory,” and I believe it after spending a couple of hours there tonight. [Make sure to use the “Select Tag” bar at the top of the page to narrow your searches.] Insanely cool, but I’m already cursing it because I have just found about 2 dozen new ways to burn time I don’t have. Too many damn choices!
Mike makes the essential point about the H1-B visa fight: the job market isn’t a zero-sum game. Granting more visas doesn’t mean fewer jobs for Americans, except possibly in the very short run. More skilled workers make companies more successful, creating new jobs. Moreover, some immigrants go on to start companies of their own, which wind up employing more Americans.
But I think Mike was too kind to this article purporting to debunk the notion that there’s a shortage of skilled IT workers. On one level, it’s just a totally nonsensical issue. The demand for workers is a curve, not a point. At a salary of $80,000/year, some number of IT workers would be hired. You’d see significantly fewer hired if the average salary were $100,000, and significantly more at $60,000/year. So the question isn’t whether there is “a skill shortage.” The question is what effects restricting the supply of IT workers will have on wages and on the growth of the technology industry. Most likely the answers are that restricting immigration of IT workers means that native IT workers will enjoy modestly higher wages at the expense of a somewhat smaller and less productive technology industry. This is good for IT workers, of course, which is why there’s considerable sympathy for it among the Slashdot crowd. But it’s not good for much of anyone else, and like most forms of protectionism, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. IT workers are already among the best-compensated professions around, and I see no reason that truck drivers and school teachers should pay higher prices or enjoy fewer high-tech products in order to prop up the wages of workers who already get paid twice as much as them.
While I’m critiquing random aspects of my air travel experience, I have a question: why are airline attendants such control freaks? I’ve gotten used to the “seat backs and tray tables in their upright and locked positions” restrictions, which could have some safety implications in cases of turbulence. And it’s at least conceivable that the ban on cell phones could be necessary to avoid interference with air traffic control systems. But I’m totally baffled by the rule that was in force between the time we landed the plane and the time we reached the gate: cell phones were OK but other portable electronic devices were not. I can’t think of any plausible safety reason—scratch that, any reason at all—for this restriction, especially when the opposite rule is in force while the plane is at cruising altitude. Weirdest of all, the flight attendant announced, and then diligently enforced, the rule that window shades must be up during takeoff and landing. I’ve wracked my brain and I can’t think of any reason it would matter what position the window shade is in. Do flight attendants (or airline executives) get off on making up totally arbitrary rules to impose on their passengers?
Since I’m new here and since this is the Technology Liberation Front, I’m earnestly reposting some recent thoughts about how technology is driving political evolution in China.
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In a long and thoughtful article in the Jan/Feb 08 issue of Foreign Affairs, John Thornton, a former head of Goldman Sachs and now professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, details the evolution of democracy in China. Along the way, Thornton describes two striking examples of the way “technologies of freedom” (in my colleague Adam Thierer’s phrase) are making a big difference.
In the past several years, the Internet and cell phones have started to challenge traditional media by becoming channels for the expression of citizen outrage, at times forcing the government to take action. One celebrated instance was the “nail house” incident in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing, in central China. For three years, a middle-class couple stubbornly refused to sell their house to property developers who, with the municipal government’s permission, planned to raze the entire area and turn it into a commercial district. The neighbors had long ago moved away. The developer tried to intimidate the couple by digging a three-story canyon around their lone house, but the tactic backfired spectacularly. Photos of their home’s precarious situation were posted on the Internet, sparking outrage among Chinese across the country. Within weeks, tens of thousands of messages had been posted lambasting the Chongqing government for letting such a thing happen. Reporters camped out at the site; even official newspapers took up the couple’s cause. In the end, the couple settled for a new house and over $110,000 in compensation. The widely read daily Beijing News ran a commentary that would have been inconceivable in a Chinese newspaper a decade ago: “This is an inspiration for the Chinese public in the emerging age of civil rights. . . . Media coverage of this event has been rational and constructive. This is encouraging for the future of citizens defending their rights according to the law.”
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Gary Gygax, the father of role-playing games, died today at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. As a fellow Wisconite and lover of video games–the modern forum for Gary’s roll-playing games–I have to say this is a sad day.
Wired has a post on his passing and for those of you who don’t know much about gaming and the contribution that Gygax made to the field, it’s worth reading the Wikipedia entry on his life.
Gygax with Stephen Hawking and Lieutenant Ohura on an episode of Futurama.
Though his passing isn’t a policy issue, Gygax was one of the founders of early gaming culture which has been carried through to the PC and console platforms which are under attack today. Gygax’s passing should remind us that attacks on gaming aren’t anything new. Role playing games were also attacked when they arrived on the scene. In fact, Tom Hanks starred in Mazes & Monsters, a movie based around the death of gamer James Dallas Egbert III, resulting in hype similar to the stuff we hear today about the effects of violent video games.
Today such objections to board games seem silly. Hopefully in the next decade we’ll look back on the proposed game burnings of the 90s and today as just as foolish.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.