The dumbing down effect of the internet

Ever since the rise of the internet from the early 90s as the most profound new medium for information exchange, much has been touted on the benefits for human beings, such as it being a more efficient means of communications, the democratization of ideas, having all the information at one's fingertips, etc... all true, yet like all things in life, you can have too much of a good thing. A couple of articles I just read seem to confirm this.

One was from the Economist, titled "Great minds think (too) much alike" which argues that the abundance and ease with which scientist can acquire scientific papers and journals, has in fact, narrowed or "dumbed down" to put it bluntly scientific research and knowledge:

Why this should be so remains unclear. It does not seem to have anything to do with economics. The same effect applied whether or not a journal had to be paid for. One explanation could be that indexing works by titles and authors alone, as happened with printed journals, forced readers to cast at least a cursory glance at work not immediately related to their own—or even that the mere act of flicking through a paper volume may have thrown up unexpected gems. This may have led people to make broader comparisons and to integrate more past results into their research.

It is not yet clear whether this change is for good or ill. Electronic searching means that no relevant paper is likely to go unread, but narrowing the definition of “relevance” risks reducing the cross-fertilisation of ideas that sometimes leads to big, unexpected advances. As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.

I think the over specialization of knowledge in the scientific areas has been a trend and concern well before the advent of the internet phenomenon, and it goes beyond the sciences, as this was one of the main reasons I choose not to pursue a doctorate in Philosophy after graduating college, but the ubiquity and efficiency of data via the net, is accelerating this narrowing of knowledge.

Nicholas Carr, a well known business and technology writer infamous for proclaiming that the IT department was dead, yet again boldly states that it is due to the efficiencies of search engines like Google that is making us stupid:

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Carr is arguing that not only has the internet caused a change in the way we access information, but that it is also effecting and shaping our thought process. There is some merit to this, as the scientific studies I have read and the one he cites in his article does show how new technological mediums change both at the individual psychological level as well as culturally the way we think and the influences thereof. On an anecdotal note, I do see the younger generation being extremely distracted with ever shortening attention spans and what I like to refer to as the "Twitter Crowd". It has gotten to the point where companies now are hiring consultants to learn how to manage these Millennials.

Nevertheless, with every new technological breakthrough, there are always those who want to warn us of the impending doom to humankind such technologies create, and even Carr acknowledges that "those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct", but I do think it is imperative to be mindful of the conclusion of his article, "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence".

That's basically the key dealing with all this new deluge of information that we are now bombarded with, is that you need to put more of an effort to manage this information, or get managed by it!

Socilialized Captitalism

Read this very interesting post by Robert Reich, one of the only few modern political figures I really admire, who defines the notion of "socialized capitalism" and proposes to end it as follows:

Socialized capitalism of the sort the Fed and the Treasury are now practicing, consisting of private gains and public losses, is untenable. On the other hand, it's also true that giant Wall Street investments banks as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are too big to fail. How to reconcile these conflicting principles?

Here's a modest proposal: When taxpayers insure a giant entity against loss -- as we now are with Freddie, Fannie, and Wall Street investment banks -- those entities must agree that:

(1) for the duration of the bailout, their top executives cannot receive total annual compensation higher than that received by the President of the United States, and

(2) the government gets five percent of their current valuation as shares of stock (roughly representing the benefit to their shareholders of the federal insurance) -- so that if and when the entities become profitable again, taxpayers are compensated for the risk they've taken on.

Most striking to me is that while we like to think of ourselves as living under a free-market economy, when the government intervenes like it does above, we are in reality a quasi hybrid socialist-capitalist country. And history indicates that we gravitate towards the socialist when the economy is bad like it is now, and capitalist when times are good.

I guess on a positive note, it shows America's ability to be dynamic and elastic with its monetary and economic policies as the climate dictates, but as it stands now, I do like Mr. Reich's proposals, especially the second one!

30 Days of Outsourcing in India

Very interesting and compelling videos on the phenomenon of outsourcing from a FX series called "30 Days":

Part 1:



Part 2:



The site describes his situation pretty well:

Morgan Spurlock's volunteer, a successful computer programmer who lost his lucrative job to outsourcing, travels to India to try to get it back.

Will he discover the secret of India's success? Or that sending jobs overseas is an unstable gamble?

In the 1980s American corporations realised they could manufacture their goods cheaper in a foreign country and millions of American factory workers were left unemployed.

In the 1990s it was the turn of the white-collar worker, as the advent of the internet allowed companies to fire expensive American employees and hire foreign franchises to run key parts of their businesses. This is outsourcing.

With its well-educated, English-speaking workforce, India is fast becoming the destination of choice for outsourced jobs in technology and customer services.

Typically, one imagines sweatshop like environments and poor disheveled Indians toiling away in a third world country slaving away stealing jobs from America, but the video does a pretty good job of dispelling such a prejudicial notion, and giving a fair and compelling glimpse into the realities of the outsourcing of white collar jobs from the United States.

The Business of Contradictions

Found this very interesting link by Jeff Sutherland, famed Scrum co-founder and trainer who I took my certification class from, on a paper published by Harvard Business Review. The paper is titled “The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success”. One of the paper’s authors is Hirotaka Takeuchi who co-wrote another famous paper in HBR that was the inspiration and impetus for the Scrum project management movement and which I wrote about before.

As the paper states:

Quite simply, TPS is a “hard” innovation that allows the company to keep improving the way it manufactures vehicles; in addition, Toyota has mastered a “soft” innovation that relates to corporate culture. The company succeeds, we believe, because it creates contradictions and paradoxes in many aspects of organizational life. Employees have to operate in a culture where they constantly grapple with challenges and problems and must come up with fresh ideas. That’s why Toyota constantly gets better. The hard and the soft innovations work in tandem. Like two wheels on a shaft that bear equal weight, together they move the company forward. Toyota’s culture of contradictions plays as important a role in its success as TPS does, but rivals and experts have so far overlooked it.

Toyota believes that efficiency alone cannot guarantee success. Make no mistake: No company practices Taylorism better than Toyota does. What’s different is that the company views employees not just as pairs of hands but as knowledge workers who accumulate chie—the wisdom of experience—on the company’s front lines. Toyota therefore invests heavily in people and organizational capabilities, and it garners ideas from everyone and everywhere: the shop floor, the office, the field.

At the same time, studies of human cognition show that when people grapple with opposing insights, they understand the different aspects of an issue and come up with effective solutions. So Toyota deliberately fosters contradictory viewpoints within the organization and challenges employees to find solutions by transcending differences rather than resorting to compromises. This culture of tensions generates innovative ideas that Toyota implements to pull ahead of competitors, both incrementally and radically.

I think much of Toyota’s ability to understand and overcome contradictions is due to the cultural roots of Eastern thinking, which really never viewed contradictions like the West did starting with the Greek thinkers like Aristotle. His legacy of the “Law of the Excluded Middle” permeated the whole of Western thinking and much of the reductionist, logical system on which the sciences and systematic process thinking that industry still drives on.

The Japanese on the other hand do not view contradictions as things to avoid, but rather like the Yin and Yang, as just different manifestations or phenomenon of the natural world which when viewed as a whole, is really just a unity of oppositions. Thus, this thought process would enable the company culture of Toyota to embrace, temper and balance opposing contradictory forces.

The paper found 6 ways Toyota unifies contradictory tendencies:

1. Toyota moves slowly, yet it takes big leaps.
2. Toyota grows steadily, yet it is a paranoid company.
3. Toyota’s operations are efficient, but it uses employees’ time in seemingly wasteful ways.
4. Toyota is frugal, but it splurges on key areas.
5. Toyota insists internal communications be simple, yet it builds complex social networks.
6. Toyota has a strict hierarchy, but it gives employees freedom to push back.

Traditional Western management practices would consider a company running under such an ideological platform as a badly managed company, but that's exactly why Toyota succeeds, because embracing and unifying such contradictory tendencies acknowledges first, that contradictions are a natural way of life (which it is), and that second, adopting such a mindset would allow a corporation to manage their organization in a more dynamic and fluid way. This will prevent complacency and continuously challenge an organization to push it self, whereas “most enterprises stop growing because they stick to processes and practices their past successes have generated.”

But one may mistake such a notion as giving a company license to dispense with all systematic and rigorous processes in favor of chaos, when on the contrary companies “must teach employees how to deal with problems rigorously and systematically, or they won’t be able to harness the power of contradictions”. Again, that’s to embrace, temper and manage the rigorous process and creative fluidity.

Summary of Toyota’s approach:

Three Forces of Expansion

Three forces of expansion lead the company to instigate change and improvement

• Impossible goals
• Local customization
• Experimentation

Three Forces of Integration

Three forces of integration stabilize the company’s expansion and transformation

• Values from the founders
• Up-and-in people management
• Open communication

Characteristics of Toyota Executives

• Willingness to listen and learn from others
• Enthusiasm for constantly making improvements
• Comfort with working in teams
• Ability to take action quickly to solve a problem

Interactive Innovation

In a previous post, I had written about the notion of having to measure innovation. Innovation is typically viewed as being a highly fluid, creative and dynamic process, yet when done within a corporate R&D department, there is a need to place some quantitative metrics so as to be able to forecast whether an innovation that materializes has a chance of commercial success.

Yet upon reading the June edition of PM Network, which is monthly magazine published by the PMI geared toward the field of project management, the main feature article was on the 5 most important business trends anyone in the field of PM, or any business for that matter, needs to be aware of. The one that caught my particular eye was the trend of "Interactive Innovation". The claim is that the traditional R&D centers of corporations will become passe, as the so-called "crowd-sourcing" (I would also place the trend of "smart-sourcing" here as well) and social networking platforms of the new Web 2.0 ideologies take root.

As the article elaborates:

Tapping into that customer collective delivers powerful information to companies about market perception of their products—and where the Next Big Thing might be. In a survey conducted in December 2007 by the Marketing Executives Networking Group, 62 percent of the respondents reported using crowdsourcing to help them shape the future of their products. And while the majority of those surveyed rated crowdsourcing and consumer collaboration as an effective or highly effective approach to new product and service development, only 11 percent rated internal research and development staff this way.

Not so long ago, crowdsourcing was considered on the fringe, but these days it’s officially mainstream. U.S. computer manufacturing giant Dell, for example, uses its IdeaStorm website to identify new concepts and gauge consumer response to them.

Though I do tire of some of the hype and hyperbolie of the way in which Web 2.0 will change everything again (remember the dot-com hype and crash of the late 90s?), this is a real trend that will impact how companies do product and market research and it is going straight from a command and control structure of the industrial and maufacturing era to completely decentralized, collaborative and fractured information and concept driven era that we are now immersed in.

Thus what we have now is the need to balance the need to measure, predict and manage innovation, yet allow for the collaborative, dynamic and fractured nature in which it is now in part and will probably entirely be done in the future. It will be like one big, open sourced, multi-player interactive game of innovation that will be played between customers and companies for the benefit of all.