a. Yes b. No c. Maybe d. Yes, if it cuts my healthcare
Seriously, however, I wonder if the Secret Service needs to look more broadly at this bizarre poll about whether Facebook users think it appropriate to assassinate the democratically elected president of the United States of America.
Perhaps the real investigation should be of the 731 people who actually responded to the poll before it got pulled down by the Facebook authorities.
Maybe the Secret Service should investigate the Internet and its impact on our mental distinction between fantasy and reality.
What needs to be investigated is what exactly were those 731 Facebook users thinking when they saw that poll with the question, “Should Obama be killed?” What, exactly, were they thinking when they physically responded by actually clicking one of the buttons to that mindless poll?
Maybe the real investigation should be into what damage the Internet is doing to the thinking neighborhood of our brains.
According to Susan Greenfield, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University and director of The Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Internet is indeed changing the cognitive parts of our brains.
In a recent BBC speech to mark the 20th anniversary of the Internet, Greenfield argued that the major impact of contemporary digital technology on our brains is to prioritize the “sensory” over the “cognitive.”
It’s the difference, Greenfield explained, between what she calls “screen culture” and reading a book. The short attention span of the Internet prioritizes the here and now of the immediate sensory experience, what she calls “the yuk and wow” of shallow, all-action video games and endlessly interactive online exchanges. It’s the immediate thrill of pressing the button and living for the moment, rather than sitting back contemplatively and slowly turning the many pages of a book.
What Greenfield is arguing is that screen culture so overwhelms the calming, contemplative side of the brain that it replaces deep thinking with the thoughtlessness of immediate action. The world all around us becomes such a noisy, colorful, and, of course, superficial fantasy that we actually lose touch with the densely complex, multi-layered reality of the physical world.
And it’s this loss of reality which, I suspect, explains why 731 presumably sane and law-abiding Facebook users responded to the Obama assassination poll.
On the Internet, particularly on immersive social networks like Facebook in which we interact with our thousands of “friends,” reality has become so fantastic that our senses have indeed entirely overwhelmed our cognition.
You can’t just blame all this on the Internet, of course. As Neil Postman argued so persuasively in his classic 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, television did the same corrosive harm to our brains. Video games and interactive Internet polls are really just more speeded-up versions of screen culture -- TV 2.0, if you like.
But what becomes of our culture when everything is seen as a video game? What becomes of our values when almost a thousand people respond to a poll about killing the U.S. president?
In 1985, Postman argued that screen culture was amusing ourselves to death. In 2007, I wrote a book that argued that the Internet was killing our culture. Both books, however, used the idea of death and killing as a metaphor for a deeper cultural malaise.
What the immediacy and shallowness of screen culture kills more than anything else, however, is metaphor. There’s a dark irony to this -- particularly when contemplated in the context of the Obama assassination poll.
Yes, you and I know that online death, death in a video, isn’t real death. But tragically, the distinction between fantasy and reality is becoming so flattened and blurred that, for many youngsters on the Internet, fantasy has become reality.
— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, can be reached on Twitter at @ajkeen.
Just like a hypocrate liberal socialist... all the fake outrage when it comes to one of their lefties... if you really mean what you say then where is all your 'outrage' when there are more than 3 dozen facebook sites that are currently on facebook wanting to kill President Bush.
Well pardon me for thinking that the Secret Service could be doing something other than finding out who responded yes to a Facebook poll. You're right though, someone who could be working on an extensive plan to assassinate our President took time out to log onto their Facebook account and answer a poll. Then what? They updated their status and went back to their evil plans of taking over the world?
Normally I'm the paranoid one around here, but it looks like we're going to have to agree to disagree. I personally believe it's a waste of time and that if someone is serious about doing Obama any harm, then the last thing they would be is on Facebook answering a poll and if they are on Facebook answering a poll then when they are caught, I expect to hear, "And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids!" :)
Forget the Poll, I don't care about the Poll or the Poll's attention-freak creator.
I do think we need to look into those that would answer "yes" to these hate-type Polls and not just shrug them off as "being stupid or racist or whatever"...
There were plenty of signs that those individuls whom ended up taking planes were up to no good here in Florida and certainly some indications that the teens in Colorado had some anger/violence issues...
It was apathy and a lack of awareness that assisted in allowing those incidents to be completed as designed.
The two incidents posed a serious threat and there weren't any polls floating around the web asking people,
"Hey, should my friends and I go through our school and kill people?"
1. Yes
2. No
3. You guys should just have a V-8 instead
Or even:
"So my friends and I want to crash planes into some buildings, where should we go?"
1. Chicago
2. Boston
3. New York
4. Meh, you guys should have a V-8 instead
It's a poll. Probably created by a harmless individual or someone who is looking for attention. I guess I'm silly for thinking that if someone wanted to assassinate President Obama, they would do it without asking people in a poll if they should do it or not.
But that's just me. You're taking two serious issues and trying to apply them to this situation...
People do polls about killing celebrities all the time, do they go and kill them after? No. If terrorists are wasting time on Facebook making polls then honestly, we can all sit pretty because they obviously have nothing to do but create cheesy Facebook polls.
I don't want to scare anybody back into reality, but it's exactly this "Oh, someone's just being stupid" or "oh, this is just a poll" attitude and not me mentality that led to incidents like 9/11 and Columbine... (sc?)
It's this attitude and mentality that the terrorists and criminals are counting on.
I agree on free speech but I wonder if the secret service has better things to do? It's just a poll to be truthful. If I had noticed it, I would keep moving, I wouldn't vote on it, but then again, I probably wouldn't report it either. I would chalk it up to people being stupid. There are a lot of stupid people in this world that I feel it's best to roll my eyes and move on in the event that stupidity is contagious.
While that is true, I don't put the internet into that same type of invention catagory. Now if you were to say computers, yes, definitly has permnent effects, good or bad. And I would catagorize that in the same group of inventions as you're stating. But I would look at the internet as a result of the invention of the computer, not as an invention of its' own. And while it has changed the world in many ways, I don't see the changes it creates as permanent, like the changes the computer itself has made.
But isn't it true that some cultural and/or technological developments have long-term effects? After all, the invention of the wheel led to other inventions and eventually cars replaced horses. That in turn ushered in all kinds of new ways of looking at the world.
I think the Internet is one of the technologies that has already changed life on this planet and will keep doing so.
..."I think the Web offers greater potential for permanent change -- both good and bad...."
I can't agree on that. True, the internet may create change through a wider audience, but I don't see it as permanent. Humans are too fickle, and bore quickly on subjects. So where something may have stirred only 12 people without the net, it may get 1200 with it. But, as soon as people get tired of whatever, or some new cause catches their eye, they'll move on. As usual.
We've had a number of discussions on this site about the value of journalism in the blogishere and generally agreed that bloggers have to earn the reputations just as they had to do in the world of print. The cost of enrty is much lower here, so the sheer number of posts means that the averaage quality is bound to suffer. The cost of entry on Facebook and Twitter is zero, so the quality of posts is expected to be the lowest. That's just my cognitive brain function I guess. What do you expect?
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The problem with much analysis of the old-versus-new media wars (including some of my own, I confess) is that we always assume that there’s a moral struggle going on, that the real battle is between fairness and injustice, and that, in the best Hollywood tradition, good will eventually triumph over evil.
In an age of a myriad of media devices and platforms, what does the digital consumer want? The answer, in a word, is simplicity. When a consumer buys a book, a movie, a magazine, or a musical track, they want to watch, read, and listen to their product on every device and platform -- from their two-channel hi-fi to their home theater-powered television to their Internet-enabled computer to their 3G smartphone to their revolutionary new touch tablet.
Thus reads a thesis from American political scientist Robert Kagan, meaning that Americans are intrinsically warlike while Europeans are the natural pacifiers; Americans destroy things and Europeans fix them.
Good news for those with a religious faith in Sarah Palin: She’s done the impossible. Miracle of miracles, she’s made me -- the Antichrist of Silicon Valley -- fall in love with the Internet.
Smarter Collaboration: How to Thrive in a Challenging Business Environment Market conditions are changing faster than ever, and organizations need to improve their agility and adaptability in order to provide better service and improve processes. The ability to work with customers, business partners, and employees as effectively as possible - while at the same time holding down costs - is a key to success. READ THIS eBOOK
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