The 1955 article paints a rosy world, straight out of Pleasantville.  Witness the headline:

In a sense, it really was a different era. As the 1955 Life article claims, “Embroiled in no war, impeded by no major strikes, blessed by almost full employment, the U.S. was delighted with itself and almost nobody was mad with nobody.” But Greene notes the dark underbelly of the era: “Racial inequity was widespread, constrictive conformity was all around, intolerance of anything different was itself tolerated … your list could go on and on.”

More importantly, Greene compares the fantasies of yesteryear with the “anger” of today:

If monolithic national happiness was, in fact, being sold as a commodity back then, a case can also be made that the commodity being sold to us today is national animosity. Just about every day, we are told how furious we are at each other. If . . . Life magazine was endeavoring to promote the notion of consensus, what we are being relentlessly barraged with now is a message of anti-consensus. And that may be just as false an impression, in its own way, as the everyone’s-joyful pitch was in 1955.

Cass Sunstein makes a similar, important point, one that others have made, and one that bears emphasis.  In an age of information overload, people are drawn like bees to viewpoints that reinforce pre-existing social and political beliefs. I’ve written about the problems of information overload in the trademark context. Here, in the context of social tensions, the echo chamber is even more dangerous. It’s easy to read the Drudge Report or Huffington Post and pat yourself on the back — left shoulder or right, as the case may be — for being so clever as to believe things that other smart (or sometimes smart) people are saying. It’s quite another to force yourself to question your beliefs by reading things that challenge them. Moreover, the loss of shared communal experiences (something that Sunstein correctly bemoans) means that you’re losing out on beliefs and values that you may not even know about.

And now for something completely different….  Not only were the pundits of the 1950s wrong about themselves. They also got the future wrong. Witness this 1959 cover of Superman, where the Big Blue Boy Scout battles evil-doers from the year 2000, who use ray guns from flying cars.

Me, my 2001 Tiburon doesn’t fly, let alone possess a ray gun. But thank goodness it can get NPR on Satellite radio (as well as Fox and CNN).

IMHO, information overload is addictive, and it doesn’t necessarily lead to knowledge or wisdom. I don’t know about others, but the biggest thing that clears my mind is getting away from the computer, the Blackberry, and the television, and sitting quietly to read or think. As most people know, today that’s not always easy to do.

Too bad that some of the amateurs on the Web don’t have similar class.  Shortly after the bad call, somebody vandalized Joyce’s Wikipedia page to declare he was dead.  That’s just sick.  Yesterday, I saw that Joyce’s name was a trending Twitter topic, but the results were polluted with Twitter spam.

Such online foolishness illustrates what Andrew Keen derided as the “Cult of the Amateur” in his book by the same name.  Keen says:

We — those of us who want to know more about the world, those of us who are the consumers of mainstream culture — are being seduced by the empty promise of the “democratized” media.  For the real consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information.  One chilling reality in this brave new digital epoch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth.

In some ways, the foolishness of Wiki vandals and Twitter spammers provides support for Keen’s observations.  But Keen’s critiques of amateurs are also somewhat overblown.  Keen’s preference for traditional “experts” over Web 2.0 “amateurs” ignores that the distinctions between the two are not always clear.  Indeed, in federal court, the qualification of a witness as an “expert” permitted to provide opinion testimony on “scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge” is often sharply argued.  Plus, traditional experts are also subject to error, as amply illustrated by Joyce’s bad call.

But Joyce has class, something that doesn’t require, or always come with, expertise.  You either have it or you don’t.

Also, even without a perfect game, Galarraga’s game combined with Joyce’s bad call are the stuff of legend.  As Paul Clemens noted in the New York Times, the replays of the bad call may become “baseball’s Zapruder film.”  Such immediate-legend status is even better illustrated by this exchange between Kevin Costner (Roy) and Rene Russo (Molly) in the classic sports film Tin Cup.  Immediately prior, golfer Roy loses the U.S. Open by massively blowing par by stubbornly refusing to take a lay-up shot on the 18th hole for an easy win.  Instead, he tries (repeatedly) to hit the ball over a long water hazard.  Roy loses the tournament, but wins the hearts of the fans, and of Molly:

Molly: That was incredible! That was the shot of the tournament!

Roy: I just gave away the U.S. Open.

Molly: It doesn’t matter.

Roy: One time in my life I know the safe play to hit and I still…Shit, I still can’t make myself do it.

Molly: It doesn’t matter.

Roy: My whole career, my whole life on the line…I just made a 12 on the last hole of the Open!

Molly: You sure did. It was the greatest 12 of all time. No one’s going to remember the Open 10 years from now, who won…but they’ll remember your 12! My, God, Roy, it was…Well, it’s immortal! I am so proud of you!

Sometimes it’s the ones that get away that are the most memorable.

Until today.  Now Google permits users to select background images, either from an online database or their own computers.  Sure, other search providers have pretty backgrounds (Bing, anyone?)  Sure, it’s kind of pretty.  But after playing with backgrounds for a few minutes, I went back to the default white.

Why avoid backgrounds?  To reduce information overload and the attendant distractions.  Google is an essential tool, one that should foster focus rather than distraction.  The loading of the background and the perceived — even if not actual — delay, is another addition to a sea of distractions.  For better or for worse, I use Google numerous times a day.  In an era where focused attention is becoming increasingly difficult — see, e.g., Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson — the fewer distractions, the better.

Plus, Google is a hypocrite.  Contrasting Google’s new “backgrounds” feature with the company’s stance on privacy is extremely revealing.  A few years back, as noted here, Google adamantly refused to include a link to its privacy policy on its home page, allegedly because an additional link would distract from its “beautiful clean home page.”  Only after privacy advocates pushed did Google finally relent and add a privacy link to its homepage.  Even now, that link remains in the smallest typeface, possibly to avoid reminding people of how much information they sacrifice to Google daily.  Yet if Google truly cares so much for its minimalist aesthetic, why permit users to now clutter their homepages with pictures of kittehs?

So my response to Google: yuk.  For now, I’ll carry Google’s banner and stick to the minimum.  Enough distractions.

[B]oredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief.   Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter.  In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.

Fascinating.  I’ve often felt that my mind processes information the best when I give it a chance to idle.  For instance, I’ll read complicated materials before bed and let my brain process things while I sleep.  When I awake, things often seem to have gelled.  Although the mental processes associated with sleep are likely quite different from those associated with boredom, it would seem that in both instances, the brain sometimes needs to detach in order to wade through information overload.

An updated and expanded study of information growth, conducted by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship, will complete an update of the 2003 Berkeley report by the end of the year.  The 2008 report will be the first in a three-year research program, sponsored by seven companies, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, LSI, Oracle, Seagate and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and spanning three research universities, UC San Diego, MIT and UC Berkeley.

Hat tip to Lockergnome’s Tech News Watch.

Around the same time, I read Maggie Jackson’s post at Nanci Alboher’s blog about Jackson’s new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.  Citing an expert in the field of “interruption science,” Jackson states that knowledge workers switch tasks on average every three minutes.  Once distracted, they take a half-hour to return to their original task.  Jackson notes that “[in] meetings where everyone is checking e-mail, opportunities for collective creative energy and critical thinking are lost.”

Substitute “meetings” with “law school” and one sees a pretty accurate image of what can happen in classrooms with laptops.  I would imagine that Jackson would agree that banning laptops would enhance the classroom experience.  As she states in her posting (albeit not on the topic of laptops):

We are born interrupt-driven -– that’s how humans stay tuned to their environment. But if we jump on every e-mail or ping, we’ll have trouble pursuing our long-term goals. To make inroads on the deep, messy work of life, we need to stay focused, bringing the spotlight of our attention back again and again to the work at hand.

Commenting on the quick availability of his blogs, Kristof observes that it’s impossible for China’s 30,000 censors to keep up with 120 million Chinese netizens. This might be correct: the sheer quantity of internet information makes absolute control pretty much impossible. But Kristof further concludes that “the Web is beginning to assume the watchdog role filled by the news media in freer countries.” As Ethan Leib notes at PrawfsBlawg, he’s not as optimistic as Kristof, and I agree. The fact that Kristof’s postings went online mostly unscathed likely says more about the ineffectiveness of filtering programs than about governmental permissiveness. Getting things on the web and keeping them there are not the same.

To his credit, Kristof recognized that his postings might not last long, predicting that “[w]hen State Security reads this, it may finally order my blogs closed.” His prediction was proven correct, and quickly. Though the blogs were online last night, when I checked this afternoon they were gone. One, http://jisidao.blog.sohu.com/, now apparently says that the user does not exist. (Caveat: I don’t read Chinese and used Babelfish to translate.) The other, http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1238333873, now redirects the user to the main page at http://blog.sina.com.cn/main/. Almost certainly it was humans — and not programs — that removed the sites. Automated and human censorship in China apparently work hand in hand.

Kristof’s observations do contain some seeds of optimism that Chinese censorship can be circumvented by technological and human countermeasures. He writes that young people use proxy software to reach forbidden sites and Skype to make phone calls. He also writes about Chinese blogger Li Xinde, “who travels around China with his laptop, reporting on corruption and human-rights abuses.” Xinde’s sites are closed down constantly, but “the moment a site is censored he replaces it with a new one.” Xinde uses an overseas site, http://www.lixinde.com, to inform readers of the best current internet address.

Nonetheless, I have to wonder how many Chinese citizens engage in these activities or risk imprisonment to blog about politically charged subjects. Even though automated and human censorship might be circumvented by technological and human countermeasures, the will to take such risks must exist as well. As Ethan Leib notes, “it is hard to blog from a Chinese prison.” How does one counteract fear?