I loved reading Jon Udell’s post on net-enhanced democracy. Back in 2006, when I started to do what Jon did so wonderfully in his essay, the hope was exactly this — that some generally less political individuals would take these tools and do what poli-bloggers were doing — dig out the backstory and deflate the press coverage on very specific issues.

And while Jon is in no way your average person, the fact he was able to get his specific answer on pellet stoves outside of any political support network is pretty amazing.

But as I sit here today reading Jon’s essay on how Sununu used his vote on cloture to gut clean energy initiatives from the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 Energy Independence and Security Act [thx, Jon!], I can’t help but think of the bill that was put in limbo by a cloture vote today, a bill that would have doubled heating aid to low income families this winter.

The Democrats tried to schedule that heating aid bill for a vote, and the Republicans stopped them.

Reading Jon’s essay caused me to think about the reasons I haven’t looked up how Sununu voted on this newer motion — because ultimately it doesn’t matter what his vote was. The truth is what your individual Senator does on bills matters quite a lot less than you think.

Let me explain why.

The reason why the heating aid bill (S. 3186) did not pass a cloture vote is because the Republicans have been trying to get an offshore drilling provision in a passable bill for a while now, and the mechanism they have used to do this is to filibuster any bill the Democrats see as must-pass, and have the leadership make a deal: we’ll stop our filibuster if you pass our offshore drillling agenda.

The current focus of this effort is a bill on the floor right now: S.3268. This bill was originally about limiting market speculation in oil futures, a policy most Americans support (and most Senators support). However, the GOP has decided to filibuster bringing this bill to a vote unless it includes provisions that lift offshore drilling bans.

Today the Democrats tried to table this speculation bill which has been in filibuster limbo for days now so that they could move onto a widely supported heating aid bill. In an effort to up the stakes, the Republicans effectively filibustered a motion to bring the heating aid bill to the floor. (Some people may be confused by my use of the word filibuster here, but filibustering does not require speeches anymore — under Senate Rule 22, it simply requires requesting a cloture vote to end debate then defeating that motion. This is, for all intents and purposes, a filibuster.)

So they’ve kept the heating aid bill off the floor, despite the fact that as we speak families are scrambling to figure out how they are going to heat their homes and want to see firm action from the government. And the GOP has done this as a way to increase their chances of getting offshore drilling passed.

Now why would they engage in such a game of chicken?

The idea is this — the public sees the Senate as controlled by Democrats — if the Democrats can’t get the heating aid passed, the Republicans can point to the fact the Democrats are a “do-nothing” Congress that cant get anything passed.

On the other hand, if they are successful in getting the offshore drilling provision into something, they’ve managed to force major legislation through the Congress using only the 41 votes it takes to filibuster. And even if they are not successful at this, they get to keep the debate about offshore drilling, which they think will play well in certain key states.

This strategy, paired with a media that loves the “Democrats in disarray” meme, has allowed the Republicans to stop major legislation in the Senate at levels that are historically unprecedented. Here’s a comparison of cloture votes over the last 30 or so years:

[This graphic above is from here, but the best history on this is from McClatchy, which continues its tradition of being the only news agency doing its job. We are currently at 127 cloture votes with 5 months left in the session.]

Notice the outlier? This is not a story you’ll hear in the media. But it is impossible to understand any vote in the Senate without understanding this strategy.

Which brings me back to today’s heating aid bill. The Republicans need 41 votes to hold this bill hostage to offshore drilling concerns — or more specifically, they need to make sure there are not 60 votes for cloture (cloture requires 3/5 of the Senate to vote Yea, not 3/5 of present Senators).

So what’s the strategy here? It’s called Catch and Release. The Republican leadership gets all the votes it needs — 41 people to vote Nay or not show up. Then it hands out passes — they let certain vulnerable Senators up for reelection vote for the bill (or in this case, possibly Senators from the oil-heated Northeast.). Those passes could theroretically be up to 8 in this session, but it’s usually somewhat less.

As long as they don’t cut it *too* close they can block the bill and burnish a couple “maverick” crendentials.

So did Sununu get a “catch and release” or not? Did our other Senator, Senator Gregg get one?

Internet tools can tell you that — but what they can’t tell you is that in this case it doesn’t matter, that what matters in this case is an overall party strategy which has been used to rule from the minority in a historicaly unprecendented way. And that the money here that matters most is not neccesarily the donations of the industries to the individual campaigns (though, believe me, that matters), but quite possibly the general slush of party senatorial campaign money.

Given that — what is the best approach to building our emerging digital democracy?

I think it’s maybe what we see here. I’m an optimist ultimately — Jon’s discovery regarding where his wood pellet tax credit went *is* significant in the way it personalized the issue — the specificity of that really brings the issue home. And it’s significant in that it showed the media narrative around the issue to be what it is — a farce.

Those are big and important things. But I think it’s also significant in that Jon’s post prompted me to post this explanation here, on my personal blog, rather than the progressive venues I’d normally post it to. As more people delve into these tools, the conversation around how our process really works can occur. And hopefully it can start to occur in channels outside the poliwonkablogosphere that I love so much but that others, well, not so much.

The first reaction to tools in the hands of novices is always that the novices don’t have the proper context. But use those tools and the context will come to you. Whether you asked for it or not.

Update: I broke down and checked THOMAS. John Sununu, our Senator who is up for re-election this fall, voted for cloture. Judd Gregg, who is up in 2010, did not.

When I saw this summary of part of Stallman’s talk in Barcelona, it irked me:

When a work embodies practical knowledge you’re going to use for your life, it should be free and it should be free to be modified. It’s not the case of art. Art should be shareable, but not modifiable.

Caveats: this is a summary of what Stallman said by an audience member, not a direct quote.

But as stated, the distinction doesn’t hold water.

I’d have to do an entire blog post series to enumerate the many ways such a distinction is untenable, but here’s a quick example:

Say I find a book that tells me how to use a spreadsheet to better compute inventory, and as a small business owner, I modify that document and publish pieces of it into my employee handbook. That’s practical, I guess, and therefore free. Why should I have to rewrite something that’s already been written? Better to build on the work already done, and move things forward from there.

And I suppose the spreadsheet information should be still free to me even if my business does something “impractical” like publish novels. By bettter managing inventory, we can bring better art to the public more cheaply, and it would be wrong (morally wrong in Stallman’s world) to set up policy to prevent that.

Here’s another way to bring better art more cheaply to the public though — a fan fiction approach. As a publisher of books, if I could publish the best fan fiction for say, Doctor Who, then from the point of view of my publishing house, that’s incredibly practical. Making Doctor Who and its related characters “free” would unleash a ton of untapped creativity, and like the best open source sofware, would allow people with a talent in one area (plots and dialogue) to put their effort into a larger frame they couldn’t create by themselves (characters, backstory, world creation) but can certainly extend.

Now, can someone show me how a concept of “practicality” clarifies this situation, making the rights in the first situation fall toward society whereas in the second situation they fall towards the author?

I’m not saying, incidentally, that all art should be absolutely “open”, or that fan fiction should be freely publishable by for-profit publishers. I really don’t know how to make sense of the new world of copyright (though I would start by making no copyright last longer than 20 years — which would give you access to seven of the ten Doctors anyway — and I would vigorously protect all non-commerical distribution of fan fiction).

I am saying that Stallman’s take on Art, if the quote is accurate, is strangely static — and seems to not acknowledge that art builds on past work in ways that are not unfamiliar to software engineers. There may be a way to separate software from hip-hop, fan fiction, and that Christian company that clips all the bad bits out of movies — but I haven’t seen it yet.

I agree that we have to start thinking of the ways in which Art is different from software and recipes. Only the most committed monist would deny that. But like most issues in Art, picking this apart is bound to be a messy endeavor no matter what, and my guess is “practicality” is the wrong string to start pulling on.

(h/t OLDaily for pointing me to the summary)

If you want to understand why the word-that-must-not-be-named spread like wildfire, you need only read the Inside Higher Ed article on Blackboard “partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai.”

Jim has a nice post on Blackboard’s co-option of “openness” in their statements on this project. As for me, I continue to find it amusing that quotes from Blackboard leadership almost always follow the term “learning” with the term “login”. In the quote in the current press release, “login” appears almost eight words after “learning”, making for a couple tense moments:

“Students should not have to worry about whether different technology is powering their online learning environments for different classes,” said Michael L. Chasen, Blackboard’s president and CEO, in a prepared statement. “With a single login users should have access to all of their courses and course material. There should be one place they can go to get all of their course information.”

Did you catch that?

learning (0) environments (1) for (2) different (3) classes (4), With (5) a (6) single (7) login

Blackboard as an access control company anyone?

God save the single login. No matter what it costs!

But I think I differ with Jim in what I feel the most interesting part of this whole deal is. I don’t feel that there is any real danger of Blackboard co-opting the term “open”. In fact, in the current press release the line:

With Project NG, Blackboard is working to create a more open, flexible platform that allows educators to better personalize, customize and integrate their educational ecosystem.

reads to me more like white noise than anything else. It’s a bit of exquisite corpse poetry, apparently composed in the interstices of an edtech conference.

And the rest of the release? I just can’t work up a steam about it, because the whole thing is too darn amusing. I mean, how open is your system if the two owners of the systems have to “partner” to get the systems integrated?

And the line:

“Students should not have to worry about whether different technology is powering their online learning environments for different classes…”

Hilarious. The point is not whether “Students shouldn’t have to worry about whether different technology is powering their online learning environments.” The point is I shouldn’t have to care what Blackboard thinks is a “legitimate” worry to get stuff out of their system. What I decide to worry about is really none of their business.

It’s the difference between engagement and openness. Engagement is admirable, but it is essentially interacting with the world on terms that you define.

Openness is letting the world interact with you on terms the world defines.

That difference is crucial, and should not be forgotten. As engagement with the broader community, this effort is not a bad thing. But it has absolutely nothing to do with openness.

I’ve created a new site that bascially aggregates the offlining posts from this site: Offline Thinking. The idea is to eventually get others to post on it as well via tag based syndication.

The design of the site is stripped-down WordPress template — the theme is meant to be ASCII-friendly in case you want to download it to your Sony Reader or Kindle. All the headings are marked with surrounding characters, and there’s a minimum of layout junk to get caught in your select operation. I’m working on ASCII-friendly blockquoting as well.

Anyway, check it out, and let mr know what you all think.

So last month we had an embarrassment of riches with intelligent articles on the perils of multitasking and the online rabbit hole.

This month, please welcome blowhardization, the inevitable second round of the public multitasking debate where bloviators are given extra time on the mike, and the more intelligent voices are gonged off stage.

Exhibit A: the recent Chicago Tribune article: “So how dumb are we?“. After drifting over Carr’s excellent essay, and giving a nod to another book, the writer decides to spend nine of her twenty paragraphs on this guy:

The question is hotly debated in academic circles, where Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein further turned up the temperature with his recent book, “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” Its subtitle: “Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.”

Who’s Bauerlein? He’s the English professor that formerly made a name for himself criticizing how “liberal” our college campuses were:

Academics may quibble over the hiring process, but voter registration shows that liberal orthodoxy now has a professional import. Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses, conservative opinion doesn’t qualify as respectable inquiry. You won’t often find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued in American studies. Historically, the boundaries of scholarly fields were created by the objects studied and by norms of research and peer review. Today, a political variable has been added, whereby conservative assumptions expel their holders from the academic market. A wall insulates the academic left from ideas and writings on the right.

His influence in the Tribune article extends well beyond the eight paragraphs that quote him. In fact the Tribune author’s lede:

NEW YORK—Who hasn’t snickered at “Jaywalking,” a “Tonight Show” segment in which host Jay Leno flummoxes unsuspecting young people on the street with such tricky questions as: In what country is Paris located?

is strangely similar to the first lines of Bauerlein’s book:

Everybody likes the “Jaywalking” segment on The Tonight Show. With mike in hand and camera ready, host Jay Leno leaves the studio and hits the sidewalks of L.A., grabbing pedestrians for a quick test of their factual knowledge.

So it’s not a surprise when Bauerlein shows up six paragraphs later to answer all the hard questions that less stellar lights such as Nick Carr have posed. This may look like a newspaper article, but in reality it’s a genre that astute readers are familiar with — it’s a book promotion piece plus extras. It’s not a book review — nothing in the article actually examines the premises of Bauerlein’s work in any systemic way. It’s an article written based on book, fueled by a promotional push.

Nick Carr doesn’t have a book out, or at any rate one on this subject that will sell, so he’s a footnote.

So if you ask why blowhardization always has to happen, there’s why. Because Bauerlein, Keen, and others write books that make people feel good about what they never learned, and argue their points without any disturbing ambiguity. That sells books, which generates press, and by the time this game of telephone ends people receive a debate that has all the nuance of an Andy Rooney rant.

I’m fully prepared to believe that Google may be making us stupid. But they are still remain rank amateurs compared to the press.

It seems every year for the past several years there’s been a couple of weeks where there is a flurry of intelligent articles about the dangers of multitasking and the hivemind. Then the inevitable blowhardization of the subject sets in, the intelligent voices fade and the Grandpa Simpsons come out of the woodwork. And we wait another year for the subject to get back on track, hoping next year will be the year that we can sustain a rational discussion about these core issues without falling into techno-utopianism or decline of civilization hyperbole.

I’m not sure that year is upon us yet, but the latest crop of articles out has made for one of the more enjoyable weekends of reading I’ve had in some time.

Nick Carr, my favorite IT contrarian, writes one of the best summaries of the issues of the hivemind I’ve seen, and offers some new insights to boot.

Get past the title (for some reason Carr is addicted to titles that undercut the nuance of his articles). The article is actually strongest when it is not focussing on Google, and in fact the discussion of Google’s particular influence is the one place where the article almost comes off the rails. In particular, I’m not completely sure the argument that the CPM/CPC structure of web financing exhibits a uniquely pernicious influence on the structure of the web is correct. Haven’t print media in general, and magazines in particular, been using similar models for a century now? I’m willing to buy the argument in a smaller dose, I suppose — I have to guess that the advent of the magazine (as replacing the journal) had some deletorious effects on attention, and began the reward system for page flipping that we now see in spades on the Internet.

But as for the rest of the article, it’s very good, and models precisely the sort of end-to-end depth of argument that the web may be eroding. Get past the title and read it, it’s the sort of article you’ll love even if you disagree with it (and I do disagree with quite a bit of it).

Christine Rosen’s essay is more pedestrian fare, but as an example of the argument that seems to emerge once a year on multitasking it’s a wonderfully compact iteration. There’s a good layperson level overview of some of the recent science, some discussion of the cost to business, and of course, some talk about the effect on our personal lives.

And among other things, it contains this little nugget:

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

It’s always tempting to riff off of science nuggets like this in inappropriate ways. But that skills vs. knowledge distinction in evaluating multitasking seems fertile ground, even apart from what the fMRIs may say.

It’s worth noting The New Atlantis is tied to the conservative think-tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center — worth noting because although Rosen’s article is pretty clean of conservative baggage, these things very quickly fall into specific political ruts. There is a larger frame that some would like to advance — that if we just go back to reading what we’re told, maybe the Great Books front to back, everything’s going to come up roses. That is, the question of multitasking ultimately plugs into some people’s lack of comfortability with the hoi polloi being in the driver’s seat, and an uncomfortability with hierarchical lines disappearing in general.

I’m not sure why that has to be, but it’s inevitable that the Sean Hannity’s of the world will be gloating in the coming month over the Myth of Multitasking, as if this is some victory for God, guns, and Reagan. I’d like to figure out why — if we could peel that part of the debate off, we’d get a lot further with this…

Tools used:

Sony Reader (yeah, I know, should have waited for the Kindle)
T-Mobile Dash

I needed to read some of the latest articles on the perils of multitasking (we seem to be in our yearly cycle here). Figured this was as good a chance as any to try offlining.

Method:

Searched via Google for recent news articles and blogs on multitasking, pasted them into one huge OpenOffice document, kept going until I had just short of 50 single spaced pages. Saved to smartcard which I then popped into my Sony Reader and took out to the patio. Used my phone’s email to punch some quick notes in while reading.

Results:

Overall, a wonderful experience, though I’m not sure it would work this well every time.

Some concerns while I was doing it were whether I was actually taking more time to copy and paste the material and get it into the Reader than it would take to read the material. This was aggravated by the fact my Linux laptop doesn’t write to the SD card writer, so I had to move doc to my wife’s computer and save it to the card from there.

All in all, though, it took me about 20 minutes to assemble the monster text file, and I am halfway through reading it, having spent an hour so far — so it looks like the time spent to assemble it is not completely out of order, although I’d love to get a better ratio (here’s where kindle-lust kicks in).

The experience of reading it was wonderful, but I won’t clutter up the notes here with observations on that. I was lucky that I got three substantial articles in the mix — the Christine Rosen piece on The Myth of Multi-tasking, the Nick Carr piece on how the web is changing how we read and think, and a summary of the Payne, Duggan, and Neth research on task-switching.

I’ll summarize my thoughts on those articles in a later post, but the process of reading them on the Reader was wonderful. There were some issues with the formatting, and at least one article didn’t make much sense with out the associated graphs, but the ability to really focus on these articles, which were worth the attention, was pretty fulfilling.

Of course, had they been worse articles, who knows. As George Siemens points out, part of the reason why we fall into continous partial attention is an awful lot of stuff out there doesn’t merit full attention. Had there been more fluff articles in the mix, I suppose I would have been cursing my inability to teleport out via hyperlink to greener pastures….

I’m in the process of creating a new blog, Offlining, which will deal with my experiments in “offlining” (yep, a new neologism) — the practice of disconnecting from some or all of the network in order to increase productivity and life satisfaction while maintaining the killer connectivity which has enriched all our lives.

Offlining isn’t merely the luddite response of removing the Network from swaths of your life. I continue to believe the Network-with-a-capital-N will save the world, and has the power to transform our politics, enrich our lives, improve our standard of living, and generally save the planet.

But the Network can also be an incredibly destructive thing. It makes tasks jump queue, it lets ambient information draw you away from important goals, and gives precedence to event-driven information over more static forms of understanding.

Offlining seeks to maximize the strengths of the network while reducing its horrors. And it does that by being smarter about technology rather than avoiding it altogether.

Examples? It’s learning to take notes on your qwerty cellphone at the library so that you don’t get sucked into laptop world. It’s setting a hard rule that you don’t read email before you have accomplished at least one significant thing in the morning. It’s letting friends know they have to email you by six if they want to make evening plans so that you’re not constantly looking at your cell phone to see if there is something better to do.

In short, it’s an umbrella term for those lifehacks we’ve all been developing for the past couple of years to help us engage with the Network on our own terms rather than be swallowed by it.

I think the idea is related to the PLE concept, so I will cross-post much of my experiments with offlining here, but the main action will be at the Offlining Site.

Let me know if I’m crazy in the comments.

And yes, I am starting this project not to convert people to a way of life I live, but to experiment with changes to my life — I am one of the worst of the online lot.