Beware the Social Networks!

About 12 hours ago “The Mail Online” has published an article titled: “Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist“.

The top neuroscientist quoted is Lady Susan Greenfield. She is an amazing 59 year old woman and a specialist on the physiology of the brain, a professor at the department of pharmacology at Oxford university in the UK.  A serious, serious academic.

I am dedicating this post to her achievements and to the Ada Lovelace day, and to this pledge.

I had to read the article several times to try and understand what she is saying. After all, she is a top neuroscientist. You can’t simply dismiss what she says. Being a mother of 3 children – I want to know.

I am already poisoning my kids with un-organic food, we live in a polluted city, there are cellular antennas in the neighborhood, not to mention their personal mobile phones. Am I doing some more damage to their brains by letting them have a Facebook account??

Anxiously I was looking for scientific hints in the article. The research conducted… the methods and subjects… anything to learn a little more. But the most scientific reference I found was: she “believes repeated exposure could effectively ‘rewire’ the brain”.

OK.

The article quotes her saying “Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered” and then adds the quote “My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.”

Last month, the same lady, who is a member of the house of lords said “I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues…, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf,” arguing that exposure to computer games, instant messaging, chat rooms and social networking sites “could leave a generation with poor attention spans”.

Well, hello and welcome to E V O L U T I O N.

Indeed not all evolutions do well for the specie. Think Mammoth for instance. Perhaps we are doomed.

But, does this mean we have to exclude all new media and stick with the old ways? Is preserving the current wiring of the brain more important than developing and arriving at new, yet unknown, places?

Here is something to think of. My 9th grader told me about her new History text book. Text books are rarely noted or gaining any sort of comment from a teenager. But she actually pointed out that this is a rather good book to study from. The book’s uniqueness is by adding several different fields of information into each page. Allowing the students to follow the main text while absorbing other types of information, some are minor others are accented.

When I encountered this fantastic presentation by Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins – things fit. I already wrote about it here.

I am not a scientist. But I believe that Lady Susan Greenfield is right. The young brains do go through some re-wiring. Sarah Robbins is right too. Students today are capable of handling a lot more information then students in the past. Call it “poor attention spans” if you like. I actually think it’s rich attention span.

I know that my Kids find it easier to absorb and process several sensory and information sources at once. They are certainly more successful at it than most adults I know and I believe they are better at it then I was as a student. Excuse me for not crediting social networking or penguin club with these achievements. I give most of the credit to the environment they are growing into and the future they are naturally preparing for.

Some of the many comments made to the article on “The Mail” try to dismiss everything as an oldie attacking the younger generation. Which makes you wonder really, about how society related to various media changes in the past century, or better yet – from print, through phones, to mass and digital media.

Still one question remains: can we really fight it, or should we find a way to use it to society’s advantage?

Control your info?? On the Internet??

I read Mark Zuckerberg’s blog titled “On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information” and thought.

I remember a time when I regretted that my phone number appeared on the printed phone directory. Once the directory was printed and circulated there was nothing I could do to change it, delete it, retrieve it or make it go away. Hundreds of thousands of people had this private information at their disposal.
I waited a whole year till the next directory was published without my details, and hoped that people quickly dumped the older, out of date, copy.

But the online life actually awards us better opportunities to control our information, even if it’s slightly more complicated.

True, we cannot control information that was already circulated, distributed, copied or passed on to our friends and contacts, and their friends and contacts. But why not enable us full control on those items which we have published or uploaded and are identified with us? This control should be definitely ours.

Not according to Facebook. Here is the phrasing of their new terms of service, the problematic part only:
“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

Facebook is assuming ownership of copyrighted material. How does that settle even with the friendliest CC? They think they have a right to use any information I put on Facebook for their own commercial gain – and to use it not only when I am using Facebook, but forever. It’s as if Flickr or Picasa will suddenly decide they own all the photos on their servers and can use them for commercial gain however they like.

To be honest, I can’t imagine giving up Facebook at the moment. I am using other networks too. Good old LinkedIn at the top, and Twitter, as one of the recent I joined. But Facebook somehow allows the mixed networking of formal and non formal, friends and family, business and fun. If you want to hear and be heard – Facebook is your main channel. You need to learn of events and happenings – this is the way. There isn’t a day I don’t visit my Facebook homepage at least once, mostly more.

But I must admit I will think twice before tagging images of myself, not to mention uploading any photos I’ve taken, adding notes or blogs or any other creations. I don’t mind very much, though, about my personal profile. Mainly because I carefully created this online profile and coordinated it with my profiles on other networks as well. I carefully chose the information I wanted to post and the information I should keep to myself. On a standard Facebook profile page one is asked, for example, on political views or religion – things that are definitely not for public sharing and eternal storing.

Back to print. I gave someone a business card. Actually, believe it or not, it was on an Internet World convention a thousand years ago. On the back I wrote my private Yahoo email address. I was recently contacted by this person. Looks like my business card survived “for ever”. But I didn’t mind the survival of such info forever. My yearbook photo also exists forever. So what?

However, if the poems I wrote to my high school sweetheart when I was 17 were suddenly published, because I was once a member of some club or network who chose to store and own it – I might have been slightly embarrassed. To some people their past creations, photos or publications can be even detrimental, financially or socially.

My suggestion? Think twice about the information you are donating to Facebook, oops, sorry, publishing on Facebook.

Reflections on a democracy

Following the results of yesterday’s general elections in Israel, I have some reflections on democracy. Especially our own democracy.

Israel is a young state. Only 60 years old, it is not surprising that it is still searching for the right method of political order, or governance. Very clear on the fact that it is this version or another of a democracy, a rule of the people, I keep hearing the voice of my high-school history teacher reminding us, in a lesson on 20th century in Europe, that the democracy has what it takes to destroy itself.

If you legislate rules to prevent democracy from destroying itself – you will probably destroy democracy with these rules. Free will of the people is a core of democracy, which is probably why some people in Israel find it difficult to understand the Republic version of governance.

Israel is indeed a democracy when is comes to allowing all of its citizens to voice their will. It seems like we have a political party for every 30 citizens. Which is why this democracy, for years now, has not practiced a real rule of the majority, but rather the rule of the minorities. No party in the history of Israel was big enough to become the ruling party, without the participation of the smaller, minor parties. Those small parties, faithful to their voters, exercised their power as the balancing factor to extract as much as they could in return for supporting the bigger party as the leader of the country.

Yesterday’s elections generated, again, a talk about the need to change the method of governance in Israel. If we are going to be a democracy it should be a rule of the majority. But perhaps the type of a republic will function better. Whichever way you look at it, it seems like the threshold for registering a political party in Israel is way too low. This creates a weak government again and again, which in turn weakens the country and generates a chaos of opinions, instead of a clear targeted government.

The results of the elections yesterday are puzzling: who will lead the country? Is it the party who won the largest number of seats, as it traditionally is? Or is it the party who is the largest, among the group of parties who won the majority of seats? I believe, that most Israeli citizens who voted for the 4 larger parties, would have preferred a “unity” government of those large parties or at least 3 of them, without the minority parties extortion, usually representing the extreme wings of the people. But the thirst for power may blind the leaders of these parties.

The party who received most of the voice is the young centre party “Kadima” (freely translated ‘forward’). But the second largest party, only one seat less than Kadima, is the “Likud” party, the right side of the centre. They claim they should be the ruling party because the collection of right-winged parties, including the many small parties, representing various minority groups, makes a majority of right-winged people in Israel. So, being a democracy, the majority should rule. The Kadima people are saying, obviously, that if they won the largest number of seats, they should be the governing party. A republic might have worked better for Kadima this time.

In the process two other phenomena happened. The party which was the ruling party for most of Israel’s existence, the Labor party, has lost its power and became only fourth in the number of seats it achieved.
The party that became the third in its power is the party called “Israel Beitenu” (translated – “Israel is our home”). This party established in 1999, has now won two more seats than the Labor party and people are wondering about the changes in the political scenery and what it means for the future of the country.

L’État c’est Moi ??

Can’t end this blog post without my observation on the web scenery of the 4 large parties.
If  I have to rate them – Israel-Beitenu gets the highest rate. It’s a clear, no nonsense site, easy to find your way in it. All relevant information is accessible from the homepage. A link to the party’s platform is available on the first page. The site offers information in Hebrew, Russian and English. Not surprising, though disappointing, that they offer no information in Arabic, which is the second official language of the state of Israel and is relevant to about 20% of its residents.

The Likud party’s web site could have received a better score, had it not been on the url http://www.netanyahu.org.il/

What is it? L’État c’est Moi ?? Where is the party??

They also offer information in Hebrew, Russian and English only, ignoring the need for Arabic.

The Labor party’s web site must be the worst – with the figure of the candidate to prime minister walking over the screen – I don’t know whether it’s humor or misuse of the medium. Either way, the web site is in Hebrew only, which is amazing considering the fact that a million Jewish citizens are speaking and reading Russian, and even more are Israeli Arab citizens, whose first language is Arabic, a public that the labor party claims to address too.

Competing for the worst web site is also the Kadima web site. No English, no Arabic. A modest link in Russian – hardly enough, considering who they are up against. I don’t believe in the flash animation on the homepage of the party. I’d rather have a straight forward information. And here they make it even harder for me to know what their platform is – since I am required to download PDF files to my computer, if I want to know what they propose on the 9 topics listed at the bottom of an inner page. This information should have been put forward. This is what the party is about. At least in a democracy.

World Without Google

“World without oil” is the name of a famous alternate reality game (ARG). It was created to imagine the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis. Titled “a serious game for the public good” it is now used for education purposes, depicting a scary reality.

I had this association the other day, when Google stopped functioning for “less than” an hour. All links had a “may harm your computer” warning attached. Suddenly, people where shocked and amazed at the horrifying possibility of a world without Google.

The Chicago Breaking News article include links to other sources reported on the event. Lucky it was the weekend.

So I was thinking about it. I mean, it was OK before Google. There were other search engines. At the beginning Google seemed pale compared with them. Yet nowadays, the indisputable ruler of the world wide web is Google. The ultimate portal. All quests begin with Google.

Well, just in case, I thought it could be wise to prepare a list of alternative search engines:

First is the good old Yahoo! . Strangely enough, yahoo is the one looking pale now, compared to the relatively colorful pages Google may generate.
Lycos is still doing what it knows. Quick and relevant search.
What used to be MSN search is now Live search.
It seems like there are many more search engines we simply skip on our way to Google. You can actually find many listed on wikipedia and learn of local search engines and sector searches.
On this page I found WIKIA search, which seems just a little different from the rest, aiming at the web 3.0, or semantic web. It did start with the wrong foot with me, placing the two most irrelevant results first, forcing me to use quotes. It has some interesting features built in. Starting with being able to graphically personalize your search page, than you can add web sites to the search results, you can delete results and also search by application – including such as twitter, meetup, wordpress, alexa, crunchbase, lastfm and more.

I also tried DogPile, the search engine searching all of the above from a single point, promising to donate a portion of its income to rescue pets. Nice touch. I think I may adopt it. What am I missing there? The comfortable reach to my other Google applications – the mail, documents, photos, Youtube and other personal services.

Well, there is life beyond Google after all. Ha. So why was it such a shock to see Google down for less than an hour?

A Global Game Jam

It was the first time I joined The Global Game Jam and a new discovery for me.
The first discovery was that of the location. It was my first visit to “The Garage”. Literally a garage, located in an old building, among other garages and storage rooms. Oil and tools, peeling walls, and rusty metal gates. The Garage must be one of the most famous locations among the Israeli Hi Tech industry in the last several years. A group established around it, “The Garage Geeks“, has been hosting various hi-tech events there.

I didn’t verify statistics, but we were told that our Israeli Game-Jam group was one of the largest groups. We had close to 60 participants. Unfortunately, less than 10% female presence, though.

The garage was packed when I arrived Friday morning. People brought folding tables inside, so they will have a proper sitting area, and it was so crowded we could hardly move between the tables. Seems like most of the people knew each other, or at least there were groups of people who know each other. Yuval Sapir who organized it with people from the Israeli chapter of IGDA like Oded Sharon and the Garage people like Rafael Mizrahi,  spoke on behalf of the Global Game Jam and ran their introduction including the constraints and guideline for the creation of games. That’s when the wheels started to move and people began pouring their game ideas.

This creative session was one of the best parts of the game jam. Game developers can be technical people, programmers, or writers – narrators, graphic designer, or animators, not to mention music composers. Some see games through numbers or command lines, some through words, there are those who visualize games and those who can hear them. It is a multi-disciplinary industry, which makes a creative session incredibly interesting. Ideas started to shoot and people contributed each with their own view-point to all game ideas. For the next 36 hours people formed groups and started to work on their games. Some members contributed to more than one group. Seems like graphic designers were needed the most and programmers also exchanged information and helped each other. Narration was less needed for these 5 minute games.

On the second day, games were already taking form and sound. By the evening of this day uploads started. The Israeli session had to cut in shorter than others, as by Sunday most participants have to go back to work.

The Israeli Game Development industry grows steadily over the last few years. Several years ago one of the colleges opened a program for certificate in Game Development. IGDA, the International Game Developers Association has an active chapter in Israel, and people are trying to create collaborations with the international game developers’ community through various channels. However, Israel does not stand out in the global community. Here, it is still considered to be a developing industry. Venture investments in games in Israel if made, concentrate on supporting technology, and not content. Successful Israeli game developers who “made it”, had to make it in the US, with companies like Oberon Media and Impact Games.

The global digital games industry is growing steadily for years now. It’s one of the very few economic segments that are, more or less, recession-proof.
Games supply the most accessible and one of the cheapest channels of entertainment. With more people at home and less money to spend, experts predict a change in the industry, but certainly not a fall like in other industries. Some even predict a positive impact in the coming year.

So here we have a young industry, with lots of room to grow to, with good timing, relatively to other industries, yet, no interested investors. Game developers I spoke with suspect this lack on interest by potential investors may be due to their lack of understanding in the industry, others seem to think that even the well-known-risk-investors are looking for safe harbors nowadays, not to mention quick return on their investments. Not all games are that quick. So Israeli game developers are forced to look for investments abroad. Placing a question mark over the future of this industry in Israel .