Diversion | London, England | 2005

Diversions…

• Geoff Manaugh, This Gaming Life: An Interview with Jim Rossignol:

  What [studies of how playing digital games impact game players] have shown is that visual processing is increased—so that gamers are much better at figuring out what’s happening in a particularly busy visual field—and it’s a very quick change, as well. People only have to play games for a few hours to see a distinct difference. What I think is interesting about that is that we don’t yet have any real handle on what’s going to happen to an entire generation of people who have spent years and years increasing their visual processing. Will we have this sort of super-visual human whose abilities to pick things out and understand things on a visual basis are going to be massively accelerated beyond what we’ve had in the past? I can’t even really see what sort of ramifications that would have—other than that we might be short-sighted as well, from being sat looking at the screen for so long. [laughs]

  I read in a recent story about texting—I think it was in New Scientist—that texting actually improves your general literacy. That was the headline. I think the actual content of the article was that people who were more literate were better at texting, and better at reducing words down to a shorter form. There are graphical forms finding their way into text—obviously, the smileys and emoticons—and people have started doing other ones, like an o with a slash—a little man waving hello—and stuff like that. That kind of pictorial thing—this truncation that you’re getting from text-speak—is rapid visual processing.

  Why is this important? For all the cries for better processes, filters and algorithms to pick out important, relevant content and deliver it with meaningful context, perhaps the real issue is that we just need more time for our minds to adapt to the new reality. Isn’t that what the human mind has always done?

• Josh Young, Not by Links Alone:
  

  “The difficulty of distinguishing good quality from bad is inherent in the business world,” Nobel laureate George Akerlof wrote in the kicker of his most famous paper, published in 1970. “This may indeed explain many economic institutions and may in fact be one of the more important aspects of uncertainty.”

  … the economist Phillip Nelson studied the differences between what he called “search goods” and “experience goods.” Search goods and experience goods express a certain kind of asymmetry. For search goods, consumers can overcome the asymmetry before the point of purchase by doing their homework, while for experience goods, consumers must take their time and invest.

  … News articles are experience goods. Just as with an apple, you need to consume the story, reading the article or watching the video or so on, in order to judge its quality.

  As Alan Patrick points out, this highlights the general problem with charging (especially using micropayments) for widely-available, easy-to-substitue experience goods in highly competitive markets.

• Chart OF The Day: China Goofs Off Online, We Buy Stuff:
  

  Using mostly broadband connections, the Chinese are getting more entertainment online than Americans do, but they lag behind in many other consumer-related online activities.

  Click the link to check out the chart; it’s an interesting example of how numbers are meaningless without context: different demographics (US internet users skew older than Chinese Internet users, leading to very different interests and income levels), access methods (personal PC vs. internet cafes), intellectual property regulations, payment systems (credit card availability), access rules (firewalls), and economic opportunities and incentives for using the web for commerce.

  Link via Jan Chipchase.