[editor's note: Phooey on Digg. Sorry that this post is a bit of a repeat, but I used their "blog this" link and all it ended up doing was truncating what I wrote and didn't put any links in the body of the post (which is just my style). So I'm posting this again with some additional information]

So Gen X were slackers and Gen Y are kickin’ it? There are some nice statistics on Steven Johnson’s blog that show that our new Web medium is encouraging participation and entrepreneurship. Kids rule! —give them video games. And maybe Johnson is right in his tome “Everything Bad is Good For You” that this development has more to do with a generation that has grown up with interactive mediums (i.e. video games and the web) than a generation that grew up with a passive medium (i.e. television).

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A few days ago, I mentioned an article in the economist that discussed Bayesian learning in people. The article led me to wonder if it is this kind of learning in people coupled with the influence of the media that could cause people to overestimate[PDF] their chances of being a victim in a crime. Little did I know… Read more…

Steven Johnson has jumped on the Web 2.0 cluetrain along with a lot of other people. He uses a great metaphor to discuss web 2.0, that of a rain forest versus a desert. I think his metaphor is appropriate for more reasons than he realizes, though, namely that this jungle, built on vast quantities of data, has no inherent mechanism for trust. In other words, in just the same way that Web 2.0 makes room for a lot of niche activities, it also makes more room for predators.

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In “Interface Culture,” Steven Johnson identifies many programs of media that aim to imitate a new form of media. His most eloquent example was that of the radio drama. The radio drama, the form of the drama itself, the theater, was “stripped down to meet the limited dimensions of radio” and would have been much more suited to the new media of television. [1] And just as television outpaced the radio and the radio attempted to imitate it, so the television has attempted to imitate the next generation of tactile media found on the Internet. CNN’s “Situation Room” is the latest of an incarnation of television that only barely captures the power of the next medium and manufactures a disjointed interface in the process. Read more…

Sorry for the made-you-look title… but made you look! At any rate, I can’t believe that Steven Johnson’s latest release happens to be just what I was discussing on Sunday with my girlfriend’s family. Read more…