I am 100% Exceptionalist (for me, Johannes Gutenberg is the most important person of the 1st half of the 2nd millennium, Tim Berners-Lee the most important person of the 2nd half – actually that’s interesting – you said “Internet” and I cited the inventor of the Web. Even though the Net is a superset of the Web and so does everything it does and more, I do think that it’s the Web that changes everything)

I am 85% Technodeterminist. Just as we are hosts for genes to reproduce themselves, I do think we are hosts for memes and technology to reproduce themselves. You can argue that anything that’s possible to invent, will be invented. Even if you have a George W. Bush who hates scientists, drives them out of his country, and destroys a nation’s half-century of scientific leadership in a single administration… those scientists will just flee to other more progressive nations and do the work anyway. It’s funny that David calls himself an “ETH”… if you come to ETH Zurich, you’ll find that the place is filled with Iowa farm boys!!

Did I just digress?

I don’t think that you can prevent anything from being developed. But you can change the rate of development. I like to think of it as river rafting. It’s a lot more about the river than it is about you, and you’re pretty much going where the river wants to go. Then again, if there’s a big rock in front of you, a little steering to the right or left could significantly change your experience. So, mostly about the river/technology, but we can steer a little bit and that’s pretty important.

I am 90% Optimist. There’s plenty to be pessimistic about. I just listened to Lisa Nakamura’s talk on “enlightened racism” – depressing stuff. In fact the larger idea, besides the chauvinism that the currency of the web/life is lol, that’s troubling. But if you think about the developed world, if citizens there don’t happen to have their lives cut across by illness, they often do live in “entertainment culture” with or without the net.

I have students who spend 60 hours a week on Facebook, which for me is a fairly contentless site. BTW, has anyone projected how long it will be till Facebook passes India and becomes the 2nd most populous nation on earth?

I could go on, but that’s enough already, plenty to be pessimistic about. But for every “Google making us stupid” there’s a network of people building something amazing. I like to liken Wikipedia to the starship Enterprise – you could never build the Enterprise on earth, it would collapse, it can only be built in the weightlessness of space, and Britannica is probably as big as you can go in the gravity of paper, for Wikipedia you can only build it in the “weightlessness” of the cloud.

When you look at these large problems of today – Global Warming, Global Water, etc, they don’t seem solvable by a solitary genius, they do seem like “network” problems that need network solutions. So perhaps our networked/ADD culture is appropriate for these kinds of issues.

Because the web is disruptive, it’s easy to be pessimistic about the losses. We don’t interact with our physical neighbors as much as we may have in the past, but we now have virtual neighbors who we share more in common with.

Going back to the river rafting analogy, it seems, well, pessimistic to be a pessimist! If we’re going there anyway, it’d be insane not to “find the fun” – wouldn’t it?! Also, hmm… is this another axis? Creationist vs Evolutionist? Well, not exactly, but if you think that Homo sapiens are the ultimate manifestation of intelligence in the universe, then lots of things, AI for example, become creepy because they threaten to mess up perfection. On the other hand, if you think our species is a pretty amazing, robust, plastic form that none-the-less is just “a” form, not the ultimate form, then why wouldn’t intelligence evolve to other forms over time and why is that bad.

Anyway, back to the river, I don’t see how you can put your back to the wall and try to stop the river by chanting the mantra “not on my watch” – even if you win, you lose! I’d much rather jump on the uncertain raft, steer it a little and see where we find ourselves.

kk – so I guess I’m:

ETH – 100/85/90

I know I wrote about the Net’s temporality in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, but I don’t remember what I said :(

I like the various suggestions for a fourth dichotomy brought up in comments so far. Mark (above) suggested time: I wonder whether you can create a dichotomy specifically around time (how we perceive it) that would relate in a significant way to your “internet fanatic” scale?

The internet in some ways wreaks merry hell with our experience of time, whether we indulge its ability to suspend, accelerate, or anticipate time, or whether we resist it. In particular, I’m thinking about the work of Philip Zimbardo (The Time Paradox), which I blogged about briefly on May 22 (albeit not in the context you’re presenting). In Zimbardo’s analyses, our perception(s) of time really shape what we do with our lives, and if the internet influences how we perceive time, then that’s a strong argument for including it in your set of dichotomies.

As I’m about halfway through Nicholas Carr’s book and really enjoying it, I’d probably have to class myself with him as an ETP by your metric. [ However, as I am also a strong P on the Myers-Briggs, I do reserve the right to change my position as I learn more. ;-) ]

I do think it’s worth noting that Carr may not be as much of a Technodeterminist and certainly not as much of a Pessimist as the current public discussion paints him. If his motivation for writing The Shallows is the same as mine would have been, he may merely be trying to give voice to grossly under-represented (but perhaps widely held?) opinions.

How would you classify Linda Stone? ECH? I appreciate her focus on how _how_ we use technology determines its impact on us. Does that make her a strong C?

What if I think that technology does carry an “intellectual ethic” that interacts with culture, and that interfaces can be designed to encourage certain patterns of behavior, but that the way we utilize technology as individuals gives us at least some degree of control over it rather than it over us? Maybe I’m a Contextualist after all.