GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATION t

GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATION t MICHAEL FASSBENDER - BEST ACTOR CULTURE "THE MOST PROVOCATIVE AND COMPELLING FILM OF THE YEAR" "ONCE SEEN, NEVER FORGOTTEN "MESMERISING" "OUTST1NtANDING" * * * * * "SEARINGLY BRILLIANT AND UTTERLY. ,UNMISSABLE" *:A:A* **** * * * * "MICHAEL FASSBENDER GIVES A SCORCHING PERFORMANCE" MICSASS BEN DE R IN CINEMAS FRIDAY Ii `Elites that are open and based on merit can be nurturing Continued from page 13 Brockman (1969), taking information theory - the mathematical theory of communications - as a model for regarding all human experience. A main theme has continued to inform my work over the years: new technologies = new perceptions. An incident from those years stands out. During an evening at dinner. Cage reached across the table and handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. Fast forward two years. Around 1967, I spent two days with Stewart Brand while he was assembling the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog and we sat and read the book together. underlining as we went along. Central to our interest was the notion of 'feedback", the non-linear relationship of input to output. It was apparent that the ideas in cybernetic theory were far more important than the applications for which the mathematical descriptions were designed. Stewart and I have been in touch regularly since then - a 45-year connection. 1N Was it difficult to come up with Edge's 2010 question, about the Internet? JB Every August, I begin a conversation with three of the original members of Edge - Stewart, Kevin Kelly and George Dyson. Eventually, I came up with the idea of asking how the internet is affecting the scientific work, lives, minds and reality of the contributors. A big consideration of this question is the difference between "we" and "you". When people respond to "we" questions, their words tend to resemble expert papers, public pronouncements or talks delivered from a stage. "You" leads us to share specifics of our lived experience. The challenge then is not to let responses slip into life's more banal details. M I was struck by something that one respondent, Evgeny Mammy, said about his fear of a chasm opening "between the disengaged masses and the ovcrengaged elites". The elites, he goes on. "continue thriving in the new environment, exploiting superb online tools for scientific research and collaboration" etc. Actually, it's clear that many - most? - of your respondents are, par excellence, members of those elites. That's not a criticism, but it might mean that a casual reader could come away from the book thinking that public engagement with the internet and its significance is rather more elevated and intelligent than is actually the case. JBThe problem with a discussion that uses the word "elites" is that the word is automatically perceived as a pejorative. But that's not how I feel about it at all. Elites area problem if they're closed and exclusive. Elites that are open, inclusive and based on merit can be nurturing. Also, members of elites give one another permission to be great. One example is the Beat poets. Another example is the mix of people who created Silicon Valley. While Edge is a read-only site, the cast of characters contributing to the various projects is ever-changing and inclusion is by recommendation of members of the community. That said, Edge is not for everybody. It helps to know some stuff. But one thing you won't find in the responses is arrogance. The site stands or falls on the quality of the questions it asks. In terms of this particular question - "Is the internee changing the way you think?" - there's the question of people having skin in the game. The contributors to Edge are what I call third-culture thinkers or intellectuals. Not only am they focused on science- minded pursuits based on evidence and empiricism, they are also public communicators, reaching out to the public by means of their books, lectures, etc. They live by their wits, and doingso in the changing times of the digital age is a challenge. Their concerns are very different than, say, the casual user, who has signed up for a social network and by default becomes the product whose private information is sold to advertisers. IN In a way, the shadow of Marshall McLuhan looms over the conversation. Two of his aphorisms in particular - "The medium is the message" and "We shape our tools and later they shape us" - seem particularly apposite. The first captured the thought that what's important about a medium is not the content of the messages it carries but what the medium is doing to those who use it. That seemed to me to emerge from lots of the responses (and not just Nick Carr's. either). And the meme about our tools shaping us surfaced again and again in the essays. JB McLuhan is certainly central to INSIDE TRACK Edge members share their opinions about MARTIN REES Ex-president of the Royal Society. professor of cosmology and astrophysics. University of Cambridge The internet enables far wider participation in front-line science it levels the playing field between researchers in male( centres and those in relative isolation. hitherto handicapped by inefficient communication. It has transformed the way science is communicated and debated. More fundamentally. it changes how research is done.what might be discovered and how students learn. JON KLEINBERG Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University When I first used an Internet search engine in the early 1990s. I imagined myself dipping into a vast. universallbrary. a museum vault filled withaccumulated knowledge. The fact that I shared this museum vault with other visitors was something that I knew in principle. but could not directly perceive. When I go onfne today. all those rooms and hallways are teeming. What strikes me is the human texture of the information. I've come to appreciate the way the event and the crowd in fact live in symbiosis. each dependent on the other — the people all talking at once about the event. but the event only fully comprehensible as thesum totalof the human reaction to it. The cacophony might make sense. and it might not. HELEN FISHER Research professor, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University The nternet is a retum to yesteryear it simply allows me (and the rest of us)to think arid behave in ways for which we were built long.bng ago. Takelove. We think it's natural to court a totay unknown person ina bar or club. But Ws far more natural to 14 THE NEW REVIEW I 08.01.12 I The Observer EFTA00607426