Alice has never known a world without the Internet. Naturally, since she was born well after the advent of the World-Wide Web. But depending on how old she is, she may not even remember a world before Web 2.0. After all, in just a couple of months we’ll be coming on thirteen years of Google.
It’s a little terrifying, in a breathtaking sort of way. Does she remember life before YouTube? Do you?
xkcd #903
Alice’s genius in Kamisama no Memo-chou is dramatized, but in many ways it isn’t unique.
Are you familiar with the concept of technological singularity? If you aren’t: It’s a hypothetical future scenario in which technological advancement becomes self-sustaining and self-improving. Usually, people believe that we’ll reach this state through the invention of superintelligent AI, computers that can think– and innovate– many times faster than the human brain. (While robots may have yet to pass the Turing Test, we do have some capable of making independent scientific discoveries.)
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking the future might be much simpler. Much digital ink has been spilled over the rise of “cloud computing,” wherein society relies on shared high-powered, connected servers to store information, rather than on personal computers. However, the Internet has also changed the way people consume information. Anybody who’s lost an evening or three to Wikipedia can tell you how true that is.
All the information of the world is just a few keystrokes away. Literally anything you want to learn, you can. What an elegant development, a “cloud” for the brain! If you can’t beat human intelligence, enhance it.
There is one rather odd and head-scratching thing that Kamisama no Memo-chou does, calling Alice a “NEET detective” with her crack team of NEET investigators, when the very nature of what they do precludes NEETdom in the first place (“Not in Education, Employment or Training”). But I think we’re meant to let go of definitions. They are NEETs not for lack of revenue, but in that they exist outside the system.
Tied to nothing, beholden to no one, this Scooby gang charges forward with computerized confidence to solve the mysteries of the world. Not quite transhuman, perhaps, but it is definitely a kind of power.
Further Reading
Vucub_caquix and AJtheFourth have a running conversation on this show’s first episode, both Part A and Part B.
July 10, 2011 at 3:08 pm
The subtitle, “It’s the only NEET thing to do”, is kind of interesting.
One of the draft titles for the final Evangelion episodes was “The Only Neat Thing To Do”, which was the title of a SF story about a young girl on a spaceship who discovers she is infected with a deadly infectious organism and sacrifices herself by piloting the ship into the sun.
Coincidence? A clue as to where the ending is going, what with the sense of responsibility to end all human suffering? Well, probably not since the light novels don’t seem to go that way.
July 13, 2011 at 8:08 am
That is an incredible connection. Thank you for pointing it out!
Maybe it’s not an exact one-for-one correspondence, but the link to death and self-sacrifice is interesting, at least.
July 10, 2011 at 3:13 pm
And watching the video link, ‘speaker of the dead’ – an Orson Scott Card reference? One wonders if those are the only SF references.
July 10, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Really, all her talk about dead people and reviving and writers and detectives just sorta went over my head, not to mention almost completely mocking the speakers for the dead (how do you sum up an entire person’s life with such a simple cliché? Is that what speakers for the dead do, look at what somebody did and browse on TVTropes to find a trope that somewhat fits the circumstances?). I don’t know if they intended to do that, but Alice & Co. just seem way too elitist, as if they’re super-intelligent people who can make a difference in the world – even in their ‘modesty’ (“These people die because I didn’t prevent them from dying!”) shows that she thinks she /could’ve/ prevented people from dying if she could prevent people from dying. I don’t know what I’m saying, perhaps all I mean is that these characters are getting way too self-assured. Perhaps there will be a future episode in which her deductions break down and she calls for help in a moe-manner, but even that reeks of self-pity instead of that sense of failure that we all know.
I’ll tie this into this post by saying that Alice isn’t anyone special or anything, she’s what she proclaims herself to be – a NEET leeching off the information on the Internet. Even Victorique is better than that.
July 11, 2011 at 12:21 am
If there is one thing these characters are, it is precisely self-assured. Especially Alice. But I think she did already “break down” and called “for help in a moe-manner” when her teddy bear’s ear ripped. We can probably expect more of that.
It’s been almost a week since I saw this, but from what I remember, I don’t believe she was claiming to have the ability to prevent people from dying. Rather, her status outside society allows her to be concerned for the troubles of people that others overlooked in their routine, and maybe even unearth those lost voices.
July 11, 2011 at 4:45 pm
No no, she said something about ‘people are dying because I /don’t/ have the power to stop them from dying’, haha.
Yeah, that breakdown felt really self-pitiful instead of a ‘real’ breakdown – you know that sense of failure you get when everything just goes wrong? That’s the type of breakdown that I mean – something that I feel never happens to characters these days.
Maybe she’s just /way/ too similar to Victorique, I don’t know.
July 13, 2011 at 8:13 am
Well, Victorique has that magical ability to pull out evidence from nowhere, with little rhyme or reason beyond proving her theory of the crime. Can’t really beat that.
It’s interesting that you should bring up elitism, though. The hardcore internet crowd, especially among the otaku, has this weird bit of cognitive dissonance where they feel themselves special while fully acknowledging that they’re neckbeards living in their parents’ basements.
July 13, 2011 at 8:09 am
That struck me as well, but I’m wary about assigning meaning to fansubs.
July 10, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Yes, I do remember life before YouTube, ADSL, Web 2.0.
When I was studying programming, C++ was the most advance programming language.
How time flies as technologies get more advance by the second.
July 13, 2011 at 8:16 am
I do too, but only vaguely, as a childhood thing. I got a 56K connection when I was in fifth grade, and it rocked my world.
Technology is advancing in orders of magnitude compared to the past. It just remains to be seen if we’re going to hit a wall, or achieve some kind of breakthrough. That’s the singularity, if it happens.
July 10, 2011 at 5:23 pm
I think basically NEET implies that they don’t have proper occupations, but whatever.
Anyways, people really do rely on the internet a lot these days. I even catch my self looking things up on the iPhone at times when I’m not sure. Using the internet, you can give the illusion that you’re inherently smart by knowing all the answers where you’re actually just searching it up on Wikipedia. That’s not a strong argument, but I just wanted to throw my two cents in.
July 13, 2011 at 8:18 am
How do you think I get by?
But being able to find information whenever you want is also a kind of intelligence, I think. It astounds me how little people actually bother to type a few things in Google that would answer all their questions.
July 10, 2011 at 6:02 pm
Something I tend to fixate on (and you can corroborate this with my viewing partner) is how this large amount of information, or extension of our own organic computing abilities, affects how we perceive the world at large.
Take, for example, my brother, myself, my close friend Shawn, and Vuc. Technology has changed rapidly in the years that all four of us were growing up; however, I was born two years prior to the three of them. Despite them all having drastically different personalities, I’ve noticed that they, and other friends of mine who are younger than this two-year age gap, tend to lose themselves to wikipedia, youtube, etc. far more often than myself. My own ways of processing information are a lot more focused, and narrow-minded (in the literal sense).
I’m no scientist, but I can’t help but see a correlation between the way that they process information and the fact that their brain functions were less mature when they began to use the same technology that I did. In similar fashion compare this to my parents, who are both technologically savvy and also use the latest technology with ease. They process information in a far more methodical and disciplined way than I do, and never are distracted by incoming information. They simply put it aside, finish what they’re currently doing, and then click on the link to a stupid youtube video.
As you mentioned, Alice is someone who has been connected to mass amounts of information her entire life through cloud computing. Yet, this sort of scatterbrained way of gathering things is exactly was seems to make her such an excellent detective; she doesn’t delve too deeply into any one part. Alice can piece the puzzle together more accurately due to the fact that her brain simply works that way, and has been conditioned to work that way thanks to growing up with this type of technology.
I love the idea of the idea of technological singularity changing as technology develops. With the advent of social networking, it certainly seems that it will be more like what you describe, and extension of our own abilities, rather than independent robots.
Fascinating entry. Sorry I exploded all over your comments section.
July 11, 2011 at 5:55 am
If there’s one blogger who won’t mind you exploding over his comments section, it’s 2DT. The guy’s a saint.
>As you mentioned, Alice is someone who has been connected to mass amounts of information her entire life through cloud computing. Yet, this sort of scatterbrained way of gathering things is exactly was seems to make her such an excellent detective; she doesn’t delve too deeply into any one part. Alice can piece the puzzle together more accurately due to the fact that her brain simply works that way, and has been conditioned to work that way thanks to growing up with this type of technology.
I disagree. To me, it seems like this “scatterbrained” perspective that the internet imparts would be less than helpful for someone like a detective, since it would distract attention from any particular detail. On the other hand, the existence of such a convenient database also allows for cross-referencing and a more through analysis can be done with the massive amount of information available.
July 13, 2011 at 8:28 am
Hmm. Perhaps it’s only scatterbrained from the perspective of the common consumer, is what I’m thinking. The datasphere still possesses a certain elegance, if you’ve got a long enough perspective.
July 13, 2011 at 8:26 am
You and Vuc apologize way too much for things I should be thanking you for. You’re interacting with my material. It’s the blogger’s dream! I’m just sorry I can’t quite match it.
This generation might indeed be more inclined to see patterns, as a survival mechanism (against the endless churning sea of information) if nothing else. For an example of that, see this very blog, versus the material of a more traditionally journalistic effort like Anime News Network. I think of them as the Jin to my Mugen.
July 10, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Oooh, tying the evolution of the web to the idea of a technological singularity (which I only know of thanks to Dresden Codak!) is interesting. It certainly looks more and more likely to be the path to the futures of science fiction, but then, it’s very difficult to predict how these things will develop in the future. People tend to assume it’ll be like what we have now, but more so (perhaps this is where the flying cars ideal came from?), whereas actually the future is often new and unexpected.
The web is a social technology, in the sense that social factors shape how it has developed and will develop. It’s a medium through which we communicate, in various ways. Human social patterns will be reflected in its shape (and that’s why I’m planning a thesis on online social groups! ^_^). I think that’s also which makes it resonate with the singularity idea: the web reflects human nature, in some hard-to-define but fundamental ways, if only because it’s shaped and organised by a whole lot of humans.
July 13, 2011 at 8:32 am
Whenever someone says the future’s in any way lacking because there aren’t any flying cars, I wonder what they think about the global human information network sitting in their pocket, or the fact that they can eat a Big Mac in Johannesburg and it’ll be exactly the same as a Big Mac in Toronto. But we don’t think about the things we grow up with.
Good luck with your thesis! Sounds fascinating.
July 10, 2011 at 9:00 pm
In the 50s, we had slide rules, paper encyclopedias, paper dictionaries and the post office. In the 80s, we had electronic calculators and electric typewriters and faxes. Now we have a web page or an app for just about any piece of information we want to find, process or send.
My parents were young in the 50s, I was young in the 80s. I think we can expect the world to change at least as much between now and the 40s as it did in either of the previous 30 year periods. Which is both scary and exciting.
But as much as things change, they’ll stay the same. Whether we check a wiki or pull out E-F in our Enyclopedia Britannica, we are still doing the same basic thing we’ve been doing ever since writing was invented.
July 13, 2011 at 8:37 am
This is true. It’s also a huge chink in the armor of this cloud-transhumanism idea: If we’re just accessing already-available human information faster, then how can we achieve a singularity? We’d eventually hit a wall of human ability, even if that wall is composed of the combined effort and will of 9 billion connected minds.
Oh well. It looks good on paper.
July 11, 2011 at 3:12 am
According to the definition, backpackers are NEETs too.
July 14, 2011 at 8:54 am
But they totally are!
In an admirable way, though– the way some of them can just walk away from whatever they’re doing and travel the world for a year or more, it’s amazing.
July 11, 2011 at 6:33 am
I think the idea of the word “Employed” in NEET is twisted in a way that people can actually be NEETs while having a substantial source of income. That’s because the word “Employed” in the abbreviation means “having a job that requires the basic fundamentals of employed life”, i.e. going to a standard workplace, having regular shifts and schedules, as well as a fixed income (unless Alice and the gang have an agreed price on their jobs, which isn’t the case). Meanwhile, occupations that do not require employment can’t be labelled as “improper” or irregular, as there are some of these jobs that still adhere to the fundamentals I stated earlier (this is to answer tomphile’s comment). Simply put, NEETs would go along the definition of freelance jobs that they can accept in accordance to their specialization/s.
July 14, 2011 at 8:56 am
This is true. “Employed” is an incredibly loaded word, and it says a lot about the country that values its children becoming civil servants over, say, entrepreneurship. If you’re not a NEET, in many ways you’re plugged in.
July 11, 2011 at 7:29 am
This brings up something I often think about back when I had to take final exams, especially in subjects so dependent on memorization like molecular biology and different biochemical pathways. What is the point? After the test, I can do a quick check on wikipedia and immediately know exactly which organic compounds require which catalyst to make what. Do I really need to spend hours memorizing them?
Maybe in a few years, students really won’t have to with the way information is being handled. In fact, I remember my professor harking back to a time when every chemistry student memorized the periodic table. Nowadays, no one does it anymore. Progress, I suppose.
July 11, 2011 at 10:26 am
It’s all a matter of convenience now. It’ll be a matter of time before a lot of people become total idiots who rely more on the Internet to do their assignments rather than review and study the notes they themselves have written.
July 14, 2011 at 8:59 am
It is rather strange, to be in such a technologically advanced profession and being trained as if you’re getting ready for the day the machines rebel and leave us back in the stone age.
But I guess the slippery slope is: If you can look up the answers on Wikipedia to a test that qualifies you to be a doctor, what stops people from self-diagnosing on the Internet? Getting those letters in front of your name requires a certain amount of sacrifice, I suppose.
July 14, 2011 at 9:44 am
Make it constant for those who work in the IT and Tech Departments.
July 14, 2011 at 10:10 am
That’s a great point. Self-diagnosis is pretty dangerous, and that’s why we have professional doctors. The difference, I suppose, is the human element and experience. Symptoms and others are hard to spot for the untrained, and interpreting those signs correctly are even harder.
My college major isn’t actually directly related to medicine. It’s more biochemistry… The research/theory side of things: drugs, pathways… etc. And so it lacks the things that make medical doctors doctors. The emphasis is on hard facts that can be found on the internet (sometimes for a steep price for in online journals…)
Still, I guess true inspiration can never be replaced by technology. The information on the net are put there because someone did the nitty gritty work to further and continue furthering the field.
July 12, 2011 at 1:07 am
A NEET can make money, or be involved in an occupation not necessarily tied to earning income. While they are training somewhat, I think the title still stands. With that aside, we’re indeed moving closer toward a self sustaining reality that isn’t bound to the physical world past hardware necessary to maintain it.
July 14, 2011 at 9:02 am
Can they? I kind of figured it was the archetypal image of the fat guy in a headband, in a room filled with empty cans.
But this show is aiming to recalibrate our definitions, if Alice is any indication.
Thanks for reading!
July 12, 2011 at 5:09 am
NEETs working in a detective agency…
Well, it’s kinda contrary on my part.
Well, I really much get the truer definition of the word itself.
But it does interests me on how well will this one go as it progresses.
July 14, 2011 at 9:02 am
Yes, I am also very interested in this show!
Thanks for reading.
July 15, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Have you been hearing the reports of that study on the effects of Google in our memory? (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388557,00.asp)
July 16, 2011 at 1:22 am
What a scary headline for what seems to me like a not-so-bad thing, once you read the article.
We’ve grown accustomed to machines that we’ll probably want to keep using more of from now on? Good, wonderful, sign me up for the cyborg revolution!
July 28, 2011 at 9:04 am
(To make a connection with current students:) I don’t know about yours, 2DT, but my colleagues and I frequently refer to our students as the Google-search/ Wiki-search/ Spell-check generation. They appear very good at multi-tasking and sifting through large amounts of information, but this is often in a very ‘scratch the surface’ sort of way. That’s probably why (to generalise) they find studying and revising so much harder that we, arguably, did. Our ability to read and process information is clearly a subjective thing, but I’ve noticed it more among the younger folks these days, and quite frankly, it’s a bit worrying. Though, a ‘bit’, being the operative word, I guess, as it’s not something that can be reversed in this sense, given how we’re all bombarded with so much information, in all its forms, these days (takes all the different news channels available these days, for one thing)…
…I guess it raises a moral question for all of us, how to respond to all this information, whether or not we let most of it wash over us, or (where possible) follow more in the direction of Alice and co.
August 1, 2011 at 6:59 pm
[...] importantly, the fact that it is a disputed label. 2DT discussed what exactly makes a NEET in a recent post about Kami-sama no Memo-chou, but it was watching Eden of the East which got me thinking enough to [...]
November 6, 2011 at 10:54 pm
[...] written before about cloud computing, and the advent of a technological human overbrain in the World Wide Web. But what about morality? As we continue to put more and more of ourselves on the Internet, what [...]