Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 20
June 26, 2015
In the kingdom of the bored, the one-armed bandit is king
It still feels a little shameful to admit to the fact, but what engages us more and more is not the content but the mechanism.Kenneth Goldsmith, in a Los Angeles Review of Books essay,writesof arecent day whenhe felt an urgeto listen to some music:
I wasin the mood to listen to the music of the American mid-century composer Morton Feldman. I dug into my MP3 drive, found my Feldman folder and opened it up. Amongst the various folders in the directory was one labeled “The Complete Works of Mor...
June 24, 2015
How to write a book when you’re paid by the page
When I first heard that Amazon was going to start paying its Kindle Unlimited authors according tothe number of pages in their books that actually get read, I wondered whether theremight be an opportunity for a craftyintra-Amazon arbitrage scheme that would allow meto game the system and drain Jeff Bezos’s bank account. I thought I might be able to start publishing long books of computer-generated gibberishand then use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to pay Third World readers to scroll thr...
June 23, 2015
Music is the oil in the human machine
In announcing thefree version of its music streaming service— that’s free as in ads —Google also discloses something revealingabout the way it viewsmusic:
At any moment in your day, Google Play Music has whatever you need music for — from working, to working out, to working it on the dance floor — and gives you curated radio stations to make whatever you’re doing better. Our team of music experts, including thefolks who created Songza, crafts each station song by song so you don’t have to.
T...
June 22, 2015
When triumphalists fail, they fail triumphantly
Progress turns everyone into a nostalgistsooner or later. You just have to wait for your own particular trigger to come along — the new thing that threatens theold thing you love.
David Weinberger has afunny-sadarticleinThe Atlantic today.Called “The Internet That Was (and Still Could Be),” it’s a tortured piece, mixing memory and desire, that callsto mind some lines from agreat old Buzzcocks tune:
About the future I only can reminisce
For what I’ve had is what I’ll never get
And although th...
June 15, 2015
Media takes command
Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of addressing the annual convention of the Media Ecology Association in Denver. The title of my talk was “Media Takes Command: An Inquiry into the Consequences of Automation.” Here is what I said, along with the slides that accompanied the remarks.
As I was trying to figure out what to talk about this afternoon, I found myself flipping through a copy of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death — the twentieth anniversary edition that has the two people with...
June 9, 2015
The seconds are just packed
This post is the final installment in Rough Type’s Realtime Chronicles, which began here in 2009. An earlier version of this postappeared at Edge.org.
“Everything is going too fast and not fast enough,” lamentsWarren Oates, playing adecaying gearhead called G.T.O., in Monte Hellman’s 1971 masterpieceTwo-Lane Blacktop. I can relate. The faster the clock spins, the more I feel as ifI’m stuck in a slo-mo GIF loop.
It’s weird. We humanshave been shown to have remarkably accurate internal clocks....
June 4, 2015
A reasonable part of the house
There was, in most homes, a small, boxy machine affixed to the wall, usually in the kitchen, and this machinewas called a telephone. —Wikipedia, 2030
The home telephone had a good hundred-year run. Its days are numbered now. Its name, truncated to justphone, will live on, attached anachronistically to the diminutive general-purposecomputers wecarry around with us. (We really should have called them teles rather than phones.) But the thingitself?It’s headed for history’s landfill, one layer u...
May 31, 2015
The way of the tweet
[notes in search of anessay]
The lifecycle of the twitterer:
1. Skepticism
2. Enchantment
3. Disenchantment
4. Servitude
(This may also be the lifecycle of Twitter itself.)
Everycommunication medium hasformal qualities and social qualities. The uniqueness of each medium lies in the tension between the formal qualities and the social qualities.
The initial skepticism of the twitterer stemsfrom the formalrestrictiveness of the medium, which makes itssocial possibilitiesappear meager. Limiting...
May 27, 2015
Can computers improvise?
Bust this:
Girl I’m down for whatever cause my love is true
This one goes to my man old dirty one love we be swigging brew
My brother I love you Be encouraged man And just know
When you done let me know cause my love make you be like WHOA
These rap lyrics, cobbled together by a computer from a database of lines from actual rap songs, “rival those of Eminem,” wroteEsquire‘s Jill Krasny last week.I have to think that’s the biggest disever thrown Eminem’s way. But Krasnywasnot the only one gush...
May 25, 2015
The Uber of labor unions
One of the underappreciated benefits of the internet is that it is continually forcingus to relearn the lessons of the past. Take publishing, for instance. In the early days of blogging, there was a sense, shared by many, that online publishing systems were serving to “liberate” writers from editors and proofreaders and fact-checkers and all the other folks who had long stood between the scribbler and the printed page. The internet, it was said, had revealed these peopleto be useless interlo...
