Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 29

Taking measurement’s measure

“What can’t be measured can’t be managed” goes the old saw. But what Peter Drucker is reported to have actually said was “What gets measured gets managed,” which is altogether different and altogether wiser. The wisdom becomes clearer when we get the rest of Drucker’s remark:

“What gets measured gets managed —even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.”

It’s dubious and dangerous, Drucker is saying, to take what’s measurable...

Measure and measurement

“What can’t be measured can’t be managed” goes the old saw. But what Peter Drucker is reported to have actually said was “What gets measured gets managed,” which is altogether different and altogether wiser. The wisdom becomes clearer when we get the rest of Drucker’s remark:

“What gets measured gets managed —even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.”

It’s dubious and dangerous, Drucker is saying, to take what’s measurable...

Worlds of wordcraft

I enjoyed James Gleick’s review of Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime today, particularly the ending:

Poetry and logic live in different places, after all. Poetry has patience. It reaches into a dark vastness. But computer code has powers too. “It acts and interacts with itself, with the world,” Chandra says. And it changes us along the way. “We already filter experience through software — Facebook and Google offer us views of the world that we can manipulate, but which also, in turn, manipulate us...

Shattered

The unboxing ceremony has begun.

The photo doesn’t do justice to the remarkable texture of the book jacket. Even if you’re not planning to buyThe Glass Cage, you’re going to want to make a stop at your local bookstore just to touch the cover. Bring some band-aids.

Et in arcadia ego

Here’s a newMicrosoft ad for your contemplation:

The other dude in the car

In “How Uber Explains Our Economic Moment,” MIT’s Andrew McAfee describes a short triphe recently arranged with the big ride-sharing company:

My driver said he’d been with Uber ever since he’d graduated from his master’s program in IT project management last year. This profession was, according to him, going through hard times. In the wake of the great recession steady jobs had been replaced by short-term contracts, and there weren’t even a lot of these to be had. As a result he was now compet...

A storm in Second Life

Remember Second Life? It’s still around, apparently. Ten years ago, it was the thing, the ultimate reality disrupter. We were all going to shed our skins, turn into glamorous, or at least skanky, avatars, and flit about Second Life’stransplendentvirtual reality. Liberatedfrom our workaday lives, we would fulfill our destiny as. . . merchants and consumers.

“In one important way, this virtual stuff isn’t imaginary at all,” reported Business Week in a2006cover story. “Second Life residents [can]...

tweets penyeach

“Here is our poetry,” proclaimed Ezra Pound in 1910, “for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”

He was talking about lightbulbs.

Poor poetry. It can’t just be the highest form of speech. It has to trail clouds of metaphorical gas.

And so Virginia Heffernan, in a “3 min” at Medium, declares tweets to be poems andheralds a new “Age of Poetry”:

Asking what’s to become of poetry in the age of Twitter is like asking what’s to become of music in the age of guitars. It thrives. It more than thrive...

The Glass Cage: sneak peek

From page twenty, the last page of the first signature of the printed book:

The medium is the message from our sponsor

For the next recycled post from the Rough Type archives, we go back to a more innocent time, the fallof 2007, when Mark Zuckerberg peeredinto the past and discerneda pattern to the historyof media. This post originally appeared on November 6, 2007, under the title “The Social Graft.”

“Once every hundred years media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerbergdeclaredtoday at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. And it’s true. Look back over the last millennium or t...