Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 31

The soma cloud

“The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their overall needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. …By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programmed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate.” —Marshall McLuhan, 1969

“The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N= 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. Thi...

I feel measurably less emotional now

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, responds to the uproar about the company’s clandestine psychological experiment on its members:

“This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated.And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”

So an experiment designed to explore how the delivery of information can be programmed to manipulatepeople’s emotional states was just part of routine product-development...

I feel much less emotional now

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, responds to the uproar about the company’s clandestine psychological experiment on its members:

“This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated.And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”

So an experiment designed to explore how the delivery of information can be programmed to manipulatepeople’s emotional states was just part of routine product-development...

An android dreams of automation

Google’s Android guru, Sundar Pichai, provides a peak into the company’s conception of our automated future:

“Today, computing mainly automates things for you, but when we connect all these things, you can truly start assisting people in a more meaningful way,” Mr. Pichai said. He suggested a way for Android on people’s smartphones to interact with Android in their cars. “If I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music...

The quarter-of-a-second rule

Mother Jonesexcerpts my brief essay on the malleability of our sense of time, “The Patience Deficit,” from the anthology What Should We Be Worried About?Here’s the essay’s first paragraph:

I’m concerned about time — the way we’re warping it and it’s warping us. Human beings, like other animals, seem to have remarkably accurate internal clocks. Take away our wristwatches and our cell phones and we can still make pretty good estimates about time intervals. But that faculty can also be easily dis...

Bringing economics into the world

Throwing his considerable weight behind the post-autistic economics movement, Robert Skidelsky offers a calm but blistering critique of the “mainstream economics” curriculum that has come to dominate universityteaching. Arguing that mainstream economics, with its pseudo-scientific mathematical models, is at heart an “ideology of the free market” that can circumscribe thinking and excusefailed policies, Skidelsky argues that the context of economics teaching needs to be broadened to include hi...

Technology as love

For a few years now, I’ve used summertime laziness as an excuse to recycle some of this blog’s old posts. The following postwas originally published, under the ponderousheadline “God, Kevin Kelly and the Myth of Choices,” in July of 2011. The influence of tools on human possibility is a central theme of The Glass Cage , so it was interesting for me to reread this post in the wake of writing the book. If I were to rewrite the post now, I would shift the focus away from technological progress as...

From endless ladder to downward ramp

A couple of months ago, in the post “The Myth of the Endless Ladder,” I critiqued the widespread assumption that progressin production technology, such as advances in robotics and analytical software, “frees humans up to work on higher-value tasks,” in the words of economics reporter Annie Lowrey. While such a dynamic has often been true in the past, particularly in the middleyears of the last century, there’s no guarantee that it will be true in the future. Evidence is growing, in fact, that...

The ebook equilibrium

Last week, I gave a talk at the Digital Book Conference at Book Expo America (BEA) in New York. Here’s the text of my remarks.

Let me begin with a confession: I used to fear ebooks. You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve gotten over that.

The change in my own attitude or perception reflects, I sense, some trends that have been unfolding recently in the marketplace. Actually, it would be more accurate to say “some trends that have stopped unfolding.” The big upheaval that followed Amazon’s introduc...

Let them eat images of cake

David Graeber observes:

It used to be that Americans mostly subscribed to a rough-and-ready version of the labor theory of value. Everything we see around us that we consider beautiful, useful, or important was made that way by people who sank their physical and mental efforts into creating and maintaining it. Work is valuable insofar as it creates these things that people like and need. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an enormous effort on the part of the people runnin...