Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 40

From movable type to movable text

The Review section of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal includes a brief essay by me on what I think will prove to be one of the most radical consequences of the rise of electronic books: the ability to perpetually revise a book even after it's been published. We take for granted the fixity of text in a printed book. But on a Net-connected digital reader, fixity disappears, replaced by endless malleability. Here's how the piece begins: I recently got a glimpse into the future of books. A few months ago, I dug out a handful of old essays I'd written about innovation, combined them into a single document, and uploaded the file to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. Two days later, my little e-book was on sale at Amazon's site. The whole process couldn't have been simpler. Then I got the urge to tweak a couple of sentences in one of the essays. I made the edits on my computer and sent the revised file back to Amazon. The company quickly swapped out the old version for the new one. I felt a little guilty about changing a book after it had been published, knowing that different readers would see different...

Sign of the times

Stumbled on this today while perusing Facebook as a non-member: I suppose it was inevitable....

The curious incident of the dog in the story-book

Fetch....

A new landscape for online news

Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab is running a series this week on media trends likely to play out over the coming year. It begins today with a piece by me on how the app explosion is changing consumers' attitudes toward online media and expanding newspapers' options for creating new content bundles tailored to different groups of readers. Here's what I say: For years now, the line between the software business and the media business has been blurring. Software applications used to take the form of packaged goods, sold through retail outlets at set prices. Today, as a result of cloud computing and other advances, applications look more and more like media products. They're ad-supported, subscribed to, continually updated, and the content they incorporate is often as important as the functions they provide. As traditional media companies have moved to distribute their wares in digital form — as code, in other words — they've come to resemble software companies. They provide not only original content, but an array of online tools and functions that allow customers to view, manipulate, and add to the content in myriad ways. During 2011, the blending of software and media accelerated greatly, thanks to what might be...

The serendipity machine is low on oil

It's Friday, which means it's time for the unveiling of the Official Rough Type Sentence of the Week. This one comes from Steven Johnson, and it appears at the end of a vertiginous post about mental hyperlinking: "People who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly." Now, first of all, I hadn't even realized that there was a correct way to use the Web. I wish someone had explained this to me years ago, because I'm sure it would have saved me all sorts of time. But what really drew me to Johnson's line was the way that it immediately conjured up in my mind this vision of a scene that looked like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie. There's this big, windowless room, and sprawling across it is a vast, elaborate steampunk contraption. It's got all sorts of pipes and pulleys and gears and bellows, and it's belching smoke and making loud metallic noises, and there's a sign hanging from it that reads: Serendipity Machine. A guy is running madly around it yanking levers and pulling out stops and pushing buttons and fiddling with dials. Behind him, observing, is an old man in...

From hunter-gatherer to cutter-paster

Edge is running a fascinating interview with the evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, who puts the development of human culture into a cosmic perspective. He draws a parallel between the replication of successful innovations in a society and the replication of successful genes in an environment: "Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those." Pagel argues that our evolution as "social learners" has likely had the effect, as it's played out through hundreds of millennia, of encouraging the development of copying skills, perhaps over the development of originality. "We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species," he explains. "But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves ... And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators." What that also means is that as the scope of our potential copying broadens, through advances in communication and networking,...

May I toot my own horn?

Two nice notices of The Shallows appeared out of the online blue today, and doggone it if I'm not going to share them. At Paste, Kurt Armstrong reviewed the book, calling it "essential": It lays out a sweeping portrait of the thing we're moving too quickly to see. It's easy for someone like me to piece together opinions or carve rhetorically charged rants about the deleterious effects of our growing technological dependency. In contrast, Carr's book bursts with research — from neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists and sociologists — and careful analysis. And anxious as Carr might be about what the Internet is doing to our brains, his writing isn't shrill or self-righteous. It's intelligent, deeply researched, articulate and, much to my dismay, most likely prophetic: "The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers … is that we'll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines." And at The Millions, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer pegged The Shallows as "the best book I read last year": Carr persuasively — and with great subtlety and beauty — makes the case that it is not only the content of our thoughts that...

About Facebook

Mike Loukides, 2011: Let's go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It's also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There's no "sharing" at all. Frictionless sharing isn't better sharing; it's the absence of sharing. There's something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it's just a feed in some social application that's constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It's just another form of spam, particularly if I'm also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends. Theodor Adorno, 1951: If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straightforward. Every sheath interposed between men in their transactions is felt as a disturbance to the functioning of the apparatus, in...

The cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away

I've been using Apple's iDisk syncing service for - I can't believe this - about ten years now. When I signed up, iDisk was part of the company's iTools service, which was subsequently revamped and given the goofy name MobileMe. The transition to MobileMe was a little hair-raising, as there were moments when my iDisk seemed to flicker out of existence. Since I was using the service to sync critical documents between my computers, seeing the iDisk folder disappear caused, to say the least, a little panic. But Apple, after much bad press, worked out the kinks. iDisk since then has worked fine, and I've grown ever more dependent on it. Now, as Apple replaces MobileMe with iCloud, iDisk is about to get tossed onto the great junk pile of abandoned software. And I have to go through the nuisance of finding a replacement. Apple is also discontinuing its (fairly crappy) iWeb service, which I've been using to publish theshallowsbook.com. So there's another pain in the ass I'm going to have to deal with. The cloud is great in many ways, but it's also fickle. Look at all the cloud services that Google has shut down: Google Health, Wave, Friend...

People in glass futures should throw stones

Remember that Microsoft video on our glassy future? Or that one from Corning? Or that one from Toyota? What they all suggest, and assume, is that our rich natural "interface" with the world will steadily wither away as we become more reliant on software mediation. The infinite possibilities of our sense of touch become reduced to a set of scripted gestures. Former Apple engineer Bret Victor makes a passionate, and nicely illustrated, case that we need to challenge the reigning visions of future computer interfaces, which he sums up as "Pictures Under Glass": Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade. Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat. Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they...