Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 42

Farewell

Matter-eater lads

Now here's a sight for sore eyes: Guided by Voices in its original (more or less) lineup recording Let's Go Eat the Factory, its first new album since 1996's Under the Bushes Under the Stars, in a basement rec room, with Robert Pollard singing in a doorway and bass player Greg Demos monitoring the TASCAM four-track cassette recording deck while sitting in a chair that appears to have been stolen from a kindergarten: Pollard is one of the great American artists of the past 50 years, though I suspect it will be another 50 years before that begins to be acknowledged. There are more things in heaven and earth, Lightning Boy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy....

The remains of the book

One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books - "some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained" - but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn't mean that a book exists in isolation - its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men - but rather that a book offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges. The idea of edges, of separateness, is antithetical to the web, which as a hypermedium dissolves all boundaries, renders implicit connections explicit. Indeed, much of the power and usefulness of the web as a technology derives...

The see-through book

One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books - "some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained" - but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn't mean that a book exists in isolation - its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men - but that it offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges. The idea of edges, of separateness, is antithetical to the web, which as a hypermedium dissolves all boundaries, renders implicit connections explicit. Indeed, much of the power and usefulness of the web as a technology derives from the...

Beyond words: the Kindle Fire and the book's future

The future arrives wearing the clothes of the past. The first book that came off a printing press - Gutenberg's Bible - used a typeface that had been meticulously designed to look like a scribe's handwriting: The first TV shows were filmed radio broadcasts. The designers of personal computers used the metaphor of a desk for organizing information. The world wide web had "pages." The home pages of online newspapers mimicked the front pages of their print editions. As Richard Goldstein succinctly put it, "every novel technology draws from familiar forms until it establishes its own aesthetic." It's tempting to look at the early form of a new media technology and assume that it will be the ultimate form, but that's a big mistake. The transitional state is never the final state. Eventually, the clothes of the past are shed, and the true nature, the true aesthetic, of the new technology is revealed. So it is with what we call "electronic books." Amazon's original Kindle was explicitly designed to replicate as closely as possible the look and feel of a printed book: When Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, introduced the Kindle in late 2007, he went out of his way to...

Facebook's business model

The desire for privacy is strong; vanity is stronger....

Raise high the paywalls, publishers

This is the third in a series of occasional pieces on the transformation of the newspaper business. The first two pieces, both published in 2009, were The Writing Is on the Paywall and Google in the Middle. Information doesn't want to be free. Nor does it want to be expensive. Information wants to be reasonably priced. And when it's reasonably priced, it gets purchased. The internet has changed patterns of supply and demand in media businesses in profound ways. We're not going back to the way things used to be. But it's a mistake to assume that the contours of the landscape in the immediate aftermath of the disruption are the permanent contours of the landscape. New patterns of supply and demand - and, in turn, new ways of doing business - emerge to replace old ones, though it can take a long time for those patterns to mature and become stable. And in the meantime, there can be a whole lot of wreckage to clean up. The arrival of Napster and its various progeny gave rise to the assumption that the recorded music business was doomed, that no one would ever pay for music again. That assumption, which at...

Great concept for a new reality TV series

Put Mike Arrington, Tim Armstrong, and Arianna Huffington in a beach house together for six months and film the proceedings. The hijinks would be primo. And if the action ever flagged, you could always helicopter Paul Carr in for a sleepover. Can I patent this idea?...

On autopilot

Skills are gained through effort. Automation relieves effort. There's always a tradeoff, but because the relief comes immediately whereas the loss of skills manifests itself slowly, we rarely question the pursuit of ever greater degrees of automation. Recent case in point: Pilots' "automation addiction" has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don't know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years ... "We're seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes," said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee on pilot training. "We're forgetting how to fly." Something to think about on Labor Day....

The Shallows named PEN Center Award finalist

I'm thrilled to report that The Shallows was today named a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2011 Literary Award in the category of Research Nonfiction. The other finalists in the category are Colossus by Michael Hiltzik and Charlie Chan by Yunte Huang. The winner in the category is Why the West Rules - For Now by Ian Morris....