Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 43

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....

Google then and now

The National Interest is running my review of Douglas Edwards's new memoir, I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Here's how the review begins: In December 2001, an upstart Silicon Valley company named Google posted its corporate philosophy, in the form of a list of "Ten Things We've Found to be True," on its website. At once charmingly idealistic and off-puttingly smug, the list set the tone for Google's future public pronouncements. "You can be serious without a suit," read one of the tenets. "You can make money without doing evil," read another. But it was the most innocuous sounding of the ten principles—"It's best to do one thing really, really well"—that would prove to be most fateful for the company. No sooner had it pledged to remain a specialist than it began to break its promise by branching into new markets, with far-reaching consequences not only for its own business but also for the Internet as a whole. Google issued its philosophy at a decisive moment in its history. Although it had incorporated just three years earlier, in late 1998, its eponymous search engine was already widely viewed as the best tool available for navigating the...

Digital sharecropping (rerelease)

Rough Type's retro summer continues with this post, which originally appeared on this blog on December 19, 2006, under the title "Sharecropping the Long Tail." A while back I wrote that Web 2.0, by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few. Richard MacManus's new analysis of web traffic patterns helps illustrate the point. Despite the explosion of web content, spurred in large part by the reduction in the cost of producing and consuming that content, web traffic appears to be growing more concentrated in a few sites, not less. Using data from Compete, MacManus shows that the top ten sites accounted for 40% of total internet page views in November 2006, up from 31% in November 2001, a 29% increase. The greater concentration comes during a period when the number of domains on the web nearly doubled, from 2.9 million to 5.1 million. Even if we grant that traffic numbers are unreliable and...

Cognitive surplus watch

Thanks to the Internet, Americans are devoting less of their free time to watching television and more to creating socially useful stuff online. As if. A year ago, the Nielsen Company reported that Americans' TV viewing hit an all-time record high in the first quarter of 2010, with the average person spending 158 hours and 25 minutes a month in front of the idiot box.* That record didn't last long. Nielsen has released a new media-usage report, and it shows that in the first quarter of 2011, the average American watched TV for 158 hours and 47 minutes a month, up another 0.2 percent and, once again, a new all-time high.* Twenty years into the Web revolution, and we're boob-tubier than ever. But even that understates our video consumption. One of the Net's big effects has been to free TV programming from the living room and the bedroom. We can now watch the tube through our laptops and smartphones 24/7 - at work, in restaurants, and while strolling down the street. And that's just what we're doing. In the first quarter of 2011, the average American watched 4 hours and 33 minutes of streaming video on a computer, up a...

Más información, menos conocimiento

Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa discusses The Shallows (Superficiales is the Spanish title) in an essay published last week in El País. Here's a bit: Lo acabo de leer, de un tirón, y he quedado fascinado, asustado y entristecido. Carr no es un renegado de la informática, no se ha vuelto un ludita contemporáneo que quisiera acabar con todas las computadoras, ni mucho menos. En su libro reconoce la extraordinaria aportación que servicios como el de Google, Twitter, Facebook o Skype prestan a la información y a la comunicación, el tiempo que ahorran, la facilidad con que una inmensa cantidad de seres humanos pueden compartir experiencias, los beneficios que todo esto acarrea a las empresas, a la investigación científica y al desarrollo económico de las naciones. Pero todo esto tiene un precio y, en última instancia, significará una transformación tan grande en nuestra vida cultural y en la manera de operar del cerebro humano como lo fue el descubrimiento de la imprenta por Johannes Gutenberg en el siglo XV que generalizó la lectura de libros, hasta entonces confinada en una minoría insignificante de clérigos, intelectuales y aristócratas ... Here's the rest....

Location unawareness

As our cars, phones, and computers become more location-aware, do we become less location-aware? What would going "on the road" have meant for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty if their cars had been outfitted with sat-nav screens? Those are among the questions Ari Schulman tackles in his searching essay GPS and the End of the Road in the latest issue of The New Atlantis. Here's a taste: Just as important as what we see in the world is how we go about seeing it. We are adept at identifying points of interest, but pay scant attention to the importance of our approaches to exploring them; our efforts to facilitate the experience of place often end up being self-defeating. What [Walker] Percy's strategies aim to do, in part, is to put the traveler into a state of willingness and hunger to encounter the world as it is, to discover the great sights with the freshness, the newness, that is so much of what we seek from them. Alain de Botton also describes this attitude as the solution to the guidebook problem, and identifies it as the mode of receptivity. Practices like geocaching and geotagging rely on this receptivity. Geocaching asks the...

Yesterday in Today

The New Republic is running my review of Simon Reynolds's new book, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. It (the review) begins like this: "Who wants yesterday's papers?" sang Mick Jagger in 1967. "Who wants yesterday's girl?" The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: "Nobody in the world." That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday's papers and carry on with yesterday's girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past — with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button. Nowhere is the past's grip so tight as in the world of music, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds meticulously documents in Retromania. Over the last two decades, he argues, the "exploratory impulse" that once powered pop music forward has shifted its focus from Now to Then. Fans and musicians alike have turned into archeologists. The evidence is everywhere. There are the reunion tours and the reissues, the box sets and the tribute albums. There are the R&B museums, the rock halls of fame, the punk libraries. There are the collectors of vinyl and cassettes and...

The G+ spot

Google+, Google's latest attempt to crack social networking, marks a refreshing break from tradition for the Behemoth of Mountain View. First, unlike its predecessors, G+ entered the arena with something other than a spectacular and fatal bellyflop. Second, the site actually seems to have been designed rather than just engineered. It's a pleasant place. Third, it does a nice job of carving out at a newish space in a crowded market. The benefits of the site's most talked about feature, Circles, at this point remain largely theoretical, but the way it presents information is distinctive without feeling unfamiliar - a neat trick. In its first weeks of invitation-only existence, G+ has reportedly managed to attract something like 20 million members. That's impressive, but probably not as impressive as it sounds. Getting people to check out a buzzy service is pretty easy, particularly when Google's muscle is behind it. Getting them to keep using it is a different matter. My unscientific survey of the site indicates that there are a whole lot of accounts that are still just shells. A social network is, like the internet itself, a network of networks. The network expands by tracing the intersections among fairly well-defined...

Days made of glass (continued)

Here's a followup to an earlier post:...

Is technology a moral force?

Part 1 (Kevin Kelly's interview in Christianity Today) Part 2 (my reply, posted here) Part 3 (drawn from the comment thread to my post): Kevin Kelly: Nick, Thanks for the careful read and thoughtful response. Curious lingo??? I think there is no doubt that God speaks just like Kevin Kelly. But to the crux of our disagreement: You end with: "The best you can argue, therefore, is that technological progress will, on balance, have a tendency to open more choices for more people." This is precisely my argument. I am not arguing that technology increases the options for everyone equally. Of course new technologies remove some options. Lots of excellent horse buggy and whip makers lost their opportunities. I talk about a very tiny net gain in options when you tally up all the options lost compared to the ones added. That very tiny micro net gain accumulated over time is progress. You say: "Look at any baby born today, and try to say whether that child would have a greater possibility of fulfilling its human potential if during its lifetime (a) technological progress reversed, (b) technological progress stalled, (c) technological progress advanced slowly, or (d) technological progress accelerated quickly....