Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 44

News in the net age: sources

In the course of preparing my statements for the Economist journalism debate, I reviewed a bunch of recent, useful studies and surveys. It took a while to dig these up, so I thought I'd provide a list here (in no particular order) in case anybody needs it in the future. Federal Communications Commission, The Information Needs of Communities (2011) Congressional Research Service, The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition (2010) Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, Informing Communities (2010) and Re-imagining Journalism (2011) Media Standards Trust, Shrinking World: The decline of international reporting in the British press (2010) American Journalism Review, Statehouse Exodus (2009) and Abandoned Agencies (2010) and Retreating from the World (2011) Columbia Journalism Review, The Reconstruction of American Journalism (2009) The Guardian, Stop Press (UK regional journalism survey) (2009) Global Journalist, Is the Foreign News Bureau Part of the Past? (2010) Human Rights Watch, Whose News? (2011) Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism offers many studies, including its annual State of the News Media reports and News Leaders and the Future (2010)...

The limits of neuroscience

I've been looking for good counterpoints to John Gray's mind-altering book Straw Dogs since reading it a couple of years ago. Raymond Tallis provides one in his formidable critique of "neuroscientism" in The New Atlantis. Here's a drop from the bucket: A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in [Daniel] Dennett's words, "the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice" to explain everything else in the material universe. Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but...

And the law won

And lest we forget, amid all the clamor surrounding the McLuhan centennial, this week also marks the 45th anniversary of the death of Bobby Fuller at the age of 23, asphyxiated by gasoline fumes. The official cause of death was either suicide or accident - the coroner couldn't decide - though many believe it was murder. I'm convinced that, like Robert Johnson before him, Fuller pawned his soul to the Devil, and the Devil collected on the loan. The gun-toting dancers are beyond great:...

McLuhan on the cloud

As a footnote to my previous post on Marshall McLuhan and his legacy (tomorrow is the centenary of his birth), I share the following excerpt from a 1969 Playboy interview, in which he describes his vision of the end point of what we today call cloud computing. As is typical of McLuhan, there's brilliance here, but there's also a whole lot of bad craziness. At least I hope it's bad craziness. MCLUHAN: Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society. PLAYBOY: How? MCLUHAN: The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it's technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways. PLAYBOY: How do you program an entire society - beneficially or otherwise? MCLUHAN: There's nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you'd realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should...

Popping Jay Rosen's news bubble

These Economist debates seem to unspool in slo-mo. They're a sin against realtime. But the third and final round of my debate with Jay Rosen on whether the net is making journalism better is now up. Here's my closing statement: Like many who celebrate the net's informational bounties, my opponent in this debate is a member of the online elite. He is a fixture on Twitter, having written, at last count, 16,963 tweets and garnered 61,765 followers. He is a prolific and popular blogger. He broadcasts his thoughts to the world through a FriendFeed account, a Facebook account, a Posterous account, a Tumblr account, a Storify account, a YouTube account and a Google+ account. And he has a weekly podcast. Jay Rosen is very much of the net. I do not intend that as a criticism. Mr Rosen is plying his trade, and he is doing a fine job of it. On the internet, hyperactivity is no sin. But even though he has devoted so much time and energy to the online world, he has not been able to back up his defence of the net's effects on journalism with facts. Instead, he continues to give us sunny platitudes and...

God, Kevin Kelly and the myth of choices

I suspect it's accurate to say that Kevin Kelly's deep Christian faith makes him something of an outlier among the Bay Area tech set. It also adds some interesting layers and twists to his often brilliant thinking about technology, requiring him to wrestle with ambiguities and tensions that most in his cohort are blind to. In a new interview with Christianity Today, Kelly explains the essence of what the magazine refers to as his "geek theology": We are here to surprise God. God could make everything, but instead he says, "I bestow upon you the gift of free will so that you can participate in making this world. I could make everything, but I am going to give you some spark of my genius. Surprise me with something truly good and beautiful." So we invent things, and God says, "Oh my gosh, that was so cool! I could have thought of that, but they thought of that instead." I confess I have a little trouble imagining God saying something like "Oh my gosh, that was so cool!" It makes me think that Kelly's God must look like Jeff Spicoli: But beyond the curious lingo, Kelly's attempt to square Christianity with...

McLuhan at 100

This week — Thursday, July 21, to be precise — marks the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birth. Here are some thoughts on the man and his legacy. One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a 1968 Canadian TV show featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both icons of the sixties, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. "The planet is no longer nature," he declares, to Mailer's uncomprehending stare; "it's now the content of an art work." Watching McLuhan, you can't quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As the novelist Douglas Coupland argued in his recent biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, McLuhan's mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate,...

Whither journalism: round two

My debate on the net's effect on journalism with Jay Rosen has entered the second, rebuttal round over at the Economist's site. Here's my rebuttal: Jay Rosen grants that the internet has left us with "a weaker eye on power" while increasing "the supply of rubbish in and around journalism". As a counterweight, he gives us ten reasons to be cheerful about journalism, most of which revolve around the "democratisation" of media. (I will resist the urge to point out how appropriate it is to provide a defence of the net's effects on journalism in the form of a Top Ten list.) I join Mr Rosen in applauding the way the net has reduced barriers to media participation. Having written a blog for many years, I can testify to the benefits of cheap digital publishing. But I do not take on faith the idea that democratising media necessarily improves journalism, and, unfortunately, Mr Rosen provides little in the way of facts to support his case. In place of hard evidence, we get dubious generalisations ("journalists are stronger and smarter when they are involved in the struggle for their own sustainability"), gauzy platitudes ("new life flows in through this opening") and...

Minds like sieves

"As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves ... Any piece of knowledge I acquire today, (a fact that falls under my eyes, a book I read, a piece of news I hear,) has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. Tomorrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge, and use it better. Thus, all the facts in this chest of memory are property at interest. And who shall set a boundary to this mounting value?" -Emerson There's a fascinating - and, to me, disquieting - study on the internet's effects on memory that's just come out in Science.* It provides more evidence of how quickly and flexibly our minds adapt to the tools we use to think with, for better or for worse. The study, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips," was conducted by three psychologists: Betsy Sparrow, of Columbia University; Jenny Liu, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and Daniel Wegner, of Harvard. They conducted a series of...

The see-through world (revisited)

Rough Type's summer retro blitz continues with the recycling of this post, originally published on January 31, 2008. As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions. But, as with all popular technologies, those dashboard maps are having some unintended consequences. In many cases, the shortest route between two points turns out to run through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets. Scores of villages have been overrun by cars and lorries whose drivers robotically follow the instructions dispensed by their satellite navigation systems. The International Herald Tribune reports that the parish council of Barrow Gurney in southwestern England has even requested, fruitlessly, that the town be erased from the maps used by the makers of navigation devices. A research group in the Netherlands last month issued a study documenting the phenomenon and the resulting risk of accidents. It went so far as to say that GPS systems can turn drivers into "kid killers." Now, a new generation of sat-nav devices is on the horizon. They'll be connected directly to the internet,...