Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 45
July 11, 2011
News to me
Over at the Economist site, I'm debating the proposition "the internet is making journalism better, not worse" with Jay Rosen. He's pro, I'm con. Here's my opening statement: Journalism and the internet are both hot buttons, and when you combine the two you get plenty of opinions. But there are facts as well, and what the facts show is that the internet boom has done great damage to the journalism profession. According to a 2010 review by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, newsroom staffing at American newspapers plunged by more than 25 percent between 2001 and 2009, and large-scale layoffs of reporters continued through 2010. A 2009 study commissioned by the Columbia Journalism Review concluded that newspaper editorial jobs dropped from more than 60,000 in 1992 to about 40,000 in 2009. Scores of newspapers, both large and small, have stopped publishing, and many others have scaled back the scope of their reporting. The picture appears similarly bleak in the U.K., where the number of working journalists fell by between 27 and 33 percent over the past decade, according to an analysis by the School of Journalism, Media & Communication at the University of Central Lancashire. The decline in journalism jobs...
July 10, 2011
Semidelinkification, Shirky-style
Call me a nostalgist, but sometimes I like to plop my hoary frame down in front of the old desktop and surf the world wide web - the way we used to do back in the pre-Facebook days of my boyhood, when the internet was still tragically undermonetized. I was in fact on a little surfin' safari this morning when I careened into a new post from Clay Shirky about - you guessed it - the future of the news biz.* It was totally longform, ie, interfrigginminable. But I did manage to read a sizable chunk of it before clicking the Instapaper "Read Later" button (a terrific way to avoid reading long stuff without having to feel guilty about it). It was a solid piece, as you'd expect from Shirky, if marred a bit by an unappealing new-media elitism (apparently the great unwashed never made it past the sports pages). But what interests me at the moment is not the content of Shirky's post but its form, particularly the form of its linkage. It's been a while since I wrote about delinkification, but it's still an issue I struggle with: How does one hang on to the benefits of having...
July 5, 2011
Exile from realtime
I've got a bad case of the shakes today, and it has nothing to do with the M-80s and bottle rockets going off into the wee hours last night. No, over the long weekend I was cast out of realtime. I had no warning, no time to prepare for my reentry into the drab old chronological order. I feel like a refugee living in a crappy tent in a muddy field on the outskirts of some godforsaken country. I know exactly how T. S. Eliot felt when he wrote "Ridiculous the sad waste time / Stretching before and after." What happened is that Google turned off its spigot of realtime results. I still see the "Realtime" option in the drop-down list of search options, but when I click on it it returns nothing. Just a horrifying whiteness, like a marble tombstone before the letters are carved. And the "Latest" option for arranging results that used to appear in the lefthand column of search tools has been replaced by "Past hour." Past hour? Are you kidding me? Why not just say "Eternity"? I freaking lived in "Latest," with its single page of perpetually updated results, punctuated by pithy little tweets from...
June 27, 2011
Another study points to advantages of printed textbooks
Even as administrators and legislators push schools to dump printed books in favor of electronic ones, evidence mounts that paper books have important advantages as tools for learning. Last month, I reported on a study out of the University of Washington which showed that students find printed books more flexible than e-books in supporting a wide range of reading and learning styles. Now comes a major study from the University of California system showing that students continue to prefer printed books to e-books and that many undergraduates complain that they have trouble "learning, retaining, and concentrating" when reading from screens. The University of California Libraries began a large e-textbook pilot program in 2008. In late 2010, more than 2,500 students and faculty members were surveyed to assess the results of the program. Overall, 58% of the respondents said they used e-books for their academic work, with the percentage varying from 55% for undergraduates to 57% for faculty to 67% for graduate students. The respondents who used e-books were then asked whether they preferred e-books or printed books for their studies. Overall, 44% said they preferred printed books and 35% said they preferred e-books, with the remainder expressing no preference. The...
June 26, 2011
United States vs. Google (revisited)
Summer is a good time to pick lazily at the archives. Here's a post that originally appeared on Rough Type on October 12, 2006. Given last week's news that the Federal Trade Commission has launched a formal anti-trust investigation of Google, it seems timely to repost it now. Every era of computing has its defining antitrust case. In 1969, at the height of the mainframe age's go-go years, the Justice Department filed its United States vs. IBM lawsuit, claiming that Big Blue had an unfair monopoly over the computer industry. At the time, IBM held a 70 percent share of the mainframe market (including services and software as well as machines). In 1994, with the PC age in full flower, the Justice Department threatened Microsoft with an antitrust suit over the company's practice of bundling products into its ubiquitous Windows operating system. Three years later, when Microsoft tightened the integration of its Internet Explorer browser into Windows, the government acted, filing its United States vs. Microsoft suit. With Google this week taking over YouTube, it seems like an opportune time to look forward to the prospect - entirely speculative, of course - of what could be the defining antitrust case...
June 23, 2011
Who invented e-mail?
Over at the Times site, Errol Morris has just posted the last installment of a five-part series about the role his late brother Noel played in the invention of e-mail. In addition to being a fascinating and valuable oral history of the time-sharing era of computing, it's a moving memoir and a meditation on life's refusal to be calculable: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5...
June 18, 2011
More evidence of Net's effect on the brain
A new study provides evidence that heavy internet use by the young results in "brain structural alterations" of a kind associated with "impairment of cognitive control." The study, published this month in PLoS ONE, was conducted in China, where approximately 14 percent of urban youths - some 24 million kids - are believed to suffer from so-called "internet addiction disorder." Using brain scans, the researchers compared the brains of 18 adolescents who spend around eight to twelve hours a day online (playing games, mainly) with the brains of 18 adolescents who spend less than 2 hours a day online. The heavy Net users exhibited gray-matter "atrophy" as well as other "abnormalities," and the changes appeared to grow more severe the longer the kids engaged in intensive Net use. The whole subject of Internet addiction remains controversial among experts, but, according to a Scientific American article on the new research, the study "cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain." The Scientific American piece translates the key findings into layman's terms: One set of [MRI] images focused on gray matter at the brain's wrinkled surface, or cortex, where processing of speech, memory,...
June 9, 2011
Inspiring thought of the day
It was shaping up to be a dreary Thursday until I stumbled upon this headline over at The Official Google Blog: "There's a perfect ad for everyone." I felt as if some benevolent god had hurled a spear of sunlight through the clouds and hit the bullseye of my heart dead-on. For close to a half century now, I have been searching for my perfect ad, and I have to confess that I had begun to despair that the object of my desire, the ad that would be the apple of my eye, simply didn't exist in this world. A couple of nights ago, after perhaps one too many glasses of wine, I found myself tearfully saying to myself: I will never find my perfect ad. I should not have underestimated Google and its kindhearted ad-serving algorithms. Now I know that somewhere deep in the Googleplex a flock of code-writing cupids is hard at work fashioning a promotional message that will dovetail perfectly with each and every one of my rational and emotional purchasing triggers. I need only be patient. My ad will come....
June 8, 2011
Ethics in the data mine
You can describe people in words, or you can describe them in numbers. Either system can be abused, but in general words tend to create bonds while numbers tend to create distance. (There's a reason why parents give their babies names rather than numbers.) History, though, seems to tilt toward numbers, and the tilt is getting steeper as the potential profits get larger. Even the data miners are starting to get creeped out. In a thoughtful article over at O'Reilly Radar, Jim Stogdill, an IT consultant with expertise in large-scale data-management systems, poses a question to his colleagues: Let me just ask this: If you are involved in data capture, analytics, or customer marketing in your company, would you be embarrassed to admit to your neighbor what about them you capture, store and analyze? Would you be willing to send them a zip file with all of it to let them see it? If the answer is "no," why not? If I might hazard a guess at the answer, it would be because real relationships aren't built on asymmetry, and you know that. But rather than eliminate that awkward source of asymmetry, you hide it ... I think what's interesting...
June 3, 2011
(re)framed
A day made of glass: I'm reminded of an interesting passage in the book Glass: A World History: As we have seen, one of the rapid developments in glass technology was the making of panes of window glass, plain and coloured, which was particularly noticeable in the northern half of Europe [after the twelfth century]. One very practical effect of this was on working conditions. In the cold and dark northern half of Europe people could now work for longer hours and with more precision because they were shielded from the elements. The light poured in, yet the cold was kept out. Prior to glass only thin slivers of horn or parchment were used and the window spaces were of necessity much smaller and the light admitted, dimmer. It could also be argued that windows altered thought at a deeper level. The question here is the way in which glass, whether in a mirror, window, or through a lens, tends to concentrate and frame thought by bounding vision, and at the same time leads to abstraction and attention to the details of nature. It seems likely that the glass window altered the relations between humans and their world in ways...
