Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 46

Get on my lawn, kids

The paperback edition of The Shallows has just been published and should be in stores now. It includes a new afterword, which takes a look at the mounting backlash against the Net's cultural hegemony. Here's an excerpt: I've always been suspicious of those who seek to describe the effects of digital media in generational terms, drawing sharp contrasts between young "Internet natives" and old "Internet immigrants." Such distinctions strike me as misleading, if not specious. If you look at statistics on Web use over the past two decades, you see that the average adult has spent more time online than the average kid. Parents are as besotted with their BlackBerrys as their children are with their Xboxes. And the idea that those who grow up peering at screens will somehow manage to avoid the cognitive toll exacted by multitasking and persistent interruptions is a fantasy contradicted by neuroscientific research. All of us, young and old alike, have similar neurons and synapses, and our brains are affected in similar ways by the media we use. Net culture isn't youth culture; it's mainstream culture. And my guess is that if the incipient Net backlash expands into a broad movement, the people leading...

The wisdom of statistically manipulated crowds

The wisdom of a crowd is often in the eye of the beholder, but most of us understand that, at its most basic level, "crowd wisdom" refers to a fairly simple phenomenon: when you ask a whole bunch of random people a question that can be answered with a number (eg, what's the population of Swaziland?) and then you add up all the answers and divide the sum by the number of people providing those answers - ie, calculate the average - you'll frequently get a close approximation of the actual answer. Indeed, it's often suggested, the crowd's average answer tends to me more accurate than an estimate from an actual expert. As the science writer Jonah Lehrer put it in a column in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday: The good news is that the wisdom of crowds exists. When groups of people are asked a difficult question - say, to estimate the number of marbles in a jar, or the murder rate of New York City - their mistakes tend to cancel each other out. As a result, the average answer is often surprisingly accurate. To back this up, Lehrer points to a new study by a group...

Zero tolerance for print

Politicians are usually sticks in the mud, technologywise, but that certainly wasn't the case down in Tallahassee this week. Florida legislators closed their eyes, clicked their heals, and took a giant leap forward into the Information Age, passing a budget measure that bans printed textbooks from schools starting in the 2015-16 school year. That's right: four years from now it will be against the law to give a kid a printed book in a Florida school. One lawmaker said the bill was intended to "meet the students where they are in their learning styles," which means nothing but sounds warm and fuzzy. I reported last week on a new study indicating that e-textbooks, despite some real advantages, aren't very good at supporting the variety of "learning styles" that students actually employ in their studies, particularly when compared to printed editions. That research won't be the last word on the subject, but it does show that we're still a long way from understanding exactly what's gained and lost when you shift from printed books to digital ones. Yet, as the moronic Florida bill shows, perception often matters more than reason when it comes to injecting new technologies into schools. E-textbooks are...

Virtual books on virtual shelves for virtual readers

As part of its Ideas Market speaker series, the Wall Street Journal is hosting a discussion on that venerable topic "The Future of the Book" at the New York Public Library on Tuesday evening. I'll be one of the panelists, along with tech scribe Steven Levy and Random House e-strategist Liisa Mcloy-Kelley. Moderating will be the Journal's Alexandra Alter. The event is free and open to the public, but seats are limited and need to be reserved in advance, by sending an email with your name to ReviewSeries@wsj.com. More details here....

E-textbooks flunk an early test

When it comes to buzzy new computer technologies, schools have long had a tendency to buy first and ask questions later. That seems to be the case once again with e-readers and other tablet-style computers, which many educators, all the way down to the kindergarten level, are lusting after, not least because the gadgets promise to speed the replacement of old-style printed textbooks with newfangled digital ones. In theory, the benefits of e-textbooks seem clear and compelling. They can be updated quickly with new information. They promise cost savings, at least over the long haul. They reduce paper and photocopier...

"The Shallows" is Pulitzer Finalist

The 2011 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and I'm thrilled to report that my book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains was named a finalist in the General Nonfiction category. The prize winner in the category was Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The other finalist was S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History....

Is Facebook geared to dullards?

Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring? Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills? Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own? Buck up, my friend. The traits you consider signs of failure may actually be marks of intellectual vigor, according to a new study appearing in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior. The study, by Bu Zhong and Marie Hardin at Penn State and Tao Sun at the University of Vermont, is one of the first to examine the personalities of social networkers. The researchers looked in particular at connections between...

To hold infinity in the palm of your hand

Alice Gregory writes: Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone "was that New York fell away . . . It disappeared. Poof." That's the first thing I noticed too: the city disappeared, along with any will to experience. New York, so densely populated and supposedly sleepless, must be the most efficient place to hone observational powers. But those powers are now dulled in me. I find myself preferring the blogs of remote strangers to my own observations of present ones. Gone are the tacit alliances with fellow subway riders, the brief evolution of sympathy with...

Grand Theft Attention: video games and the brain

Having recently come off a Red Dead Redemption jag, I decided, as an act of penance, to review the latest studies on the cognitive effects of video games. Because videogaming has become such a popular pastime so quickly, it has, like television before it, become a focus of psychological and neuroscientific experiments. The research has, on balance, tempered fears that video games would turn players into boggle-eyed, bloody-minded droogs intent on ultraviolence. The evidence suggests that spending a lot of time playing action games - the ones in which you run around killing things before they kill you (there are...

Google's recipe for recipes

Q: How do people cook these days? A: They cook with Google. When you're looking for a good recipe today, you probably don't reach for Joy of Cooking or Fannie Farmer or some other trusty, soup-stained volume on your cookbook shelf. You probably grab your laptop or tablet and enter the name of a dish or an ingredient or two into the search box. And that makes Google very important in the world of eating. Very, very important. I'll let Amanda Hesser, noted food-writer, cookbook-author, and web-entrepreneur, explain: The entity with the greatest influence on what Americans cook is not...