Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 47
March 23, 2011
A message to you, Larry
Just two weeks before he retakes the reins as Google's CEO, Larry Page has been pulled down from his high horse, hauled off to the woodshed, and given a good paddling by a federal judge. The matter and tone of Judge Denny Chin's rejection of the proposed Google Books settlement are generally circumspect and measured - James Grimmelmann provides a lawyerly rundown - but when it comes to passing judgment on Google's actual behavior to date, Chin is blunt and scathing: The [settlement agreement] would grant Google control over the digital commercialization of millions of books, including orphan books and...
March 22, 2011
Sanctuary
For the past seven years, the Belgian photographer Sebastian Schutyser has spent his winters wandering through northern Spain taking pictures of small, ancient churches and chapels - hermitages, or "ermita," which stand isolated and sometimes ruined in the surrounding landscape. To capture the "aura" of the buildings, Schutyser found it necessary to abandon his "expensive cameras and sophisticated lenses" and instead use a simple pinhole camera. The resulting images are mysterious, beautiful, and moving, and I find that they also carry considerable metaphorical weight. Schutyser has given me permission to share a few of the photographs with Rough Type's readers;...
March 21, 2011
Nothing much happened
"If you look at the history of the world, up until 1700 nothing much happened." That's what Karl Marx said to Friedrich Engels when the two first met, at a cafe in Paris, in 1844. No, I'm kidding. The guy who actually spoke those words is Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, and he spoke them just a few days ago. What roused history from its millennia-long stupor - what finally made things happen - was, in Varian's view, the steam engine, the technology that jump-started "the wonderful Industrial Revolution," which in turn began to lift "GDP growth per capita." History,...
March 7, 2011
Situational overload and ambient overload
"It's not information overload. It's filter failure." That was the main theme of a thoughtful and influential talk that Clay Shirky gave at a technology conference back in 2008. It's an idea that's easy to like both because it feels intuitively correct and because it's reassuring: better filters will help reduce information overload, and better filters are things we can actually build. Information overload isn't an inevitable side effect of information abundance. It's a problem that has a solution. So let's roll up our sleeves and start coding. There was one thing that bugged me, though, about Shirky's idea, and...
Killing Mnemosyne
It was, in retrospect, inevitable that once we began referring to the data stores of computers as "memory," we would begin to confuse machine memory with the biological memory inside our minds. At the moment, though, there seems to be a renewed interest in the remarkable, and not at all machinelike, workings of biological memory, due at least in part to the popularity of Joshua Foer's new book Moonwalking with Einstein. When I was writing The Shallows, the research that was most fascinating and enlightening to me came when I looked into what we know (and don't know) about human...
March 6, 2011
Distractions and decisions
In a new article, Sharon Begley, Newsweek's science writer, surveys the growing body of evidence indicating that an overabundance of information handicaps our ability to make smart decisions. One of the main causes of the problem seems to be that our conscious mind, which has trouble handling an onslaught of incoming information, seizes up when overloaded: Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, ... recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity...
March 1, 2011
Message minus meaning
The Daily Beast is running my review of James Gleick's fascinating new book The Information. Here's how it (the review, not the book) starts: At a technology conference last year, Google's outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt tried to put our current "information explosion" into historical perspective. Today, he said, we create as much information in 48 hours—five billion gigabytes worth—as was created "between the birth of the world and 2003." It's an astonishing comparison, and it seems to illuminate something important about the times we live in. But the harder you look at Schmidt's numbers, the fuzzier they become. What does...
February 25, 2011
Sex, math, code
One topic that book writers and publishers don't much like to talk about is the recent explosion of bootleg copies of popular books online. And I'm not going to talk about it either. But I am going to point to GalleyCat's current bestseller list for pirated books, which provides a remarkably clear view of what savvy media pirates spend their time thinking about: 1. 1000 Photoshop Tips and Tricks 2. Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking 3. What Did We Use Before Toilet Paper?: 200 Curious Questions 4. Photoshop CS5 All-in-One For Dummies 5. What Rich People Know &...
February 11, 2011
Cities of the page
The rapid spread of the printing press, after its invention by Gutenberg around 1450, still stands as one of history's most remarkable examples of technological transformation. Jeremiah Dittmar, an American University professor who has been studying the economic consequences of the early diffusion of printing technology, provides a striking visual representation of the print explosion, showing how, over just 50 years, printing presses spread from a single city - Gutenberg's Mainz - to more than 200 cities throughout Europe: What makes the diffusion of printing so remarkable is not just that it began in the late Middle Ages, when news,...
February 7, 2011
Inside out, outside in
Adam Gopnik surveys a year's worth of books about the Internet in the new New Yorker. "A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible," he says, and goes on from there. Like other such New Yorker surveys, reading this one feels something like taking a walk through the woods with a charming, clever, and jaded nature guide - "The squirrel is renowned as an industrious creature, but let's not forget that it is also a flighty one" - but toward the end Gopnik makes a particularly penetrating point: A...
