Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 48

Tools of the mind

One of the things I try to do in The Shallows is to place the Internet into the long history of technologies that have shaped human thought - what I term "intellectual technologies." In this clip from an interview I did recently with Big Think in New York, I discuss three of those technologies: the map, the mechanical clock, and the printed book....

Moderating abundance

Every year, Edge.org poses a question to a bunch of folks and then publishes the answers. This year's question is (in so many words): What scientific concept would have big practical benefits if it became more broadly known? Here's my answer: Cognitive load You're sprawled on the couch in your living room, watching a new episode of Justified on the tube, when you think of something you need to do in the kitchen. You get up, take ten quick steps across the carpet, and then, just as you reach the kitchen door - poof! - you realize you've already forgotten...

Short is the new long

"The general point is this," writes economist Tyler Cowen, the infovore's infovore, in his 2009 book Create Your Own Economy: When access [to information] is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces. Through this mechanism, costs of access influence our interior lives. There are usually both "small bits" and "large bits" of culture within our grasp. High costs of access shut out the small bits - they're not worthwhile - and therefore shunt us toward the large bits. Low costs of...

The quality of allusion is not google

Last Saturday, Adam Kirsch, the talented TNR penman, accomplished a rare feat. His cherry-scented byline marked the pages of both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In the Times piece, he tied the Congressional whitewashing of the Constitution to the latest attempt to give poor old Huck Finn a thorough scrubbing. Upshot: "To believe that American institutions were ever perfect makes it too easy to believe that they are perfect now. Both assumptions, one might say, are sins against the true spirit of the Constitution." Yes, one might very well say that. One might even say "one...

Media's medium

The New Republic is today running my review of Douglas Coupland's biography Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! Here's the start: One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a Canadian television show in 1968 featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both heroes of the 60s, 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 internet changes everything/nothing

In an essay at Berfrois, Justin E. H. Smith gets at the weird technological totalitarianism that makes the Net so unusual in the history of tools: The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated...

The "Like" bribe

Yesterday, I was one of the recipients of an amusing mass email from the long-time tech pundit Guy Kawasaki. He sent it out to promote a new book he's written as well as to promote the Facebook fan page for that book. Here's the gist of it, verbatim: A long time ago (1987 exactly), I published my first book, The Macintosh Way. I wrote it because I was bursting with idealistic and pure notions about how a company can change the world, and I wanted to spread the gospel ... I recently re-acquired the rights for this book, and I'm...

Same shit, different medium

The internet changes nothing, argues Marshall Poe, whose ambitious new book, A History of Communications, has just been published: We knew the revolution wouldn't be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet. Now we know these hopes were false. There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution. We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives ... Before the Web we were already used to sitting in front of electronic boxes for hour upon hour. The boxes have...

Angst floods social networks

No sooner does Time magazine place its fabled curse on the head of the Star Child than the fanboys begin to sidle toward the exits. "I've started to take one step back from the digital world," tweets Nick Bilton, the New York Times' chief tech blogger and resident future-dweller. He cops to the fact that "over the last few months, my wife and I have started to make a conscious effort to limit the use of our mobile phones during dinner or while spending time with family." Bilton is not alone in giving in to the denetworking urge. Wired columnist...

Interactive storytelling: an oxymoron

Craig Mod is psyched about the future of literary storytelling. "With digital media," he writes in "The Digital Death of the Author," an article that's part of New Scientist's "Storytelling 2.0" series, "the once sacred nature of text is sacred no longer. Instead, we can change it continuously and in real time." E-storytelling is to storytelling, he says, as Wikipedia is to a printed encyclopedia. And that's a good thing: The biggest change is not in the form stories take but in the writing process. Digital media changes books by changing the nature of authorship. Stories no longer have to...