Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 49

The attack on Do Not Track

If your ability to make money hinges on keeping people in the dark, there's nothing quite so discombobulating as the prospect of someone turning on the light. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission recommended the establishment of a Do Not Track program for the Internet. The program would give people a simple way to block companies from collecting personal data about them, data that is today routinely collected and used for targeted, or "behavioral," advertising. The Do Not Track program, which in some ways would be similar to the popular Do Not Call program for blocking telemarketers, is part of...

The cloud press

Stephen Baker points to an illuminating, and troubling, report on the current state of electronic publishing by Newsweek COO Joseph Galarneau. This past week, amid the controversy surrounding Wikileaks' publishing of confidential messages from US diplomats, Amazon.com tossed Wikileaks off of its cloud computing service. Wikileaks, the company said in an announcement, had violated at least two clauses in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer agreement: AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of...

Absorbing self-communion

Virginia Heffernan is not the first New York Times Magazine writer to tackle the topic of attention. A correspondent pointed me to another piece (published precisely 100 years ago today), which was titled "The Secret of Success – Intellectual Concentration." It looks at "notable cases where men won fame and fortune through absorbing self-communion." These fellows – they include "Edison, Keene, Pupin, Hewitt, Westinghouse and Gould" – seem to have been gifted with big, fat, wonky attention spans. I particularly enjoyed the description of Edison's ability to focus his attention: When Edison, still a telegraph operator in Boston, was receiving...

Yes, Virginia, there is attentiveness

Virginia Heffernan has a funny little column in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. She opens by pointing to Jonah Lehrer and me as examples of people who allegedly believe that, as she puts it, "everyone has an attention span" and "an attention span is a freestanding entity like a boxer's reach, existing independently of any newspaper or chess game that might engage or repel it, and which might be measured by the psychologist's equivalent of a tailor's tape." This is complete nonsense. Lehrer and I have different views of how the internet and other media influence attentiveness, but I...

Privacy is relative

January 17, 2010: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -Eric Schmidt November 10, 2010: "Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced the salary hike in a memo late Tuesday, a copy of which was obtained by Fortune. The memo was also leaked to Business Insider, which broke the news. Within hours, Google notified its staff that it had terminated the leaker, several sources told CNNMoney. A Google spokesman declined to comment on the issue, or on the memo."...

The unrevolution

"I am not a Communist," declared the author-entrepreneur Steven Johnson in a recent column in the business section of the New York Times. Johnson made his disclaimer in the course of celebrating the creativity of "open networks," the groups of volunteers who gather on the net to share ideas and produce digital goods of one stripe or another. Because they exist outside the marketplace and don't operate in response to the profit motive, one might think that such collaboratives would represent a threat to traditional markets. After all, what could be more subversive to consumer capitalism than a mass movement...

Homo digital

In an essay in The American Interest, Sven Birkerts offers a thoughtful survey of some recent writings on the internet and culture, including John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital, Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, my own The Shallows, and a Clay Shirky post celebrating the post-literary mind. Here's a maxisnippet: Modern but Pre-Digital Man was different in untold ways from his counterpart in the Athenian agora. Millennia of history had altered his psychological structure, mentality and even his neural reflexes. What Lanier raises but then ducks is the inevitable question: If change and adaptation have been a...

Out and about

I'll be talking about some of the themes of The Shallows in three upcoming events in the Northeast: This Saturday, Oct. 16, I'll be at the Boston Book Festival, participating in a panel discussion called "Internet or Not?" with William Powers (author of Hamlet's BlackBerry) and Eric Haseltine (author of Long Fuse, Big Bang), moderated by MIT's Andrew McAfee. It's free, and details are here. On Monday, Oct. 18, I'll be giving a talk at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. The talk is part of the school's fall symposium, called "Slowing in a Wired World," and it's free, too. Details....

Touch me

Yesterday, the NPD Group released the results of a survey of iPad owners. The most intriguing finding was that "20 percent of users' time with the iPad was spent with it in bed." One has to wonder what other sorts of activities are being displaced by the nocturnal stroking of the iPad's highly responsive screen....

Mighty stupid media

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing an interview with the BBC World Service's excellent show Digital Planet. One thing we discussed was the way software tools, by automating certain mental chores, may in subtle ways weaken our ability to learn. We talked, in particular, about how the reliance on GPS systems may weaken our ability to build mental maps of space, as well as about a fascinating Dutch study that showed that user-friendly software can lead to intellectual laziness. T...