Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 51
July 26, 2010
Tradeoffs
I had the pleasure last month of talking about The Shallows with Christopher Lydon, a superb interviewer, in his offices near Charles Street in Boston. Lydon has a very different view of the Web than I do, which, combined with his sympathetic reading of the book, made for, I think, a particularly good conversation. You can listen to it, via Lydon's Brown University-based Radio Open Source program, here....
July 23, 2010
Maps and minds
The National Geographic Assignment Blog is featuring a short excerpt from my book The Shallows, illustrated with some photographs from National Geographic photographers. In the excerpt, I look at the map as an early example of an intellectual technology that both reflects and disseminates a new way of thinking. Read it....
July 22, 2010
Forgotten characters
As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories. Barbara Demick recently reported on this "long descent into forgetfulness" in the Los Angeles Times: This is a strange new form of illiteracy — or, more exactly, dysgraphia, the inability to write — that is peculiar to China ... The more gadgets people own — cellphones, smart phones, computers — t...
June 28, 2010
Colbert Report redux
I am scheduled to be on the Colbert Report this Wednesday, chatting with Stephen Colbert about The Shallows. Tune in, or program your Tivo appropriately. (I was on the show once before, about two years ago, and you can watch that interview, during which Stephen multitasked with his iPhone, here.) In the meantime, I will be talking about the book at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., this evening [details:], and at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., tomorrow evening [details:]....
June 23, 2010
The pleasure of waiting
James Sturm, the cartoonist who has taken a four-month sabbatical from the Internet, continues to write (and draw) about his experience as one of The Disconnected. Here's a bit from the "halftime report" he issued after having been offline for two months: Whether it's a sports score, a book I want to get my hands on, or tuning into Fresh Air anytime of day, I can no longer search online and find immediate satisfaction. I wait for the morning paper, a trip to the library, or, when I can't be a...
June 21, 2010
Speaking in Seattle
I will be giving a talk this evening on The Shallows at Town Hall Seattle, at 7:30 pm. Please stop by if you're in the vicinity. Also, a few more book reviews of note: Ploughshares Christian Science Monitor Computerworld USA Today And, at Open Culture, an interview....
June 19, 2010
Kids, computers, books
The National Bureau of Economic Research has begun circulating a report on what seems to be the largest study yet of what happens when you give a kid a computer. The news is not good, as has been reported in the last few days by David Wessel at the Wall Street Journal and by the Freakonomics crew at the New York Times. The study, conducted by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, examined extensive data on all public school students in North Carolin...
June 15, 2010
News now
The new issue of Nieman Reports, the journal of Harvard's Nieman Foundation of Journalism, offers a wide array of perspectives on the future of news in our age of instant information. I've just dipped into the contents, but it looks like there's a lot of interesting stuff here: Check it out....
June 14, 2010
Ear full
Running in the New Republic today is my review of In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik's thoughtful examination of our complicated relationship with noise: In 1906, Julia Barnett Rice, a wealthy New York physician and philanthropist, founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. Rice, who lived with her husband and six children in a Manhattan mansion overlooking the Hudson River, had become enraged at the way tugboats would blow their horns incessantly while steaming up and ...
June 13, 2010
Software that loves too much
We all like friendly, helpful software, but at what point does user-friendliness go too far? Some fascinating studies are beginning to appear that show how software applications can, by usurping personal agency, subvert learning and narrow our field of view. I have a short essay on the topic, focusing on that most solicitous of software companies, Google, in the new issue of the Atlantic: I type the letter p into Google's search box, and a list of 10 suggested keywords, starting with pandora ...
