Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 52
June 12, 2010
Steven Pinker and the Internet
As someone who has enjoyed and learned a lot from Steven Pinker's books about language and cognition, I was disappointed to see the Harvard psychologist write, in Friday's New York Times, a cursory op-ed column about people's very real concerns over the Internet's influence on their minds and their intellectual lives. Pinker seems to dismiss out of hand the evidence indicating that our intensifying use of the Net and related digital media may be reducing the depth and rigor of our thoughts. H...
June 9, 2010
Net effects
I had a couple of fairly lengthy discussions on the themes of The Shallows this week: On the NPR program On Point, I talked about the book with Tom Ashbrook. New York Times blogger Nick Bilton provided a dissenting view. Listen. And I discussed the book with Jerry Brito, of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, as part of his excellent Surprisingly Free podcast series. Listen. Finally, if you'd like to get a sense of the scope of the book's content, I'd recommend taking a look at Mi...
June 6, 2010
Nowhere fast
Monday's New York Times features a disturbing series of articles on the theme "Your Brain on Computers": Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price, by Matt Richtel An Ugly Toll of Technology - Impatience and Forgetfulness, by Tara Parker Pope More Americans Sense a Downside to an Always Plugged-In Existence, by Marjorie Connelly Maybe we're ready to stop and think....
Losing our bearings
All technologies have unintended side effects, and the most useful and popular technologies tend to have the largest unintended side effects. (Witness the automobile.) Our eager embrace of GPS systems and other computer mapping tools will be no different, I suggest in a column in today's Washington Post. The column was inspired by the recent news that a woman is suing Google because, she claims, one of its walking maps led her into harm's way: Blaming Google seems like a stretch. Using any ki...
June 5, 2010
Self-linking behavior
Has anyone written a good essay about the soul-sapping power of ego feeds? If not, I'm going to have to give it a shot, as I'm rapidly becoming an expert on the matter. One thing I've learned about myself is that I'm better at writing than talking. So I always cringe when I read, or watch or listen to, an interview I've done. But I'm fairly pleased with my interview with Benjamin Carlson over at the Atlantic's site. I seem to have been more or less cogent in my replies - or else the piece has...
June 4, 2010
Reviews
Because I know you have nothing better to do on a pleasant Friday afternoon in spring: John Horgan, Wall Street Journal Daniel Menaker, Barnes & Noble Review Patrick Tucker, The Futurist Fritz Nelson, InformationWeek Ellen Wernecke, The Onion A.V. Club Peter Burrows, Bloomberg BusinessWeek Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times Laura Miller, Salon John E. Mitchell, North Adams Transcript Russell Arben Fox, In Medias Res Postings will be sparse here now...
A footnote on delinkification
In response to my earlier post on delinkification, and the ensuing discussion, the folks at Arc90 have rushed out a new version of their bookmarking tool, Readability. It includes a feature that will automatically convert links into footnotes on web pages. I have a feeling the feature isn't going to instigate a sweeping change in general web-browsing behavior, but it is ingenious - and welcome....
June 3, 2010
Burying the book
NPR is featuring, at its site, an excerpt from a chapter of The Shallows titled "The Very Image of a Book," which looks at the rise of e-books and the consequences for reading and writing. The excerpt, which is taken from the end of the chapter, describes how pundits have, for about two centuries now, been eagerly proclaiming the imminent death of the book. And, over and over again, they've been proven wrong. Today's book lovers may take comfort from that fact, but they probably shouldn't. He...
June 2, 2010
The Shallows on All Things Considered
I'll be talking about The Shallows with Robert Siegel this afternoon on NPR's All Things Considered. Tune in. Also, ABC News has just posted an interview I did with John Berman about the book....
Links on delinkification
The airing of the idea of delinkification did not, you'll be relieved to know, set off a catastrophic implosion of the World Wide Web. It did, however, set a few minds to pondering. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum considered the distracting qualities of the link and their influence on our ability to pay attention: Think about reading a newspaper pre-Web that decided it wanted to turn a few words blue here and there. Isn't that in itself distracting? Now think about how many ti...
