Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 53

You can thank Lee de Forest for this

Gizmodo has a brief excerpt from The Shallows in which I describe the instrumental, but now largely forgotten, role that the inventor Lee de Forest played in the launching of our electronic age: Our modern media spring from a common source, an invention that is rarely mentioned today but that had as decisive a role in shaping society as the internal combustion engine or the incandescent lightbulb. The invention was called the Audion. It was the first electronic audio amplifier, and the man wh...

FT on Shallows

Christopher Caldwell reviews The Shallows in the Financial Times: The subtitle of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock 'n' roll was corrupting the nation's youth; or in the 1970s about how television was turning kids into idiots; or in the 1990s about the sociopathology of rap music. But this is no such book. It is a patient and rewarding popularisation of some of th...

Experiments in delinkification

A few years back, my friend Steve Gillmor, the long-time technology writer and blogger, went on a crusade against the hyperlink. He stopped putting links into his posts and other online writings. I could never quite understand his motivation, and the whole effort struck me as quixotic and silly. I mean, wasn't the hyperlink the formative technology of the entire World Wide Web? Wasn't the Web a hypermedia system, for crying out loud? My view has changed. I'm still not sure what Gillmor was up...

The Shallows excerpt, reviews

The new issue of Wired features an excerpt from my new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The excerpt draws on material from the chapter of the book entitled "The Juggler's Brain," in which I examine an array of research on how the Internet and networked computers are influencing our mental habits and altering the way we think. (For those of a scientific bent, I should note that the chapter itself, which is considerably longer than the excerpt, surveys many more stu...

Facebook's identity lock-in

"You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal." -Bob Dylan Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a knack for making statements that are at once sweeping and stupid, but he outdoes himself with this one: You have one identity … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. This is, at the obvious level, a clever and cynical ploy to recast the debate about Facebook's ongoing efforts to chip away at its members' privacy safeguards. Facebook, Zuckerberg implies, is...

Long player: super deluxe limited-edition reissue

A correspondent, noting the imminent re-re-re-release, in several analogue and digital formats at escalating price points, of the Rolling Stones masterwork Exile on Main Street, suggests that I issue my own re-release of my 2007 post Long Player, which was inspired, in part, by the Stones record and which, as it happens, I wrote in the cellar of a villa in the south of France. I was thinking of hiring a crackerjack blogsman to remix the post - Doc Searls, perhaps - but in rereading it I reali...

Not addiction; dependency

This week's New Yorker features an article, by Julia Ioffe, on Chatroulette, the quirky video chat service that at this point seems mainly of interest to pervs and reporters. Ioffe suggests that, in addition to all the wank artists and show-me-your-tits doofuses, expeditions into "the Chatroulette vortex" also reveal "a lot of joy": There is, for example, the video of the dancing banana, crudely drawn on lined paper, exhorting people to "Dance or gtfo!" (Dance or get the fuck out.) The banana...

My own private internet

Here's Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, in a new Esquire interview, describing her vision of the future of the Net: I call it the Internet of One. I want it to be mine, and I don't want to work too hard to get what I need. In a way, I want it to be HAL. I want it to learn about me, to be me, and cull through the massive amount of information that's out there to find exactly what I want. Cool. Going online would feel like being isolated in one of those comfy suspended-animation capsules where HAL kept t...

Sunday rambles

The editors of n+1 examine the rise of "webism" and some of its paradoxes: The webists met the [New York:] Times's schizophrenia with a schizophrenia of their own. The worst of them simply cheered the almost unbelievably rapid collapse of the old media, which turned out, for all its seeming influence and power, to be a paper tiger, held up by elderly white men. But the best of them were given pause: themselves educated by newspapers, magazines, and books, they did not wish for these things to ...

Realtimesink

James Sturm, the cartoonist, continues to post about his experience going cold turkey from the Internet. (He writes up his accounts and has someone else send them in to Slate for publication.) "Cutting myself off from the Internet hasn't been easy," he confesses in his latest missive from the offline world. "The Web had burrowed deeper into my domestic life than I'd realized." But his isolation from the Net's realtime stream of distractions has brought a burst of creativity and productivity: ...