Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 55

The post-book book

The iPad's iBooks application may or may not become our e-reader of choice - even uber-fanboy David Pogue seems a mite skeptical this morning - but the model of book reading (and hence book writing) the iPad promotes seems fated, in time, to become the dominant one. The book itself, in this model, becomes an app, a multihypermediated experience to click through rather than a simple sequence of pages to read through. To compete with the iPad, the current top-selling e-reader, Amazon's Kindle, ...

Greenpeace raids the cloud

In late 2006, I wrote a post about the energy consumption of modern computing plants, in which I made a prediction: As soon as activists, and the public in general, begin to understand how much electricity is wasted by computing and communication systems - and the consequences of that waste for the environment and in particular global warming - they'll begin demanding that the makers and users of information technology improve efficiency dramatically. Greenpeace and its rainbow warriors will ...

The Shallows at SXSW

I will be reading from my forthcoming book, The Shallows, a week from today at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. The reading is scheduled to take place on March 16 at 11:30 am on the Day Stage. If you are in the neighborhood, and are properly badged, please stop by....

Nowness

"Ripeness," Shakespeare told us, "is all." The Bard did not anticipate the realtime web. On the New Net, ripeness is nothing. Nowness is all, as David Gelernter tells us in his essay "Time to Start Taking the Web Seriously." Web 2.0 was supposed to bring us a creative outpouring of "social production." Instead it's tossed us into the rapids of instant communication. The Web has become a vast multimedia telephone system, where everyone is on the same party line, exchanging millions of bite-siz...

The crystal stream

David Gelernter peers into the ineffable nowness of realtime: Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in...

A typology of crowds

Over the last few days, I've been involved in an email discussion on "The Crowd," which will be excerpted on PBS's Digital Nation site. One thing that has long bothered me about discussions of online crowds is that they tend to yoke lots of different sorts of groups together under a single rubric. Important differences end up being glossed over. With that in mind, I've been trying to think through the various forms that online crowds take. As a rough starting point, I came up with four: "Soci...

Raising the realtime child

Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type's Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell. Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned - and rightly so - that the...

The end of corporate computing, revisited

Five years ago, in early 2005, I wrote an article for the MIT Sloan Management Review called "The End of Corporate Computing." The article, which predicted an imminent shift to "utility computing," was the seed for my book The Big Switch. Usually, the article lies behind the Review's paywall, but for the moment it is freely available to read. Here's a bit from the beginning of the piece: [Information technology:] is beginning an inexorable shift from being an asset that companies own in the fo...

The library, debooked

The New York Times has published a debate on the question "Do school libraries need books?" I am one of the contributors, along with Cushing Academy's James Tracy....

Information wants to be free my ass continued

Some followup on my earlier post: In today's New York Times, Jenna Wortham reports: It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or m...