Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 56

Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly

I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak. Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet...

Eric Schmidt's second thoughts

I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I've been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net's effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which came yesterday: July 30, 2008: "I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? The Atlantic: 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?' I mean, we've got a problem if this is true, right? In the article, the author ...