Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

Let them eat tweet

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:33:17 -0500

Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate goofiness? That's the question that's been flittering about my skullcage after reading Gideon Rachman's column on the popular microblogging service in yesterday's Financial Times. In reviewing John McCain's vigorous tweet stream, Rachman observes that "some of the senator’s tweets make him sound like a peasant." He quotes one: “Meeting with Dr Kissinger – the smartest man in the world.” I have this picture in my mind of McCain and Kissinger sitting in comfortable armchairs in a well-appointed governmental office, a couple of aides hovering in the corners, and McCain is...

Books for the times

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:54:01 -0500

The Big Switch gets a nice recommendation from Newsweek. It's #4 on the magazine's list of Fifty Books for Our Times. Here are the top ten: 1. The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope 2. The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright 3. Prisoner of the State, by Zhao Ziyang 4. The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr 5. The Bear, by William Faulkner 6. Winchell, by Neal Gabler 7. Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 8. Night Draws Near, by Anthony Shadid 9. Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely 10. God: A Biography, by Jack Miles...

Sivilized

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:02:50 -0500

Michael Chabon, in an elegiac essay in the new edition of the New York Review of Books, rues the loss of the "Wilderness of Childhood" - the unparented, unfenced, only partially mapped territory that was once the scene of youth. It is by now an old theme, but he gives it a vigorous workout: As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes,...

The sour Wikipedian

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:01:48 -0500

Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70 non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it, Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new ideas." In their report on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures...

Banished

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:05:30 -0500

Do not ask for whom the Google tolls. It tolls for me. I woke up this morning to discover that I no longer exist. The entire contents of this blog has been erased from Google's index. Every post. Every last bon mot. Gone. Without a trace. Here, by way of illustration, is what you'll get if you google the word "google" and restrict the search to the roughtype.com domain: Now I know how Adam and Eve felt after God kicked their sorry asses out of Eden. I'm on my knees. Please, Google, I beg of you, let me back into...

For whom the Google tolls

Wed, 20 May 2009 11:07:23 -0500

It's amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company's Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google's ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind's extinction. The less data Google is allowed to store, said Page, the "more likely we all are to die." (This is a particularly sensitive issue for Page, as he's a big backer of the Singularitarians' attempts to secure human immortality.) I couldn't help but be...

The New York Real Times

Tue, 12 May 2009 12:35:43 -0500

Twitterification continues. Not only are other social networking sites, such as Facebook, scrambling to pour their members' energy into the realtime stream, but more traditional publishers are also adopting the Twitter model to firehose their content. Build your arks, my friends: The stream is going mainstream. Yesterday, it was the New York Times that took the realtime plunge with the launch of Times Wire, a jittery twittery service that the paper describes as "a continuously updated stream of the latest stories and blog posts." The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker...

2 minutes ago from Tweetie

Thu, 07 May 2009 15:36:51 -0500

Eric Rice explains the devolution of media, with 60 characters to spare: This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here....

Is Twitter making us stupider?

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:31:46 -0500

InformationWeek's Fritz Nelson ponders the question, and discusses it with me in a podcast. Nelson also points to a memorable video clip that I somehow missed, in which Stephen Colbert clears up the confusion about the proper perfect-tense form of the verb "to twitter": This may well be my most multimediatastic post ever....

Tim writes a book

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:03:28 -0500

Tim wrote a book. The title of Tim's book is The Twitter Book. Tim didn't use a pen to write his book. Tim didn't even use a word processor to write his book. Tim used PowerPoint to write his book. Tim wrote his book very fast, as fast, he says, as he writes "a new talk." There are pictures in Tim's book. Pictures, Tim says, "are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story." Tim says he is "reinventing the book in the age of the web." Tim's book was a lot easier to write than an old-fashioned book would...

The fickle Twitterer

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:43:11 -0500

The biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter's entryway. The second biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter's exit. Twitter's recent growth has been explosive, even by web standards. The number of Twitter users doubled last month, reaching an estimated 14 million. This month, with Ashton's Million Follower March and Oprah's First Tweet, the Twitter flock has almost certainly swelled even more quickly. Everybody who's anybody is giving Twitter a whirl. But a whirl does not a relationship make. According to a study out today from Nielsen, at least three...

The unripened word

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:36:56 -0500

He was off by two centuries and a medium or two, but it was, nevertheless, the French poet and bureaucrat Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine who, in an 1831 letter, foretold all: Before this century shall run out, Journalism will be the whole press - the whole human thought. Through that prodigious multiplication which art has given to speech - multiplication to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet - mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written,...

Writing for nonreaders in the postprint era

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:38:37 -0500

The syllabus. I'm particularly looking forward to Week Two....

Clutter

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:43:07 -0500

Tim Bray, the software writer and self-professed "sicko deranged audiophile," is getting rid of his jewel cases. He's been ripping his large collection of CDs into digital files and tweaking his hifi setup to play music off hard drives rather than disks. "I can’t wait to shovel the disks into boxes or binders or whatever, and regain a few square feet of wall," he says. I'm with him there. The CD jewel case is the single worst technology ever invented by man. It defines, in a truly Platonic sense, the term "piece of crap." Now, Bray is looking forward to...

Hashmobs

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:50:49 -0500

Forget flashmobs. The new thing is the hashmob. A flashmob is, in case it's already slipped your mind, "a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse." The term is, as Wikipedia continues, "generally applied only to gatherings organized via social media or viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt." Flashmobs had their moment of near-fame back in the middle years of this decade. I believe they were particularly popular in Finland. Flashmobs were okay, but they had...