Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

The informavore in its cage

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:35:54 -0500

Edge is featuring, in "The Age of the Informavore," a fascinating interview with Frank Schirrmacher, the influential science and culture editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung."The question I am asking myself," Schirrmacher says, "[which] arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, [is] how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life ... And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly...

Atmospherics

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:42:28 -0500

Google held a one-day conference on cloud computing in London last week, called Atmosphere, and they asked me to give a talk on the historical and economic context of the development of the cloud. All the presentations from the event are now up on YouTube, including mine, which if you have a half hour to kill you can watch here: The other presenters included Werner Vogels, Marc Benioff, Geoffrey Moore, and various Googlers and their clients....

"The Shallows": publication details

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:58:41 -0500

I've completed my next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and the manuscript - actually, the wordprocessingscript - is with the publisher, W. W. Norton, for editing and production. (The cover image below is provisional. It will be used in the publisher's catalog, but probably won't be the actual cover of the book.) The Shallows is slated to be published in North America on June 1, 2010, and if you're antsy you can preorder a copy from Amazon today. The English version of the book will also be published in the UK by Atlantic Books,...

The eternal conference call

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:45:27 -0500

What goes around comes around, if always a little faster. Remember when we first started using email, back in the foggy depths of the twentieth century? The great thing about email, everyone said and everyone believed, was that it was an asynchronous communications medium. (Yes, that's how we used to talk.) Email cured the perceived shortcomings of telephone calls, which dominated our work lives. The ring of your phone would butt into whatever you happened to be doing at that moment, and you had no choice but to answer the damn thing (it might be your boss or your client,...

Cloud koan

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:34:14 -0500

Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything....

Netflix's tail massage

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:17:32 -0500

A couple of Wharton professors recently released a study of the distribution of demand for movie rentals at Netflix, based on the data the company released for the Netflix prize. The authors say the data contradict Chris Anderson's long tail theory; Anderson says the data back up his theory; and Tom Slee says the data do neither. I wonder, though, whether the Netflix data aren't hopelessly skewed, at least when it comes to getting a sense of the relative demand for hits as opposed to less popular or niche titles. I've subscribed to Netflix for a long time, and what...

Rough Type valued at $351.80 after beer injection

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:37:34 -0500

I gave a guy down the street a 5% ownership stake in Rough Type in exchange for a 30 pack of Natty Light. The beer's worth $17.59, according to the sign in the window of the liquor store downtown, which gives Rough Type a current valuation of $351.80, or 0.0000003518 Twitters....

Questioning Accidentalism

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:35:07 -0500

I've noticed over the last couple of years the rise of an interesting new theory of human history, which I'll call Accidentalism. Although it may have broader implications, it has tended to be applied mainly to the history of media. In short, the theory posits, or, more typically, takes as a given, that the media of the past developed as a result of a series of accidents. Technological accidents begot economic accidents, which begot accidents of production and consumption, and human beings tumbled around in all those accidents like socks in a dryer. Let me point to two examples I've...

Anthologized

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:19:48 -0500

I'm happy to report that my essay Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which appeared last year in The Atlantic, has been selected for inclusion in three anthologies: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert; The Best Technology Writing 2009, edited by Steven Johnson; and The Best Spiritual Writing 2010, edited by Philip Zaleski. The first two anthologies are available now; the third will be published early next year. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" also appears in the new edition of the popular textbook Writing Logically, Thinking Critically....

Close down the schools!

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:06:18 -0500

The headline on Steve Lohr's Bits post sounds pretty definitive: "Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom." And the quote that Lohr gets from the study's lead author, Barbara Means, sounds equally definitive: “The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction." Predictably, Lohr's post is now inspiring even more extreme summaries of the study. "Want to learn better?" screams the headline at the misnamed SmartPlanet.com. "Crack open your laptop (and ditch the classroom)." Chimes in Podcasting News: "Why Go to...

Turn the page, turn the channel

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:48:55 -0500

I have seen the future of print, and it is TV. Thank you, Gordon Moore....

Rock-by-number

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:08:48 -0500

Man, this looks good: Those avatars can really swing. It's like you're in a wax museum and all of a sudden the wax figures come to life and you're like jamming with them on a wax guitar. Seriously, though, the release next month of The Beatles™: Rock Band™ is shaping up to be the cultural event of the year, if not the millennium to date. The making of the game was the subject of an epic article, by Daniel Radosh, in the Sunday New York Times, which featured comments from Paul and Ringo as well as John's widow, George's widow,...

The diminishing returns on data

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:30:04 -0500

CNet's Tom Krazit has posted a brief but very interesting interview with the Berkeley economist Hal Varian, who now serves as one of Google's big thinkers. Krazit asks Varian whether search scale offers a quality advantage - in other words, does the ability to collect and analyze more data on more searches translate into better search results and better search-linked ads. Here's the exchange: Krazit: One thing we've been talking about over the last two weeks is scale in search and search advertising. Is there a point at which it doesn't matter whether you have more market share in looking...

Slanted and enchanted

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:59:40 -0500

I've been hanging out at the TPM Cafe this week, discussing Bill Wasik's book And Then There's This. Here's my latest post from the discussion: If, as Amanda Marcotte suggests, the Internet is like the Beach Boys in 1963, then I guess we have a few more years of inspired genius before the psychosis, death, and exploitation set in. Then again, everything goes faster on the Net, so maybe we're already in the psychosis, death, and exploitation phase. Like Amanda, I think that Bill Wasik, in his book, glosses over the fact that one of the foundational characteristics (and joys)...

Let them eat tweet

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

Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate dopiness? 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...