For several days now, journalism professor Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr have been debating whether the internet makes journalism better or worse. In the end, neither side wins — or both do — because the internet amplifies both the good and the bad things about… Read More »
Tech
New research seems to show that our memories are less accurate when we know the information is stored somewhere else. Some feel this is going to make us less human in some way, but I for one am glad to outsource parts of my brain. Read More »
Today’s recommended reading links include a fascinating look at a ghost town in the California desert, an analysis of why more free parking would be bad for cities, an inspiring story about how open data helped Alzheimer’s research and a graveyard for computers in Ghana. Read More »
Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker has joined in the ongoing debate over whether the Internet makes people smarter or dumber. He says using Twitter and spending time on the web doesn’t make us less intelligent, any more than reading an encyclopedia makes us more intelligent. Read More »
Is the Internet making us smarter or dumber? Authors Nick Carr and Clay Shirky have dueling essays appearing in The Wall Street Journal this weekend that look at opposing sides of that provocative question — but the bottom line is that they are likely both right. Read More »
Nick Carr, author of “Does IT Matter” and “The Big Switch,” helped us kick off the Structure 08 conference yesterday with a short and sweet message about the shift to cloud computing and why we need to think about the ethics of… Read More »
Om kicked off the morning with a nice surprise in the form of a video clip message from Nick Carr. Here’s some notes: The fundamental unit of computing is shifting from individual computers to the data center or the grid of computers. This means different things… Read More »
Question of the Day: Do social networks exploit their user-content generators? I don’t know if you saw Billy Bragg’s Op-Ed yesterday, The Royalty Scam, but it’s worth reading as a criticism of social media business models that leverage the intellectual and artistic capital… Read More »
