Carr looked at a recent speech from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin at the DLD conference in Germany (one Om also attended, where he conducted an in-depth interview with Levchin) and clearly didn’t like what he saw. Levchin’s view of people, according to Carr, is that they are just resources that are not being utilized efficiently, and the technology of sensors and real-time information can be used to improve that, in much the same way that programmers try to optimize the clock cycles of a microprocessor. To take one example, Levchin said:

“How about dynamic pricing for brain cycles? We have been maximizing utilization of very high-value, very low-frequency specialists — today you can already rent the brain of a data-mining genius via Kaggle by the hour, tomorrow by brain-hour. Just like the SETI@Home screensaver ‘steals’ CPU cycles to sift through cosmic radio noise for alien voices, your brain plug firmware will earn you a little extra cash while you sleep, by being remotely programmed to solve hard problems.”

More efficient for users, or just creepy?

If you are a geek, this might sound like something with a lot of potential, but Carr describes it as “Clay Shirky’s ‘cognitive surplus’ idea taken to its logical, fascistic extreme.” Levchin goes on to paint a picture of a future in which his insurance company learns — via sensors in his car — that he is taking his children to work, and boosts his insurance premium by a few dollars for the extra risk (Note: we’ll be talking more about the potential of big data at our Structure:Data conference in New York).

Levchin no doubt sees this as efficient, but Carr sees the looming shadow of Big Brother: What if those same sensors detected that you were overweight, or had eaten too much pizza, he asks — would they report that to your insurance company? Maybe the company would boost your rates a little, or maybe you would be “scheduled for a brief re-education session down at the local office of the Bureau for Internal Resource Optimization.” As he puts it:

“This is the nightmare world of Big Data, where the moment-by-moment behavior of human beings — analog resources — is tracked by sensors and engineered by central authorities to create optimal statistical outcomes. We might dismiss it as a warped science fiction fantasy if it weren’t also the utopian dream of the Max Levchins of the world. They have lots of money and they smell even more.”

In a recent piece for Slate, Carr’s fellow digital skeptic Evgeny Morozov looked at the potential implications of banks and other credit-issuing agencies using big data to determine who deserves a loan. Although he says the idea of big data is “mostly big hype,” Morozov talks about several companies that are trying to use data from all kinds of sources — including social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — to figure out who is credit-worthy.

Hong Kong-based Lenddo and U.S.-based LendUp look at an applicant’s connections on Facebook and Twitter, Morozov says, and “the key to getting a successful loan is having a handful of highly trusted individuals in your social networks.” A British payday-loan company called Wonga even considers the time of day and how a user clicks around a website in order to determine whether they deserve a loan (although Morozov doesn’t mention it, PayPal uses similar methods to gauge credit-worthiness).

The key is who controls the use of the information

Morozov also mentions ZestFinance, founded by former Google chief information officer Doug Merrill (who we had at our Structure: Data conference in New York last year), whose company looks at more than 70,000 signals and 10 different models to assess credit risk. And he draws a direct link between this and Big Brother, saying: “If only East Germany’s Stasi — the true pioneers of ‘big data’ — had the same model for assessing potential dissidents!”

Despite that comment, however, in the end he (somewhat surprisingly) seems concerned mostly that these companies will use all this information to market things to people who don’t need them, rather than turning them in to the government or their insurance company:

“What happens once these firms, having figured out that all data are credit data, realize that all data are also marketing data? Given how much they know about their clients, it would be very hard for such lending companies not to use this information to sell their existing customers on yet another loan or, perhaps, encourage them to use the loan to take advantage of some unique online sales offer.”

The common thread in both of these dystopian visions is a world in which our data is transmitted without our knowledge, and/or used against us in some way. Where Levchin seems to see an efficient exchange of data between user and service, one with benefits for both — and presumably a level (and secure) playing field in terms of who has access to it — Carr and Morozov see companies and governments misusing this data for their own nefarious purposes, while we remain powerless.

What makes it difficult to argue with either one is that we’ve already seen the building blocks of this potential future emerge, whether it’s Facebook playing fast and loose with the privacy settings of a billion people, or companies aggregating information and creating profiles of us and our activities and desires. What happens when the sensor-filled future that Levchin imagines becomes a reality? Who will be in control of all that information?

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Flickr / Thomas Leuthard.

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Internet curmudgeon Nick Carr attacked this particular question in a recent post on his blog, and got into an interesting debate with digital-media theorist Clay Shirky via the comments. Ironically, while Shirky is often criticized as a purveyor of wishful thinking about media, it is Carr who argues there is something ineffable and mysterious about the format we know as the book, while Shirky’s argument seems more based in reality

(Note: we are going to be discussing the future of the book and potential business models for book-related content at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 18, with a panel discussion featuring Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks).

In his original essay — entitled “Will Gutenberg laugh last?” — Carr notes that research shows e-book reading is still on the rise, but also shows that print reading continues to command a large share of the market, and that printed book sales are “holding up relatively well.” Some publishers and distributors have even noticed a slowdown in e-book sales, says Carr, who then goes on to propose some reasons why that might be the case, including:

“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been.”

Shirky says even e-books themselves are transitional

Among those who showed up to comment on Carr’s piece was Shirky, who argues that it is more likely the book format itself is simply going to die out as a result of the web and other developments — and not just the printed book, but the whole concept of a book, which he describes as nothing more than a “production unit” for content, like the album was for music.

As Shirky puts it:

“Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.”

In a comment of his own, Carr responds that whatever might happen to reference works like encyclopedias or phone books — which he agrees would make more sense in digital form — books that consist of an “extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice” would always remain, even if it is in digital form, because there is more to it than just being a convenient container for content.

“Your desire to see cultural artifacts as mere technological artifacts, as “production units,” leads you to jump to the conclusion that because the narrative art of the book is resistant to digital re-formation, the narrative art is doomed to obsolescence.”

In a follow-up comment, Shirky maintains that the novel — fictional or not — is a content model that is “pretty decisively wrapped up in the affordances and limitations of print,” from their length to the idea that all of the content has to be delivered at the same time and for a single price. He argues that given the “native grain of the internet,” those features would not be transferrable to an online environment in the long term. In other words, e-books themselves might be just an interim step towards something else.

“If I’m right about this, the fate of the printed book will have less to do with competition from ebooks (at least in their ‘digital copy of print’ versions) than from competition with Longreads and New Inquiry for the time and attention of the reader of extended narratives.”

Will books follow the epic poem into oblivion?

This doesn’t sit well with Carr, however, who responds with a comment that (among other things) accuses Shirky of having an almost nihilistic approach to cultural artefacts like books, and of failing to see that in some cases having a new product or platform replace an old one might be a loss for humanity rather than a gain:

“I’m certainly not suggesting that uniquely valuable forms of media, or the modes of thinking or expression that they promote, are immune to destruction or alteration by historical forces, particularly ones driven by utilitarian concerns. But if such a medium is lost or diminished by technological or economic change, we shouldn’t simply say ‘who cares; other shit will come along.’”

In a response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.

In the end, Carr’s argument comes down to a belief that old forms of expression like the traditional book are better than anything that might have come along to displace them from their position of dominance in our culture — and his belief forms part of the argument in his book The Shallows, which argues that digital media is actually changing the way we think, and in general making us more stupid (a view I have argued against).

Are we seeing the rise of new artistic forms that will be as beneficial to humanity as the epic poem was, or the symphony, or the silent film? I think we are, and Clay Shirky seems to as well, but Carr clearly disagrees. Who is right won’t be known for some time, if ever.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson, retro writer and Frederic della Faile

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Nick Carr famously wrote about the lack of differentiation that IT brings to the business in his 2004 book Does IT Matter?. His argument was essentially that as computing is more and more expected in business, the things IT does for the business provide less and less differentiation. That means that each business owning its own information technology makes less and less sense.

If you believe Carr’s vision, cloud computing is one logical outcome. In fact, Carr himself made the argument in his subsequent 2008 book, The Big Switch, where he argued that the increasingly commoditized nature of computing would drive it toward a utility model, like electricity or water. It’s a compelling vision, and one that helped to ignite the cloud computing market we know today.

So,  is it possible IT departments will fade away completely as more IT services are available from third parties online and there are fewer legal hurdles to creating, analyzing and taking action on data outside of an organization’s own figurative four walls? I don’t think so.

I think there is a critical role for a central IT unit in organizations of any significant size (beyond help desks and device management). To understand what that role is, however, we have to explore the nature of the applications being created, acquired and operated in those organizations. We also have to explore what IT has been doing, and why that’s so disassociated from what they would be asked to do in a cloud-centric organization.

The IT we know and love

One of the problems of generalizing about IT is that any given organization probably operates somewhat differently from any other. However, there are some general trends that evolved from the client-server computing model that I would argue apply to most mature IT organizations. The most-critical of these trends is what I would call “server centricity,” which might be better called “infrastructure centricity.”

Think about how computing got its start. Before you could do anything, you needed a computer. Once you had a computer, you needed an operating system, which acted as an interface between the human and the machine. With those things in place, you could now decide how you wanted to apply that computer to some form of problem (or some set of problems). That’s where application software came in.

The computer (or the switch or the storage system) was critical to this model. Without the hardware, nothing else happened.

So, IT evolved to take on running infrastructure (and, almost always, operating systems, middleware and databases) to support the applications that business units required to do their jobs. This function grew in complexity until companies spent significant budgets on data centers, infrastructure availability, inter-networking and so on. This was the most critical role IT could possibly play for the business.

IT and cloud computing

Developers — the ones who ultimately applied computing to business problems — were frustrated with the understandably limited capacity that IT had for addressing software opportunities. Standing up infrastructure is work — often expensive work — and the time and money needed to deliver it could never keep up with the so-called long tail of developer demand.

Now, however, the game has changed significantly. General infrastructure is available on a cashflow-friendly basis to anyone who wants it. Add to that the variety of innovative software tools and services that have evolved thanks to the internet, open source and the new economics of cloud computing, and developers are finding utility services a much more palatable option than internal IT for many classes of application development and deployment.

Provisioning virtual servers on Amazon Web Services.

When developers think about operations, they are most definitely focused on the applications themselves, not the infrastructure the applications are running on.

So IT is getting cut out of the loop in many organizations? Not “officially,” and often in very stealthy ways. However, it is happening, and increasingly in unexpected industries and companies. And while most of this happens with the two critical software classes that cloud enables – web applications at scale, and data collection and analysis —  some of it is just developer frustration with IT in general.

So what is an IT department to do?

I think the answer comes in recognizing what “application-centricity” really means in a complex business. No business runs on one application. No business has only one deployment that they manage, only one executable that must meet the breadth of its computing demand. Every company runs on a system of applications: a collection of  highly interconnected, interdependent software components, services and data that must all work as required in order for the company as a whole to survive and thrive.

In the era of cloud computing, what the business requires of a central IT department is coordination of the application system — aiding the various application owners with what has to happen for their software to be a “good citizen” within the computing environment as a whole.

Here are just a few key questions that IT must answer with respect to the new application system:

1. How does the company handle identity, authentication, authorization, data management, and other central security and compliance-related operations functions that must be coordinated across all of its independent operating entities.

2. How does the company troubleshoot issues that happen when applications interact with each other across operating entity or even development team boundaries?

3. Is there anything that can be done independent of the individual appliations to improve the heath of the system as a whole?

4. Who knows the system as a whole well enough to give the appropriate advice on how to best integrate new application ideas and components?

Thus, the primary role of IT moves from running infrastructure to operating software — or, more accurately, assisting developers in operating their software in a larger software system. It’s a consultative role with a number of tools and services that have to be in place and — this is very important — relevant to the developers that IT is supporting. These could be tools to visualize how applications are interconnected and the resources they’re consuming, or services that add intelligence to operations.

The core idea is that IT has to let go of trying to control everything and focus on coordinating and enhancing things that other people control. It can be done. Several online companies, including Netflix and Amazon do it today. The result is significantly better agility, experimentation and innovation, with the trade-off that cooperation, communication and measurement are increasingly critical to success.

The scary part is that most IT organizations are still infrastructure-centric, or at least “context”-centric if you include so-called enterprise software packages. The move to application-centricity and developer self-service is going to be hard, and require some change of skills and culture. It also means that private cloud is not the most important cloud initiative that IT can take on.

I wonder how long it will be until most IT organizations figure that out.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Arjuna Kodisinghe.

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Science-fiction author Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s leading writers of the genre for more than 60 years, died on Tuesday at the age of 91. Although he wrote many books and short stories that were well-received — and in many cases made into movies, plays and TV shows — he was probably best known for Fahrenheit 451, about a dystopian future in which the government burns books. The story is usually seen as a protest against censorship, but Bradbury said his point was to draw attention to how television and other forms of media were making people less interested in the world of ideas. Given that we are surrounded by more media and entertainment content than ever before, what would Bradbury think of the world we live in now?

In the book (which Bradbury wrote in the UCLA library on a typewriter he rented by the hour), protagonist Guy Montag is a fireman — but that term is used for people who burn things, including books, rather than for people who put fires out. In the future envisioned by Bradbury, people’s lives have been taken over by television, which for most people involves multiple wall-sized screens that broadcast mind-numbingly mundane shows with which the citizens of the future are obsessed. Montag’s wife is one of those people, and he grows estranged from her and fascinated by the books he is supposed to be burning. The book ends (spoiler alert!) with a nuclear war that apparently destroys most of civilization.

Bradbury saw society as becoming anti-intellectual

Although books are outlawed in Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury said in interviews that his main purpose wasn’t to argue against censorship (although that’s clearly a sub-theme). Instead, he said he was trying to paint a picture of where society might be heading, as books and other old forms of media and entertainment were being replaced by what he saw as shallow and frivolous alternatives like television shows. In this future, Bradbury argued that books would become outlawed because people themselves would become increasingly anti-intellectual and see them as suspicious. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he was no fan of electronic books:

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell… A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Bradbury also reacted strongly when Yahoo wanted to publish a book of his online: “You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting,” he said. In a lot of ways, Bradbury’s views about television and the dumbing down of culture were similar to those raised by author Neil Postman in his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” which was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and was about the soporific effect of television and its impact on society. It’s not clear what Bradbury thought (if anything) about the internet or the rise of social media, but it seems likely he would see them as just part of the same pattern: shallow amusements that serve to distract people from the pursuit of true knowledge.

Bradbury wasn’t alone: in recent years, others have made similar kinds of arguments about the dangers of the web and social media. Author Nick Carr’s book “The Shallows” tries to make the case that the internet and its non-stop distractions are not only making us less interested in deep thoughts (and less interesting as well) but are actually changing our brains so that this is permanent. And more recently, internet sceptic Andrew Keen’s book “Digital Vertigo” takes aim at social media and the shallow and distracting effects it has on society.

Would social media support Bradbury’s view, or oppose it?

There’s certainly plenty of ammunition for this kind of criticism — from the distractions found on sites like Buzzfeed and the hours people waste on Facebook games like Farmville, to the shallow amusements offered by sites like Perez Hilton or the often darker distractions of a community like 4chan, or the way rumors and hoaxes prevail on a network like Twitter. But does all of this mean that society is becoming anti-intellectual, to the point where people prefer to be amused instead of reading or thinking deep thoughts? I’m not convinced.

One of the things that Bradbury — as great as his vision was — didn’t foresee was how much of the media we consume would be created by us, rather than by some faceless media corporation aimed at serving us mental pablum or lulling us into a false sense of security. The social and user-generated part of social media is the part that makes it truly magical in some ways, whether it’s when Reddit comes together to raise money for a boy like Caine Monroy, or when people in Tahrir Square and elsewhere risk their lives to show us images and video of a war, and thereby help bring it closer than any news show could ever do.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of brain candy out there, or that shallow amusements and distractions created by YouTube or 4chan users are any more uplifting or redeeming than a TV sitcom, because they aren’t. But the tools that we have now are capable of so much more, and there are many people using them for those purposes — and the potential benefits of that are almost unlimited. Bradbury’s dystopia serves as a useful warning about the dangers of amusing ourselves into stupefication, but there is hope yet.

Author Neil Gaiman has written a wonderful tribute to Bradbury that is worth reading, and embedded below is a video clip of the author in 1969, describing what he sees as the social benefit of artistic pursuits like writing:

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of MyLot user CillySophie and Flickr user Alan Light

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When you look around at the web and the state of the online economy, does it look like it has been colonized by large corporations for their own purposes, or do you see a world that is powered primarily by peer-to-peer networks? That’s the question behind one of the longest-running wagers of the modern web era — a bet that author and web sceptic Nick Carr made with Harvard professor and networking theorist Yochai Benkler in 2006. Carr claims that he has won, since commercial interests rule the web, but Benkler maintains the web as we know it is clearly based on what he calls “commons-based peer production.” So who is right?

The wager got started after Carr wrote a blog post criticizing Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks, which he called a “techno-anarcho-utopian magnum opus.” Benkler argued that networks like the web were allowing individuals to come together for various purposes that had economic value — including content creation — without the requirement for traditional pricing systems or managerial structures. In other words, Benkler said there were would be more and more entities involved in some form of economic production based on peer relationships rather than corporate structures.

Carr — whose latest book, The Shallows, argues that the internet is changing our brains for the worse — maintained that the only reason social content-sharing networks such as Digg existed outside of the normal economic system (in other words, were powered by volunteers) was that a market hadn’t developed for such goods yet. Once that happened, Carr argued, the usual pressures of a capitalistic structure would assert themselves and profit-oriented or professional players would take over.

Carr says the web is mostly run by corporate interests

Nicholas Carr

The wager with Benkler, which had no monetary value, was set to expire in 2011. In a recent blog post, Carr argues that he has clearly won, since the majority of players in the media sphere in particular — such as YouTube, Hulu and Netflix — are professionally run and filled primarily with paid-for content (or at least that makes up the most valuable content, according to Carr), and so are music-based services such as Spotify or Pandora. And what about Facebook and Twitter, both of whom rely on massive amount sof free content created by unpaid volunteers? Carr effectively says that they don’t count:

[M]ost contributors are not getting paid for their activity, but many of the most popular tweeters and Facebook pages are motivated by commercial interests – entertainers and other celebrities promoting their (profit-making) careers, journalists contributing as an element of their (salary-paying) jobs, corporations using the networks as PR or marketing channels, etc.

One thing Carr doesn’t mention is that in the original wager, he predicted professional players like entrepreneur and then-Weblogs owner Jason Calacanis would swoop down on socially-driven networks like Digg and siphon off all the most popular content producers by paying them for their content. This, of course, didn’t happen (as Benkler points out). Digg tried to reinvent itself to please its financial backers and wound up destroying the very community that created the value it was trying to monetize, and as a result its more community-focused competitor Reddit wound up winning the battle.

Benkler says peer networks are the real power source

Yochai Benkler

Benkler, meanwhile, has responded to Carr in his own blog post, arguing that he has clearly won the wager, and marshalling a substantial number of examples — far more than his opponent. If you look at content sharing and discovery, he says, it’s obvious that services like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Tumblr are dominant, and all rely on “commons-based peer production” for their value. Similarly, he says, in the world of photos (Flickr, Google Images) and video (YouTube, Vimeo) and travel and restaurant reviews (TripAdvisor, Yelp), peer-to-peer is much more commonplace than a corporate service based on paid-for content.

I think Benkler is also right when he singles out Kickstarter as a growing force in the digital economy — and one that supports his argument. As he puts it:

[I]n 2006, would you predict that artists would get funded by people ponying up real money without expecting to make big bucks in return because of social motivations; or would you predict that the industry would find ways of monetizing it all and re-asserting control over independent artists? The former is where I was standing.

In the end, I don’t think there’s any contest here: Benkler has clearly won. While there are large corporate entities with profit-oriented motives involved in the web, a group that includes Facebook and Twitter, the bulk of the value that is produced in those networks and services comes from the free behavior of crowds of users. Yes, all of the companies involved in those networks and services are trying hard to monetize that value, but it doesn’t come from charging them directly — and very little of what is produced comes in return for a salary, which was a key part of Carr’s argument.

You could argue that relying on networks such as Facebook and Twitter (or Google, for that matter) has a downside, since they are corporations with interests of their own, and they have a significant amount of control over what happens to the freely-produced content generated by their users. But the fact that those users produce that value of their own free will — and that this makes up the majority of the web’s value — is not really in doubt. Time to admit that you lost, Nick.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Images of Money and Wikimedia Commons

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For the past several days, The Economist has been hosting a debate between journalism professor Jay Rosen and digital skeptic and author Nicholas Carr, as part of an ongoing series about the future of media. The proposition tabled by the magazine was that the internet is making journalism better rather than worse, with Rosen arguing in favor of the proposition and Carr arguing against it. In the end, neither one wins — or both do — because with journalism (as with so many other things) the internet is simply an accelerator, amplifying both the good and the bad. Whether society as a whole is better off is still an open question.

In his arguments, Rosen admits that the internet has damaged the traditional media industry — by causing a collapse of the business model that has supported most print-based or traditional journalism — and at the same time has led to an explosion of questionable online content that pretends to be journalism. He says:

By unbundling the newspaper and making advertising cheaper and more efficient, the internet has led to a drastic drop in newsroom employment [and] the internet has increased the supply of rubbish in and around journalism: content farms, recycled PR (known as churnalism), stories that are cheap rewrites of other stories, lists and “charticles” with no purpose other than pushing up page views.

Despite that, however, the New York University journalism professor maintains that the internet is improving journalism, and he lists the reasons why, including:

• It drives down the cost of getting journalism to the people who want it, and that has “opened the market up to more players, allowing more ideas to be tried.”
• It has made location irrelevant, in the sense that media consumers can get journalism from virtually any source, thus “bringing vastly more of the product within easy reach.”
• It gives new tools to anyone who wants them, such as search, online databases, the ease of making charts, Skype interviews and so on.
• It alters the balance of power between users and journalists, “replacing a system in which a small number of gatekeepers employed by a heavily capitalised industry that tended towards monopoly held almost all the powers of the press.”

Journalism gets better when more people do it

In the end, Rosen says, journalism is “not like brain surgery or flying a 747, which are not improved by having more hands on deck.” The more people who are involved in it, the better it gets, he argues. Anyone who doesn’t think that journalism is better now just has to go to the New York Times website, he says, where when news happens they can “read about it right now rather than waiting until the next morning for the paper to land.” Ultimately, Rosen says the internet will improve journalism because it will have to become better in order to survive.

For his part, Carr argues that “what the facts show is that the internet boom has done great damage to the journalism profession.” He also goes through all the data about the loss of journalism jobs and declining revenue, and says that while the internet theoretically has the potential to improve journalism, there is no sign of that happening:

If we can agree that the internet, by altering the underlying economics of the news business, has thinned the ranks of professional journalists, then the next question is straightforward: has the net created other modes of reporting to fill the gap? The answer, alas, is equally straightforward: no.

Digital success stories “modest and fleeting”

While there have been “many noble attempts” to create new kinds of news-gathering organizations online, Carr says their successes have been “been modest and often fleeting [and] they have not come anywhere close to filling the gap left by the widespread loss of newspapers and reporters.”

Carr says he doesn’t believe that democratising media — what Om has called the democracy of distribution — necessarily improves journalism, and argues that Rosen “provides little in the way of facts to support his case.” The biggest problem, Carr says, is that despite all the experimentation, the industry has not found “a substitute for the cross-subsidies that allowed newspapers to use the profits from popular features to pay for broad, in-depth reporting.”

Web only a benefit for the “plugged-in elite”

While members of what Carr calls the “plugged-in elite” like Rosen may believe that the internet has improved journalism, this is because for web-savvy news junkies the “net is a crack house that dispenses its wares for free.” Beyond the elite, however, are the average citizenry who Carr argues are being starved of hard, objective reporting — something that he says contributes to a narrowing of opinions rather than a broadening of them (which sounds a lot like author Eli Pariser’s fears about a “filter bubble”).

So who is right? In many ways, both are. To me, the debate comes down to a battle of optimism vs. pessimism. Carr — who has written a book all about how the internet is changing our brains and making us more shallow — sees nothing but the decline of traditional journalism and a great chaos in its place. Rosen, however, sees the green shoots of new business models poking up through the ashes of the traditional industry.

In the end, McLuhan wins

It’s more than a little appropriate that The Economist debate is taking place as some followers celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of a giant in media theory, Marshall McLuhan — who, as author and fellow Canadian Doug Coupland points out, saw many of the shifts in the way we experience media coming. Megan Garber at the Nieman Journalism Lab also has an excellent overview of how McLuhan’s beliefs about how media functions in a digital age are effectively coming true thanks to the web.

As Paul Ford writes in a very perceptive piece at New York magazine, some of the fear about the decline of the traditional media industry stems from a fear of losing control over the machine he calls “The Epiphanator” — that giant engine that churns out happy and sad stories with tidy beginnings and satisfying conclusions. In its place we are seeing something much more like the stream of content that McLuhan tried to describe, in which everyone can publish and everyone can filter (or not), and stories simply rise and fall and live and die regardless of what a traditional media outlet thinks of them.

Is that a scary future or a bright one? It is both.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig, jphilipg and zert sonstige

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Science magazine has published some research into how our memories are influenced by the availability of computers as a source of information, and this has some in a tizzy about the implications of outsourcing our brains. Author Nick Carr, for example — who has written a whole book about how the web is changing the way we think and making us more shallow — says he worries this phenomenon is going to make us less human in some way. But is that really a risk? I don’t think so. I, for one, am glad to outsource the duty of remembering miscellaneous facts to the cloud, because it leaves me free to do more important things.

In a nutshell, the Columbia University psychologists who published the study performed a number of experiments designed to test whether subjects remembered certain things better or worse when they were told that the information — such as “An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — would be stored in a computer somewhere or would be available through a search engine. Not surprisingly perhaps, people’s memories were somewhat less reliable when they knew the answers they were seeking would be stored for later retrieval (there are more details at the Columbia website).

Implanting forgetfulness?

Carr says he’s worried that by losing these facts and details we store elsewhere, we will become less human in some way, or lose some core of ourselves. But is that really what’s happening? I don’t think so. It’s not like I’m suddenly going to forget my son’s first steps (oh, that’s right — I have daughters!) because I use Google to look up who starred in that movie we watched a couple of years ago, or to figure out who the head of the United Nations is. It’s worth remembering that the invention of writing triggered similar fears, as Plato reminds us in The Phaedrus, quoting the King of Thebes:

If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls;they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.

Carr also makes the argument in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” that we are becoming not just dumber as a result of the web, but also (supposedly) less interesting, because our brains are being trained to focus on the ephemeral and the trivial instead of the important things we should be spending time on. I took issue with this kind of fear at the time, as did some others, and I think Carr is being similarly alarmist in this case. Besides, if we use the cloud to remember the trivial and ephemeral for us, wouldn’t that be a good thing by Carr’s definition?

Do we still need to memorize things?

I know that in my parents’ time, memorization of huge lists of facts and figures and Shakespearean sonnets was standard, because that was the criteria by which knowledge was judged. But what difference does it really make if I can’t remember when the War of 1812 was? (that’s a joke, by the way). Is my experience of the things that matter in life going to be impaired because I don’t know who signed the Magna Carta? I can see how this would be a problem if a trivia game suddenly comes up while I am camping in the woods, but other than that, I don’t see why I shouldn’t outsource that to the cloud — the same way lots of people used to outsource it to Encyclopedia Britannica.

As one commenter on Google+ mentioned when I shared the Science magazine article in my stream, the benefit of having something like the Internet available at all times is that it is the most comprehensive collection of knowledge ever invented (although obviously not all of it is correct). How can that not be a good thing? Said Justin Fogarty:

The plus side is that the whole of human knowledge is nearly at our fingertips. I will not miss card catalogs, the Dewey decimal system or heavy book bags.

Computers can’t really replicate memory anyway. All they can do (so far, at least) is store facts — but facts are not memories. What real memories are made up of is smells and sounds and emotions, and no computer or cloud-based system can store those things. But what the cloud can do quite well is store my phone numbers and the photos I took on a particular day or the tweets I sent (something an app called Momento is extremely good at) and leave me free to relive the memories associated with those facts.

To me, that’s a fair trade — the cloud remembers all the boring and mundane details and facts of my life (yes, I use Facebook to remember when people’s birthdays are, as I expect a lot of people do) and I get to focus on the things that are really important.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Stefan and Tim O’Brien

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One of the reasons I love the weekend is you get a little time to yourself (if you are lucky) and you can sink into a good book or magazine article, or maybe catch up on some reading that you didn’t have time for during the week. I’m always looking for interesting things to read, so I reached out to the Twittersphere for some recommendations, and I went through my Instapaper account too, because that’s where I save articles and blog posts that I want to read later. I thought I would post them here, in case you are looking for a good read to pass the time — and if you have any suggestions of your own, feel free to leave them in the comments.

• A Desert City That Didn’t Fan Out: The LA Times has a fascinating look at a lonely outpost called California City — a town that developer Nathan Mendelsohn hoped would become a vast oasis when he bought 82,000 acres of desert in 1958. All that is left is a sleepy desert town with miles of unpaved streets, waiting for homes that were never built.
• Free Parking Comes at a Price: Wouldn’t it be great if we had more free parking? Well no, it wouldn’t — at least, not if you look at the economic and behavioral spin-off effects that would likely result. An urban planner did just that and came to the conclusion that free parking is “like a fertility drug for cars.”
• The Internet: Is It Changing the Way We Think? Author and blogger Nick Carr recently started (or reignited) a debate over whether the Internet and the always-on nature of social media is changing the actual way our brains work (which we wrote about here). The Guardian asked a number of prominent authors, educators and psychologists for their thoughts on the issue.
• Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s: The benefits of an open approach to data are well known in the technology arena, but the New York Times has an inspiring story about how being open with data helped advance medical research on Alzheimer’s.
• Our Daughter Isn’t a Selfish Brat, Your Son Just Hasn’t Read Atlas Shrugged: If you’re in the mood for a laugh — or at least a McSweeney’s-type smirk — this letter of explanation from a parent about their offspring’s antipathy towards sharing on the playground might do it.
• A Global Graveyard For Dead Computers: It’s for looking rather than reading, but this slide-show from the New York Times magazine is thought-provoking nevertheless, in a terrible kind of way. It looks at a slum in Ghana where scavengers burn and tear apart computers — most of which have been donated by better-off countries — so they can sell the precious metals inside.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of The New York Times

Nick Carr and Clay Shirky recently waged a head-to-head battle — via dueling Wall Street Journal essays — over whether the Internet is making us smarter or dumber. Carr reiterated some of the points made in his recent book “The Shallows,” saying the web continually distracts us, and that this distraction is making us less smart (and less interesting). Shirky, however, argued that the explosion of media the web has brought us contains a lot of noise, but also has a lot of value for society.

Shirky’s side of this debate has now gained significantly more momentum, thanks to a New York Times op-ed piece by Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology and author of “The Stuff of Thought.” Pinker makes it clear that he believes human beings are more than capable of adapting to the current flow of constant digital information and stimulus, just as they adapted to other forms of media — including books (which some researchers believe are just as alien to our brains as video games and the Internet, if not more so).

New forms of media, Pinker says, “have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.” But more than that, he takes issue with the idea — put forward by Carr, with support from several researchers — that Twitter and the Internet in general are making us dumber by literally rewiring our brains, so that we can no longer think deep thoughts. Says Pinker:

As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.

As Nick Bilton notes in a separate NYT piece, while Carr and other critics point to research that says our brains are being impaired by multitasking and the Internet, similar research could just as easily be used to prove that walking in New York is hazardous to the brain. Pinker notes that the things Carr values so much about the non-Internet world — the deep thinking, contemplative moments and other elements that describe an intellectual life — are no more natural or commonplace than playing video games all day or checking Facebook and Foursquare every 10 minutes. As he puts it:

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

In other words, the Internet and social media such as Twitter or Facebook, and video games — and every other form of what Carr and others see as digital distraction — are not necessarily making society dumber. In fact, Pinker concludes that “far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.”

Post and thumbnails courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Dooley