1A: Nicholas Carr (1959--)

See Nicholas Carr's website for information about his career and publications.

Also, see his page at Big Think for more of his writing and videos with him. The Big Think videos do not have Closed Caption, but they do have a transcript of the interviews. You can find the Show Transcript button (it's orange) to the left, underneath a description of the video.

"[Media] supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
 And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity
 for concentration and contemplation."
--Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Nieman Reports

Summer 2010

News in the Age of Now

‘On the Web, skimming is no longer a means to an end but an end in itself. That poses a huge problem for those who report and publish the news.’

By Nicholas Carr

“Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other—sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth.” 

Those opening words would seem to describe, with the zeal typical of the modern techno-utopian, the arrival of our new online media environment with its feeds, streams, texts and tweets. What is the Web if not sudden, instantaneous and burning with fervor? But French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine* wrote these words in 1831 to describe the emergence of the daily newspaper. Journalism, he proclaimed, would soon become “the whole of human thought.” Books, incapable of competing with the immediacy of morning and evening papers, were doomed: “Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book—the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper.”

Lamartine’s prediction of the imminent demise of books didn’t pan out. Newspapers did not take their place. But he was a prophet nonetheless. The story of media, particularly the news media, has for the last two centuries been a story of the pursuit of ever greater immediacy. From broadsheet to telegram, radio broadcast to TV bulletin, blog to Twitter, we’ve relentlessly ratcheted up the velocity of information flow.

To Shakespeare, ripeness was all. Today, ripeness doesn’t seem to count for much. Nowness is all.

The daily newspaper, the agent of immediacy in Lamartine’s day, is now immediacy’s latest victim. It’s the newspaper that arrives too late. An enormous amount of ink, both real and virtual, has gone into diagnosing the shift of news from page to screen and the travails the shift inflicts on publishers and journalists. Yet when we take a longer view, the greatest threat to serious journalism may not be the Web. Instead, it may be found in changes already under way in the ways people read and even think—changes spurred by the Web’s rapid-fire mode of distributing information. 

Read the rest of this article at this this page.

* [1790-1869; for additional information about Alphonse de Lamartine, if we do as Nicholas Carr or James Hamblin say we do, we will take time to get lost on the Net and see what Wikipedia, Britannica, BrainyQuote, Encyclopedia.com, NNDB, a Google search direct us to so we can learn more about Alphonse de Lamartine]

Nicholas Carr on the PBS NEWSHOUR

ROUGH TYPE is Nicholas Carr's blog

Big Internet, September 4, 2014

by Nicholas Carr

We talk about Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Ag. Maybe it’s time we started talking about Big Internet.

That thought crossed my mind after reading a couple of recent posts. One was Scott Rosenberg’s piece about a renaissance in the ancient art of blogging. I hadn’t even realized that blogs were a thing again, but Rosenberg delivers the evidence. Jason Kottke, too, says that blogging is once again the geist in our zeit. Welcome back, world.

The other piece was Alan Jacobs’s goodbye to Twitter. Jacobs writes of a growing sense of disillusionment and disappointment with the ubiquitous microblogging platform:

As long as I’ve been on Twitter (I started in March 2007) people have been complaining about Twitter. But recently things have changed. The complaints have increased in frequency and intensity, and now are coming more often from especially thoughtful and constructive users of the platform. There is an air of defeat about these complaints now, an almost palpable giving-up. For many of the really smart people on Twitter, it’s over. Not in the sense that they’ll quit using it altogether; but some of what was best about Twitter — primarily the experience of discovery — is now pretty clearly a thing of the past.

“Big Twitter was great — for a while,” says Jacobs. “But now it’s over, and it’s time to move on.”

These trends, if they are actually trends, seem related. I sense that they both stem from a sense of exhaustion with what I’m calling Big Internet. By Big Internet, I mean the platform- and plantation-based internet, the one centered around giants like Google and Facebook and Twitter and Amazon and Apple. Maybe these companies were insurgents at one point, but now they’re fat and bland and obsessed with expanding or defending their empires. They’ve become the Henry VIIIs of the web. And it’s starting to feel a little gross to be in their presence.

So, yeah, I’m down with this retro movement. Bring back personal blogs. Bring back RSS. Bring back the fun. Screw Big Internet.

But, please, don’t bring back the term “blogosphere.”

Image: still from Lost.

"Big Internet" can also be found at this page.

Other Essays by Carr
"Are We Becoming Too Reliant on Computers?", The Guardian, January 17, 2015

Carr's page at The Atlantic

For your viewing and listening pleasure:
NPR: Think You're Multitasking? Think Again (radio program, yet it has a transcript of the report)

ABC News: Texting While Walking (not Closed Captioned)

CNN: Your Brain on Multitasking (not Closed Captioned but has transcript)

Inc.: Multitasking is Killing Your Brain

Nicholas Carr interviewed at Google [Closed Captioned]