I will be reading from my forthcoming book, The Shallows, a week from today at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. The reading is scheduled to take place on March 16 at 11:30 am on the Day Stage. If you are in the neighborhood, and are properly badged, please stop by….
This post appeared originally, in a slightly different form, at Edge.org. Ripeness, Shakespeare told us, is all. The Bard did not anticipate the realtime web. On the New Net, ripeness is nothing. Nowness is all, as David Gelernter tells us in his essay “Time to Start Taking the Web Seriously.” Web 2.0 was supposed to bring us a creative outpouring of social production. Instead it’s tossed us into the rapids of instant communication. The Web has become a vast multimedia telephone system, where everyone is on the same party line, exchanging millions of bite-sized updates and alerts with every tick…
David Gelernter peers into the ineffable nowness of realtime: Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world’s attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but…
Over the last few days, I’ve been involved in an email discussion on “The Crowd,” which will be excerpted on PBS’s Digital Nation site. One thing that has long bothered me about discussions of online crowds is that they tend to yoke lots of different sorts of groups together under a single rubric. Important differences end up being glossed over. With that in mind, I’ve been trying to think through the various forms that online crowds take. As a rough starting point, I came up with four: “Social production crowd”: consists of a large group of individuals who lend their…
Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type’s Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell. Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned – and rightly so – that their kids will be at a disadvantage in the realtime milieu in which we all increasingly live, work,…
Five years ago, in early 2005, I wrote an article for the MIT Sloan Management Review called “The End of Corporate Computing.” The article, which predicted an imminent shift to “utility computing,” was the seed for my book The Big Switch. Usually, the article lies behind the Review’s paywall, but for the moment it is freely available to read. Here’s a bit from the beginning of the piece: [Information technology] is beginning an inexorable shift from being an asset that companies own in the form of computers, software and myriad related components to being a service that they purchase from…
The New York Times has published a debate on the question “Do school libraries need books?” I am one of the contributors, along with Cushing Academy’s James Tracy….
Some followup on my earlier post: In today’s New York Times, Jenna Wortham reports: It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they…
I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You’d walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it’s just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak. Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles…
I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I’ve been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net’s effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which came yesterday: July 30, 2008: “I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid? I mean, weve got a problem if this is true, right? In the article, the author … points out that deep reading is…