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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog
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High Tech News weblog of writer Nicholas Carr
Nicolas is a writer
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| Address URL | http://www.roughtype.com/ Registered: 23-Feb-2008 |
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 Rough Ty | Vice city in General | | 29-Jul-2010 | The New Republic is today running my review of Tom Bissell's latest book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It begins: Tom Bissell is a Renaissance Man for our out-of-joint time. In addition to being a versatile and exuberant writer, a restless if ennui-ridden globetrotter, and a dedicated chewer of tobacco and smoker of pot, he is a prodigiously gifted slayer of zombies and other digitized dem [..] Read complete article | | Rough Ty | More, please, and faster in General | | 28-Jul-2010 | Paul Graham has a perceptive post on what he terms "the acceleration of addiction," describing how technological progress, by giving us more of what we want, will naturally tend to amplify compulsive behavior: Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes [..] Read complete article | | Rough Ty | Tradeoffs in General | | 26-Jul-2010 | I had the pleasure last month of talking about The Shallows with Christopher Lydon, a superb interviewer, in his offices near Charles Street in Boston. Lydon has a very different view of the Web than I do, which, combined with his sympathetic reading of the book, made for, I think, a particularly good conversation. You can listen to it, via Lydon's Brown University-based Radio Open Source program, [..] Read complete article | | Rough Ty | Maps and minds in General | | 23-Jul-2010 | The National Geographic Assignment Blog is featuring a short excerpt from my book The Shallows, illustrated with some photographs from National Geographic photographers. In the excerpt, I look at the map as an early example of an intellectual technology that both reflects and disseminates a new way of thinking. Read it.... [..] Read complete article
Read 1 times | | Rough Ty | Forgotten characters in General | | 22-Jul-2010 | As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories. Barbara Demick recently reported on this "long descent into forgetfulness" in the Los Angeles Times: This is a strange new form of illiteracy ? or, more exactly, dysgraphia, the inability to write ? th [..] Read complete article
Read 1 times | | Rough Ty | Colbert Report redux in General | | 28-Jun-2010 | I am scheduled to be on the Colbert Report this Wednesday, chatting with Stephen Colbert about The Shallows. Tune in, or program your Tivo appropriately. (I was on the show once before, about two years ago, and you can watch that interview, during which Stephen multitasked with his iPhone, here.) In the meantime, I will be talking about the book at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., this [..] Read complete article
Read 2 times | | Rough Ty | The pleasure of waiting in General | | 23-Jun-2010 | James Sturm, the cartoonist who has taken a four-month sabbatical from the Internet, continues to write (and draw) about his experience as one of The Disconnected. Here's a bit from the "halftime report" he recently issued, after having been offline for two months: Whether it's a sports score, a book I want to get my hands on, or tuning into Fresh Air anytime of day, I can no longer search online [..] Read complete article
Read 2 times | | Rough Ty | Speaking in Seattle in General | | 21-Jun-2010 | I will be giving a talk this evening on The Shallows at Town Hall Seattle, at 7:30 pm. Please stop by if you're in the vicinity. Also, a few more book reviews of note: Ploughshares Christian Science Monitor Computerworld USA Today And, at Open Culture, an interview.... [..] Read complete article
Read 3 times | | Rough Ty | Kids, computers, books in General | | 19-Jun-2010 | The National Bureau of Economic Research has begun circulating a report on what seems to be the largest study yet of what happens when you give a kid a computer. The news is not good, as has been reported in the last few days by David Wessel at the Wall Street Journal and by the Freakonomics crew at the New York Times. The study, conducted by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke University's Sanfor [..] Read complete article
Read 3 times | | Rough Ty | News now in General | | 15-Jun-2010 | The new issue of Nieman Reports, the journal of Harvard's Nieman Foundation of Journalism, offers a wide array of perspectives on the future of news in our age of instant information. I've just dipped into the contents, but it looks like there's a lot of interesting stuff here: Check it out.... [..] Read complete article
Read 2 times |
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| Vice city | | The New Republic is today running my review of Tom Bissell's latest book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It begins: Tom Bissell is a Renaissance Man for our out-of-joint time. In addition to being a versatile and exuberant writer, a restless if ennui-ridden globetrotter, and a dedicated chewer of tobacco and smoker of pot, he is a prodigiously gifted slayer of zombies and other digitized dem [..] Read complete article |  | Published 29-Jul-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 0 times. More hits in   |
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| More, please, and faster | | Paul Graham has a perceptive post on what he terms "the acceleration of addiction," describing how technological progress, by giving us more of what we want, will naturally tend to amplify compulsive behavior: Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes [..] Read complete article | | Published 28-Jul-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 0 times. More hits in |
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| Tradeoffs | | I had the pleasure last month of talking about The Shallows with Christopher Lydon, a superb interviewer, in his offices near Charles Street in Boston. Lydon has a very different view of the Web than I do, which, combined with his sympathetic reading of the book, made for, I think, a particularly good conversation. You can listen to it, via Lydon's Brown University-based Radio Open Source program, [..] Read complete article | | Published 26-Jul-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 0 times. More hits in |
|
| Maps and minds | | The National Geographic Assignment Blog is featuring a short excerpt from my book The Shallows, illustrated with some photographs from National Geographic photographers. In the excerpt, I look at the map as an early example of an intellectual technology that both reflects and disseminates a new way of thinking. Read it.... [..] Read complete article | | Published 23-Jul-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 1 times. More hits in |
|
| Forgotten characters | | As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories. Barbara Demick recently reported on this "long descent into forgetfulness" in the Los Angeles Times: This is a strange new form of illiteracy ? or, more exactly, dysgraphia, the inability to write ? th [..] Read complete article | | Published 22-Jul-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 1 times. More hits in |
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| Colbert Report redux | | I am scheduled to be on the Colbert Report this Wednesday, chatting with Stephen Colbert about The Shallows. Tune in, or program your Tivo appropriately. (I was on the show once before, about two years ago, and you can watch that interview, during which Stephen multitasked with his iPhone, here.) In the meantime, I will be talking about the book at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., this [..] Read complete article | | Published 28-Jun-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
|
| The pleasure of waiting | | James Sturm, the cartoonist who has taken a four-month sabbatical from the Internet, continues to write (and draw) about his experience as one of The Disconnected. Here's a bit from the "halftime report" he recently issued, after having been offline for two months: Whether it's a sports score, a book I want to get my hands on, or tuning into Fresh Air anytime of day, I can no longer search online [..] Read complete article | | Published 23-Jun-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
|
| Speaking in Seattle | | I will be giving a talk this evening on The Shallows at Town Hall Seattle, at 7:30 pm. Please stop by if you're in the vicinity. Also, a few more book reviews of note: Ploughshares Christian Science Monitor Computerworld USA Today And, at Open Culture, an interview.... [..] Read complete article | | Published 21-Jun-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 3 times. More hits in |
|
| Kids, computers, books | | The National Bureau of Economic Research has begun circulating a report on what seems to be the largest study yet of what happens when you give a kid a computer. The news is not good, as has been reported in the last few days by David Wessel at the Wall Street Journal and by the Freakonomics crew at the New York Times. The study, conducted by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke University's Sanfor [..] Read complete article | | Published 19-Jun-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 3 times. More hits in |
|
| News now | | The new issue of Nieman Reports, the journal of Harvard's Nieman Foundation of Journalism, offers a wide array of perspectives on the future of news in our age of instant information. I've just dipped into the contents, but it looks like there's a lot of interesting stuff here: Check it out.... [..] Read complete article | | Published 15-Jun-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
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| Ear full | | Running in the New Republic today is my review of In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik's thoughtful examination of our complicated relationship with noise: In 1906, Julia Barnett Rice, a wealthy New York physician and philanthropist, founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. Rice, who lived with her husband and six children in a Manhattan mansion overlooking the Hudson River, [..] Read complete article | | Published 14-Jun-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
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| Software that loves too much | | We all like friendly, helpful software, but at what point does user-friendliness go too far? Some fascinating studies are beginning to appear that show how software applications can, by usurping personal agency, subvert learning and narrow our field of view. I have a short essay on the topic, focusing on that most solicitous of software companies, Google, in the new issue of the Atlantic: I type t [..] Read complete article | | Published 13-Jun-2010 by Rough Ty in General
Read 1 times. More hits in |
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