01/31:The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

[논둑길맨발로]

► 4:03► 4:03

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr - YouTube youtube.com2008년 2월 4일 - 4분 - 업로더: SESConferenceExpo Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch and the Keynote Speaker at SES London and SES New York, chats ...

► 9:56► 9:56

Nicholas Carr Big Switch - YouTube youtube.com2009년 5월 16일 - 10분 - 업로더: ngcarr Excerpt from Nicholas Carr's "Big Switch" keynote address.

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

a Wall Street Journal bestseller; now in its seventh printing

"the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing" -Financial Times

His last book shook up the high-tech industry. Now, Nicholas Carr is back with The Big Switch, a sweeping and often disturbing look at how a new computer revolution is reshaping business, society and culture.

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.

The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. We can already see the early effects — in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in debates over the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth. As information utilities expand, the changes will only broaden, and their pace will only accelerate.

Nicholas Carr is the ideal guide to explain this historic upheaval. Writing in a lucid, engaging style, he weaves together history, economics and technology to describe how and why computers are changing — and what it means for all of us. From the software business to the newspaper business, from job creation to community formation, from national defense to personal identity, The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the “World Wide Computer.”

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google is published by W. W. Norton. Order your copy from Amazon.com.

Acclaim for The Big Switch:

"Future Shock for the Web-apps era ... Compulsively readable - for nontechies, too."

-Fast Company

"Magisterial ... Draws an elegant and illuminating parallel between the late-19th-century electrification of America and today's computing world. "

-Salon

"Quick, clear read on an important theme ... Scary? No doubt. But as we prepare for the World Wide Computer, it's not a bad idea to consider its dark side. "

-Business Week

"Mr. Carr's provocations are destined to influence CEOs and the boards and investors that support them as companies grapple with the constant change of the digital age."

-The Wall Street Journal

"... widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement."

-The Christian Science Monitor

"The first serious examination of 'Web 2.0' in book form."

-The Register

"Carr's book is persuasive, well-researched, authoritative and convincing. He's reasonable in his conclusions and moderate in his extrapolations. This is an exceedingly good book. "

-Techworld

"The Big Switch is thought-provoking and an enjoyable read, and the history of American electricity that makes up the first half of the book is riveting stuff. Further, the book broadly reinforces the point that it's always wise to distrust utopias, technological or otherwise. "

-New York Post

"Carr may take a somewhat apocalyptic view of the vast technological and social issues which a move to utility computing will raise, not least those of privacy, ownership and access, but he makes a compelling case for its desirability in a world where the network is pervasive. Whether we go gently into this world is, of course, up to us, but with the insight offered here we will at least be prepared to understand the consequences of our choices earlier in the process rather than later. "

-New Humanist

"Lucid and accessible ... [Carr's] account is one of high journalism, rather than of a social or computer scientist. His book should be read by anyone interested in the shift from the world wide web and its implications for industry, work and our information environment."

-Times Higher Education

"While technological innovation is largely the creation of idealistic geniuses spurred on by utopian visions, Carr points out, it is rapidly co-opted by the incumbent in power and turned to other purposes ... Technology may be the ultimate tool or even the ultimate psychedelic, but do we really want to become utterly dependent on something about which we have essentially no say? And as for those utopian visions, do we really share them? "

-San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. Carr is always interesting."

-Washington Times

"Carr is one of the more cogent writers on the economic and social implications of the changes sweeping through corporate data centres."

-Financial Times

"'Information is born free, but everywhere is found in chains.' So Nicholas Carr – in his latest and characteristically stimulating challenge to conventional thinking about technology – might have paraphrased Rousseau."

-Democracy

"Nick Carr has written a meditation on the loss of the old when confronted by the new, the loss of the incumbents' advantage when history shifts under them, the loss of data control to third parties, and the loss of sovereignty to institutions and other actors we can't control."

-Public CIO

"The Big Switch ... will almost certainly influence a large audience. Carr persuasively argues that we're moving from the era of the personal computer to an age of utility computing - by which he means the expansion of grid computing, the distribution of computing and storage over the Internet, until it accounts for the bulk of what the human race does digitally. And he nicely marshals his historical analogies, detailing how electricity delivered over a grid supplanted the various power sources used during most of the 19th century ... I also suspect he's right to suggest that in a decade or so, many things we now believe permanent will have disappeared."

-Technology Review

"Considered and erudite."

-The Telegraph

"Carr stimulates, provokes and entertains superbly."

-Information Age

"Carr created a huge rift in the business community with his first book, Does IT Matter?, challenging the conventional wisdom that information technology provides a competitive advantage. Here he examines the future of the Internet, which he says may one day completely replace the desktop PC as all computing services are delivered over the Net as a utility, the Internet morphing into one giant 'World Wide Computer.' ... Carr warns that the downside of the World Wide Computer may mean further concentration of wealth for the few, and the loss of jobs, privacy, and the depth of our culture."

-Booklist (starred review)

"Highly interesting. Carr presents a persuasive historical analogy that computer utilities will replace in-house computer facilities as electrical utilities replaced in-house generators. . . . The Big Switch impressively discusses the positive and negative aspects of the coming 'World Wide Computer.' "

-Thomas P. Hughes, Emeritus Mellon Professor of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Human-Built World and American Genesis

"Nick Carr gets it right. There's a big switch coming. Personal computers are over; instead our lives will soon center around one planetary World Wide Computer. Carr lays out scores of reasons why he, and we, should dread this inevitable future. But even for those of us who can't wait for its arrival, this profile of the emerging machine by a very competent reporter is the kind of evidence every future-oriented person should read."

-Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy

"Carr’s analysis of the recent past is clear and insightful as he examines common computing tools that are embedded in the Internet instead of stored on a hard drive, including Google and YouTube."

-Publishers Weekly

"A leading technological rabble-rouser prognosticates a world beyond Web 2.0. [Carr's] broader sociological observations are punctuated by a pair of ominously prescient chapters about privacy issues and cyberterrorism."

-Kirkus Reviews

"An enjoyable and thought-provoking read."

-GigaOm

"The Big Switch explains the future of computing in terms so simple I can understand them."

-Ed Cone, Greensboro News-Record

copyright 2004-2008 by Nicholas G. Carr

site design by timothy swan

http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/

An excerpt from "Burden's Wheel," the first chapter of Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

At a conference in Paris during the summer of 2004, Apple introduced an updated version of its popular iMac computer. Since its debut in 1998, the iMac had always been distinguished by its unusual design, but the new model was particularly striking. It appeared to be nothing more than a flat-panel television, a rectangular screen encased in a thin block of white plastic and mounted on an aluminum pedestal. All the components of the computer itself - the chips, the drives, the cables, the connectors - were hidden behind the screen. The advertising tagline wittily anticipated the response of prospective buyers: “Where did the computer go?”

But the question was more than just a cute promotional pitch. It was, as well, a subtle acknowledgment that our longstanding idea of a computer is obsolete. While most of us continue to depend on personal computers both at home and in the office, we’re using them in a very different way than we used to. Instead of relying on data and software that reside inside our computers, inscribed on our private hard drives, we increasingly tap into data and software that stream through the public Internet. Our PCs are turning into terminals that draw most of their power and usefulness not from what’s inside them but from the network they’re hooked up to - and, in particular, from the other computers that are hooked up to that network.

The change in the way we use computers didn’t happen overnight. Primitive forms of centralized computing have been around for a long time. In the mid-1980s, many early PC owners bought modems to connect their computers over phone lines to central databases like Compuserve, Prodigy, and the Well - commonly known as “bulletin boards” - where they exchanged messages with other subscribers. America Online popularized this kind of online community, greatly expanding its appeal by adding colorful graphics as well as chat rooms, games, weather reports, magazine and newspaper articles, and many other services. Other, more specialized databases were also available to scholars, engineers, librarians, military planners, and business analysts. When, in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he set the stage for the replacement of all those private online data stores with one vast public one. The Web popularized the Internet, turning it into a global bazaar for sharing digital information. And once easy-to-use browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer became widely available in the mid-1990s, we all went online in droves.

Through the first decade of its existence, however, the World Wide Web was a fairly prosaic place for most of us. We used it mainly as a giant catalogue, a collection of “pages” bound together with hyperlinks. We “read” the Web, browsing through its contents in a way that wasn’t so different from the way we’d thumb through a pile of magazines. When we wanted to do real work, or play real games, we’d close our Web browser and launch one of the many programs installed on our own hard drive - Microsoft Word, maybe, or Aldus Pagemaker, or Encarta, or Myst.

But beneath the Web’s familiar, page-like surface lay a set of powerful technologies, including sophisticated protocols for describing and transferring data, that promised not only to greatly magnify the usefulness of the Internet but to transform computing itself. These technologies would allow all the computers hooked up to the Net to act, in effect, as a single information-processing machine, easily sharing bits of data and software code. Once the technologies were fully harnessed, you’d be able to use the Internet not just to look at pages on discrete sites but to run sophisticated software programs that might draw information from many sites and databases simultaneously. You’d be able not only to “read” from the Internet but to “write” to it as well— - ust as you’ve always been able to read from and write to your PC’s hard drive. The World Wide Web would turn into the World Wide Computer.

This other dimension of the Internet was visible from the start, but only dimly so. When you ran a Web search on an early search engine like AltaVista, you were running a software program through your browser. The code for the software resided mainly on the computer that hosted AltaVista’s site. When you did online banking, shifting money between a checking and a savings account, you were also using a utility service, one that was running on your bank’s computer rather than your own. When you used your browser to check your Yahoo or Hotmail email account, or track a FedEx shipment, you were using a complicated application running on a distant server computer. Even when you used Amazon.com’s shopping-cart system to order a book - or when you subsequently posted a review of that book on the Amazon site - you were tapping into the Internet’s latent potential.

For the most part, the early utility services were rudimentary, involving the exchange of a small amount of data. The reason was simple: More complex services, the kind that might replace the software on your hard drive, required the rapid transfer of very large quantities of data, and that just wasn’t practical with traditional, low-speed dial-up connections. Running such services would quickly overload the capacity of telephone lines or overwhelm your modem. Your PC would grind to a halt. Before sophisticated services could proliferate, a critical mass of people had to have high-speed, broadband connections. That only began to happen late in the 1990s during the great dotcom investment boom, when phone and cable companies rushed to lay fiber-optic cable and retool their networks to carry virtually unlimited quantities of data.

The first clear harbinger of the second coming of the Internet - what would eventually be dubbed Web 2.0 - appeared out of nowhere in the summer of 1999. It came in the form of a small, free software program called Napster. Written over a few months by an 18-year-old college dropout named Shawn Fanning, Napster allowed people to share music over the Internet in a whole new way. It scanned the hard drive of anyone who installed the program, and then it created, on a central server computer operated by Fanning, a directory of information on all the song files it found, cataloguing their titles, the bands that performed them, the albums they came from, and their audio quality. Napster users searched this directory to find songs they wanted, which they then downloaded directly from other users’ computers. It was easy and, if you had a broadband connection, it was fast. In a matter of hours, you could download hundreds of tunes.

Napster, not surprisingly, became wildly popular, particularly on college campuses where high-speed Net connections were common. By early 2001, according to an estimate by market researcher Media Metrix, more than 26 million people were using the service, and they were spending more than 100 million hours a month exchanging music files. Shawn Fanning’s invention showed the world, for the first time, how the Internet could allow many computers to act as a single shared computer, with thousands or even millions of people having access to the combined contents of previously private databases. Although every user had to install a little software program on his own PC, the real power of Napster lay in the network itself - in the way it created a central file-management system and the way it allowed data to be transferred easily between computers, even ones running on opposite sides of the globe.

There was just one problem. It wasn’t legal. The vast majority of the billions of songs downloaded through Napster were owned by the artists and record companies that had produced them. Sharing them without permission or payment was against the law. The arrival of Napster had turned millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into digital shoplifters, setting off the greatest, or at least the broadest, orgy of looting in history. The musicians and record companies fought back, filing lawsuits charging Fanning’s company with copyright infringement. Their legal counterattack culminated in the closing of the service in the summer of 2001, just two years after it had launched.

Napster died, but the business of supplying computing services over the Internet exploded in its wake. Many of us now spend more time using the new Web 2.0 services than we do running traditional software applications from our hard drives. We rely on the new utility grid to connect with our friends at social networks like MySpace and Facebook, to manage our photo collections at sites like Flickr, and Photobucket, to create imaginary selves in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Disney's Club Penguin, to watch videos at sites like YouTube and Joost, to write blogs with WordPress or memos with Google Docs, to follow breaking news through feed readers like Rojo or Bloglines, and to store our files on “virtual hard drives” like Omnidrive ond Box.

All these services hint at the revolutionary potential of the new computing grid and the information utilities that run on it. In the years ahead, more and more of the information-processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed with the rise of electric utilities in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society - for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think - promise to be equally profound. If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth century society - that made us who we are - the information dynamo is the machine that will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century.

An excerpt from "The White City," the fifth chapter of Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

In 1893, just a year after Samuel Insull arrived in Chicago, the city hosted the largest world’s fair ever - the Columbian Exposition - to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Constructed on a 633-acre site on the shores of Lake Michigan, the fairgrounds formed a spectacular city-within-a-city, featuring ornate neoclassical exhibition halls, displays by dozens of countries and hundreds of businesses, and a midway with a 265-foot-tall Ferris Wheel, the first ever built. The fair drew more than 27 million visitors - equal to nearly half of the country’s population at the time - over the course of its five-month run.

The Columbian Exposition was a monument to the idea of technological progress. It celebrated advances in industry, transportation, and the arts, but most of all it celebrated the arrival of electricity as the nation’s new animating force. The organizers of the event wrote that it was their intention “to make the World's Fair site and the buildings one grand exemplification of the progress that has been made in electricity." A steam plant, built on the grounds, pumped out 24,000 horsepower of energy, nearly three-quarters of which went to generating electric current. During its run, the exposition consumed three times as much electricity as the rest of the city of Chicago.

The electricity powered railroads and boats, moving walkways, elaborate fountains, and dozens of commercial displays of the latest machinery and appliances. Most of the current, though, went into the 100,000 incandescent bulbs, arc lights, and neon tubes that illuminated “The White City,” as the fairgrounds came to be called. One visitor described the sight of the exposition at night in rhapsodic terms: “The gleaming lights outlined the porticoes and roofs in constellations, studded the lofty domes with fiery, falling drops, pinned the darkened sky to the fairy white city, and fastened the city’s base to the black lagoon with nails of gold.” The beam of a search light, he wrote, “flowed toward heaven until it seemed the holy light from the rapt gaze of a saint or Faith’s white, pointing finger.” Another visitor, L. Frank Baum, was so dazzled by the fair that it became the inspiration for the Emerald City in his 1900 book The Wonderful World of Oz.

One of the exposition’s most popular attractions was the palatial Electricity Building. Sprawling over 5.5 acres, it contained, in addition to an 80-foot-tall Tower of Light built by Thomas Edison, hundreds of exhibits of the latest electrical equipment, including “horseless carriages” powered by batteries. An awestruck Henry Adams spent two weeks exploring the treasures of the Columbian Exposition, but he was most deeply affected by seeing a display of electric dynamos - two 800-kilowatt General Electric machines, the largest available at the time, and a dozen of the latest Westinghouse generators.

He recalled the experience in his biography The Education of Henry Adams. “One lingered long among the dynamos,” he wrote, “for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase.” Sensing that such machines “would result in infinite costless energy within a generation,” Adams knew that they would reshape the country and the world. He felt humbled by the dynamos, but their power also troubled him. What history’s “new phase” would bring, he realized, lay beyond our understanding and even our control: “Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving.”

An excerpt from "A Spider's Web," the tenth chapter of Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

Most of the major advances in computing and networking, from the invention of the punch-card tabulator in the 1880s to the present, have been spurred not by a desire to liberate the masses but by a need for greater control on the part of commercial and governmental bureaucrats, often ones associated with military operations and national defense. Indeed, the very structure of a bureaucracy is reflected in the functions of a computer. A computer gathers information through its input devices, records information as files in its memory, imposes formal rules and procedures on its users through its programs, and communicates information through its output devices. It is a tool for dispensing instructions, for gathering feedback on how well those instructions are carried out, and for measuring progress toward some specified goal. In using a computer, a person becomes part of the control mechanism. He turns into a component of what the Internet pioneer J. C. R. Licklider, in his seminal 1960 paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” described as a system integrating man and machine into a single, programmable unit.

But while computer systems played a major role in helping businesses and governments reestablish central control over workers and citizens in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the other side of their nature - as tools for personal empowerment - has also helped shape modern society, particularly in recent years. By shifting power from institutions to individuals, information-processing machines can dilute and disturb control as well as reinforce it. Such disturbances tend to be short-lived, however. Institutions have proven adept at reestablishing control through the development of ever more powerful information technologies. As James R. Beniger explains, “information processing and flows need themselves to be controlled, so that informational technologies continue to be applied at higher and higher levels of control.”

The arrival of the personal computer in the 1980s posed a sudden and unexpected threat to centralized power. It initiated a crisis of control. Pioneered by countercultural hackers and hobbyists, the PC was infused from the start with a libertarian ideology. As memorably portrayed in Apple Computer’s dramatic “1984” television advertisement, the personal computer was to be a weapon against central control, a tool for destroying the Big Brother-like hegemony of the corporate mainframe and its dominant producer, IBM. Office workers began buying PCs with their own money, bringing them to their offices, and setting them up on their desks. Bypassing corporate systems altogether, PC-empowered employees seized control over the data and programs they used. They gained freedom, but in the process they weakened the ability of bureaucracies to monitor and steer their work. Business executives and the IT managers that served them viewed the flood of PCs into the workplace as “a Biblical plague,” in the words of Paul Ceruzzi, the computer historian.

The breakdown of control proved fleeting. The client-server system, which tied the previously autonomous PCs together into a single network connected to a central store of corporate information and software, was the means by which the bureaucrats reasserted their control over information and its processing. Together with an expansion in the size and power of IT departments, client-server systems enabled companies to restrict access to data and to limit the use of software to a set of prescribed programs. Ironically, once they were networked into a corporate system, PCs actually allowed companies to monitor, structure, and guide the work of employees more tightly than ever. “Local networking took the ‘personal’ out of personal computing,” explains Ceruzzi. “PC users in the workplace accepted this Faustian bargain. The more computer-savvy among them resisted, but the majority of office workers hardly even noticed how much this represented a shift away from the forces that drove the invention of the personal computer in the first place. The ease with which this transition took place shows that those who believed in truly autonomous, personal computing were perhaps naïve.”

The popularization of the Internet, through the World Wide Web and its browser, touched off a similar control crisis. Although the construction of the Internet was spearheaded by the Department of Defense, a paragon of centralized power, it was designed, paradoxically, to be a highly dispersed, loosely organized network. Since the overriding goal was to build as reliable a system as possible - one that could withstand the failure of any of its parts - it was given a radically decentralized structure. Every computer, or node, operates autonomously, and communications between computers don’t have to pass through any central clearinghouse. The Net’s “internal protocols,” as New York University professor Alexander Galloway writes, “are the enemy of bureaucracy, of rigid hierarchy, and of centralization.” If a corporate computer network was akin to a railroad, with tightly scheduled and monitored traffic, the Internet was more like the highway system, with largely free-flowing and unsupervised traffic.

At work and at home, people found they could use the Web to once again bypass established centers of control, whether corporate bureaucracies, government agencies, retailing empires, or media conglomerates. Seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the Web was routinely portrayed as a new frontier, a Rousseauian wilderness in which we, as autonomous agents, were free to redefine society on our own terms. “Governments of the Industrial World,” proclaimed John Perry Barlow in his 1996 manifesto "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," “you are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” But, as with the arrival of the PC, it didn’t take long for governments and corporations to begin reasserting and even extending their dominion.

The error that Barlow and many others have made is to assume that the Net’s decentralized structure is necessarily resistant to social and political control. They’ve turned a technical characteristic into a metaphor for personal freedom. But, as Galloway explains, the connection of previously untethered computers into a network governed by strict protocols has actually created “a new apparatus of control.” Indeed, he writes, “the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom - control has existed from the beginning.” As the disparate pages of the World Wide Web turn into the unified and programmable database of the World Wide Computer, moreover, a powerful new kind of control becomes possible. Programming, after all, is nothing if not a method of control. Even though the Internet still has no center, technically speaking, control can now be wielded, through software code, from anywhere. What’s different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.

http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/index.shtml

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains

inShare50

By Nicholas Carr

Illustration by Guy Billout

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They 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. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

Also see:

Living With a Computer (July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing  proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor  carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman  eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Nicholas Carr’s most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published earlier this year.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/