Posts tagged Nicholas Carr
[W]e tend to think of the information age as something entirely new. In fact, people have been wrestling with information for many centuries. If I was going to say when the information age started, I would probably say the 15th century with the invention of the mechanical clock, which turned time into a measurable flow, and the printing press, which expanded our ability to tap into other kinds of thinking. The information age has been building ever since then.
In an interview with The Browser, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, discusses a number of books that inform his thinking.
The Browser, Nicholas Carr on Impact of the Information Age.
Click through for the interview and Carr’s book recommendations
Why publishers should give away ebooks
Nicholas Carr writes that book publishers should follow the lead of a few record labels that give away mp3 downloads of an album when you purchase the vinyl.
Via Rough Type:
Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow.
There’s a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.
To App or not to App
Nicholas Carr: 2012 will bring the appification of media
Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. The influence will be exerted directly, through a proliferation of specialized media apps, as well as indirectly, through changes in consumer attitudes, expectations, and purchasing habits. There are all sorts of implications for newspapers, but perhaps the most important is that the app explosion makes it much easier to charge for online news and other content.
Dave Winer: Why apps are not the future
Visualize each of the apps they want you to use on your iPad or iPhone as a silo. A tall vertical building. It might feel very large on the inside, but nothing goes in or out that isn’t well-controlled by the people who created the app. That sucks!
The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub.
If you click through, and to give Winer his due, read his follow-up to the original post quoted above.
Because it begins in homogeneity, a social network often quickly assumes a particular character - a culture, as we like to say these days - based on the people populating its early core networks and the way that they initially use the service. This foundational culture plays a crucial role in encouraging use and loyalty early on - it’s the magnet that holds everything together and pulls in new members. But if the foundational culture is too strong and too narrow it can end up limiting the eventual growth of the network. Magnets repel as well as attract. To succeed on a global scale, Facebook had to transform its early student culture to a more mainstream culture - it had to go from Shitfacebook to Straightfacebook. It has been very successful at that - it’s a heck of a lot easier to entice older people to a youth culture than to do the opposite - though in the long run its mature, increasingly white-bread culture may prove to be its Achilles heel. A hipper network could quickly siphon away Facebook’s younger members, leading to a network implosion of breathtaking magnitude.
Nicholas Carr, Rough Type. The G+ Spot.
Carr goes on to say that Google+’s specific appeal to the new media crowd is the secret to its early success. However, that same crowd is also creating G+’s originating culture which is too narrow and strong for the general public to latch on to.
In fact, Carr writes that the cultural identity emerging on G+ might repel most normal folk ‘cause who besides the crazies wants to talk media technology all the time?
