Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog Perhaps the best essay on the current state of the Web and the Internet yet writtten. A great read.
The early texts of Web metaphysics, many written by thinkers associated with or influenced by the post-60s New Age movement, are rich with a sense of impending spiritual release; they describe the passage into the cyber world as a process of personal and communal unshackling, a journey that frees us from traditional constraints on our intelligence, our communities, our meager physical selves. We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm.
But as the Web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. And when the new millenium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed. Somewhere along the way, the moneychangers had taken over the temple. The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. We were the same as ever. (continue…)
found by Andrew Orlowski
I’m sorry, but I think it’s pretentious drivel. It is full of high-sounding phrases that, when looked at closely, turn out to have little paraphrasable sense:
“… rich with a sense of impending spiritual release …”
This is rather precious, too:
“The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune.”
What have communes to do with consciousness? And by what stretch of the imagination could “commerce” and “consciousness” be seen as opposites?
I’m conscious when I buy and sell (take part in “commerce”) as we all do most days in one way or another. I’m also conscious when I do something else – read a book, eat, walk, tell a joke, go to the lavatory, scratch my nose.
Consciousness is merely a basic fact of biological existence and of no particular relevance here, since it is even shared by the animals who have no concept, one assumes, of religion (or “spirituality” – whatever may be meant by _that_) … perhaps because they lack the fear of death, being conscious but not _self_-conscious. (Human beings, by contrast have, to use Kant’s phrase, a “transcendental unity of apperception”.)
The Internet isn’t this or that; not one thing or another. Like Terence, “nothing human is alien” to it:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Terence
I saw this C/Net headline on Saturday.
‘Critical Windows patch may wreak PC havoc’
Patch to fix serious Windows flaws can lock users out of their computer, prevent the Windows firewall from starting, block applications or cause other trouble.
“The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us.” It may of transformed your PC into something that is not working at this particular moment or locked you out. I guess nobody knows what “other trouble” means yet.
How much LSD do you have to do to think like this? Just curious…
There’s a base flaw in this guy’s ideology: That individualism doesn’t matter. I’d argue that, using his same reasoning, that the Internet has changed everything because it allows us to customize our lives to our specific interests. Granted, this is basically the opposite of his goal of a collective mecca of thought and knowledge, but with the Internet going the way it is the information required to reach his nirvana is being gathred and indexed at a rapid rate.
There are just some people that can’t enjoy the ride, and this Dr. Spock -reared reject is clearly one of them.
Just like the big promise of TV. It was to educate and bring people closer together. Society is more fragmented than ever. Grand desires are held by few people. Most just want to get home to their TIVO to watch Desperate Housewives. The proverbial quiet desperation. Did I mention I was antidepressant resistant? 😉
Are you guys reading this right? It seems pretty cynical to me. Or do you take the side of Kevin Kelly and his dingling reasoning that is being quoted and criticized??
John — hopefully, most denizens of DU are outdoors on the weekend. Intermixed with bits of fandom, reading, family life — and those remaining, sadly, appear to have the imagination of a hoe handle. Not that I draw much of anything personally useful from Kelly OR Carr. I wandered through the drone of parallel discussions in the 50’s, 60’s, and on and on.
The heroes who draw their conclusions from one or another flavor of philosophic idealism have no choice but to end up divorced from the fruits of reality. If we were discussing this in a forum, right now — I’d still have to introduce a footnote to explain the difference between idealism and materialism because, after all, most of these discussions are only pointed to folks who haven’t yet tried existential questions on the hot stove of science — and watched them pop, sizzle and evaporate.
I find the Web and ways it’s growing often interesting, usually useful. I can find legitimate information, advancing science, competent sources — easier than ever. That’s good enough for now.
Cringely does a good job interviewing the old farts
I just finished listening to the one with that ol Jerry Garcia clone, Dave Winer and it was excellent.
A lot of my geekier friends have problems relating to this interview or ones with Oreilly and such because they see computers, the internet and such from a different perspective.
Sort of like a Microsoft middle manager who cannot comprehend Open Source. It is anathema to their very way to thinking. OSS still has a higher percentage of people who see their field differently than just profits and market shares.
There is something in his writing that transcends techspeak that we are used to in the IT field and wholly refreshing.
I will be going to Toronto right after the UbuntiBelowZero in Montreal to hear Carr debate “Does IT Matter?”
Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message” by a man who also believed in a “Global Village”