Archive for the 'Book Reviews' Category

Will The Personalized Web Filter Out Diversity?

Published by Jarred on January 14, 2009 in Book Reviews, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Search, Social Networks, Sociology and Web 2.0. Comments

About a year ago, I wrote that I had received a book for Christmas called The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr.  I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was only two weeks ago, on my post-holiday flight back to California, that I finally finished it after ten months of letting it collect dust.

Carr’s attitude about the rise of cloud computing, social networking, and all the other web 2.0 buzztrends caught me off guard.  While he seems to marvel at and mostly celebrate the speed and scale at which this phenomenon has grown and subsequently become integral to modern life, he does so with a very cautionary and sometimes pessimistic tone.  I guess I should have expected as much after reading his piece in the Atlantic last summer (hat tip to Joel for passing it along) called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.  Though I don’t share all of his concerns, it is refreshing to find a voice like his among the generally over-enthusiastic technorati (myself included).

Carr highlights a particularly interesting threat in the chapter he titles “The Great Unbundling.”  While granting that the jubilation over the democratizing and barrier-lowering nature of the Internet is mostly well deserved, he also warns that these characteristics come with potential harm.  What harm?  In short, Carr argues that the speed and personalization offered by the Internet facilitate our natural human tendency to cluster into isolated groups that can deafen and blind us to differing opinions.

Carr’s main evidence is an experiment conducted in 1971 by a Nobel Prize winning economist named Thomas Schelling.  The experiment consisted of a grid of squares and a set of white and black markers.  After randomly distributing these markers to represent an “integrated” community, he moved the markers around based on the rule that no one marker could have more than 50% of its immediate neighbors be of the opposite color.  This rule, Schelling posited, mirrored a natural instinct that humans possess: to be closer to people similar to ourselves than we are to those who are different.  After moving pieces one at a time based on this rule, he ended up with one all-white cluster and one all-black cluster.  Self-segregation, Schelling concluded, is the natural result of our instinctual preference to be closer to those that resemble us than to those who differ from us.

Extrapolating from these results, Carr hypothesizes that because the Internet removes so much friction from the market for information, self-segregation will happen much more quickly and completely online than, say, in a once-integrated neighborhood that slowly segregates over many years into two or more distinct socioeconomic or racial groups.  In my opinion, however, his interpretation of Schelling’s experiment, and his application of it to the Web, is flawed from the start.

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Who Are The Digital Natives?

Published by Jarred on September 12, 2008 in Book Reviews, Computing, Culture and Sociology. Comments

There’s a new book out that Taylor pointed me to a few weeks ago called Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. The book’s website describes the phenomenon in question and the purpose of the book:

The first generation of “Digital Natives” – children who were born into and raised in the digital world – are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed.

But who are these Digital Natives? How are they different from older generations – or “Digital Immigrants” – and what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of these young people who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow.

A book about the impact of technology on an entire generation, written by two law professors?  Consider it Kindled, my friends.  But wait, there’s more!  Make the jump!

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The Big Switch

Published by Jarred on January 7, 2008 in Apple, Book Reviews, Business, Computing, Google and Web 2.0. Comments

En route to my mailbox from Amazon.com (via my mother as a sort-of late Christmas present… thanks Mom!) is The Big Switch by Nick Carr.  A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Carr is now widely regarded as an authoritative voice on information technology.  He frequently comments on the impact of IT on culture and business, and this new book explores the history, the present, and the future of that impact.  I look forward to reading it and reporting back in.

This morning, Carr published an excerpt from the first chapter of The Big Switch on his blog.  While you should definitely check out the whole excerpt, here is — as Fake Steve would put it — the “money quote”:

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.

For another interesting post by Carr (especially for you dual Apple- and Googlephiles), read this.