Nicholas Carr – On The 8 Spot

August 19, 2009

Best Read:Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Paul is dead

I see people playing rockband with an intensity that could split a hair in half and I weep. When (I believe it was an MIT lab) created rockband they thought they were bringing music to the masses, what they brought was another way to to fool ourselves that we are doing “something” while the world beckons to be changed. I love technology , but I sometimes act like a Luddite, Its simple, I see people playing rockband and the like , what 1-3 hours a day, time better spent on learning an instrument or the like.

Given that our culture is fundamentally consumerist, every countercultural movement is by definition anti-consumerist, a quixotic attempt to create an imaginary space that exists outside of and in opposition to the marketplace. Counterculturalism is a doomed attempt to maintain innocence in the face of the market’s all-consuming cynicism. Once the Beatles, and particularly John Lennon, became aware of their power, they dedicated themselves to sustaining the countercultural dream of the sixties, even after the dream had evaporated. Rock Band in general, though especially the Beatles edition, makes a particularly good vampire. The blood it sucks is the blood of the innocent.
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Paul is dead.

March 22, 2009

Best Read::Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: More present than the present

: Image via Wikipedia

Read the whole thing, this is but half of it (but of course the good parts here)

Take the following passage from a series of lectures he gave, in California, in May of 1999 (collected in the book The Vital Illusion), in which he limns our era:

Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.
Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.
Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.
Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.
Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex …
Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.

If a clearer depiction of realtime exists, I have not come upon it in my inchworm meanderings.
The fact that Baudrillard could so clearly describe the twitterification phenomenon ten years before it became a phenomenon reveals that the phrase “new media,” when used to describe the exchange of digital messages over the Internet, is a coinage of the fabulist. What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them. <Emphasis Mine>
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: More present than the present.

March 13, 2009

Things To Ponder: Reclaiming The Space :Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Realtime kills real space

: Image by Scarleth White via Flickr

Call me a Luddite but I think its time to fight back!
Not by isolating ourselves and not using the web and all its gifts but by trying to one up the web and making our real world interactions better. Trying to find the kinds of interactions that would flow naturally from using the web and living a connected life.
This is a new category , “Reclaiming Space”. trying to find the ways that would help make the web a complement , and not a substitute to real connections!

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”
Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen – the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Realtime kills real space.

February 22, 2009

rePost: Big Brother Becomes Little Bug! :Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Secret agent moth

: Image via Wikipedia

scary.

Elsewhere on the robotics front, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is making good progress towards its goal of turning insects into remote-controlled surveillance and monitoring instruments. Three years ago, Darpa launched its Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) project, with the intent, as described by IEEE Spectrum, of creating “moths or other insects that have electronic controls implanted inside them, allowing them to be controlled by a remote operator. The animal-machine hybrid will transmit data from mounted sensors, which might include low-grade video and microphones for surveillance or gas sensors for natural-disaster reconnaissance. To get to that end point, HI-MEMS is following three separate tracks: growing MEMS-insect hybrids, developing steering electronics for the insects, and finding ways to harvest energy from the them to power the cybernetics.”
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Secret agent moth.