Intel on Cloud Computing
For those still interested in the cloud computing debate: Intel: "Web 2.0"-style cloud computing just a passing vapor.
For those still interested in the cloud computing debate: Intel: "Web 2.0"-style cloud computing just a passing vapor.
FYI, if anyone's interested in further reading.
Newspapers
Economist piece on declining revenues among American newspapers:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11294258
Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice (NYT):
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/business/media/16habits.html?ex=1342238400&en=0ffe4f0b0d234d12&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
WSJ Op/Ed on the future of newspapers:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010131&mod=RSS_Opinion_Journal&ojrss=frontpage
Time Magazine: Do Newspapers Have a Future?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1538652,00.html
Cloud Computing
Slate Op/Ed in defense of the traditional desktop experience in light of the cloud computing movement:
http://www.slate.com/id/2188015/?from=rss
IBM rolls out a new cloud computing hardware solution:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/technology/23blue.html?_r=2
Term definitions (NY Times):
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E180025742400363509.html?ex=1365307200&en=3aa8122436bda02f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Adobe launches online version of Photoshop:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/technology/25adobe.html?_r=2&ex=1361682000&en=c09070712db77c8d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Anyone still interested in considering the future of newspapers should check out this New Yorker article from their March 31st issue. I wish I had noticed it before my post. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman
After reading the article, one reader sent in this skeptical response:
"Alterman’s predicted demise of the newspaper is premature. Newspapers are still making good money while firing staffers or offering them buyouts. An industry that has garnered profit margins of twenty-five to thirty per cent—figures that other businesses could only dream about—flies into a panic when the margin dips to seventeen per cent. Do newspaper executives really believe that they can cure their ills by reducing their news holes and closing bureaus? In my view, as someone who has spent many years as a newspaperman and as a journalism professor at New York University and at California State University, Long Beach, a glaring failure of newspapers is in not making their importance known to the public. While the television, movie, and other industries inundate us with information about their exploits, newspapers are mostly silent about themselves. The newspaper industry and individual newspapers could well benefit today from the assistance of public-relations firms that are able to tell the story of newspapers that they themselves unfortunately don’t—that they produce news coverage unlike any other medium."
I'll let you decide for yourself which argument about the future of newspapers you find more convincing, but I will note that when an industry's business model shifts, there is often unjustified panic that the industry cannot continue, whereas time often shows that the industry must simply change its business model to survive.
In the second part of his book, Carr identifies several potential negative effects that may arise from wider acceptance of utility computing. One of his concern is the loss of privacy. Although other posters mentioned privacy implications involving the internet being directly connected to our brain, I believe that even if such technology does not get developed in the future, utility computing has the potential for significantly eroding our privacy in the future.
The research
and development trend suggests that there will be even greater erosion of our
privacy in the future. For example, the
consumer electronics industry has been putting substantial amount of effort in
commercializing sophisticated home networking solutions. Although some number
of homes already have a primitive form of home networking by sharing internet
connection amongst multiple computers through routers and hubs, the next
generation of home networking will include more sophisticated features such as monitoring
the contents in your refrigerator and generating your grocery list based on
your cooking habits or even automatically ordering items through an online
grocery, to monitoring individual preferences for temperature and humidity and
adjusting according. Most of these
function will require some sort of a system that will record and analyze our
behaviors. However, very little thought
has been put into where this information will be stored and who will have
access to this information.
Differences in nature of loss of privacy. The effect of utility computing on our privacy is even more alarming because of the differences in the nature of the loss. Until recently, companies collected information mainly for marketing purposes. It did not matter for the companies to actually know who you are but rather needed know in the aggregate what public wanted and behaved. However, with increased storage and computational power, it is now possible to market directly to you as an individual. Furthermore, we ourselves are providing identifiable information to companies. The loss of privacy that will arise out of utility computing is not merely loss of something that is of trivial value to us, such as our address, but our actual identity, something that has tremendous subjective value to us.
Where to go from here. So what should we do about the loss of privacy? Should we try to restrict the development of utility computing? I don’t think we have to go to that extreme. There are significant benefits that we will enjoy from greater adoption of utility computing. However, I feel there is a need for additional public discussion on privacy. I also feel that we would need some sort of additional regulation along the lines of HIPAA to restrict companies and governmental agencies from disclosing private information without our consent. Furthermore, similar to moral rights for artists, I feel that we need recognize moral right to our identity. People should not be able to aggregate information without our explicit consent. It should not be enough that we clicked on some EULA. It should not be sufficient that we posted some information on a website. I believe that absent showing of some greater public need (e.g., public’s right to know for significant events), people should be prevented from utilizing any of my private information.
Well I think we've said a lot about Carr's book so far. I'll try not to be repetitive, but i think one thing Carr overlooks in the second half of his book is the cycle of creative destruction. As Max mentions, Carr focuses on a lot of the "negatives" that greater internet use and more computing power brings, but the second half is seriously lacking in a discussion of the benefits.
1) No Natural Monopoly after all?
Last week we talked a lot about a possible natural monopoly in the market for utility computing. This week maybe we'll talk more about why utility computing won't lead to a natural monopoly. Dan Jones has already kicked this off in his post describing how distributed computing may counter the effect of greater centralized computing facilities. I argued in my post last week that fears of natural monopoly regarding utility computing were ill-founded. While Carr likes the analogy to electricity, and the use of the term "utility", it seems that he's also not worried that utility computing will lead to a natural monopoly. On p.111 Carr even points out some of the same differences between electricity and utility computing that I mentioned last week, and discusses how "modularity reduces the likelihood that the new utilities will form service monopolies, and it gives us, as the users of utility computing a virtually unlimited array of options." I think Carr's analysis here is pretty solid, and I was pleased to read that he didn't think "utility computing" would turn into what we traditionally think of as a "public utility".
2) Mo' Money, Mo' Problems?
Ross' Post already discusses some of the issues with Carr's conceptualization of greater wealth concentration in that hands of a few. Carr describes the situation of YouTube's founders, who relied heavily on free content provided by volunteer users to cash in on their invention. Carr is right that utility computing, and more broadly the entire Web 2.0 phenomenon, enables just a few individuals (even just one) with the power to create largely profitable corporations while sidestepping the traditional business models that required large investments in infrastructure and more employees.
Carr seems to think that this is just another example of greater wealth concentration in the hands of a few. Where previously a company would "spread" their wealth among their employees, a small Web 2.0 company can extract millions of dollars and spread it among just a few individuals. I think this view is a little shortsighted.
For one thing, in a world dominated by companies operating on more traditional business models, small players such as the three guys who made YouTube would have had no chance. The wave of utility computing (coupled with cheaper bandwidth, cheaper processing, cheaper storage, etc) has the effect of giving people more opportunities to make money outside older, more traditional, business models. Take the YouTube founders: They'd never be able (or at least it'd be much harder) to generate the capital necessary to invest in the infrastructure and employees necessary to run their site directly. Utility computing can allow a few individuals to focus on just the software programming aspect of the site, while they pay a "computing utility" to take care of the infrastructure. This is basically the same trend we saw in the .com boom... "anyone can make a website! Make one and sell something!" Except that now even smaller players, with minimal technical skills, can take advantage of "utility-ized" computing services.
Better examples than YouTube are all the "mom and pop" shops sprouting up on the internet through services such as E-Bay or Amazon.com's "stores". In the .com boom you needed enough resources to build up a website from scratch, either build your own hosting infrastructure or lease hosting space (much more expensive then), and you'd need to promote your site and somehow drive visitors to it. Today, small independent vendors can leverage the user base of E-Bay or Amazon (Or Google through products.google.com) to drive customers to their products, and all the investment they need to make is create an account. In regards to Amazon small stores can even have amazon manage shipping logistics, in a way creating a "logistics utility" that has little to do with the internet & computing power.
My point is while we might have more millionaires like the YouTube guys, we also have a lot more opportunities to become millionaires ourselves. Even if many e-bay / amazone sellers won't become millionaires, they have a much larger market than they would have otherwise. These seem like pretty huge benefits to weigh against the costs Carr describes. A few posters have also already mentioned that just because more individuals are getting wealthier, that doesn't necessarily mean that the poorer are getting poorer.
That being said, the title of this post is Creative Destruction, and I think a lot of what I was just describing focuses on the creative side. Now for the destructive; which Carr doesn't delve into much beyond his wariness of "concentrating wealth". Old business models are being quickly set aside to create new ones. The winners are the YouTube guys and those taking advantage of utility computing services such as those provided by E-bay and Amazon. But what about the losers? If we need less IT infrastructure employees... and we end up having to many of them, what are they going to do? Many of them might be software programmers themselves, maybe they'll take advantage of the utility computing model and create new, innovative services themselves and no longer need to be the "middlemen". Others might go work for the utility computer providers themselves, as they'll likely grow in size. But yet others, particularly older generations in the IT realm might be left out to dry as more-traditional tech roles start to go away. To an extent we've been experiencing this with outsourcing for a while, and I think Tech-workers are a little more mobile and don't expect as much job security as, say, union workers at a Ford factory, but it's still something to think about.
3) The Shifting Newspaper Business
I know the traditional characterization is the "death" of the newspaper business, and Carr surely portrays a grim picture of the newspaper industry, but I think what we're about to see is a phenomenal shift in news... and not so much its implosion/death/etc. I have no magic key as to what the revenue system for future internet-based news outlets will be, but I'm pretty sure they won't be focusing on classifieds and other services that websites like craigslist can provide more effectively and cheaper. (Can you imagine looking up stock ticker symbols in the newspaper anymore?)
Carr points out that traditional newspapers have one thing that blogs, craigslist, local TV news, and other websites don't have: deep investigative journalism. I don't think the market for investigative journalism is simply going to go away, but without cross-subsidization by services such as classifieds newspapers are going to have to find a different funding source. This might mean shifting newspapers more into an investigative journalism role, and let websites, blogs, and other free internet media cover more mundane every-day stuff.
I for one don't buy Carr's suggestion that ad-supported news will only lead to articles about popular products being viewed. Generally, popular articles drive the ads--not the other way around (an article isn't popular because it has a high-priced ad, the ad is high priced because it's going to be displayed next to a popular article). Maybe Carr fears that newspapers will want to display certain product-oriented articles ahead of non-product oriented ones. Search engines would likely make such preferential placing moot, since popular articles would presumably come up on searches regardless of editorial placement on the nytimes.com homepage. I think this "commercialization" fear is telling though, it goes to something Carr said in the first half of his book. Carr described how the idealistic vision of the internet as an information sharing mechanism didn't come to pass and that it became largely an instrument of commerce. It's true that a vast proportion of the internet is dedicated to commercial endeavors. I think it's shortsighted, however, not to consider the vast advances in non-commercial communications, scholarship, and the free exchange of ideas that the internet has enabled. Just because a huge percentage of the net is dedicated to commerce, doesn't mean the smaller percentage dedicated to non-commercial pursuits hasn't grown substantially since the web's inception as well. This notion of a "commercialized" internet may lead to false fears that the more newspapers shift to the net, the less "newsworthy" they'll be and the more "consumerist" they'll be. It's also important to note that the newspaper's product for years has been "the news", simply placing it online doesn't mean that the only thing people will care about is gadget reviews.
As other posters have noted, the second half of Carr’s The Big Switch reads like a parade of horribles. He touches on various problems that we can expect from ever-increasing internet use and connectivity, which contradicts his seemingly optimistic take on the future of utility computing in the first half of the book.
One of the primary areas of concern Carr mentions is “crowdsourcing”—a business model in which a company allows users to generate their own amateur content as opposed to paying professional employees to do the same tasks. (page 142). Carr elaborates on the threat crowdsourcing poses to professionals, such a “journalists, editors, photographers, researchers, analysts, librarians” and others who can be replaced by the public for free. Even the number of police officers could be lessened, Carr explains, through the use of the public to monitor illegal immigrants crossing borders. (page 138). Carr seems to discuss crowdsourcing with an air of disapproval. Indeed, there are probably many people, especially professionals, who decry the use of cheap or free labor from the public instead of trained professionals. I think that some of these concerns are overblown, however, and in fact, the rise of crowdsourcing may actually be a positive development that can help combat some of the other dangers Carr sees in the future.
Democratic Values
Carr writes about the potential for polarization and balkanization as the Internet has made it easier for people to seek out content that is ideologically in tune with their own beliefs. (page 159). This has larger implications for the fate of a democratic society (see Ross’s post and Derek and Vikas’s comments).
Crowdsourcing, however, pushes back against some of these fears for democracy. Crowdsourcing can be taken not as the death knell for professionals, but rather as proof that the masses will participate in democratic society if it is easy to do so. The rise of news blogs and other commentating sites shows that people are no longer satisfied with passively registering the opinions of professional experts; instead, they want to be involved themselves. They no longer only want the opinion of an expert; they want to share their own opinions. People want to interact with the news; they want to discuss, organize, and even create the news stories themselves. Technology has made it easier than ever for so-called citizen reporters to use cameras and phones to record events as they are happening and then share them with the world. Crowdsourcing takes the immediacy provided by 24-7 cable news channels and increases it. Internet users no longer have to wait to discuss an event with people at work the next day or call into CSPAN at a specific time. They can simply post and comment on news stories in real time online. People can drive the news themselves instead of waiting for editors and journalists to tell them what is important. This is not a harmful development. Politicians are always decrying the lack of participation by citizens, particularly young people, in our democracy. Granted, the advent of news blogs may not mean that more people vote, but it does mean that more people are engaged in and have ownership of issues of local and national concern.
Moreover, although we probably will still see polarization effects, crowdsourcing allows for diverse point of views to be contributed. We already see polarization effects in old media—Fox News Channel, Air America, CNN, NPR, etc… Even without the Internet, liberals and conservatives already tend to categorize certain sources of information as friendly or unfriendly. And, some will argue that contributors to Fox News, CNN and other sites are primarily conservative or liberal reporters. With crowdsourcing, though, we might see a wider range of viewpoints simply because a myriad of people contribute to site. For example, because so many diverse people contribute to Wikipedia, articles are often unbiased—or at least, present multiple sides of a controversy. In fact, if an article seems to be too one-sided users can flag it as being unfair or biased. This is not to say that liberals still will not flock to liberal sites and conservatives still will not flock to conservative sites, but, at the very least, it is easier for a liberal to post something on a conservative site than it is for a liberal to get a report broadcasted on Fox News.
Social Interaction
Another of Carr’s Internet concerns is the potential for isolation due to a lack of human interaction. As Sarah points out, some of these concerns may be overblown because most people do have a need for some human interaction, even if they do not care about interacting with a grocery store clerk. And while crowdsourcing cannot provide the answer to worries about lack of face-to-face human contact, it does push back against concerns of decreasing interaction.
Many user-generated content sites show that people do have a need to create interactive communities, where issues can be discussed. Such sites create communities around the ideas being shared, allowing people to debate with and draw wisdom from other posters. These sites may or may not be discussing “important” issues like politics or foreign policy, but nevertheless they can pave the way for interaction between posters.
In fact, most of these sites exist because people want to interact with each other—perhaps they want to keep in touch with friends (Facebook, Myspace), expose their creativity to the world (Youtube), or even just contribute to something for others to learn from (Wikipedia). User-generated content sites can also provide the impetus for face-to-face interaction by posting about local events, parties, or organizing conventions. As Carr explains, there are a variety of reasons people contribute their own content (page 139), and most of these reasons can be seen as a desire for interaction with others.
Moreover, the egalitarian aspects of the Internet and crowdsourcing—everyone has a chance to participate—will make people feel less isolated and more like part of a community, even if it is an online community. People can find blogs or other content relating to their own experiences, which can go a long way towards reducing isolation. Those users who searched for things like “how to tell your family you’re a victim of incest” and “can you adopt after a suicide attempt” (page 186) may have found advice and/or comfort in a Wikipedia entry or online group support. In fact, these users might have been too embarrassed to discuss their problems in a face-to-face interaction, but the Internet allowed them to interact with people anonymously.
Conclusion
There are valid concerns with crowdsourcing, though I think Carr and others worry a little too much. There will still be a need for professional reporting, for example. People do want and need expertise in many areas. Amateur blogs will never totally replace newspapers, although, as Carr discusses, newspapers will need to change their business models to respond to changes in the way people view news. Crowdsourcing though can be a very positive tool, which helps alleviate other concerns about the Internet. The public interest in crowdsourcing should be seen as a good development for the future of democracy in terms of participation, and it should be seen as a counterpoint to fears of isolation.
While reading the chapter entitled “The Great Unbundling,” I was struck by how similar the fears Nicholas Carr outlines are to the ones Jean-Noel Jeanneney expresses in his book, “Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge.” Both men see the increasing choice the internet allows the consumer to make about what content he consumes as inherently threatening to the richness and depth of our culture. Carr quickly qualifies the benefit of having more choice in deciding what to read watch, and listen to by telling us that “[m]ore choices don’t necessarily mean better choices.” (151) Carr contends that the deterioration in the quality of available media will occur as content is unbundled. In the example he uses, newspapers, readers now click links to individual articles online. Because online newspapers’ revenue comes from advertisements posted next to each article, each article will have to carry its weight by individually bringing in enough readers who will increase advertisement revenue. Carr claims that the articles that are going to bring in the most revenue will be ones about consumer products, that then encourage readers to click on a link to that same product, advertised on the side. These fluff piece articles about consumer goods will therefore come to dominate deeply researched, investigative journalism pieces about malaria in Africa. (154-55) Although Carr frames his argument in terms of bundling, in effect he’s lamenting the same thing as Jeanneney: As soon as technology allows the unsophisticated masses to quickly and efficiently access exactly the material they want, culture is reduced to a mediocre, bland, contentless mess. As Carr says, it was already a long shot that a serious piece about government corruption or malaria in Africa would attract a lot of readers. (155) Perhaps because he is American, and knows such solutions are much less likely to be embraced in America, Carr doesn’t propose solving this problem by designing the internet so that people are coerced into accessing what is “good for them,” he just let’s us know that it’s equally likely that “[c]ultural impoverishment” is our future. (167)
However, I question Carr’s prediction that “cultural impoverishment” is our future, mainly because I was not convinced by his description of how news sources will only be able to get value from consumer product articles that lead to a large number of clicks on the product link. I agree that people will increasingly read their news on the internet. Each succeeding generation is increasingly comfortable with the internet, and views it as the “normal” way to get news. Even the nostalgia for hard copies will disappear, because people will no longer remember hard copies as the way news was served up in their childhood. While there will remain some benefits to hard copies such as portability--being able to read them at the breakfast table or on the subway--the benefits to online news are great. One, you don’t have to wash your hands after you read news online. Two, most people have busy schedules and don’t have time to read the newspaper over a leisurely breakfast. Where they do have time to read is at their computer at work. So Carr is likely right in his prediction that hard copy subscriptions will continue to decline.
But is Carr right that only specialized newspapers like the Wall Street Journal are able to charge anything for their online editions? (154) Carr states this as fact, with no support, perhaps because this assumption about newspapers’ business models has never been tested. The New York Times, arguably the most reputable news source in the country, went straight to offering free online content. Yes, they experimented with making their opinion pieces subscription only, but the failure of that experiment may be because what readers value about the New York Times is their investigative reporting, not the opinions of some random people. Perhaps the New York Times and other newspapers who do important investigative journalism, did put themselves in a bind they cannot get out of by conditioning their readers to expect free online content. One can argue that if the New York times started charging for online subscriptions, they would alienate their readers who expect free content, and those readers would simply try to find the same news at other free sources elsewhere on the internet. But if a handful of papers offer investigative journalism of a depth and quality that can’t be found elsewhere, then its seems likely that people will in fact pay for online subscriptions. After all, they paid for hard copy subscriptions. Carr himself says that “[w]hen bundled into a print edition, hard journalism can add considerably to the overall value of a newspaper. Not least, it can raise the prestige of the paper, making it more attractive to subscribers and advertisers.” (155) Even with its content online, people still think of the New York Times as an entity, with a reputation for a certain kind of news based on the articles they post online, so there’s no reason why hard journalism posted on the online version will not add the same value to the newspaper by raising the prestige and making it more attractive to subscribers and advertisers. And there’s no reason why the New York Times cannot capitalize on that reputation and prestige by charging for online subscriptions.
The real downfall of newspapers like the New York Times may come from doing exactly what Carr thinks they must do to survive--having freelancers dash off reviews of high-definition television sets. (155) Newspapers do not have a monopoly on certain types of information now, and need to adjust accordingly. Yes, they used to be able to make easy money through classifieds because they were the only way for individuals to distribute information to a large audience. Their reviews of movies, theatre and other entertainment also attracted a lot of readers, because there weren’t many other sources for reviews. Now individuals post reviews online by the thousands. The New York Times may no longer be able to compete when it comes to fluff. I don’t need to read a review for a consumer good in The New York Times. Its reputation and prestige do not make me think that their review will be any more valuable or accurate than one on a consumer products site that specializes in that kind of thing. In fact, I’d prefer to read a review elsewhere where more information has been synthesized, instead of the single opinion of some freelancer for the New York Times. If instead, the New York Times realizes that its real value comes from its reputation for hard journalism and high standards, and focuses on exploiting its superiority in that field, then it will stand out in the market, and get readers. It may lose the readers from the hard copy subscription days who bought the paper only to read the classifieds, but it needs to realize it already largely lost those readers to websites that do a better job providing that information anyway.
Jeanneney might argue that there is no market for investigative journalism if people aren’t forced to consume it. Carr would argue that these articles are too expensive to produce without subsidies from fluff pieces. I believe the internet has already shown that neither is true. For example, talkingpointsmemo.com has produced amazing quality journalism on national news, with a small staff, free content, and advertisements on the side. Increasingly websites like talkingpointsmemo.com will step in to provide real news if the New York Times goes in the direction Carr suggests in order to increase advertisement revenues. Maybe we need to accept that the market for hard journalism is smaller than Jeanneney or Carr would ideally like, but it exists, and will continue to be served by someone. However, that someone may not be the New York Times if it tries to hold on to its former glory as a bundled provider of all information.
1) Intro: Where’s the Beef?
In his ominous chapter “iGod,” Carr predicts that more important than the possibility that “computers will start to think like us” is the possibility that “we will come to think like computers… as our minds are trained, link by link.” (228-229) This conception of the mind must have guided his book’s structure because all he does is walk us through some anecdotes, fear-inducing facts, predictions, and harbingers. There is no overarching structure, just one story linking to a law review article, which tells us a story, which links to a prediction, which we ought to be scared of. That’s the formula for every chapter in the Part Two of “The Big Switch.” From others’ recapped stories and predictions, Carr offers no conclusion and no solution and doesn’t weigh the potential benefits of a fully computerized world against the dangers he foresees.
2) The Lowest Common Denominator
If Carr takes the premises he lays out in his book seriously, there is only one logical conclusion: that we are doomed to a flat, shallow, hedonistic supply of information appealing to whatever will get us to click a link and (possibly) buy a product. Carr chides Lewis Mumford for believing we can control technology and its consequences by exerting our will over the machines we make. (22) By the same logic, Carr cannot deny the likelihood of his fears being realized. Carr becomes a fatalistic Chicken Little: I will have my brain wired; I won’t even ask about a topic; the search engine in my brain will simply “tell me what I should” be looking for. (225) He presumes that this leads to a cursory surfing of the web and an inability or inertia meaning A) I won’t learn about anything in-depth (due both to the monotony of available materials and my feeble interest and memory, i.e. “it’s easier for us to look up something twice on Google than remember it” (226)); and B) I won’t encounter interesting information outside of my immediate purview (his newspaper bundling/online news unbundling issue).
Wasn’t this same prediction made upon the advent of television and radio? Carr’s concerns about bundled news and interesting, in-depth information that readers (in some normative sense) ought to encounter could be addressed by a Fairness Doctrine saying, “If you read the review of the big screen TV, you have to read about the Chinese human rights violations that made it possible.” The Fairness Doctrine has since been dropped by the FCC, and no such thing is necessary for the internet either.
Carr worries that, for example, if a University of Chicago professor like Picker will pick up a tabloid in the supermarket checkout line (as he admitted in seminar last week), aren’t the less erudite and less astute entirely hopeless? Carr thinks that our basest inclinations will take over and that no newspaper will fund an extensive investigative report of war crimes. There is one thing Carr does extraordinarily well in Part II: communicate potential problems with internet content. Let’s look more closely to see if there is some kind of solution to the problems as Carr formulates them or whether, perhaps, the context Carr offers them up in ought to be amended.
3) Is There a Solution?
There is no solution to Carr’s problems as he frames them. We are barreling toward and unquestioned goal of omniscience, making technology a runaway freight train. This follows, Carr says, from René Descartes, who sought “a model for ‘pure understanding’” because “the body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking.” (214) The all-knowing brain/database in everyone’s head is what we want and what we fear; but long before Carr suggested technological boogiemen wired into our heads controlling us, Descartes worried about his perceptions and thoughts being dictated by an unknown evil demon. (First Meditation). Descartes sat by a flame and considered whether he was being tricked into seeing a reality that simply was not there. The reality seems “real” by firelight, and, according to Carr, this “quality of ‘reality’... is lost in electric light: objects (seemingly) appear much more clearly, but in reality [electric light] flattens them.... [T]hings lose body, outline, substance – in short, their essence.” (232)
Carr’s flat-footed fears stem from sitting in the electric light for too long. He recognizes that “progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion” and blotting out all memory of what came before (i.e. the previous “big switch”). (233) Carr has flattened the world into an electric monster, eliminating the body, outline, and substance of the human users that created it and of which it consists. I would not go so far as Mumford and claim that we can stop technological progress by force of the human mind, but I would not go so far as Carr and claim that technological progress will force itself into the human mind.
Carr’s perceptions of reality are influenced by an evil demon: they are influenced by the very computing universe in which he has immersed himself. His time in an electric world (which world he believes to be flattened and robbed of substance) has, in fact, flattened him and robbed him of substance. His account and recitation of fears speak to the extent to which he believes they really are a brooding cloud overhead, but the boogieman here is one of Carr’s creation, and the big thing that gets flattened is his account of users. The cloud is not descending, the sky is not falling, and Carr’s fatalism is unmerited (even though some of his individual fears are).
4) Reframing the Problems
We should start by looking to the benefits which Carr hardly considers mentions in his laundry list of harbingers. While Professor Picker will read tabloids in the check-out line, he will also conduct in-depth research online about his nerdy interests. Jeanneney and Carr are as wrong to believe our interests will be flattened, homogenized, and “ideologically amplified” (164) as Jeanneney was right to say that the book would not be put out of business by the internet. There will always be people who want in-depth knowledge, and they can click links or go to the library (that’s how they expand their knowledge). Conversely, there will always be people who are easily lead, and to the extent that they have money, they will dictate what marketing makes sense. The Bud Light commercials during the Super Bowl do not hit home with me even though I’m a 25 year-old male beer-drinker. I face them because they are target the broadest base of moneyed viewers.
“You have zero privacy. Get over it,” says the President of Sun. (190) Honestly? Fine. Either there’s an expectation of privacy and some Fourth Amendment protections apply or we’re all in the same stew. While President Clinton had to answer for possibly inhaling marijuana in 1991, the youtube generation will have to answer for this http://youtube.com/watch?v=7899CfQNTVI or for a blog post or for something else. These things are relative. Trent Lott didn’t expect to be videotaped at Strom Thurmond’s 100th Birthday party idiotically joking about segregation, but my generation expects to be video taped all the time (you can post videos of your friends on facebook, viewable by all of your networks, not theirs). It’s depressing (terribly, terribly depressing) that Subscriber 1515830 searched for “how to tell your family you’re a victim of incest” and “can you adopt after a suicide attempt,” (186) but the internet repays disclosures with information about the world (and, fortunately or not, about each other). Lexisnexis research, TV reviews, craigslist, and Google cost me some privacy, but they are not simply one soul-sucking, flattening machine. They educate, inform, and help in ways that Carr seems to underestimate. If you see the section above, I think you can understand why he underestimates the internet. To reframe the problems, we have to start with a sense of the internets advantages as well as dangers.
5) Control (195), Globalization, and “America’s” Internet (183)
Just as spammers adapt to stay ahead of spam blocking strategies, users will stay ahead of the government. As Carr himself recognizes, “governments tend to be slow to respond to technological revolutions.” (184) Corporations, profits, and the markets, however, are not slow to respond; rather, they seek out revolutions (wherever one might be profitable). Carr seems to have some protectionist concerns about the state of the nation where markets will have databases and processing shipped offshore. There are two responses to this.
First, as economists, we don’t care about wealth redistribution to poorer countries. Call centers in India, Ford getting hybrid engine parts from Japan, and NAFTA are all water off a duck’s back, according to an economist. Frankly, if the internet and computer applications can be run more cheaply from elsewhere, that’s great. It makes it more widely available. To the extent the internet is an educator and not simply a provider of droolingly stupid content, this is a good thing. The cheaper the service, the more widely available it is. More competition for data processing and computing services will lower the price. Posner is happy. We’re happy. Carr is right, but maybe not happy. He might say this future this is like the electric appliance revolution of the 50’s: a purported improvement in society that self-perpetuates and seems like a greater gain than it is.
Second, this kind of outsourcing has been a fear for decades in many American industries. When there are fewer jobs in production, perhaps there are more jobs in service. Where there are fewer jobs in computer service (in America), there other jobs created by the money that America will be saving on computing expenses. While one can have legitimate concerns about whether the money saved will simply wind up in executives’ pockets, widening the gap between rich and poor, in the long run that gap could more easily be closed due to the increased availability of cheap computing and education online facilitated by the outsourcing in the first place. (That may be overly optimistic.)
Finally, I would like to briefly say something about Carr’s concerns about the internet as either a libertarian, democratic device or a machine of state control. Obviously to some extent it is each. I have no particular recommendations for how to deal with it going forward (and neither does the E.U.), but it should start, as Carr didn’t, with an appreciation for what the internet gives and what we give each other through it rather than simply an exhaustive account of what it takes from us.
This post is really a bunch of mini-comments inspired by the second half of Carr’s book, designed more to stimulate discussion than provide answers.
An Inevitable
Monopoly?
I’d be interested in hearing more from the class about the form utility computing will or might take. One of the assumptions in much of last week’s discussion is that there will be giant centralized data centers like Google’s Dalles facility (see, for example, Ed’s discussion about the dangers of having a target-rich environment for hackers), but the example of the CERN grid on p 117 and botnets on p 174 might complicate the assumption. It was also nice to see the acknowledgment of the hybrid approach by Carr. Could a decentralized form of utility computing deflect some of the concerns that it will be a natural monopoly?
Out with the Old?
Going along with the new forms of online business, we, like Carr, should perhaps be concerned about what happens to the old line firms. Newspapers are a particularly good example (see p 134, the later chapter on “The Great Unbundling,” and Jim’s post). First of all, they’ve had to unbundle, since certain sections, notably classified ads, are displaced by free online alternatives (Craigslist, anyone? Or even more targeted versions, like the lawannounce listserv). The news coverage is also in jeopardy as revenues continue their freefall. For some further discussion on the difficulties facing print newspapers, scan the results of this Google search. The larger question though is should we care? Is the New York Times a dinosaur that should either evolve or perish, or is society losing something valuable if all our news is online and generated through “lean” providers like bloggers? This was touched on briefly in previous discussions, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover. And since we are in law school, I suppose there should be a legal question too. One is how antitrust law should operate to prop up traditional firms, if at all, by defining the market broadly to allow for monopolization of print newspapers within geographic areas. This general issue, not just the antitrust component, is perhaps analogous to the discussion in the first week. If the market doesn’t support something, why get in the way? There is inevitably a paternalistic element in any proposal for regulation or public subsidies of an undesirable good. But the increase in computing efficiency does go beyond newspapers to pressure on wages generally (see p 145-47). Does this justify intervention? What kind and to what degree? This is obviously a huge question, and given the current political season and economic forecast, one of significant interest.
Spam!
Indelible Prints
This is particularly salient since Judge Kozinski just gave a talk about it last week, but to what extent do or should we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our online activities? We are a long way from Katz and phone booths to an age of Blackberries, emails, Google searches, and text messages. Carr is starkly pessimistic in “A Spider’s Web,” and I think he might be right. What interests me more is how should we respond? We’re not going to shut down the internet. So what should the legal system do, if anything? Or is the onus on individuals to avoid “public mentions” (p 189) that seem innocuous but in reality can be connected rather easily? I completely agree with Sarah that the way Ms. Arnold was “discovered” is “chilling.” But is it “chilling” in the sense that the ability to meaningfully connect these data points would have a chilling effect on internet users if widely known? It strikes me that this is more than just an education problem in which people don’t know how much their anonymity is at risk, since even after reading this book, my own internet behavior is unchanged. In fact, most people’s internet behavior is probably quite resilient in the face of privacy concerns. Does that mean that those privacy concerns are unimportant relative to the benefits of my typical internet behavior, or is something else at work?
Where’d I put my
keys? Ask Google
The final chapter is so forward looking and speculative that it generates lots of good material for class discussion. One issue I found especially salient and less hypothetical is the outsourcing of our own memory (see p 225). For another take, see here. Who needs to store trivia when Google is always a click away? Indeed, much of my social and personal data is already online (though not widely published), whether in my email address book, Google calendar, or on Facebook. Of course, this is not exactly novel, since people have kept physical calendars and address books for a long time. But the scale and ease with which this data can be stored digitally, combined with the rapid access to information, makes human factual recall seemingly less crucial. Though, as Carr notes, what happens when the grid goes down? Will we feel like we do when the power goes out, angered and annoyed and bored? The tragicomic Blackberry outage a few months ago might be just a preview.
There might even be an interesting debate about education policy in this concept of outsourced memory, since traditional testing often requires memorization and regurgitation of material. What was once a common complaint about early mathematics / “hard” science instruction—why do we have to figure out this calculation by hand when we can just plug it into a calculator?—now seems relevant, though not necessarily valid, to all sorts of fields.
The
second half of Carr’s “The Big Switch” is shockingly cautionary, given his mostly
unbridled enthusiasm concerning utility computing in the first half of the
book. I have to admit that coming away from the book, I was a bit confused
about what Carr wanted his message to be. Taken together, one might describe
his attitude as cautious enthusiasm, but I didn’t feel like Carr made much of
an effort to draw together the theme of each section. The second half of the
book, while still focusing some on utility computing, seemed to be making its
strongest points with respect to general internet use and the potential dangers
of a fragmented society where privacy becomes more and more limited.
Carr
makes interesting points about the potential dangers of an increasingly
interconnected world. The fact that like-minded people tend to flock together
online, and that concentration of a singular viewpoint tends to skew that
viewpoint in more extreme ways, is certainly a problem. However, I wonder if
Carr overstates the case for this flocking-and-skewing. While certainly some
people will fall prey to the phenomena, there are also many people who are
accessing information that they never would have without the development of the
internet.
Also,
while I recognize the internet’s utility, I wonder if Carr paints an overly
morose picture of an internet-age society. While the internet may certainly
isolate some, on the whole, I think that there is a point at which the internet
cannot isolate any further because of a real human need for something other
than virtual companionship. As long as we still have schools, churches, and
civic centers, I think people can only become isolated so much. I wonder, too,
whether certain types of isolation are really as bad as Carr believed. Is
something really lost when one orders their groceries online, as opposed to
going to a grocery store? Perhaps when the grocery store was a truly local,
individually-owned institution Carr could make this point, but with the proliferation
of large company-owned grocery stores, I wonder if “isolation” from grocery
clerks really has a substantial effect on the quality of human interactions.
A
much stronger point, in my opinion, is the one Carr makes about the potential
for privacy invasions in a world where the internet is relied on more and more.
Certainly, his description of the release of “anonymous” data which allowed
researchers to pinpoint Thelma Arnold is quite chilling. The question of
whether the internet is a public or private entity is an important one, and it
certainly seems like no matter how private an individual might assume the
internet to be, in reality, all of their information is at least theoretically,
if not actually, available.
Plugging
one’s brain in to Google, something that the founders of the company envision
as one of the potential future developments, would exacerbate this privacy
issue even further. It was unclear from the book exactly how this development
would work (unsurprising, given that it’s still in its nascent stage), but one
has to imagine that in order to have a level of responsiveness from Google such
that your phone could whisper an answer to you when you think a question would
require some serious invasions of the human thought process. Essentially, what
Google envisions is every person connected to every other person and
eventually, possibly, the ability to access data not just from the internet at
large but from the minds of other plugged in to Google.
It
sounds fantastical and more than a little sci-fi-y, but it is clear that there
are individuals and companies out there who think that this idea is not only
workable, but desirable. It is here that I diverge most strongly from these
individuals, and I think Carr and I take a similar view of the harmful
potential of such a network. First, in this kind of mind-network, no one’s
thoughts are their own, and at a certain point, it is unlikely that people will
be able to distinguish their own thoughts from Google-thoughts. Second, Carr
provides a number of quotes demonstrating that some of those who embrace the
idea of this mind-network see such a network as beneficial because humankind is
just so pathetic compared to the power of computers. While I agree that
computers have their place, and I have no problem with a computer or system of
computers that is able to access more information than I ever could, I question
whether the exaltation of machine over humankind will ultimately have the
beneficial effects that Google’s founders speak of. This is particularly true
if mind-access is limited to a single entity, like Google, although I am not
really comfortable with the idea even if access is more diffuse. I am more
inclined to agree with Richard Foreman, who said, “I see within us all (myself included)
the replacement of the complex inner density with a new kind of self– evolving
under the pressure of information overload and the technology of ‘instantly
available.’”
It
is possible, however, that there is really no way to stand in the way of progress
in this direction. After all, as Carr points out, many see the development of
new technologies as inherently good, and I think in our modern age where we are
so comfortable with technology as a whole that we are likely to downplay the potential
negative effects of some new technological development. That being said, I
think that the idea of a Google mind-meld might seem sufficiently foreign to a
majority that progress in that direction is not inevitable. Given what
information can be found out about an online user today, how much more would
privacy be stripped away by a direct Google link in one’s brain?
I
think one of the problems with this book is that Carr seems to be trying to
weave a cautionary tale in the second half, while in the first half, he seems
to suggest that those who stand in the way of utility computing and similar
technological advancements are like those people who opposed the spread of
electricity because of its allegedly dangerous effects (something we know now
to be false). Ultimately, Carr doesn’t sufficiently demarcate between the
utility computing he seems to champion, and new technology that we should be
wary of.
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