Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog Latest Blog Posts

Cecilia Kang, who writes a blog about technology policy for the Washington Post, reports today that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has been reading my book The Big Switch. Genachowski finds (as I did) that the story of the buildout of the electric grid in the early decades of the last century ...

Toward the end of his strange and haunting 1940 story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Jorge Luis Borges described the origins of a conspiracy to inscribe in the "real world" first a fictional country, named Uqbar, and then, more ambitiously, an entire fictional planet, called Tlön: In March of ...

Computerworld reports on an extensive new Harvard Medical School study, appearing in the American Journal of Medicine, that paints a stark and troubling picture of the essential worthlessness of many of the computer systems that hospitals have invested in over the last few years. The ...

A correspondent pointed me to this document, dated March 30, 1965, in which an executive with Western Union, the telegraph company, lays out the company's ambitious plan to create "a nationwide information utility, which will enable subscribers to obtain, economically, efficiently, immediately, ...

Here are links to a few pieces I've written that have appeared over the last week or so: The Price of Free, in the New York Times Magazine, looks at how online video is beginning to reshape the TV business. The San Francisco Chronicle ran my review of Ken Auletta's new book, Googled. As part of ...

Singularity University appears to be in full swing now, which is a great comfort to me. Already I feel much less fearful about being turned into a sex slave for a gang of immeasurably brainy robots. Ted Greenwald, from Wired's Epicenter blog, has been hanging out at the Sing U campus - it feels, ...

As the velocity of communication approaches realtime, language compresses. Think about it. When people originally started talking about Twitter, the first thing they'd always mention was the 140-character limit that the service imposes on tweets. So short! Who can say anything in 140 lousy ...

The BBC has recently featured two thoughtful takes on how the Net is altering people's experience of popular music. What's particularly interesting (to me, anyway) is how the two articles examine the same phenomenon - the ability to listen to pretty much anything that's ever been recorded, ...