I Google, therefore I forget

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This morning’s Observer column…

To judge from the volume of commentary that has followed his article, Carr has touched a nerve. He was ‘flooded with emails and blog posts from people saying that my struggles with deep reading and concentration mirror their own experiences’. Various über-bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan, Jon Udell and Bill Thompson took up the theme, adding their own twists. And prominent newspaper columnists such as Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald) and Margaret Wente (Toronto Globe & Mail) also revealed their private fears that addiction to cyberspace, and online media generally were, in fact, rotting their brains.

What’s surprising in a way is that people should be surprised by this. The web, after all, was designed by a chap (Tim Berners-Lee) who was motivated to do it because he had a poor memory for some things. Add powerful search engines to what he created and you effectively have a global memory-prosthesis. Who won the Ascot Gold Cup in 1904? Google will find it in a flash – and remind you that the race that year was run on 16 June, which is also the day in which all the action takes place in James Joyce’s Ulysses. What was the name of Joyce’s father? A quick Google search turns up the DNB entry, which reveals all. And what was the name of the woman who proved to be Parnell’s downfall? Ah yes, here it is: Kitty O’Shea… and so it goes on.

The combination of powerful search facilities with the web’s facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr’s powers of concentration…

End of an era

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From CNN

Steve Ballmer was sobbing. He repeatedly tried to speak and couldn’t get the words out. Minutes passed as he tried to regain his composure. But the audience of 130 of Microsoft’s senior leaders waited patiently, many of them crying too. They knew that the CEO was choked up because this executive retreat, held in late March at a resort north of Seattle, was the last ever for company co-founder Bill Gates, as well as for Jeff Raikes, one of the company’s longest-tenured executives. “I’ve spent more time with these two human beings than with anyone else in my life,” Ballmer finally said. “Bill and Jeff have been my North Star and kept me going. Now I’m going to count on all of you to be there for me.”

Aw, shucks.

Sauce for the gander…

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If you’ve been following Associated Press’s absurd attempt to rewrite the law on Fair Use then you’ll enjoy Michael Arrington’s latest sally.

As far as I can tell, the Associated Press is sticking by its ridiculous and unlawful assertion that “direct quotations, even short ones” are copyright infringements and result in lawsuit threats and DMCA takedown notices.

This story led us to ban the A.P., call the New York Times out on undisclosed conflicts of interest and begin to investigate some ridiculous organization called the Media Bloggers Association before getting bored and wandering off to other topics.

But now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I’m suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story).

Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.

Next time, A.P., ask permission before you quote me. I work hard to create content, and it just isn’t appropriate for you to simply cut and paste it into your own product and then sell that to others.

Absolute power…

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Guess who I came on the other day in the University Library? None other than Lord Acton, the celebrated Catholic historian, who in 1887 wrote to Bishop Creighton:

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Spot on. But didn’t these Victorian grandees have weird facial hair? How did they eat soup? I’ve seen a photograph of his Pa and he was just as bad.

Later: Bill Thompson emails with the information that,

The children’s writer Philip Ardagh has a similarly long and bushy beard and his party trick when he is talking to schoolchildren is to take a pencil case and hide all of its contents in his beard – pens, pencils, protractors, the lot. It’s very impressive. Perhaps Acton did something similar in the House of Lords…

Aphorisms

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Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique. You can easily see why it’s compelling, but you can just as easily see its essential creepiness. (At least it’s up-front about its creepiness, using the term “follower” in place of the popular euphemism “friend.”)

Discuss.

[Source.]

Warming to his theme, the Source continues:

What are you doing? is the question Twitter asks you to answer. But in the world of Twitter, there can be only one honest answer: I am twittering. Any other answer is a fib, a fabrication – a production.

As with other media of the self, Twitter makes the act subservient to its expression. It turns us into observers of our own lives, and not in the traditional sense of self-consciousness (watching with the inner eye) but in the mass media sense (watching with the eye of the producer). As the Observer Effect tells us, the act of observing the act changes the act. So how does Twitter warp the lives of twitterers? If truth lies in the unlinkable, does life lie in the untweetable?

Jonathan Routh RIP

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Britain’s only world-class practical joker has died, aged (improbably) 80. The Economist ran a fine obit.

He also attempted to take a grand piano on the London Underground, and persuaded a crowd of tourists that Nelson’s Column needed holding up. He set up pyramids of plates to crash when people passed them, and rigged a mirror in a hat shop so that, when each matron posed simperingly before it, the glass cracked from side to side. His notion of a day’s work was to ask a passer-by for tuppence for a cup of tea and, having got the money, produce Thermos, milk and sugar for the astonished benefactor and inquire whether they wanted one lump, or two.

Mr Routh played pranks all his life. Uppingham ejected him for hanging a banner reading “Vote Routh, Communist” in the school chapel, and Cambridge parted company with him after he gathered hundreds of signatures to stop an imaginary motorway across Bletchley Park. In 1957 he put an ad in the Times: “Practical joker with wide experience of British public’s sad gullibility organises, leads and guarantees success of large-scale hoaxes.” He hoped never to do anything else…