Michael Gorman asks, in the second part of his essay “Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason,” “Is the astonishing spread of computer technology to change not just our society and personal lives but also the very nature of human intelligence?” I believe he intends the question to be rhetorical, but I’m going to go ahead and give it an answer: Yes. As the networked computer becomes our universal medium (revealing the television to be merely a transitional device), it’s going to change the nature of human intelligence just as surely as the printed page did a half a millennium ago. Our brains aren’t constructed of wires and solder. They’re made of softer stuff – and they’re always ready to be reprogrammed.
So while I’m happy to line up on Gorman’s side in battling the hive mind fabulists, I’m not going to kid myself that it’s anything more than a sideshow. We’re not going to see the rise of a superior collective intelligence – those awaiting a higher consciousness will end up, as always, either disappointed or deluded – but neither are we going to see the survival of a way of thinking shaped by the careful arrangement of words on printed pages. Contemplative Man, the fellow who came to understand the world sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is a goner. He’s being succeeded by Flickering Man, the fellow who darts from link to link, conjuring the world out of continually refreshed arrays of isolate pixels, shadows of shadows. The linearity of reason is blurring into the nonlinearity of impression; after five centuries of wakefulness, we’re lapsing into a dream state. Here comes everybody, indeed.
What’s happening here isn’t about amateurs and professionals. George Washington was an amateur politician. Charles Darwin was an amateur scientist. Wallace Stevens was an amateur poet. Talent cannot be classified; it’s an individual trait. What’s happening here isn’t even really about expertise or its absence. The decisive factor is not how we produce intellectual works but how we consume them. When Gorman says we must cherish “the individual scholar, author, and creator of knowledge,” I can wholeheartedly agree (as most people would) and still believe that he’s missing the point. The millions of people who consult Wikipedia every day are not pursuing any kind of anti-expert or anti-scholar agenda. Their interest is practical, not ideological. They go to Wikipedia because it’s free and convenient. They know its quality and reliability are imperfect, but that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make as they hurriedly fill their market baskets with information. It’s our mode of consumption that is going to shape our intellectual lives and even, in time, our intellects. And that mode is shifting, rapidly and inexorably, from page to web.
George Dyson, in his book Darwin Among the Machines, quotes the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane: “Evolution will take its course. And that course has generally been downward. The majority of species have degenerated and become extinct, or, what is perhaps worse, gradually lost many of their functions. The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence.” The automation of physical labor did not make our muscles bigger. Are we to assume that the automation of mental labor will make our brains smarter?
When Sergey Brin said that “the perfect search engine would be like the mind of God,” he was neither hyperventilating nor blaspheming. He was giving us a peek at the future. We get the God we deserve.
1f45
June 13th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Flickering Man
From my post in the Britannica Blog’s Web 2.0 Forum: What’s happening here isn’t about amateurs and professionals. George Washington was an amateur politician. Charles Darwin was an amateur scientist. Wallace Stevens was an amateur poet. Talent ca…
June 13th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Web 2.0 Backlash
I haven’t read Andrew Keen’s new book - The Cult of the Amateur. But I will. I’ve been following his blog for about a month - not because I agree with what he’s saying, but because I believe we need…
June 13th, 2007 at 9:52 am
There’s an assumption here that there are better sources of information than wikipedia. If so, what are they? How accessible are they?
One might say that wikpedia today is filling the role of Encyclopedia Britannica when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. In that era, I remember being pushed to original sources and not just trusting the encyclopedia. Isn’t that we are witnessing now with wikipedia?
June 13th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Whew, I’m so glad you use the male pronoun in this piece, because for a second I thought this grim future applied to *me.*
June 13th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
“it’s going to change the nature of human intelligence just as surely as the printed page did a half a millennium ago …”
I know it’s a common academic cliche, but I’d say this is only true in a very trivial sense. That is, living on an isolated farm and doing backbreaking labor 18 hours a day, compared to typing at a screen and not being sick half to time, “changes the nature of human intelligence”. For women in particular, not being constantly pregnant from ages 14-40 “changes the nature of human intelligence”. In fact, arguably having people regularly living past 40 “changes the nature of human intellgence”.
That is, it’s granting the priorities of tech evangelism, but only disputing their conclusions. And then saying it’s bad (”Flickering Man”) whereas the old was good (”Contemplative Man”).
June 13th, 2007 at 5:21 pm 1f43
>> Whew, I’m so glad you use the male pronoun in this piece, because for a second I thought this grim future applied to *me.*
Actually, Karen, it does apply to you. The quoted biologist Haldane was simply being sexist, after the fashion of his time. His sexism is not to be excused, of course, but neither does it exempt you from the fall of the human race. Alas.
June 14th, 2007 at 1:56 am
[…] Britannica Blog批判性地探讨了web 2.0的挑战、集体主义、“反智”以及学术严肃性的衰退。Nicholas Carr 说我们正在改变:“逐字逐段理解这个世界的沉思者不复存在。取而代之的是思维跳跃的人, 他从一个链接冲到另一个链接,不断刷新离散象素排列,让这个世界好象变戏法一样,一幕又一幕。”我完全同意。我们正在改变我们与他人的关系以及我们与信息的关系。Geetha Narayaran提供了一个关于缓慢全面学习的观点——这个概念很重要,只可惜在我们疯狂冲向更多新信息的过程中,它被践踏在脚下。尽管Keen和其他人可能有意煽情,以多卖几本书,提高知名度,他们的观点也算是多样化认知网络上的节点。我们的确需要思考读/写工具如何改写着我们的社会,那么多人(Wikipedia)的集体活动与Britannica的关系如何。我个人并没有看见什么冲突——在调查研究时,我更多地依赖学术刊物…当我需要齐诺悖论(出现在最近的listserv讨论里)的信息时,我就用wikipedia。不同信息需求,则采用不同途径。两大阵营都可以因讨论受益,给单色的观点添加点颜色。 […]
June 14th, 2007 at 1:57 am
[…] Britannica Blog批判性地探讨了web 2.0的挑战、集体主义、“反智”以及学术严肃性的衰退。Nicholas Carr 说我们正在改变:“逐字逐段理解这个世界的沉思者不复存在。取而代之的是思维跳跃的人, 他从一个链接冲到另一个链接,不断刷新离散象素排列,让这个世界好象变戏法一样,一幕又一幕。”我完全同意。我们正在改变我们与他人的关系以及我们与信息的关系。Geetha Narayaran提供了一个关于缓慢全面学习的观点——这个概念很重要,只可惜在我们疯狂冲向更多新信息的过程中,它被践踏在脚下。尽管Keen和其他人可能有意煽情,以多卖几本书,提高知名度,他们的观点也算是多样化认知网络上的节点。我们的确需要思考读/写工具如何改写着我们的社会,那么多人(Wikipedia)的集体活动与Britannica的关系如何。我个人并没有看见什么冲突——在调查研究时,我更多地依赖学术刊物…当我需要齐诺悖论(出现在最近的listserv讨论里)的信息时,我就用wikipedia。不同信息需求,则采用不同途径。两大阵营都可以因讨论受益,给单色的观点添加点颜色。 Gsiemens发表于08:50 AM | 评论 (0) | 引用通告(0) (翻译:Allan & Paula) […]
June 14th, 2007 at 4:45 am
It’s interesting that the internet hasn’t really created any new media. It is (for a user’s intents and purposes) made up of (sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph) words, music, images and moving images.
This is a particularly grasping and patchwork entry. No, printing did not change “the nature of human intelligence”, and the internet won’t either. Little does, short of a blow to the head. This is followed by some rather tentative exposition, hard to understand, that a French post-structuralist would probably just shrug at.
Then he blows it, by saying that it is not production but consumption that is important “here”. (And I thought the debate was about production, about the production and representation of information in a scholarly fashion and the same in an open, public and non-scholarly fashion!) He says that the really important thing is the shift from reading X on a page to reading X on a computer screen. So what’s the difference, Mr Carr? The great, portentous significance?
Finally, we get some tacked-on guff about barnacles. I didn’t know reading websites made a person stupid (though browsing most Web 2.0 sites gives the point some pretty strong circumstantial backing). You can spend all day on the net and spend all your time thinking, or not, as you please.
We’re not going to lose our intelligence simply because we have some funky new tools. If fact, we can probably spread it more widely and deeply than before. Perhaps amateur specialisation across a wide range of fields will again become feasible. Perhaps we will have the tools to climb the mountains of data and specialised knowledge built up over the past century. Perhaps we’ll all become comment-junkies and arrogant know-it-alls who really have no grounding in any single topic.
I don’t know, but neither do you.
June 14th, 2007 at 5:45 am
For every fulfilling link pursued from Wikipedia, how many tangents lead to irrelevant information? How often does the searcher get sidetracked from the original goal of their pursuit? It might be more the case of the “fickle man” rather than the “flickering man.” I think it was Norman Mailer who said that we don’t have to work for information anymore, and there is no emotional reward for finding the desired information. Society has changed and as our attention span is lessened and our expectations are higher (who can actually wait for more than 20 seconds for a page to load anymore?) the happy-go-lucky nature of Web 2.0 perfectly suits the current cultural trends of the fast/developed world. I remember John Lennon declared that The Beatles were perceived as being more important to the youth of the 60’s than Jesus. This lead to mass anti-Beatles rallies across the Bible Belt where records and paraphernalia were set ablaze. I wonder how good God-fearing folk will react to Sergey Brin’s comments.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Stamboli, my reference was a broader than that. This entire discussion is dominated by the same white male voice of privilege that wrote the “encyclopedic” works reinforcing their worlds. Now, I could make the same argument about Wikipedia (try a search for women impersonators in military battles; it’s very weak… I also think there’s a connection between Wikipedia’s resistance to formal declaration of expertise and its informal, internal power structure), but the point is still that this entire debate is overwhelmingly (though yes, I know, not exclusively) among the voices of privilege.
June 14th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
What you are saying, Karen, is interesting to me. In terms of gender study, females may still be largely in the kitchen “barefoot and pregnant” and just as limited in terms of time to participate in this debate, or to contribute consistently to sources of collective intelligence. Time and responsibility constraints, on the job, at home.
So “Flickering WoMan” has always been the way that the greater percentage of females have been able to contribute to the global intellectual conversation. “Contemplative WoMan” as an archetype might only have existed in the past among privileged Victorians, and then they would not have been encouraged to actually contribute intellectually based upon what they learned.
June 14th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
No, printing did not change “the nature of human intelligence”, and the internet won’t either. Little does, short of a blow to the head.
You seem to be arguing that the media through which we discover and apprehend information and knowledge have no effect on how we think, that human intelligence somehow exists outside of (and beyond the reach of) its environment. I respectfully disagree. I think media, and technology in general, do and will continue to influence cognition.
One might say that wikpedia today is filling the role of Encyclopedia Britannica when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. In that era, I remember being pushed to original sources and not just trusting the encyclopedia. Isn’t that we are witnessing now with wikipedia?
Actually, I’d argue that Wikipedia today, as a source of information, is far, far more pervasive that Britannica ever was. Does the easy accessibility of Wikipedia really push people to explore original sources (or a variety of sources), or does it have the opposite effect? I’m not sure, though my guess is that it’s more the latter than the former (it’s a question that could, I would think, be fairly easily studied).
Whew, I’m so glad you use the male pronoun in this piece …
“Contemplative Human” just doesn’t do it for me. I didn’t mean to exclude anyone, and I’d certainly like to hear more of your thoughts about the “connection between Wikipedia’s resistance to formal declaration of expertise and its informal, internal power structure.”
“Contemplative WoMan” as an archetype might only have existed in the past among privileged Victorians …
You may well be right - and it’s a good point - but, as you note, you’re talking about contributing to the public conversation, whereas I’m just talking about how we take in and process information and make sense of things.
June 14th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
“You may well be right - and it’s a good point - but, as you note, you’re talking about contributing to the public conversation, whereas I’m just talking about how we take in and process information and make sense of things.”
I think you are on to something bigger than you think! And that your points are as applicable to the input as they are to the output and processing–the entire global conversation. Thanks for the very thought provoking essay!
June 14th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
I think you’re onto something big too, and I enjoy all of your writing, but I have to say I think your presentation here is .. uneven. You have so many undemonstrated assertions and assumptions about what is good versus bad for the way we evolve, and yet your central theme of changing intelligence is profound I think, and worthy of much future treatment. Please continue with this.
I didn’t have time to get involved here, but I did blog a quick post about the things you missed, allow me to paste 2 paragraphs below, fyi.
Also, I couldn’t help calling my post “From Thoughtful Man to Blogger,” but I mean only that it seems as if you rushed this piece into print without a lot of rewrite and rethink etc.
I said:
“Nicholas Carr’s article could have taken in concepts such as the cultivation of unstructured information to be captured for codification in structured systems; it could have saluted that aspect of intelligence that recognizes patterns, and might have seen enormously increased recognition-training happening in the face of the global network’s prodigious flicker of bits.
“Finally, the article could have looked at the reality we perceive, and questioned if in its primordial arising reality comes to us first in sentences or sense impressions - the point being, which might be our more accurate apprehension of reality?”
Keep on with this please :)
June 14th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
“Does the easy accessibility of Wikipedia really push people to explore original sources (or a variety of sources), or does it have the opposite effect?”
Couldn’t it be neither of the above? Consider the following situation–while reading this article, the song “CT Catholic” came up on shuffle. “Hmm,” I wondered, “How exactly do CT scans work?”. 30 seconds later, I had read the first few grafs of the Wikipedia entry and closed the tab. Before Wikipedia, what would I have done? Probably nothing–just ignored the thought, because it’s not worth doing a thorough search to satisfy a momentary curiosity. In this case, and I suspect in most uses of Wikipedia, it satisfies a momentary itch for information. That is to say, Wikipedia might be neither a substitute nor a complement for existing searches, but rather creates entirely new searches, by lowering the cost of getting a quick overview of something.
June 15th, 2007 at 2:35 am
[…] From Contemplative Man to Flickering Man - Britannica Blog The automation of physical labor did not make our muscles bigger. Are we to assume that the automation of mental labor will make our brains smarter? (tags: future intelligence evolution) […]
June 15th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Wikipedia might be neither a substitute nor a complement for existing searches, but rather creates entirely new searches, by lowering the cost of getting a quick overview of something.
Very good point. I would think it serves all three roles: substitute, complement, and creator of new demand (so to speak). But that raises another question: In fulfilling that “new demand,” is it in some cases actually substituting for search engines (and hence, in turn, for other web sources)?
Thanks.
1f45June 15th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
“This is a particularly grasping and patchwork entry. No, printing did not change “the nature of human intelligence”, and the internet won’t either.”
Really? There’s no differences in individual and societal decision-making between a culture based upon oral tradition and one based upon universal literacy ? Or even a literate elite ?
Nick Carr is correct. The brain interacts with the environment and to a certain marginal degree, adapts efficiently in terms of establishing neuronal connections for the behaviors in which we engage.
June 16th, 2007 at 8:43 am
“I didn’t mean to exclude anyone” — so if I call a post “Women and the Future of Knowledge” you’ll know I really mean to include you, right?
On Wikipedia, to me the interesting discussion is not about its anonymity; it’s about its very traditional, self-enforcing editorial structure. It’s just Britannica, except the authority of Britannica’s authors was conferred by the mysterious selectors behind Britannica (sure, you could figure it out, if you worked hard enough — the identical argument I hear from Wikipedians) while the authority of Wikipedia hides behind the facade of the “hive mind.”
The most significant parallel to Wikipedia’s editorial structure is not the chaos of the unstructured Web or any Web 2.0 service (I still don’t get how Web 2.0 got into this discussion except to make Britannica seem “cool”) but the informal power structure in any organization, well known to anyone outside the power structure who has observed an organizational culture give lip service to accountability in its formal structure (meetings, memos, etc.) even as the actual, binding decisions are actually made informally by informal leaders.
(Of course, in very traditional organizations, this facade is not required; hence nobody at Britannica needed to make bones about selecting an overwhelmingly straight white male roster to opine about the state of information today. How Britannica managed to find TWO male librarian reactionaries astounds me, in a profession that is still over 80 percent female and which is not short of excellent female theoreticians. But I digress.)
The problem with the Wikipedian editorial model is not that it leads to bad information — because a great deal of information on Wikipedia is as good as you’ll get anywhere — but that it is so astonishingly traditional. How odd (or — maybe not) that in a world where “transparency” has become vogue, Wikipedia’s core army of editors holds so much sway.
June 16th, 2007 at 8:52 am
K.G. Schneider wrote:
“Stamboli, my reference was a broader than that. This entire discussion is dominated by the same white male voice of privilege . . . this entire debate is overwhelmingly (though yes, I know, not exclusively) among the voices of privilege.”
Thanks for enlightening me.
June 16th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Nick, as Benn points out, human “intelligence” is constrained by biology that will not adapt to the limitations of current internet design. For example, the hyperlink is a great technological gimmick — but it completely breaks the human need to make meaning from linear narratives. When it comes to human cognition, the internet as currently designed is not “user friendly”.
Related to technological constraints, I’m surprised that you don’t refer to economic constraints driving this debate. The current storm over amateurism is in many ways a reaction to a business model: the Web 2.0 “social media” moguls create systems that generate revenue (Wikipedia excepted, for now) from free user-generated content.
As I said in a response to Gorman’s post, experts are costly in the short term, but amateurs are costly in the long term.
June 16th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Wikipedia is “Web 2.0″ because it’s about getting people to work for free by leveraging the ability of the Internet to support an enterprise with a few powerful owners and a huge number of powerless workers. With a demagogic ideological motivation used to fuel it. Very Web 2.0 indeed.
June 17th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
“Web 2.0″ is really only a very small “preview” of a fully-developed Semantic Web, where First Order Logic will become as commonplace as today’s Visual Basic programming, or… English Literature 101.
In order to benefit from the true Semantic Web, either we adopt new tools and methodologies in our own thinking process, or else we… devolve into a mass of degenerate illogical apes.
The choice is ours; but I’m afraid both tendencies may manifest at the same time, afflicting humanity with an even worse type of “class division” than all the others: The gap between people who will become masters of the new era, and those who will flicker into the background trying to catch up b y collecting fragments of what they can’t understand , still less assimilate.
June 18th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Seth, all the content is licensed under the GFDL or equivalents, and the bandwidth is paid for by charitable contributions. I’m not sure what you mean by “own” (I also reserve the right to quibble with “powerful”, but I’ll hold off for now). Could you explain?
June 19th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Sure. Read, e.g.:
“With Wikia, a Wikipedia founder looks to strike it rich.”
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/03/01/8401010/index.htm
June 21st, 2007 at 11:15 am 2027
Ah. I thought you were including Wikipedia itself (separate from Wikia) as an enterprise of exploitation.
June 25th, 2007 at 6:03 am
Most of my Wikipedia usage involves a Google search for Wikipedia entries that are primarily composed of reprinted material from allmusic.com regarding musicians or from the U.S. government regarding U.S. cities. Occasionally I’ll use it to get a quick start on a concept or fact but that’s irregular.
I’ve had a peek into the power structure within Wikipedia and read related tales of bizarre editing entities. I have absolutely no time to waste dealing with the nonsense I saw in oh so short a time. Far worse than in my multiple years as an Open Directory editor.
I agree that a big shift in how we consume information is occurring.
I’ve seen some University types proposing that academics get involved with Wikipedia to raise the quality of the entries. While that would also raise the infighting and superficial editorial decisions based on who can mobilize power within Wikipedia most effectively, it’s a good idea.
Building on how people actually consume information is much smarter than trying to convince them to change their mode of information consumption.
SpragueD comment 22:
“the hyperlink is a great technological gimmick — but it completely breaks the human need to make meaning from linear narratives.”
In a Brechtian sense you might be right but only temporarily so. Remember how Brecht’s stage devices were intended to break the spellbinding flow of narrative so that one cou;d continue to grapple with the issues at hand without being seduced by the performance gestalt?
Remember how everybody got used to that and now we’re surrounded by a media environment chock full of what were once avant-garde techniques to disrupt narrative that now facilitate narrative due to our own mental shifts?
The human need for narrative is already recuperating the disjunctive course of navigation via hypertext links. It doesn’t wait on biology to catch up in a long term evolutionary sense.
Nick:
“The decisive factor is not how we produce intellectual works but how we consume them.”
One of the things I’m seeing, especially in my library related activity, is that a lot of these discussions are exposing the fact that most people depend on brands to validate information sources. Very few people have a useful grasp of how to evaluate information and information sources outside of checking for the brand.
That used to mean that once a “fact” got distributed by a reputable source it became a fact. Unfortunately, that’s too sophisticated a concept for most folks to deal with so the shift to online information retrieval on the open Web ends up being more about branding battles than about applying useful evaluation processes.
That’s not new but the Web makes the process more visible from revealing the inner workings of the Wikipedia editorial power structure to shifting legitimacy from the process of creating content to the performativity of the user interface.
Visiblity into these processes and branded knowledge claims is another important shift facilitated by the Internet.
Sidenote [mentally hyperlinking to a related point]:
I used to write multiple choice questions for teacher certification exams. That’s right. I was testing the teachers!
One of my coworkers, a very intelligent woman with many successful years in the classroom, responded to some news brief I shared with a question regarding my source.
I told her I read it on the Internet and said it in an intentionally perky and superficial manner. She responded with a knowing “Ohhhhh” as if that made it obvious why the information was ridiculous and probably impossible.
I then clarified that it was on the website of the NY Times. She went silent.
Late.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:05 am
As in all of these things, I think there’ll be a backlash by some who will refuse to engage with the developing hivemind, disconnecting from the Internet and switching off from the insistent siren call of e-mail checking, Slashdot/Google/News/MySpace website crawling and complete-wastes-of-human-lifetime like World of Warcraft or Second Life.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:29 am
[…] Web 2.0 Junho 26, 2007 Posted by Luis Santos in Participação, Tecnologia, Internet. trackback O Britannica Blog está a promover um debate sobre a Web 2.0. Parece-me, pelo pouco que li,tratar-se de um espaço de leitura imprescindível para quem tem interesse no assunto. Retiro, do que escreveu um dos meus ‘bloggers’ favoritos - Nicholas Carr - dois excertos da resposta a um post anterior de Michael Gorman: Contemplative Man, the fellow who came to understand the world sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is a goner. He’s being succeeded by Flickering Man, the fellow who darts from link to link, conjuring the world out of continually refreshed arrays of isolate pixels, shadows of shadows. (…) What’s happening here isn’t about amateurs and professionals. George Washington was an amateur politician. Charles Darwin was an amateur scientist. Wallace Stevens was an amateur poet. Talent cannot be classified; it’s an individual trait. What’s happening here isn’t even really about expertise or its absence. The decisive factor is not how we produce intellectual works but how we consume them. (…) It’s our mode of consumption that is going to shape our intellectual lives and even, in time, our intellects. And that mode is shifting, rapidly and inexorably, from page to web. […]
June 27th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
[…] Britannica Blog批判性地探讨了web 2.0的挑战、集体主义、“反智”以及学术严肃性的衰退。Nicholas Carr 说我们正在改变:“逐字逐段理解这个世界的沉思者不复存在。取而代之的是思维跳跃的人, 他从一个链接冲到另一个链接,不断刷新离散象素排列,让这个世界好象变戏法一样,一幕又一幕。”我完全同意。我们正在改变我们与他人的关系以及我们与信息的关系。Geetha Narayaran提供了一个关于缓慢全面学习的观点——这个概念很重要,只可惜在我们疯狂冲向更多新信息的过程中,它被践踏在脚下。尽管Keen和其他人可能有意煽情,以多卖几本书,提高知名度,他们的观点也算是多样化认知网络上的节点。我们的确需要思考读/写工具如何改写着我们的社会,那么多人(Wikipedia)的集体活动与Britannica的关系如何。我个人并没有看见什么冲突——在调查研究时,我更多地依赖学术刊物…当我需要齐诺悖论(出现在最近的listserv讨论里)的信息时,我就用wikipedia。不同信息需求,则采用不同途径。两大阵营都可以因讨论受益,给单色的观点添加点颜色。 Gsiemens发表于08:50 AM | 评论 (0) | 引用通告(0) […]
1e79June 30th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
[…] Sábias palavras escritas pelo Nicholas Carr acerca da Web2.0 e que me chegam via Luís Santos. […]
July 4th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Habrá que juzgar (¿quién juzga?) por la calidad intelectual de los libros por venir. ¿Habrán mejores editores en el futuro, habrán más autores “publicables”, habrán más lectores y críticos con tiempo y voluntad de lectura, de subrayar, de anotar, de ir al diccionario, habrán más constructores de diccionarios? Yo creo que sí a todas…
July 5th, 2007 at 8:50 am
[…] Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « links for 2007-07-02 links for 2007-07-03» […]
July 15th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
,—-
| … the fellow who came to understand the
| world sentence by sentence, paragraph by
| paragraph, is a goner. He’s being succeeded
| by Flickering Man, the fellow who darts from
| link to link, conjuring the world out of
| continually refreshed arrays of isolate
| pixels, shadows of shadows. The linearity of
| reason is blurring into the nonlinearity of
| impression…
`—-
you are saying that like you think it is a bad thing
December 15th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
[…] From Contemplative Man to Flickering Man Posted in Business, Technology by Fernando Ribeiro on December 15th, 2007 Nice essay. http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/06/from-contemplative-man-to-flickering-man/ […]