Easily one of my favorite critics of wired culture is Nicholas Carr, who is at the top of his game in a couple of recent posts from Rough Type, aka, the "realtime chronicles."
Get used to the sarcasm. As someone who has been on the barbed end of it because of a brief flirtation with the kind of digital utopianism he routinely mocks, and as an introvert who has an inexhaustible desire for less stimulation from the devices he carries, I've certainly come to appreciate it.
Up first, Carr share an insight gleaned from a forthcoming book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - an IdeaFestival speaker in 2008, by the way - on the nature of information in the land of circuits: the more you look at the data, the more noise you're likely to encounter. The fault lies with us.
In my mind this statistical truism sheds light on so much of contemporary culture, which has never been so connected. And yet - and yet - through a combination of our own frailties and an interminable news cycle we've become, with good reason, jejune, skeptical about the information on offer. Yeah, there's a bit of noise in the signal.
I won't go so far as to say that the news is for suckers, but comics have certainly found it useful. Having left The Onion, Baratunde Thurston has started a new company, Cultivated Wit, devoted to the proposition that truths that can't shared in earnest might be delivered in a punchline. He's on to something; the facts ain't what it used to be. I'm looking forward to hearing Baratunde at IdeaFestival 2012.
Carr also goes after a certain modern promise. Our wetware, having co-evolved with its world over an endless expanse of time, crowns its bearers with creaturely intimacies - the scent of an apple orchard, the warmth of a lover, the jeweled depths of a truly dark sky. It is hard won knowledge. And thanks to neuroscience we also know that the synaptic leaps that make that knowledge possible take place before any conscious understanding. Our own minds lag the real world.
"But there's hope...." Taking a shot at one well known cyber evangalist and some-over-the-top language about the promise of personal technology, Carr goes on to dryly and pointedly mock the idea that our digital devices will ever anticipate our wants. Our apps have a hopeless task, not the least because knowing what we want is part of the problem.
He's not for everyone, but we need voices like Carr's. He doesn't prophesy against the wired world, just the dingbat-ery that its intimate embrace will ever have a pulse.
Wayne
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Some rights reserved by Ben Husmann
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. Saint Augustine
For the quiet person the one constant in the world is not change, it's noise. Too much and his interior life, his source of energy, suffers.
For most of you who were there, Ray Bradbury's holographic appearance at IdeaFestival 2007 was the highlight of an expansive three days. Bradbury's stories of finding refuge in libraries while writing Fahrenheit 451, of the serendipitous path that led to The Martian Chronicles, of his deep well of belief in human potential, and most memorably, his tabletop-pounding demand to "do what you love!" - they came back to me this week. There have been other remembrances in the past couple of days since his death - a few of you have taken to Twitter - and many of them have been extraordinarily moving. But the passage below, pulled from