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Book Review: Eli Pariser’s “Filter Bubble”

by on June 7, 2011 · 5 comments

In my latest weekly Forbes column is entitled “The Internet Isn’t Killing Our Culture or Democracy” and it’s a short review of the new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, by MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser. As I note in my essay, Pariser’s book covers some very familiar ground already plowed by others in the burgeoning Internet pessimism movement:

[The Filter Bubble] restates a thesis developed a decade ago in both Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com and Andrew L. Shapiro’s The Control Revolution, that increased personalization is breeding a dangerous new creature—Anti-Democratic Man. “Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view,” Pariser notes, “but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles.”  Pariser worries that personalized digital “filters” like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pandora, and Netflix are narrowing our horizons about news and culture and leaving “less room for the chance encounters that bring insights and learning.” “Technology designed to give us more control over our lives is actually taking control away,” he fears.
Pariser joins a growing brigade of Internet pessimists. Almost every year for the past decade a new book has been published warning that the Internet is making us stupid, debasing our culture, or destroying social interaction.  Many of these Net pessimists—whose ranks include Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur), Lee Siegel (Against the Machine), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) and Nicholas Carr (The Shallows)—lament the rise of “The Daily Me,” or the rise of hyper-personalized news, culture, and information. They claim increased information and media customization will lead to close-mindedness, corporate brainwashing, an online echo-chamber, or even the death of deliberative democracy.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written on this topic in recent years, you will not be surprised to hear that I disagree with Pariser and these other Net pessimists when it comes to fears about hyper-personalization and user customization. As I noted in my recent book chapter, ” The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1 – Saving the Net From Its Detractors“: Continue reading →

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The Net, Info Overload, & Our Fragmented Attention Spans

by on March 16, 2011 · 3 comments

My thanks to Linton Weeks of NPR who reached out to me for comment for a story he was doing on the impact of the Internet and digital technology on culture and our attention spans. His essay, “We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore,” is an interesting exploration of the issue, although it is clear that Weeks, like Nick Carr (among others), is concerned about what the Net is doing to our brains. He says:

We just don’t do whole things anymore. We don’t read complete books — just excerpts. We don’t listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don’t sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don’t even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. And the result: What we gain is the knowledge — or the illusion of knowledge — of many new, different and variegated aspects of life. What we lose is still being understood.

After reading the entire piece I realized that some of my comments to Weeks probably came off as a bit more pessimistic about things than I actually am. I told him, for example, that “Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption,” and that “With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span.”

Luckily, however, Weeks was kind enough to also give me the last word in the story in which I pointed out that it would be a serious mistake to conclude “that we’re all growing stupid, or losing our ability to think, or losing our appreciation of books, albums or other types of long-form content.” Instead, I argued: Continue reading →

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The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net From Its Detractors

by on January 31, 2011 · 10 comments

Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom.  In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: (1) “Net Skeptics,” who are pessimistic about the Internet improving the lot of mankind; and (2) “Net Lovers,” who appreciate the benefits the Net brings society but who fear those benefits are disappearing, or that the Net or openness are dying.  (Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with these themes since I sketched them out in previous essays here such as, “Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?” and “Two Schools of Internet Pessimism.”) The second essay is here.

This essay focuses on the first variant of Internet pessimism, which is rooted in general skepticism about the supposed benefits of cyberspace, digital technologies, and information abundance. The proponents of this pessimistic view often wax nostalgic about some supposed “good ‘ol days” when life was much better (although they can’t seem to agree when those were). At a minimum, they want us to slow down and think twice about life in the Information Age and how it’s personally affecting each of us.  Occasionally, however, this pessimism borders on neo-Ludditism, with some proponents recommending steps to curtail what they feel is the destructive impact of the Net or digital technologies on culture or the economy.  I identify the leading exponents of this view of Internet pessimism and their major works. I trace their technological pessimism back to Plato but argue that their pessimism is largely unwarranted. Humans are more resilient than pessimists care to admit and we learn how to adapt to technological change and assimilate new tools into our lives over time. Moreover, were we really better off in the scarcity era when we were collectively suffering from information poverty?  Generally speaking, despite the challenges it presents society, information abundance is a better dilemma to be facing than information poverty.  Nonetheless, I argue, we should not underestimate or belittle the disruptive impacts associated with the Information Revolution.  But we need to find ways to better cope with turbulent change in a dynamist fashion instead of attempting to roll back the clock on progress or recapture “the good ‘ol days,” which actually weren’t all that good.

Down below, I have embedded the entire chapter in a Scribd reader, but the essay can also be found on the TechFreedom website for the book as well as on SSRN.  I have also includes two updated tables that appeared in my old “optimists vs. pessimists” essay.  The first lists some of the leading Internet optimists and pessimists and their books. The second table outlines some of the major lines of disagreement between these two camps and I divided those disagreements into (1) Cultural / Social beliefs vs. (2) Economic / Business beliefs.

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Book Review: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows

by on June 1, 2010 · 652 comments

Last Friday afternoon, as I was leaving my house to en route to the airport with the family for a short vacation, Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, arrived in my mailbox. I grabbed it, jumped in the car, flipped it open during the drive to Dulles Airport (don’t worry, the wife was driving), and began devouring it.  I say “devour” because once I started reading it, I didn’t stop.  I was wholeheartedly absorbed in the text from start to finish.

I tell you all this not just because Carr’s book is that good, but because according to the thesis he sets forth in The Shallows, fewer and fewer people are likely to be engaged in such contemplative, deep reading activities due to the highly distractive nature of the Internet and digital technologies. “With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use,” Carr claims. “At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book.” (p. 116) The Net and multimedia “strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our learning and weakening our understanding,” he says. (p. 129) And we have no one to blame for this mess but ourselves:

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information… And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in ever more and different ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is not an option many of us would consider. (p. 133-4)

Although, ultimately, Carr doesn’t quite convinced me that “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness” (p. 193), he has made a powerful case that its effects may not be as salubrious as many of us have assumed.  Continue reading →

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Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society

by on January 31, 2010 · 194 comments

[I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I subsequently penned an essay on the subject that generated a fair bit of attention. So, I figured I must be on to something, and the more Net policy books I read, the more I realized that the divisions between these two camps were growing wider and increasingly heated. Thus, I thought I would share this very rough draft (much of it still in outline form) of the opening chapter of that book I want to write about this great intellectual war over the impact of technology on society. I invite reader input. Update Jan. 2011: I finally published a full-length essay on this topic. You can find it here. ]

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The impact of technological change on culture, learning, and morality has long been the subject of intense debate, and every technological revolution brings out a fresh crop of both pessimists and pollyannas. Indeed, a familiar cycle has repeat itself throughout history whenever new modes of production (from mechanized agriculture to assembly-line production), means of transportation (water, rail, road, or air), energy production processes (steam, electric, nuclear), medical breakthroughs (vaccination, surgery, cloning), or communications techniques (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) have appeared on the scene.

The cycle goes something like this. A new technology appears. Those who fear the sweeping changes brought about by this technology see a sky that is about to fall. These “techno-pessimists” predict the death of the old order (which, ironically, is often a previous generation’s hotly-debated technology that others wanted slowed or stopped).  Embracing this new technology, they fear, will result in the overthrow of traditions, beliefs, values, institutions, business models, and much else they hold sacred.

The pollyannas, by contrast, look out at the unfolding landscape and see mostly rainbows in the air. Theirs is a rose-colored world in which the technological revolution du jour is seen as improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order.  If something has to give, then the old ways be damned! For such “techno-optimists,” progress means some norms and institutions must adapt—perhaps even disappear—for society to continue its march forward.

Our current Information Revolution is no different. It too has its share of techno-pessimists and techno-optimists. Indeed, before most of us had even heard of the Internet, people were already fighting about it—or at least debating what the rise of the Information Age meant for our culture, society, and economy. Continue reading →

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What is Cyber-Libertarianism? (The Debate over Lessig’s Code at 10 Continues)

by on May 14, 2009 · 18 comments

I’ve posted another response in the Cato Unbound online debate over the impact of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace upon the book’s 10th anniversary.  You will recall that I went fairly hard on Prof. Lessig in my essay, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control,’” and Lessig responded with a counter-punch that went after me for it.  I respond in a new essay about “Our Conflict of Cyber-Visions.” In the piece, I address Lessig’s assertion that I just didn’t understand the central teachings of Code, as well as his reluctance to accept the “cyber-collectivism” label that I affixed to his book and life’s work.  Again, please hop over to Cato Unbound for my complete response.

But one thing from the essay that I thought worth reproducing here is my effort to better define the key principles that separate the cyber-libertarian and cyber-collectivist schools of thinking.  I argue that it comes down to this:

The cyber-libertarian believes that “code failures” are ultimately better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up, marketplace responses than by coerced, top-down, governmental solutions. Moreover, the decisive advantage of the market-driven approach to correcting code failure comes down to the rapidity and nimbleness of those response(s).

Of course, another key difference relates to how quickly one jumps to the conclusion that “code failures” are actually occurring at all. I argue:

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The Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008

by on December 7, 2008 · 21 comments

It’s been a big year for tech policy books. Several important titles were released in 2008 that offer interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet and the impact digital technologies are having on our lives, culture, and economy. Back in September, I compared some of the most popular technology policy books of the past five years and tried to group them into two camps: “Internet optimists” vs. “Internet pessimists.” That post generated a great deal of discussion and I plan on expanding it into a longer article soon. In this post, however, I will merely list what I regard as the most important technology policy books of the past year. Best Tech Books of 2008 (covers)

What qualifies as an “important” tech policy book? Basically, it’s a title that many people in this field are currently discussing and that we will likely be talking about for many years to come. I want to make it clear, however, that merely because a book appears on this list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything said in it. In fact, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the two most important books of 2008, as well as many of the other books on the list. [Moreover, after reading all these books, I am more convinced than ever that libertarians are badly losing the intellectual battle of ideas over Internet issues and digital technology policy. There’s just very few people defending a “Hands-Off-the-Net” approach anymore. But that’s a subject for another day!]

Another caveat: Narrowly focused titles lose a few points on my list. For example, as was the case in past years, a number of important IP-related books have come out this year. If a book deals exclusively with copyright or patent issues, it does not exactly qualify as the same sort of “tech policy book” as other titles found on this list since it is a narrow exploration of just one set of issues that have a bearing on digital technology policy. The same could be said of a book that deals exclusively with privacy policy, like Solove’s Understanding Privacy. It’s an important book with implications for the future of tech policy, but I demoted it a bit because of its narrow focus.

With those caveats in mind, here are my Top 10 Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008 (and please let me know about your picks for book of the year):

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Book Review: Nick Carr’s Big Switch

by on October 30, 2008 · 634 comments

Carr Big Switch book coverI just finished reading through The Economist’s new 14-page special report on cloud computing, “Let It Rise” in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important:

The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.

Even if you are very familiar with cloud computing, I recommend you take a look at the article. Anyway, while I was reading it, I was unsurprised to come across some comments from Nicholas Carr, whose new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is essentially an early history of cloud computing and an investigation into its effects on our economy, culture, and society. And that also reminded me that, even though I have mentioned Carr’s book here several times since it was released earlier this year, I have failed to give it a dedicated review. And it certain deserves one because “The Big Switch” is easily one of the most important technology policy books of 2008.

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Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists

by on September 6, 2008 · 47 comments

[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”]

A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: “Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists.” Here’s a list of some of the individuals and books (or other articles and blogs) that I believe epitomize these two camps of thinking:

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

Internet Optimists

Internet Pessimists

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!”

Lee Siegel, Against the Machine

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Nick Carr, The Big Switch

Cass Sunstein, Infotopia

Cass Sunstein, Republic.com

Don Tapscott, Wikinomics

Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited

Kevin Kelly & Wired mag in general

Alex Iskold, “The Danger of Free”

Mike Masnick & TechDirt blog

Mark Cuban

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

Internet Optimists

Internet Pessimists

Culture / Social

Net is Participatory

Net is Polarizing

Net yields Personalization

Net yields Fragmentation

a “Global village”

Balkanization

Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought

Homogeneity / Close-mindedness

Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies

Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies

Tool of liberation & empowerment

Tool of frequent misuse & abuse

Economics / Business

Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)

Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)

Increasing importance of “Gift economy”

Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms

“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence

“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence

Mass collaboration

Individual effort

So, what to make of this intellectual war? Who’s got the story right?

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