Is the world of big data one in which information about us allows us to personalize services and benefit from that personalization, or is it one in which our data is used against us by companies and governments?
A blog post by Nick Carr about the future of the printed book touched off an epic comment debate between the author and media theorist Clay Shirky about whether the book format itself will die out and be replaced.
IT departments need not go away in a computing world increasingly concerned with cloud computing and complex service-oriented systems, but they will have to change. IT has to let go of trying to control everything and focus on coordinating and enhancing things that other people control.
Ray Bradbury’s landmark novel Fahrenheit 451 is usually seen as a protest against government censorship, but the author said it was about how television and other media were making people less interested in ideas. What would Bradbury think of the world we live in now?
Is the web run by large corporations, or is it powered primarily by peer-to-peer networks? That’s the question behind one of the longest-running wagers of the modern web era — a six-year-old bet between author and web sceptic Nick Carr and Harvard professor Yochai Benkler.
It has been a crazy busy week for me and my reading list was much longer that normal. I have culled the seven best pieces for you to read and enjoy this weekend. Some of them might have lessons for all of us.
For several days now, journalism professor Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr have been debating whether the internet makes journalism better or worse. In the end, neither side wins — or both do — because the internet amplifies both the good and the bad things about the media.
New research seems to show that our memories are less accurate when we know the information is stored somewhere else. Some feel this is going to make us less human in some way, but I for one am glad to outsource parts of my brain.
Today’s recommended reading links include a fascinating look at a ghost town in the California desert, an analysis of why more free parking would be bad for cities, an inspiring story about how open data helped Alzheimer’s research and a graveyard for computers in Ghana.
Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker has joined in the ongoing debate over whether the Internet makes people smarter or dumber. He says using Twitter and spending time on the web doesn’t make us less intelligent, any more than reading an encyclopedia makes us more intelligent.
