#NicholasCarr has a new article out. It’s
crowned by an ominous title (“The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering”), but in fact
carries a hopeful message. Carr begins by with a look back at the founding and
relentless expansion of virtual behemoths like #Google, #Facebook, #YouTube, #iTunes, #Twitter and the like – whose stamp on sentient life has been boosted
exponentially with the rapid spread of hand-held devices. In his words, “it has been a carnival ride, and we, the public, have been the
giddy passengers.” But
don’t be dispirited, for “this year something changed” – courtesy of a
scholarly paper exposing Facebook’s experiment involving the manipulation of
users’ moods, plus the European court ruling obliging Google and its kin to
erase information citizens might deem inaccurate or outdated. “Arriving in the wake of revelations about the NSA’s online
spying operation, both seemed to herald, in very different ways, a new stage in
the net’s history – one in which the public will be called upon to guide the
technology, rather than the other way around. We may look back on 2014 as the
year the internet began to grow up.”
Lofty, almost inspirational words – which made me think. In his ur-text, #IsGoogleMakingUsStupid?”, Carr worried a few years back that too much browsing and e-reading had some detrimental effects on his own thinking – and capacity for affective processing of what he reads. Perhaps he was onto something there, after all…
