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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONCooper: If you do shop online, what’s so bad about being targeted by advertisers who know a lot about you?
Carr: One of the benefits of disclosing a lot of information about yourself to corporations is that they can do a better job of tailoring products and advertisements to your particular needs. The question is, when does customized service cross the line into manipulation? The Internet is a system of computers, and from the start computers have been used to direct people toward a specific goal established by the designer of the computer software. With the information available online, businesses can decipher triggers of our behavior.
Cooper: But isn’t the Internet freeing us by helping to connect people from different parts of the world?
Carr: Yes and no. In many cases it’s allowing information to flow more freely across borders, and that can help build understanding and empathy. But we’ve also heard a lot of rhetoric about how the Internet is going to erase old geopolitical boundaries and undermine the power of governments and so forth, and that’s largely a fantasy. As the Web has evolved, we’ve seen that our online activities are in fact subject to real-world laws and boundaries. Yahoo! was charged in France with allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia, which is illegal in that country. Yahoo!’s initial reaction was to argue that French laws don’t apply to the Net, but it soon retreated with its corporate tail between its legs because, as is true of any Internet company, it has to obey the laws of nations in which it operates.
Cooper: Is it bad that Yahoo! had to stop the sale of Nazi memorabilia?
Carr: No, I don’t think it’s bad. I’m in favor of maintaining local differences not only in laws but also in cultures. If the Internet were above the reach of local laws, there’d be a danger of even greater cultural homogeneity than we already have. But the point of the story is that the Net is not going to successfully challenge governmental sovereignty, as some of the more utopian thinkers suggest.
Cooper: Doesn’t the Internet provide a means of communication to people whose freedom of expression is limited by oppressive regimes? Iranians are some of the most active bloggers in the world.
Carr: The Internet, paradoxically, empowers both the individual and the state. On the one hand, it allows people who had no way to express themselves before, whether for political or economic reasons, an outlet to do so. The Net also makes it much easier to find out what people in other countries are thinking. On the other hand, it gives governments a better view into their citizens’ activities. There’s a danger that some people might mistake the apparent anonymity of the Net for true anonymity. It’s pretty easy for a government to get into the records of Internet providers and track who’s saying what. An anonymous person in China sent an e-mail containing what the Chinese government considered sensitive information, and the government demanded that Yahoo! disclose the identity of that person. Yahoo! agreed, and the man was put in jail. This is another indication that governmental control does not go away when people begin using the Internet. In fact, the Web gives governments a new tool for monitoring speech.
In most places the Net is still, on balance, more of a liberating force than a controlling one, but there’s no guarantee that this will continue. A utopian view of the Net needs to be tempered by the realization that it provides a remarkable infrastructure for totalitarianism. We can only hope it never gets used that way.
Cooper: But you don’t dispute that the Net is helping to democratize media?
Carr: The Internet has given many people the opportunity to express their views or distribute their creative work. It brings down the economic and technological barriers that once surrounded the media. Here too, though, the rhetoric often exceeds the reality. Though in theory you can reach a global audience through the Internet, the reality is that the vast majority of blogs, for example, are read by very small audiences. Writing one is not all that different from publishing your own photocopied zine in the eighties or being a ham-radio operator in the fifties.
There’s also an exploitative side to the Internet’s democratization of the media. When people post videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, they’re essentially providing free content to a profit-making corporation. I’ve compared this to a sharecropping model, where a company like Yahoo! or Google gives you your own plot of virtual turf and some tools to work it, but they’re the only ones who make any money from your work.
As more and more companies are able to harvest the fruits of free labor, it hurts the professionals who are trying to make a living and who are often very good at what they do. That’s not to take anything away from the amateurs, but if you look at how the rise of blogs has coincided with layoffs of reporters at newspapers, for example, it should give some cause for concern.
Cooper: You’ve said that the “unbundling of content” online is killing investigative journalism. What is “unbundling”?
Carr: The Internet allows media that used to be bundled together — such as articles in a newspaper or songs on a cd — to be unbundled, so that people can access the pieces individually. I no longer have to go out and buy a newspaper; I can launch my browser and find individual stories. I don’t have to buy a whole album; I can download individual songs from iTunes. An economist would say that’s good, because it means consumers have to purchase only those particular items that interest them, and they can ignore everything else. That’s true, but we may lose something along the way. The bundling of different content allowed newspapers, for instance, to take the money from classified ads and subscribers who read only the sports page and to invest it in stories that wouldn’t have been profitable on their own — and this includes most investigative journalism. On the Internet the classified advertising is unbundled: some of it goes to Craigslist, some to Autotrader.com, and so on. When people can get sports scores on their cellphones, they buy fewer papers. As the parts become separated, there’s no longer enough revenue to subsidize the less-profitable parts of the news business, and they are the first to be trimmed. They may also be some of the most valuable parts for society.
Cooper: With the declining ad revenues and readership at most major newspapers, do you think journalism will continue to be a paid profession?
Carr: There will always be opportunities for people to make a living as journalists, but the ranks of journalists will decrease. One of the great ironies of the Internet is that even though it provides us with easy access to an incredible amount of information, we get fewer professional voices and fewer reliable sources of information.
Cooper: What about the political blogs? We get lots of information there.
Carr: That’s true. In many ways the blogosphere is like the Op-Ed page on steroids. It gives people access to many different views, not all of which were easily accessible before. But we haven’t seen blogs, or any other type of amateur or unpaid journalism, replicate the news media’s more costly elements, like overseas reporting. The reason we see so many political and opinion blogs is that there’s no overhead on giving your opinions.
Cooper: Blogs tend to be either very liberal or very conservative. Do you think that’s because of human nature, or is it a polarizing effect of the Net itself?
Carr: I think it’s both. Obviously if you’re going to devote your time to writing a political blog, you probably have strong views on one side or the other of the political spectrum. And the more-ideological blogs tend to get more attention. Studies also demonstrate there’s little interaction between the two sides. Liberal blogs tend to link to other liberal blogs; conservative blogs link to other conservative blogs. As this effect continues, people may end up becoming more polarized rather than thinking more broadly.
And this is not only true on the Net; we’ve seen this polarization in talk radio and the cable news networks too. We seem to be moving toward an ever more Balkanized political landscape, which makes it harder for government to operate. You have to wonder how well our form of government, which is built on compromise, will adapt to this.
Cooper: You’ve also said that computing is concentrating income at the top of the ladder.
Carr: Businesses buy computers to replace workers, because machines tend to be less expensive. Jobs that used to be done by hand, such as typesetting, accounting, and filing, are now done by computer. Replacing workers with technology is nothing new. It’s been going on since the Industrial Revolution. Ideally, when you replace labor with machines, productivity goes up, and other jobs are created that replace the ones made obsolete by machines. Early industrial technologies put craftsmen out of business, but they created lots of factory jobs. And as companies became bigger and more complex, there was an explosion in white-collar jobs, which boosted living standards.
What seems to be different this time is that although computer systems allow the automation of many additional jobs, including white-collar work, we haven’t seen broad new classes of good-paying jobs coming out of the computer revolution. As you replace labor with capital, the owners of capital — along with the top executives who manage the business — are able to skim more profits from corporate earnings for themselves, and more and more money goes to a smaller set of people. That’s a trend we’ve seen here in the U.S. for the last couple of decades. Most economists believe information technology is one of the forces behind this concentration of wealth.
Cooper: If computers are cheap and the Internet is becoming the world’s computer, doesn’t that level the playing field in business?
Carr: It should help level the it playing field, giving smaller companies access to powerful computing resources that in the past have been reserved for larger companies. As computing power and software programs turn into utilities, delivered for a monthly fee over the Net from huge data centers, it frees businesses from having to devote capital to the machinery. That’s good for small businesses, which tend not to have a lot of capital to invest.
The Internet is becoming, in essence, a shared computer that all of us use. Ten years ago your computer was a self-contained device, and all of its functions were running off your hard drive. Today you can launch your Web browser and access all sorts of software and data online. It’s called “cloud computing”: obtaining computing capabilities over the Internet rather than from your own personal computer or corporate server. Computer technology, like electrical power a hundred years ago, is increasingly being supplied by central “power plants.” I think we can expect the same result we saw when electrical current went from being supplied locally by private generators to being a utility served up over the electric grid: efficiency will increase, and the cost of computing will probably continue to go down dramatically.
Cooper: Yet there’s a trend in some places to move back to home supply, where people have solar panels on their house and aren’t threatened by the instability of the big grid.
Carr: Yes, there’s a trade-off. When you rely on the big grid, you tend to get the power cheaper, but you become more dependent on that central system and the companies that run it. The trade-off with cloud computing is that, on the one hand, you get sophisticated computer programs and huge pools of data for cheap or for free; but, on the other hand, more and more of your personal information is going into central databases operated by profit-making companies. These companies are getting very good at mining that data. We don’t know what the endpoint of that will be. Will companies have so much of our information that they’ll be able to manipulate us in ways we’ll unable to perceive? We leave so many traces of our behavior and our desires through what we do online, whether it’s searches or purchases or looking at different media. If a company can aggregate and analyze all that data, there’s no telling what it might be able to do with it.
Cooper: It sounds like an advertiser’s dream come true.
Carr: In many ways it is. There’s a famous quote from retail tycoon John Wanamaker at the start of the twentieth century: “I know that half my advertising doesn’t work. The problem is I don’t know which half.” The Internet solves that problem for companies.
Cooper: Richard McManus, founder and editor of ReadWriteWeb.com, conducted a study and found that more Internet traffic is going to a smaller number of sites. What are the implications of this?
Carr: This is another of the Internet’s many paradoxes: although the number of sites continues to grow, a small number of sites dominate an ever-greater share of the traffic. It was once believed that the Web was essentially centrifugal: that it pushed people away from big, central sources of information to millions of small, independent sources scattered throughout the network. But it turns out that centripetal forces — forces that draw us back to the big power centers — are also strong on the Web. Big sites have big advantages, and they seem to get stronger over time. The Net’s Wild West days are coming to an end. The trend now is more toward the consolidation of traffic and power than toward their diffusion.
Cooper: Some have described the online, user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia as an example of a “collective mind.” What’s your take on Wikipedia?
Carr: I’m not sure what a collective mind is, but I’m pretty sure Wikipedia isn’t one. I think Wikipedia is the product of a large group of individuals engaged in a collaborative exercise in paraphrasing and editing. It couldn’t have happened without the Internet, and, judging by its popularity, it’s been incredibly successful. It’s also a useful service if you’re looking to get a quick gloss on a subject. I see no evidence that it’s made humankind smarter or more thoughtful, though. And Wikipedia provides a great example of the ongoing concentration of traffic on the Web. Wikipedia has become a giant black hole that sucks traffic away from other, smaller sites — sites that often have richer, more-nuanced information than Wikipedia supplies.
Cooper: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger says you’re blaming the Internet and programmers for your own unwillingness to think long and hard. What’s your response to that?
Carr: That’s a variation on the old “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” theme. It implies that technologies influence us only when we allow them to influence us, and that we control the nature of that influence. It’s a comforting idea, because it puts us in the driver’s seat, but it’s nonsense, as a quick glance at history will tell you. The human mind has been shaped in profound ways by the invention of the alphabet, the map, the book, and many other media technologies — and we did not get to control the shaping process. We control some aspects of our technologies, but our technologies control some aspects of us. There’s a memorable sentence in Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”
Cooper: In the “iGod” chapter of your book The Big Switch you describe Google’s desire to “have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.” Google cofounder Sergey Brin even hypothesizes about “a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”
Carr: The Googlers are nothing if not ambitious. All information technologies, I believe, have an intellectual ethic — in other words, a set of assumptions about how we should use our brains. And Google’s ethic reflects its origins in computer science. It wants to make us fast, efficient collectors of information, in many ways mimicking computers. If you look at the pronouncements of Google’s founders or its ceo, you see that their goal is for the Google search engine to become a form of artificial intelligence. They want it to be something that extends the capacity of your mind, or even provides you with a better mind than your old-fashioned flesh-and-blood one. They seem to believe that ultimately the Internet will provide the basis for the next generation of human intelligence — you could say posthuman intelligence.
Cooper: What’s wrong with that?
Carr: Well, for one thing, computers have yet to replicate any aspect of human intelligence in a meaningful way. So the glorification of artificial intelligence, or machine intelligence, reflects a narrow view of human intellect and human potential — one that is essentially mathematical and industrial and doesn’t give much credit to the great triumphs of culture: works of art, literature, music, architecture. My fear is that a definition of intelligence that discredits the individual mind in favor of some automated collective mind will feed powerful systems: governments, corporations, and other large institutions. And it will emphasize efficiency of thought over depth of thought. I fear we’re going to lose, as I’ve said, the kind of contemplative, reflective intelligence that is most valuable, most human.
Cooper: So what are you going to do when Google-chip implants become as necessary as credit cards?
Carr: Probably get one. [Laughter.] My guess is I won’t be around by the time that happens, but I think it’s probably what people will end up doing, if it becomes possible, because we will likely be rewarded handsomely for it. Having the chip will become necessary for success in your professional and social life, and hence hard to resist. If you’ll walk around with a Bluetooth headset hanging from your ear, you’ll probably walk around with a Google chip in your brain.
Cooper: I guess it’s no surprise that this is not even on the political radar.
Carr: Politicians are afraid of being seen as elitists or intellectuals. And let’s face it: how we define intelligence is a pretty intellectual concept. So I don’t have any expectation that it will enter into the political discussion. Even during the presidential campaign, we could see that our bias as a society is toward an ever-greater dependence on computers. John McCain was ridiculed for his lack of facility with the Internet. So our tendency is to venerate technology and progress without ever really questioning it.
Cooper: Some have suggested creating a department of technology in the government.
Carr: I think if we set up such a department, its purpose would only be to promote technology from an economic standpoint. If you look at education, for instance, technology has become a huge component of the school budgets, even down to the elementary grades. The assumption is that access to computers and the Internet provides a big educational benefit for young children, even though there is no solid evidence for this.
As we are inundated with information, there’s certainly a need to train children how to make sense of it all — to make them savvy about the Internet and teach them to identify what can be trusted and what should arouse suspicion. But making people smarter about navigating the Net is a separate issue from whether computers help us learn or think.
Cooper: There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how much the new president needs to understand the inner workings of the Internet.
Carr: The Internet is becoming the world’s major economic infrastructure, and I don’t think politicians have really grasped the challenges of having computer servers that are outside our country running important parts of our economy. Over the next few years, probably during Barack Obama’s first term, it’s certainly going to become a political issue, because a country’s competitiveness and wealth are going to be tied up in this network, and there’s going to be geopolitical tension over who controls it and how it works. Not only the president but also lawmakers, regulators, and even judges will need to become educated about the Internet and its implications, whether they like it or not.
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