Nicholas Carr: As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

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It’s absurd that celebrity gossip/news is being defended and rationalized to have some indirect value to our society. I could careless if you have a habit for reading pop culture stories, but claiming that it has nothing to do with the decay of journalism because it has some value is just an excuse for your habit. I find it a bit ironic that the article appears on AlterNet.

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Nadia Plesner: My illustration Simple Living is an idea inspired by the media’s constant coverage of completely meaningless things. My thought was: Since doing nothing but wearing designer bags and small ugly dogs apparently is enough to get you on a magazine cover, maybe it is worth a try for people who actually deserves and needs attention. When we’re presented with the same images in the media over and over again, we might start to believe that they’re important.

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Cory Doctorow: Dandelions and artists have a lot in common in the age of the Internet. This is, of course, the age of unlimited, zero-marginal-cost copying. If you blow your works into the net like a dandelion clock on the breeze, the net itself will take care of the copying costs. Your fans will paste-bomb your works into their mailing list, making 60,000 copies so fast and so cheaply that figuring out how much it cost in aggregate to make all those copies would be orders of magnitude more expensive than the copies themselves.
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Clay Shirky: If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

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David Hornik: The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance — don’t do one thing, do it all; don’t sell one piece of content, sell it all; don’t store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn’t work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

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New York Times: Consider, for starters, this paradox of social psychology, a problem for myth busters everywhere: repeating a claim, even if only to refute it, increases its apparent truthfulness. In 2003, the psychologist Ian Skurnik and several of his colleagues asked senior citizens to sit through a computer presentation of a series of health warnings that were randomly identified as either true or false — for example, “Aspirin destroys tooth enamel” (true) or “Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips” (false). A few days later, they quizzed the seniors on what they had learned.

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American Thinker: Today, easy access to the Internet is flooding us with gossip, rumor, celebrity tales, and slant that drown out the trickle of actual truth. The Internet can tell you anything you want to know with a googly glance at its googol of inputs. We no longer need seek out and read a book to learn; we need only power a search engine with a few words, even when they’re spelt inkorekly. Internet’s Wikipedia, which is as objective as a list on a barroom menu, and often as fully fact-checked as a diatribe, has all but replaced studiously researched encyclopedias.

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Propaganda Critic: As Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson point out, “every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate, but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda.” (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1991)

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Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: What’s more disturbing than the fact that millions of us willingly tune in to such nonsense each day is that some Web sites are making monkeys out of us without our even knowing it. By entering words into Google’s search engine, we are actually creating something called “collective intelligence,” the sum wisdom of all Google users. The logic of Google’s search engine, what technologists call its algorithm, reflects the “wisdom” of the crowd. In other words, the more people click on a link that results from a search, the more likely that link will come up in subsequent searches. The search engine is an aggregation of the 90 million questions we collectively ask Google each day; in other words, it just tells us what we already know.

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