Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Nowness

Check the full post and the linked Gelernter essay for timely reality checks

“Ripeness,” Shakespeare told us, “is all.” The Bard did not anticipate the realtime web. On the New Net, ripeness is nothing. Nowness is all, as David Gelernter tells us in his essay "Time to Start Taking the Web Seriously." Web 2.0 was supposed to bring us a creative outpouring of “social production.” Instead it's tossed us into the rapids of instant communication. The Web has become a vast multimedia telephone system, where everyone is on the same party line, exchanging millions of bite-sized updates and alerts with every tick of the clock. Google, Facebook, Twitter: the Net’s commercial giants are locked in a fierce competitive battle to speed up “the stream.”

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Nowness

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