Looking for precedents for my own blog, I stumbled across Nicholas Carr’s blog roughtype.com, a blog which provides insightful commentary on contemporary technology and its social, economic, and cultural implications. While there are many blogs devoted to the subject of technology, what really struck me with roughtype was the insightful analysis of exactly how these technologies stand to change the way we live and interact on a daily basis.
Mr. Carr is a freelance writer who gained notoriety with his publication of The Big Switch, a Wall Street Journal bestseller which discusses the shift to contemporary media, cloud computing, and the concept of Web 2.0. He has also published numerous essays, among them Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which discusses today’s reliance on internet search engines. He also lectures frequently, speaking at such notable institutions as MIT, Harvard, and NASA.
Clearly, Mr. Carr has a firm grasp on the complexities of technology and how they threaten to change life for nearly everyone in the twenty-first century. Roughtype.com was started in 2005, and has been updated by Mr. Carr himself on a very regular basis. Its focus has shifted from early posts relating to the identity and geography of the internet to more recent ones discussing how Apple’s iPhone App Store has erased much of the progress made in universal application creation in the last decade.
Perhaps one of the best articles to examine Roughtype’s strengths is entitled The Amorality Of Web 2.0, a topic of conversation which dovetails nicely with my own focus. Carr writes that while Web 2.0 inarguably presents numerous benefits to society, there is also a counterargument to be made against the seeming perfection of this new technology. As he writes with regards to Wikipedia:
In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.
He illustrates his point in both a poignant way by citing a portion of Bill Gates’s wiki, which contains nothing but a jumble of confusing factoids. If this is the quality that Web 2.0 has achieved after a rather lengthy gestation – nearly five years in Wikipedia’s case – can we truly believe that it will develop past this mediocrity?
The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity.
Keep in mind that Carr is writing this from his blog, a construct of Web 2.0 which is a part of the very machine he is criticizing. Carr is clearly not afraid of challenging the status quo and questioning the very means by which he expresses his own opinion; a hallmark of good blogging and editorial writing. It is this careful dissection of technologies which many of us have begun to take for granted which serves as great inspiration for my own blog. Carr’s careful analysis and thoughtful editorial creates a blog that is both engaging and eye-opening.
Roughtype.com also explores a varied range of internet-related topics, among them the phenomenon of the avatar, wherein Carr writes about the phenomenon of completely virtual identities.
To hear that people are vain, even obsessively so, is not surprising. Still, though, there's something sad about this - funny-sad, anyway. Your online self ... is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself - about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people "to friend," which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog - is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar's parents; there's no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community - or a virtual world like Second Life - doesn't relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.
What is consistent throughout many of his posts is Carr’s elegant and informative critique of each topic at hand. He consistently sets a high standard for both quality of writing and uniqueness of subject, while at the same time giving his blog a reasonably informal and approachable atmosphere. This is exactly what I hope to do in my own writing, and to probe yet deeper into the way Web 2.0 has changed our lives. How has our perception of the world changed? Can this new technology be used to promote interactions we’ve never seen before? Stay tuned.
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