The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from "Edison" to "Google"

Re-posted from two years ago
Reflections on:
Carr, N. (2008). The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from "Edison" to "Google". W. W. Norton & Co.: New York.

Having finished this book, I'm hesitant to blog at all (really quite disturbing how much the information we put on/in the Internet is being monitored and used for creating more control and more advanced marketing/advertising tools). Ah, well. I'm blogging this so that I remember it (as, it was argued in the book, is the result of the World Wide Computer: a dumbing down of humanity, using computers to do our thinking and remembering for us).

Most of the book was devoted to describing and highlighting the often invisible changes that technology is having on our world. Very eye-opening.

• the emergence of Internet businesses has accelerated the economic division between the richest and the poorest, since fewer people are needed to run a successful Internet business (like PlenyOfFish.com, run by one man!) and because human labor is being cheapened by the ability of technology to perform tasks for us

There are assembly lines today, but they are without workers... they are managed by computers in a glass cage above, with highly skilled engineers in charge.

Computerization hence puts many American wage-earners in a double bind: it reduces the demand for their jobs even as it expands the supply of workers ready and able to perform them.

• advances in technology have led to "The Great Unbundling" - we are able to pick and choose with advanced selection tools what we read/consume, etc., leading to a greater symbiosis between media and advertising (news stories are selected on the basis of their ability to get individuals to click on advertisements, rather than their substantive quality) and also to greater polarization of beliefs

Not only will the Internet tend to divide people with different views..., it will also tend to magnify the differences.

• humans are becoming controlled by the same forces they had hailed as liberators (i.e. once the Internet was seen as a Utopian equalizer and unifier, not to mention a tool to free individuals)

In using a computer, a person becomes part of the control mechanism. He turns into a component of what the Internet pioneer J.C.R. Linklider, in his seminal 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis," described as a system integrating man and machine into a single, programmable unit.

...the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom - control has existed from the beginning.... What's different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.

• companies like Google, which aim to create artificial intelligence (according to their creators!), are very close to producing systems that will succeed in making humans (and the human mind especially) subservient to the machine

But the most important point for me, and the reason I read the book, had to do with the ways in which technology was changing the very ways we think and act. Carr argues:

• humans are becoming inextricably incorporated into the Internet's computing web, dangerously so, perhaps to the point of becoming unable to function without computers

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy. (Kevin Kelly)

As machines become more and more intelligent... people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off
would amount to suicide. (Theodore Kaczynski)

I see within us all... the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self - evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available'.... As we are emptied of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance..., we seem to be turning into pancake people - spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. (Richard Foreman)

The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet's power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin out, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to 'DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.' The artificial intelligence we're creating may turn out to be our own.

• and our technology ends up changing and influencing our worldview

The printed page, the dominant information medium of the past 500 years, molded our thinking through, to quote Neil Postman, 'it's emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline.' The emphasis of the Internet, our new universal medium, is altogether different. It stresses immediacy, simultaneity, contingency, subjectivity, disposability, and above all, speed. The Net provides no incentive to stop and think deeply about anything, to construct in our memory that 'dense repository' of knowledge that Foreman cherishes.... On the Internet, we seemed impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link.

I think the last quote is, in itself, an argument for the need of ethnography in a world that increasingly demands quick (mostly quantitative) data. And this book has strengthened my resolve to work with designers to re-empower humanity, to sharpen rather than dull our minds. It is clear that going against the forces that are carrying us toward these undesirable fates is not easy, but I think there is potential to use creative design to create systems that improve our abilities to be human, not make us better machines.