Copyright Law

On the nature of the internet

By Andrew Raff, Esq.

Here are a couple of articles (and a response) about the history, impact and future of the internet and WWW.

Vanity Fair, How the Web Was Won, "Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it."

Nick Carr gets bored easily, blames the web in general and Google in particular. Is Google Making Us Stupid? "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages."

James Grimmelmann, The Laboratorium, Is Google Making Us Insipid?: "Overall, it’s a weak piece. While it’s better-written and slightly more convincing than other entries in the genre of ‘warnings about Internet cognition,’ there’s nothing in it that I haven’t seen before. He shuffles the deck into a different order, but it’s still the same old cards."

Full post as published by IPTAblog on June 19, 2008 (boomark / email).