Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa discusses The Shallows (Superficiales is the Spanish title) in an essay published last week in El País. Here’s a bit:

Lo acabo de leer, de un tirón, y he quedado fascinado, asustado y entristecido.

Carr no es un renegado de la informática, no se ha vuelto un ludita contemporáneo que quisiera acabar con todas las computadoras, ni mucho menos. En su libro reconoce la extraordinaria aportación que servicios como el de Google, Twitter, Facebook o Skype prestan a la información y a la comunicación, el tiempo que ahorran, la facilidad con que una inmensa cantidad de seres humanos pueden compartir experiencias, los beneficios que todo esto acarrea a las empresas, a la investigación científica y al desarrollo económico de las naciones.

Pero todo esto tiene un precio y, en última instancia, significará una transformación tan grande en nuestra vida cultural y en la manera de operar del cerebro humano como lo fue el descubrimiento de la imprenta por Johannes Gutenberg en el siglo XV que generalizó la lectura de libros, hasta entonces confinada en una minoría insignificante de clérigos, intelectuales y aristócratas …

Here’s the rest.

As our cars, phones, and computers become more location-aware, do we become less location-aware? What would going “on the road” have meant for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty if their cars had been outfitted with sat-nav screens? Those are among the questions Ari Schulman tackles in his searching essay GPS and the End of the Road in the latest issue of The New Atlantis.

Here’s a taste:

Just as important as what we see in the world is how we go about seeing it. We are adept at identifying points of interest, but pay scant attention to the importance of our approaches to exploring them; our efforts to facilitate the experience of place often end up being self-defeating. What [Walker] Percy’s strategies aim to do, in part, is to put the traveler into a state of willingness and hunger to encounter the world as it is, to discover the great sights with the freshness, the newness, that is so much of what we seek from them. Alain de Botton also describes this attitude as the solution to the guidebook problem, and identifies it as the mode of receptivity.

Practices like geocaching and geotagging rely on this receptivity. Geocaching asks the user to be an active participant in seeking, and to seek something unknown. Viewing geotagged photography may impel us to go forth into the world and seek with our own eyes what the images present to us, thus claiming them in some way for ourselves. It is a tricky balance: as always, photographs, especially when so readily viewed at the very places they were taken, hold the potential to substitute for rather than deepen our own awareness. But these practices at least give some idea as to how location-based technologies can encourage us to orient ourselves to the world in its primary, phenomenal sense — as a realm of places.

But GPS navigation, in its present form, seems to do quite the opposite: it dulls our receptivity to our surroundings by granting us the supposed luxury of not having to pay attention to them at all. In travel facilitated by “location awareness,” we begin to encounter places not by attending to what they present to us, but by bringing our expectations to them, and demanding that they perform for us as advertised. In traveling through “augmented reality,” even the need for places to perform begins to fade, as our openness to the world gives way to the desire to paper over it entirely. It is an admission of our seeming distrust in places to be sufficiently interesting on their own. But in attempting to find the most valuable places and secure the greatest value from them, the places themselves become increasingly irrelevant to our experiences … The technology that is meant to facilitate travel deadens the spirit of discovery that draws us to the experience — moreover, it traduces that spirit: dis-covery, the removal of the things that paper over our vision so as to reveal the truth of the world, gives way to covering the world over deliberately, and calling that an enhanced revelation.

Read it.

The New Republic is running my review of Simon Reynolds’s new book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. It (the review) begins like this:

“Who wants yesterday’s papers?” sang Mick Jagger in 1967. “Who wants yesterday’s girl?” The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: “Nobody in the world.” That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday’s papers and carry on with yesterday’s girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past — with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button.

Nowhere is the past’s grip so tight as in the world of music, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds meticulously documents in Retromania. Over the last two decades, he argues, the “exploratory impulse” that once powered pop music forward has shifted its focus from Now to Then. Fans and musicians alike have turned into archeologists. The evidence is everywhere. There are the reunion tours and the reissues, the box sets and the tribute albums. There are the R&B museums, the rock halls of fame, the punk libraries. There are the collectors of vinyl and cassettes and — God help us — eight-tracks. There are the remixes, the mash-ups, the samples. There are the “curated” playlists. When pop shakes its moneymaker today, what rises is the dust of the archive. …

Read on.

Google+, Google’s latest attempt to crack social networking, marks a refreshing break from tradition for the Behemoth of Mountain View. First, unlike its predecessors, G+ entered the arena with something other than a spectacular and fatal bellyflop. Second, the site actually seems to have been designed rather than just engineered. It’s a pleasant place. Third, it does a nice job of carving out at a newish space in a crowded market. The benefits of the site’s most talked about feature, Circles, at this point remain largely theoretical, but the way it presents information is distinctive without feeling unfamiliar – a neat trick.

In its first weeks of invitation-only existence, G+ has reportedly managed to attract something like 20 million members. That’s impressive, but probably not as impressive as it sounds. Getting people to check out a buzzy service is pretty easy, particularly when Google’s muscle is behind it. Getting them to keep using it is a different matter. My unscientific survey of the site indicates that there are a whole lot of accounts that are still just shells.

A social network is, like the internet itself, a network of networks. The network expands by tracing the intersections among fairly well-defined social groups – a kind of connect-the-dots process that gains network-effect momentum as it proceeds. Facebook understood this dynamic well, as it grew from one college to a small set of campuses to the entire student world and on to everyone and his brother. That’s one of the main reasons Facebook is now closing in on a billion members. (MySpace didn’t understand the dynamic very well, which is one of the reasons it has turned into Nowheresville).

Because it begins in homogeneity, a social network often quickly assumes a particular character – a culture, as we like to say these days – based on the people populating its early core networks and the way that they initially use the service. This foundational culture plays a crucial role in encouraging use and loyalty early on – it’s the magnet that holds everything together and pulls in new members. But if the foundational culture is too strong and too narrow it can end up limiting the eventual growth of the network. Magnets repel as well as attract. To succeed on a global scale, Facebook had to transform its early student culture to a more mainstream culture – it had to go from Shitfacebook to Straightfacebook. It has been very successful at that – it’s a heck of a lot easier to entice older people to a youth culture than to do the opposite – though in the long run its mature, increasingly white-bread culture may prove to be its Achilles heel. A hipper network could quickly siphon away Facebook’s younger members, leading to a network implosion of breathtaking magnitude.

Google+ is probably not that hipper network. Its foundational culture feels much more professional than social, which means it’s starting in a very different place than Facebook did. All social networks strike some sort of balance between functioning as a publishing platform (formal speech) and functioning as a conversation platform (informal speech). Facebook has always skewed toward conversation; Twitter started with a conversational skew but quickly shifted toward a publishing skew (though it continues to have conversational subcultures). Google+ skews pretty heavily to the publishing side. Its early core membership seems dominated by what might be called the new media axis – a combination of techies and media types who love to talk shop. These folks aren’t generally too keen on Facebook (too conversational, too intrusive, too untrustworthy), and while they tend to be heavy Twitter users, many of them have become frustrated by Twitter’s limitations. Google+ provides a compelling blog/tweet hybrid – a stream of published nuggets which carry their comment threads with them as they flow by – which is attractive to the new media axis, whose members look to social networks more for information exchange and self-promotion than for shoot-the-breeze conversation.

Google+’s appeal to the new-media crowd has been the secret to its early success. It is also quickly shaping its foundational culture. The problem for Google, assuming it wants to turn G+ into a mainstream social network rather than a niche one, is that this culture is both strong and narrow. It attracts a particular set of users, but it repels pretty much everyone else. G+’s prospects may, in other words, be circumscribed by the culture that its early success has already established.

Here’s a followup to an earlier post:

Part 1 (Kevin Kelly’s interview in Christianity Today)

Part 2 (my reply, posted here)

Part 3 (drawn from the comment thread to my post):

Kevin Kelly: Nick,

Thanks for the careful read and thoughtful response.

Curious lingo??? I think there is no doubt that God speaks just like Kevin Kelly.

But to the crux of our disagreement:

You end with:

“The best you can argue, therefore, is that technological progress will, on balance, have a tendency to open more choices for more people.”

This is precisely my argument. I am not arguing that technology increases the options for everyone equally. Of course new technologies remove some options. Lots of excellent horse buggy and whip makers lost their opportunities. I talk about a very tiny net gain in options when you tally up all the options lost compared to the ones added. That very tiny micro net gain accumulated over time is progress.

You say:

“Look at any baby born today, and try to say whether that child would have a greater possibility of fulfilling its human potential if during its lifetime (a) technological progress reversed, (b) technological progress stalled, (c) technological progress advanced slowly, or (d) technological progress accelerated quickly. You can’t.”

You can. If you take a random human on earth from 10,000 years ago, from 1,000 years ago, from 100 years ago and from 10 years ago, the chances are greater the nearer we pick the more that person will fulfill their potential. Or, second experiment, ask a random person today when they would prefer to live, and the more fulfilled they are, the more recent they want to live.

You say:

“It’s absurd to believe that if Mozart were living today, he would create the great works he created in the eighteenth century – the symphonies, the operas, the concertos.”

It is only absurd if the great works had already been created. That is if someone else had written Mozart like symphonies. But if no one had written symphonies like Mozart I don’t think it absurd that if Mozart was born now, he could write symphonies. Many are still writing classical symphonies. People are still writing operas and concertos. Artists are still painting still lifes and realistic portraits Writing novels. And making careers doing so. Why not Mozart? His music doesn’t have to sound EXACTLY the same. Symphonies that a 21 century Mozart would write today may be sound different, but could still be genius. Would you say that if Dickens was alive today he would not write great novels? Would you say that if Van Gogh was alive today it is absurd to think he would paint?

I’ve been thinking hard about the source of our divergent views since we agree on a lot. And in part it may be due to this:

I spent my formative years not in college, but in the middle ages. I mean I lived in medieval towns, and feudal villages and ancient camps. I have lived in the past, not just read about it. I spent a lot of time among illiterate people, simple people with very little technology. Years in places that for all practical purposes are a time before Mozart. I feel I have a visceral feeling for both the advantages and joys of that type of life, and of its disadvantages.

I feel I have a good sense of how difficult it was for a Homer to appear. It’s hard to describe to someone outside how constrained life and roles are in pre-industrial, to say nothing of post-industrial, cultures. 99% of everyone born was a farmer or herder. Only 1% achieved anything different.

My thoughts return again and again and again to the thousands of village boys and girls I met who spent their childhoods (and beyond) plowing behind an ox year after year, or mindlessly following sheep and goats for weeks on end away from home, wanting wanting wanting to leave — to do something greater.

Homer was lucky, a one in a million. The other million Greeks, as well as you and I if we were born then, had no such luck. Their lives would only be improved in satisfaction and fulfillment if they moved to the future. I know this in my bones. In particular I remember a remote Greek island I stayed on where the women were still veiled, the folk spoke a dialect of classical Doric, and all they wanted was electricity. There were farmers and housewives but no Archimedes. I have not been back for 40 years, but I bet today there are many more occupations, far more diversity of achievements. I bet 50% or more of the population of that island are now doing something other than farming or herding.

I can’t tell you how many hours/days/weeks I spent sitting around with people who had a lot of time to sit around. I would say they had a contentment, but I would never say they came close to fulfilling their potential. They generally agreed, because they encouraged their children to NOT follow their footsteps for this reason.

This progressive view does not stem from my theology. In fact it is the reverse. My theology stems from this formative experience.

Carr: Thanks, Kevin. Because your argument that technological progress is a moral force, a force of “love,” as you put it, has practical implications for how we approach technology – as individuals and as a society – I think it’s essential that we question your argument, which is what I’m trying to do.

You seem to swing between two explanations for how technological progress expands choices. One is based on a statistical analysis of utility: do new technologies (in general) have the effect of opening more choices for more people? I have no beef with you here. Human beings are toolmakers, and the main reason they make tools is because tools are useful. They extend human power and hence options. So it’s not a surprise that, on balance, technology would leave us generally with more options. This explanation does not require us to believe there is any moral force, any force of love, influencing the course of technology.

The second explanation you give is not about cold calculations of utility. It is about technological progress being a moral force that allows individuals, as individuals, to fulfill their “godly gifts.” As you say in the interview: “we are obligated to materialize as many inventions as possible, to hurry, so that every person born and to-be-born will have a great chance of discovering and sharing their godly gifts.” Please note that here you are not talking about statistics; you are talking about individuals: every person born and to-be-born.

I think it’s revealing that when I challenge your second explanation (which is the basis for your argument that technology is a force of goodness, of godly love), you quickly (in your comment above) take refuge in your first explanation. You revert to statistics, pointing to “a very tiny net gain in options when you tally up all the options lost compared to the ones added.” That is not the same as expanding the potential of “every person born and to-be-born” to fulfill their “godly gifts.”

I ask a question about a particular baby – a real child – and suddenly you want to talk about a statistically random child, a theoretical child. Does your God think about children in statistical terms, or does He think about them as individuals?

To put it another way: If there’s a God behind your first explanation, it’s a capricious god, who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the fate of his creations as individuals. He’s God as Statistician, concerned with “very tiny net gains.” The God you explicitly identify behind your second explanation is a god of love, a god who is interested in expanding the options for every one of his creations, each of whom is blessed with unique “godly gifts.”

Which God is it?

I truly believe your argument about Mozart (or Dickens, or anyone from the past) is specious. Just because the piano persists does not mean that Mozart would still be Mozart if he were born today. The world of human beings – the technium, as you describe it – has changed dramatically, opening some new opportunities and closing others, and it’s impossible to know how that complexity of changes would affect the fate of any given individual. And, as I said above in my reply to Mike, if Mozart’s gifts would survive history moving forward, why would they not survive historical change moving backward? Music existed before the piano. No, I don’t think that it’s absurd to think that Van Gogh would paint if he were born today (though it’s by no means assured); I think it’s equally plausible that he would paint if he had been born 500 years earlier than he had.

On the one hand, you want to tie individual genius to the particular technologies of the day. On the other hand, you seem to say that individual genius is not constrained by the technologies of the day. Which is it?

Let me make a final point, not for rhetorical reasons but because it’s one I struggle with in thinking about the effects of technological progress. You like to take a statistical view of technology’s effects, which leads you to speak of percentages of the population. For instance: a greater percentage of people live in material comfort today than did a few millennia ago. That’s a valid way of measuring things. But there’s an equally valid way of measuring things that looks at absolute numbers rather than statistical norms. The view is very different depending on which way you measure things. For instance: you could argue that technology has improved life on earth because a lower percentage of people exist in a state of physical suffering today than used to. But one of the most important effects of technology has been to allow for an enormous increase in human population. And if you look at absolute numbers, you might well find that more individuals exist in a state of physical suffering than did before. The statistical analysis obscures the individual sufferer. So is technology good because it has reduced the percentage of people who suffer, or is technology bad because it has increased the number of people who suffer?

Kelly: Good questions, Nick.

I think you throw out three main challenges, which I short hand here:

1) Which God is it? Individual or statistical?

2) Does time and technology constrain genius?

3) Does God care about a percentage or a quantity?

My quick reply.

1) You ask “Does your God think about children in statistical terms, or does He think about them as individuals?”

The first answer — which is not very satisfying — is that as a omniscient God he thinks both. But I don’t think it takes a God to hold both views in your head. I think that you can increase options for individuals by increasing the average option or increasing the options for the average individual. I argue that increasing technology gives a “greater chance” for an individual to become fulfilled. I do not argue that a technology A, or even set of technologies A-Z, will automatically optimize the potential of person N. I argue that it will increase the potential for potential.

Perhaps you object to the idea that a moral force could be statistical? Or that love might somehow be an impersonal force? That love is something that only occurs between two humans and is not found elsewhere in the universe?

To answer your first question directly, I think “a god who is interested in expanding the options for every one of his creations, each of whom is blessed with unique “godly gifts,” ” does this very thing by expanding the options for all. This steady expansion (known as progress) may not touch each individual (our and their loss) but because it can liberate gifts an average, like most freedoms, it is a moral force.

2) You ask, “On the one hand, you want to tie individual genius to the particular technologies of the day. On the other hand, you seem to say that individual genius is not constrained by the technologies of the day. Which is it?”

I say the presence of technology enables individual genius and the lack of technology constrains individual genius. The particular technologies available greatly influence what can be produced. If time were symmetrical, running backwards with no effect, you would be right. (” if Mozart’s gifts would survive history moving forward, why would they not survive historical change moving backward?”) But time and progress is asymmetrical. That is the whole point. So while some options diminish, most accumulate, and none completely disappear, although they may obsolesce. We have more choices. As the book Shock of the Old establishes, more of the old technologies are still very much with us. In Mozart’s case all his technologies — and options — are still here. All of Dickens’ tools are still here. That’s why, while Mozart’s gifts can go both ways, his tools only go one way.

3) Your last point is very interesting. What kind of moral progress is there if it only entails the expansion of percentages and not absolute numbers? I would say it is not a very robust progress then. But I take a very long view of progress (my books starts pre-history), and in this view the rapid expansion of population during the industrial age is still progress in absolute numbers because all those people living in rural areas were still better off than the hunter/gatherers of yore. And while we tend to ignore it, I believe there was very slow mild progress (increase in options) even in remote agricultural areas over the millennia. The peasants in China in 1776 were better off — on average — than the peasants of 1776 BC, or even 776. And as I maintain the poverty of urban slums is much preferable to the poverty of the countryside, so the mass migration into cities in absolute numbers is a sign of progress.

To sum, I think you bring up two main questions:

Is progress real? I believe the evidence is clear it is.

Is progress a moral force? I think it is, but this may be a matter of definitions.

Carr: Thanks, Kevin. I think we’ve both had our say, so I’m inclined to leave it there. But I can’t resist making two quick points. You say, “the presence of technology enables individual genius and the lack of technology constrains individual genius.” That’s not always so, as the Homer example shows. Technological change can disable individual genius as well as enable it. There may be many people on earth today who would have been better able to fulfill their genius, or in general their potential, had they lived in an earlier, less technologically advanced time. We’ll never know. You also say, “all those people living in rural areas were still better off than the hunter/gatherers of yore.” How do you know that? There’s a strain of recent research which suggests that many hunter/gatherers led pretty good lives – idyllic, in some ways. The number of available “options” is not the only measure of the richness of a life.

Kelly: Yes, I think we’ve had our say so we’ll leave it there, but I’ll just add to your final points;

You mention:

“There may be many people on earth today who would have been better able to fulfill their genius, or in general their potential, had they lived in an earlier, less technologically advanced time.”

Yes, there may be, but I find it hard to imagine who they are.

You also say, “all those people living in rural areas were still better off than the hunter/gatherers of yore.” How do you know that?

Having visited some tribes, and watching the record of others, and reading the literature by the impartial. Simply put, very few people continue that way if they have a choice.

“There’s a strain of recent research which suggests that many hunter/gatherers led pretty good lives – idyllic, in some ways.”

I’ve read that research very carefully, and you might call their lifestyle many things, but no one, especially the researchers would use any word like idyllic or anything close to it. Like the Amish it has many attractive qualities, but the closer you get, the less attractive it becomes for yourself. I know. I considered it and looked very closely.

Nick, as I said earlier, I think this difference is really what we differ on.

In the course of preparing my statements for the Economist journalism debate, I reviewed a bunch of recent, useful studies and surveys. It took a while to dig these up, so I thought I’d provide a list here (in no particular order) in case anybody needs it in the future.

Federal Communications Commission, The Information Needs of Communities (2011)

Congressional Research Service, The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition (2010)

Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, Informing Communities (2010) and Re-imagining Journalism (2011)

Media Standards Trust, Shrinking World: The decline of international reporting in the British press (2010)

American Journalism Review, Statehouse Exodus (2009) and Abandoned Agencies (2010) and Retreating from the World (2011)

Columbia Journalism Review, The Reconstruction of American Journalism (2009)

The Guardian, Stop Press (UK regional journalism survey) (2009)

Global Journalist, Is the Foreign News Bureau Part of the Past? (2010)

Human Rights Watch, Whose News? (2011)

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers many studies, including its annual State of the News Media reports and News Leaders and the Future (2010)