Carr on Bray on Carr

I read a vast number of blogs on Bloglines (you can check my blogroll, if you want); a lot of it (like a lot of everything) is a waste, but it's a good way to keep up on what's going on in the blog world (which isn't much like what's actually going on in the world).

One of the many tech talk blogs I read is Nick Carr's Rough Type blog. I'd say that overall he's one of the better commentators, in that I am seldom pissed that I happened to run across his articles (bye bye TechCrunch) and I am often at least somewhat enlightened by them. Thus I was surprised to read some other blogs castigating Nick.

Just the other day, Tim Bray commented on Nick, and I was again somewhat struck that Tim thought so little of Nick, since I think they're both good commentators. So, I was happy to see Nick's response, and a great response it was:

It's even worse, if more understandable, in the technology sphere, where newness is all. If you spend a lot of time following contemporary discussions of computer technology and its consequences - in the blogosphere, say - you may find yourself convinced that the universe came into being in 1990, fashioned by the almighty hand of Tim Berners-Lee. There's no past at all, just the illusion that what we're experiencing has never happened before and, in some odd way, counters everything that's happened before. Even the search engines we use to organize all the so-called knowledge that has migrated onto the Net are designed to discount the past, to assign a positive value to newness and a negative value to oldness. The hegemony of the recent is inscribed in the very algorithms through which we, increasingly and perhaps tragically, make sense of the world. Given how overbalanced our discourse is toward the new, I feel it's the least I can do to place my thumb on the other side of the scale.

He succinctly captures the frothy nature of the online world -- "it's new, and thus axiomatically better!". Well, ok, maybe not "succinctly", but well. This is especially the case in the new "Web 2.0" world, where suddenly nothing is interesting unless it's Web 2.0, which by definition means that if it's older than 5 or so years old, it's not interesting.

Yay for Nick for standing up for historical perspective. Sometimes I have to read a book that involves actual history just to remind myself that the world has always had froth, it's just the nature of the froth that changes.

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 | Tags: sysadmin