The Bad Guy on the Internet
Nicholas Carr (he of the “ Is Google making us stupid? ” article fame) just released his new book, The Big Switch . In his blog , he wrote an essay adapted from one of the chapters of the book. He starts with what he seeks to question, the notion that the Internet is the great emancipator: “The Net is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” declare Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their new book, The New Digital Age . “Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips.”… Seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the Web was routinely portrayed as a new frontier .” Then Carr gets down to business, calling the above notion “at best a half-truth and at worst a delusion ”: “The Internet in particular put enormous power into the hands of individuals, but they put even greater power into the hands of companies, governments, and other institutions .” He may be partly right about that; but he gets his history al...