Here’s Nick Carr commenting on the recent dialogue at the Infernal Machine between me and Andrew Piper:
It’s possible to sketch out an alternative history of the net in which thoughtful reading and commentary play a bigger role. In its original form, the blog, or web log, was more a reader’s medium than a writer’s medium. And one can, without too much work, find deeply considered comment threads spinning out from online writings. But the blog turned into a writer’s medium, and readerly comments remain the exception, as both Jacobs and Piper agree. One of the dreams for the web, expressed through a computer metaphor, was that it would be a “read-write” medium rather than a “read-only” medium. In reality, the web is more of a write-only medium, with the desire for self-expression largely subsuming the act of reading. So I’m doubtful about Jacobs’s suggestion that the potential of our new textual technologies is being frustrated by our cultural tendencies. The technologies and the culture seem of a piece. We’re not resisting the tools; we’re using them as they were designed to be used.
I’d say that depends on the tools: for instance, this semester I’m having my students write with CommentPress, which I think does a really good job of preserving a read-write environment — maybe even better, in some ways, than material text, though without the powerful force of transcription that Andrew talks about. (That may be irreplaceable — typing the words of others, while in this respect better than copying and pasting them, doesn’t have the same degree of embodiment.)
In my theses I tried to acknowledge both halves of the equation: I talked about the need to choose tools wisely (26, 35), but I also said that without the cultivation of certain key attitudes and virtues (27, 29, 33) choosing the right tools won’t do us much good (36). I don’t think Nick and I — or for that matter Andrew and I — disagree very much on all this.