Love the way that in Google Mail, when you delete spam, the helpful related link so thoughtfully provided usually points to a recipe involving Spam. Who, for example, could resist these Savory Spam Crescent Rolls? Mmmmmm….maybe not tonight, dear.

Back from a holiday (long walks in Swiss mountains) to look alarmingly at the pile of books that’s built up before and during my trip. I like the way some schools/colleges give their students a reading week half way through a long term*, though I think in my case a reading month would barely do it.

Courtesy of JP’s blog, a stimulating article by Nicholas Carr - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - along with a set of rejoinders on The Edge from the likes of George Dyson and Jaron Lanier.

I like the article a lot (it passes all my criteria for non-fiction writing I wrote about a couple of weeks back). There’s a self-consciously contrarian side to it that goes too far - Carr seems to suggest there’s an evil conspiracy amongst software developers in general and Google in particular to overthrow Civilization As We Know It. I don’t think there’s an argument with his key thesis - that the nature of the way we interact with information on the web, and the way it’s replacing the sustained narrative of the media of yore with a multiplicity of fragments of information, changes the way we structure our attention, and changes the structure of thought and hence the mind. I’m not going to comment on it directly (read it!), but here are some of the resonances that it evoked for me, from my own experience and from other bits of reading and thinking I’ve done over the past few years
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The Eccles centre for American Studies, based in the British Library, hosts an annual lecture - the Douglas W. Bryant lecture - in memory of a former President of the BL’s American Trust. They’re given by international figures, the subjects ranging from political to economic and cultural concerns, and I’ve attended the last three or so.
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