{"id":3088,"date":"2010-07-10T22:53:57","date_gmt":"2010-07-11T05:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=3088"},"modified":"2010-07-10T23:03:57","modified_gmt":"2010-07-11T06:03:57","slug":"grayscale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2010\/07\/10\/grayscale\/","title":{"rendered":"Grayscale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nicholasgcarr.com\/\">Nicholas Carr<\/a> may be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2008\/07\/is-google-making-us-stupid\/6868\/\">asking if Google is making us stupid<\/a>, but I&#8217;m pretty sure that technologies don&#8217;t make us stupid. Why? Because they can&#8217;t make us smarter or better.<\/p>\n<p>That is: a technology might make me better at something, or it might make me worse (especially if I&#8217;m missing it). But it can&#8217;t inherently confer &#8220;stupidity&#8221; or &#8220;intelligence&#8221; on me.<\/p>\n<p>Case in point: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kriskrug.com\/\">Kris Krug<\/a> and a couple of his writing partners just published <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Killer-Photos-iPhone-Matthew-Bamberg\/dp\/1435456890\/ref=reg_hu-wl_item-added\">Killer Photos with Your iPhone<\/a>, and &#8211; happy coincidence &#8211; I also just came across <strong>Gizmodo<\/strong>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5576509\/395-photos-taken-on-cellphones\">395 Photos That Prove Cellphones Make Great Cameras<\/a>, &#8230;which is total wow-eye-candy material.<\/p>\n<p>This (to my mind) raises the question: If I get an iPhone, will I be able to take the kind of &#8220;wow&#8221; photos that Kris or the\u00a0 Gizmodo site talk about? That&#8217;s sort of the flip side of thinking that the technology will make me stupid &#8211; it&#8217;ll make me smart, right? &#8230;Oh, ok, didn&#8217;t think so&#8230; I&#8217;ll still be a pedestrian photographer (<em>unless I apply myself and <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">really work it<\/span>!<\/em>)&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The technology has less power than we think. It&#8217;s still up to users.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5576509\/395-photos-taken-on-cellphones\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" style=\"border: 4px solid white\" title=\"cell phone photo by Brian Durniak\" src=\"http:\/\/cache.gawkerassets.com\/assets\/images\/4\/2010\/07\/500x_briandurniakcellphone.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" height=\"350\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nicholas Carr may be asking if Google is making us stupid, but I&#8217;m pretty sure that technologies don&#8217;t make us stupid. Why? Because they can&#8217;t make us smarter or better. That is: a technology might make me better at something, or it might make me worse (especially if I&#8217;m missing it). But it can&#8217;t inherently [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1823,1071],"tags":[16342,2482,142],"class_list":["post-3088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-canada","category-creativity","tag-cell_phones","tag-iphone","tag-technology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3088"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3093,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions\/3093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}