On your comment about Taylor’s system: I believe that Carr tries to underline the fact that the Internet works on a tayloristic way and I think he tried to make a comparison between WWW and Taylor’s system.

Taylor’s system had an influence on how tasks were managed; instead of working with thumb rules, precise procedures (algorithms) were used to accomplish tasks. Point is that these proceedings – to accomplish tasks – delivered other outcomes. The use of Taylor’s system had an positive effect on the outcome; i.e. the product. Tasks were performed on a more efficient way and waste decreased.

Knowledge can be seen as a product and the Internet, ‘a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information’. It molds how we accumulate, store and process information due to its nature. Accumulation and processing of information occurs on another way and in effect e.g. our reading habits change.

So I believe ‘knowledge work’ also happens inside the WWW due to the fact that it molds how we collect and process this knowledge in our minds. However, as you mention significant reasoning is not routine. Thank God this is something that we can do by ourselves!

–
Denise

If we take care of certain basic layout arrangement and font ideas, reading online can be made gr8.

Another aspect is the lack of options to interact with the text. 15 years ago some guys forgot that the web was supposed to be a read-write medium, and the commercial read-only web took over. Everything what came thereafter is just a bad hotfix to overcome the most severe problems. BTW_ I am talking about wikis and blogs here; and this tiny little textfield to enter my comments. All this is ridiculous given the capabilities of the computer and internet as such. There is much left to be done!
_Matthias

“And it is the tools, that make us smart.” – Don Norman

http://www.mprove.de/script/09/kiel/
http://www.mprove.de/script/09/reboot/coevolution.html
http://www.mprove.de/script/09/cognitivedesign/

However, I do not agree to the following paragraph:
“Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.””

This takes a wrong twist. Knowledge work happens outside the net, between the ears, so to speak. At best it is a dialog between mind and net.
Significant reasoning is not routine and cannot be automated in a tayloristic sense.

Apparently the author isn’t used to writing either – or at least not proofreading.

and the deeper aspects brought on by reading, the contemplation, can easily happen away from the computer. There’s no mention of the measurement of that at all.