Computer users are seen at the reception area of Google's China headquarters in Beijing on Jan. 18, 2010. (AP)

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News last week that two of the most powerful players in the Internet universe will team up to fight an onslaught of cyber invasions. Google and the NSA — the National Security Agency — will collaborate on cyber security.

Word of the alliance comes just weeks after Google accused China of hacking into its source code and the digital jewels of dozens of other American companies.

And at a time when top intelligence officials warn critical American infrastructure is “severely threatened” by cyber attack.

But what about privacy?

This hour, On Point: Google, the NSA and the age of cyber insecurity.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Ellen Nakashima, reporter for The Washington Post. She broke the story on the NSA partnership with Google.

Joining us from Vancouver is Fred Cate, director at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, where he is also a professor of law at the Maurer School of Law.

Joining us from Washington is Paul Rosenzweig, former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security, from 2005 to 2009, where he worked on international data protection rules. He’s founder of Red Branch Law & Consulting.

In this undated photograph, Nikola Tesla sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-voltage transformer at East Houston St., New York. (Wikimedia Commons)

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The world could use a new dose of innovation. The U.S. economy, in particular, is in the market for some game-changers.

A century and more ago, Thomas Edison was shaking up life with spectacular innovations in electricity. And right there also was the great visionary of innovation, Nikola Tesla — with alternating current, hydroelectric power, the guts of the radio, and much more.

Edison won the fame battle. But Tesla is back in big way.

This hour, On Point: “Tesla-mania” — as the U.S. looks for innovation.

Plus, we’ll hear expectations for Apple’s new hot product.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Brussels is Daniel Michaels, correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He wrote recently about Tesla’s resurgence in a piece headlined “Long-Dead Inventor Nikola Tesla Is Electrifying Hip Techies.”

Joining us from Charlottesville, Va., is W. Bernard Carlson, professor of science, technology, and society at the University of Virginia. He’s currently working on a biography of Nikola Tesla, to be published next year by Princeton University Press .

Joining us from Davos, Switzerland, is Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review. He’s in Davos at the World Economic Forum, where he’ll moderate a panel with technology pioneers.

Later this hour we’ll check in on today’s announcement from Apple of its latest product, the much-anticipated tablet device:

Joining us from Seattle is Scott Steinberg, publisher of the technology product review site Digital Trends.  See their Apple tablet coverage.

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Jaron Lanier was there in the morning of the digital age, when everything was thrilling and new. He was a thinker and an artist and a programmer turned on by the Internet revolution.

Now, he’s not so sure. What looked liberating may be enslaving us, he says, to a kind of aggregated, collectivist “hive mind” online.

“Digital Maoism,” he’s called it, making digital peasants out of Googlers and Facebookers. Stealing individuality. Reducing us to mush.

Ouch!

This hour, On Point: a warning on the web.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jaron Lanier joins us in our studio. A computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author, he’s a pioneer of “virtual reality,” and was a founding contributing editor of Wired magazine. His new book is “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.”  You’ll find related materials on his website, and you can read an excerpt here.

Also in our studio is David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a co-author of the 2000 bestseller “The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.” More recent books include “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” and “Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.”

Closing segment: Earthquake in Haiti

Later this hour, we turn to the situation in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there yesterday:

Joining us from Miami is Carol Rosenberg, foreign correspondent for The Miami Herald. She’s part of the team that’s been reporting on the earthquake since news of it first broke yesterday afternoon.  You can follow their latest coverage here. 

On Saturday, an apparent double agent for Al Qaeda killed seven CIA officers in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan. On Sunday, a U.S. drone flattened a militant hideout in neighboring Pakistan’s Al Qaeda stronghold.

It looked like a blow-for-blow exchange. But the U.S. blows came by remote control. By robotic warfare.

P.W. Singer says robots — on the ground, in the air — are taking the United States into undeclared war. Remote control war. War with very new parameters and implications. He’s with us today.

This hour, On Point: P.W. Singer on the relentless march of robots into war.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

P.W. Singer joins us from Washington. He’s senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.” His previous books include “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry” and “Children at War.” He served as coordinator for Barack Obama’s defense policy task force during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Read an excerpt from “Wired for War” at Singer’s website.

More links:

On our Notes & Updates blog, we take a look at several videos of U.S. drones and war-bots, like the MQ-9 Reaper, shown here:

Read the post and see more videos.

(Photo: Flickr/massdistraction)

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Month by month, year by year, American households are dropping their telephone land lines. Going entirely cellular.

In 2006, just 11 percent of homes had cell phones only. By the first half of this year, that number was 23 percent and climbing. And 37 percent of households say they don’t answer land lines anymore.

For the young, it’s second nature. Grab the cell. For American communications culture, it’s a sea change. No more communal phone. No Bobby, Suzy, Mom, Dad — “It’s for you!”

This hour, On Point: losing land lines, and what that means for how we communicate.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Spencer Ante, an associate editor for BusinessWeek magazine, where he follows the telecommunications industry.

Scott Steinberg, publisher of the technology product review site Digital Trends.

Mimi Ito, research scientist at the University of California, Irvine, studying new media use, especially among young people in the U.S. and Japan. She’s the lead researcher on a recently completed three-year study of teens and the Internet by the Digital Youth Project, supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

Tony Hawk, in Los Angeles, June 2009. (AP)

If you’ve ever stepped on a skateboard, you no doubt know Tony Hawk – and know he is huge.

If you haven’t and don’t, you’re missing a wildly popular piece of Americana.

Skateboarding was born as the outlaw sport. Morphed over the years into “extreme sport”. Spawned a whole sub-culture – attitude, outlook, flying kids, fashion.

And Tony Hawk – skater, daredevil, hero, empire-builder – has been right at the heart of it. From spinning “900s” – i.e., 900 degrees, rolling in the sky – to spinning fortunes, dreams. The Michael Jordan of skateboarding.

This Hour, On Point: Tony Hawk.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Tony Hawk acquired his first board at age 9 and went pro by age 14. At the 1999 X Games he was the first skater ever to land a “900,” a trick which involves completing two-and-a-half revolutions. Now retired from professional skateboarding, he’s an athlete-entrepreneur, running a business empire complete with video games, Birdhouse Skateboards, and the charitable Tony Hawk Foundation. His new video game release is “Tony Hawk: Ride.” See trailers and reviews at GameTrailers.com.

Watch Tony Hawk complete his “900,” after eleven attempts, at the 1999 X Games in San Francisco:

Here’s Tony and friends doing cool moves in a recent Birdhouse video:

(Photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid via Flickr)

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Brilliant tinkerers made the American economy. From Thomas Edison to Henry Ford to the Apple computer guys, late nights tinkering in the garage, the basement, the workshop changed the world.

In the late 20th century, big corporate R&D seemed to take over. Bright young Americans headed to Wall Street.

Now, a bunch of them are headed back to the garage. Tinkering again — this time turbocharged by new high-tech tools that put tinkering in high gear.

Could the next big thing, the economy’s turnaround, come out of your garage?

This hour, On Point: The return of the American tinkerer.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Justin Lahart, reporter for The Wall Street Journal. His article “Tinkering Makes a Comeback Amid Crisis” appeared on Thursday.

Bre Pettis, professional tinkerer. He’s co-founder of NYC Resistor, a tech workshop in Brooklyn, New York and co-founder of MakerBot Industries. More information about his projects at www.brepettis.com.

David Hounshell, David M. Roderick Professor of Technology and Social Change in the Department of History, Social and Decision Sciences and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, at Carnegie Mellon University.

It was part of an MIT event held on Thursday, Nov. 5, to commemorate computer science professor Michael Hammer, who died last year. Here’s video of the full interview, courtesy of WBUR.org:

Among other things, Schmidt said the possibilities of the unfolding revolution in technology are greater than many people even realize. “Think about a world of an infinite amount of new sources of information, an infinite number of digital devices, all GPS-located, attached to people,” he said. “Imagine the scale of the kinds of questions you could ask that you could not ask before.”

We’ll pull out a couple of excerpts here.

Tom probed Schmidt on the business scale of Google and on fears that it is getting too big:

TOM ASHBROOK: Google is enormous. We see a lot of your strengths. On the front of vulnerabilities: Do you see your major vulnerabilities as economic or political? And in particular when it comes to scale, Christine Varney is President Obama’s new antitrust chief – I know we all saw the Fortune article “Obama and Google: A Love Story.” But their bottom line was that your scale has become such you may well be a target of antitrust attention by the federal government. How do you look at that? Are you an out-of-control monopoly, sir?

ERIC SCHMIDT: (laughter) I can’t think of the appropriate response, aside from “no.” (laughter)

TOM ASHBROOK: Christine Varney will review the tape later, but go ahead. (laughter)

ERIC SCHMIDT: That’s right. There’s a number of different sort of ways of approaching that subject. We get a lot of criticism as a company, I think, fundamentally because we’re disruptive, and also because we are a scale company, as you said. And then finally, because people care a lot about information. So we’re used to that side of the issues, and I don’t think that’s going to go away. What we do believe is that as long as you are on the side of the consumer, you’re pretty much on the right side of all these debates. And that there’s a lot of sort of hem and haw, going on and on and on and on about it. But the fact of the matter is – and people will review what we do and so forth – but as long as we’re consumer-focused, we’ll be fine…[Google co-founder] Larry Page in fact wrote a memo which, early in our years as a company, that said, “If we were to become big, what were some of the principles that we would establish?” And we’ve established those. And one of the most important ones is that you own your own data. So, we don’t trap end users. So if you, for example, decide that you’re unhappy with Google services we make it easy for you to take the data that we have of yours, and you can go to a competitor or whatever you want to do. We recently announced the oddly named “data liberation front” group at Google, whose sole job was to make this actually happen. So we’re real serious about this.

And Tom asked Schmidt about the physical side of Google’s operation:

TOM ASHBROOK: Give us a sense of the scale of Google’s own infrastructure at this point. We’re hearing about server farms the size of cities, or maybe that’s just in our imagination. Give us a sense of that.

ERIC SCHMIDT: Well, people like to imagine all of that stuff. We benefit from centralization. So we have some number of relatively large data centers which are attached very near to power dams, literally hydro, water systems because we need a constant supply of base load to power these things. And we don’t say the exact number, but think that we benefit from Moore’s Law, and we build our own essentially super computers out of p.c. components. Connected with them is a fiber-optic network that we own and control, which we bought…Remember everybody built all that fiber and it was all cheap? Well, we bought a whole bunch of it. Technically, we bought. It was a great deal. Trust me. And we span the globe with that. And we needed to do that in order to move all the data around. When you look at the scale of YouTube, had we not done that, with the growth of YouTube, YouTube would have taken Google out, simply because of the amount of video and audio and so forth that is used. And again, those of you who are scientists can do the math in your head. But imagine that number of video streams, even with compression, and yet we’ve been able to handle it. So we engineered Google in the same way that Michael [Hammer] would have, with a notion of scale. And when you imagine the next set of applications that will be real time intensive, data intensive, maps intensive, we’re ready for that.

Apple's iPhone (as shown at apple.com) has plenty of new competition.

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Cell phones blanket the world. Billions of them. But the next phone in your hand — if it’s not there already, on the road, on the move — really isn’t a phone. It’s a computer.

Mobile computing — with powerful smart phones like the iPhone or the new Droid — is exploding in popularity. Big sales. Zillions of “apps.” Lots of power in your pocket.

New users call it a revelation. Industry watchers have long predicted a revolution. Is it here? Is it on?

This hour, On Point: What does it mean for our lives, work and economy when mobile computing goes to critical mass?

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Austin, Texas, is Omar Gallaga. He writes on technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman and is regular contributor to NPR’s All Tech Considered.

From New York we’re joined by John Abell, New York bureau chief for Wired.com. He directs coverage of business and disruptive media and writes for Wired.com’s Epicenter blog.

And from Los Angeles we’re joined by Jason Calacanis. He’s an Internet entrepreneur who has founded many companies, including Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. He’s founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a “human-powered” search engine.

The Tesla Model S, slated for 2011. (teslamotors.com)

The all-electric, hot and sexy Tesla Roadster goes zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds and sits in the garages of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, David Letterman, and the founders of Google.

There are six hundred of them in the world, put together not in Detroit but in Silicon Valley. In 2011, backed by almost half a billion dollars in government loans, Tesla plans to roll out a high-performance sedan, the Model S.

In a decade, claims Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, there could be a million new Teslas a year. They could revolutionize the U.S. auto industry, he says. And save the world.

Elon Musk dreams big. Is he just dreaming?

This hour, On Point: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, on the future of electric cars – and the planet.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Los Angeles is Elon Musk, chairman, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. A Silicon Valley entrepeneur, he’s also CEO of Space X, a space technologies company that resupplies the Space Station and aims to colonize Mars; chairman of SolarCity, a solar power provider; and co-founder of PayPal.

From Detroit, we’re joined by Bill Vlasic, Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times.

More links:

You can see a photo gallery of Tesla’s cars at their website.

In a skeptical piece last June, BusinessWeek’s David Welch asked “Can Tesla Become a Real Automaker?” And on The New York Times’ Wheels blog, Jim Motavalli looked at some of the challenges facing Tesla’s Model S.

Here’s the Edmunds.com video review of the forthcoming Model S:

Watch a video about the forthcoming Tesla sedan, the Model S:

Human memory is a famously tricky thing. We remember some things. We forget a lot more. And we shape and sculpt the memories we do have with a vengeance.

But more and more, the actual events of our lives are being recorded electronically. In Facebook albums and Twitter posts and smartphone files, yes, but also in thousands of digital transactions we don’t even think about.

Now, two top Microsoft computer scientists are talking about an era of e-memory — “total recall” — as a revolution in what it means to be human.

This hour, On Point: E-memory, total recall, and human nature.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from San Francisco are Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, co-authors of “Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.” Bell has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research since 1995.  Prior to that, he was vice president of research and devlopment for Digital Equipment Corporation from 1960 to 1983. He is the first user of “MyLifeBits,” a project funded by Microsoft to experiment with “lifeblogging.” He has been called “the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers.” Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. His work has led to features in Windows XP, Bing.com, and more, and he has worked with Gordon Bell on the MyLifeBits project.

Joining us from New York is Douglas Rushkoff, professor of media studies at the New School University, technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and author of “Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back,” “Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out,” and numerous other books.

Detail from "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game (thebeatlesrockband.com)

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Aerosmith did it. And Metallica. And the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And Spinal Tap. They’ve all seen their music take the plunge into the world of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and video games.

But the Beatles? Not until now.

Out from the mists of time, the Fab Four are making the leap. “The Beatles: Rock Band” hits the shelves tomorrow. The marketing din is deafening. Soon, you too can grab a plastic guitar and rock out like the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

Is this a revolution? Evolution? Or just fun and games?

This hour, On Point: music, video games, and Beatlemania all over again.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Alex Rigopulos, cofounder and CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, developers of “The Beatles: Rock Band.” Harmonix developed the first Guitar Hero game in 2005, and in 2006 the company was acquired by MTV Games for $175 million. Harmonix now makes the Rock Band games, the first of which came out in 2007.

Joining us from New York is Heather Chaplin, video game critic and journalist who’s written for Salon, Fortune, and The New York Times. She’s co-author of “Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.”

Also from New York, we’re joined by Lisa Robinson, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where she covers music and the music industry. She has interviewed all four of the Beatles.

A jet fly-by kicks off the aerial festivities celebrating the launch of the new T-Mobile myTouch 3G phone with Google's Android operating system, in San Francisco on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. (AP)

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“Cloud computing” sounds exotic, but it’s becoming absolutely commonplace.

All kinds of computer activity that used to happen in your home or office, on your PC’s local software, is instead happening online. On the Web. In the “cloud.”

Your digital address book is probably there. Your calendar. Your digital photos. And soon, much more — maybe all — of the computing you do will happen far from your desktop. On Internet server farms. In the cloud.

Google and Microsoft are battling there. And a lot more than money may be at stake.

This hour, On Point: Cloud computing and you.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Cambridge, Mass., is Jonathan Zittrain, professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and author of “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.” In a recent op-ed piece for The New York Times, titled “Lost in the Cloud,” he argued that cloud computing “comes with real dangers.”

And joining us from San Francisco is Kara Swisher, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal and co-executive editor of All Things Digital, a website owned by Dow Jones covering technology, the Internet and media.

More:

In a guest post on the On Point blog, Jonathan Zittrain explains why he’s still worried — despite Kara Swisher’s and others’ “utterly reasonable optimism.”

A rendering of Masdar City from the Masdar Initiative website (masdarcity.ae).

In Arabic, the word Masdar means “the source.” And right now, the desert outside Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, is the source of a budding green revolution.

Construction is underway for Masdar City, a high-tech metropolis that will be home to 50,000 residents – and be the world’s first city with no carbon footprint. No cars. Zero waste. A truly green metropolis.

The plans on the drawing board are very big. The challenges are big, too. Can it even work? We’re going direct to Abu Dhabi for answers, and a tour.

This hour, On Point: Masdar and the green city of the future.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Khaled Awad, director of property development for the Masdar project. He joins us from Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

In our studio we’re joined by Kevin Bullis, energy editor at Technology Review. His article on Masdar, “A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert,” appeared in the March/April 2009 issue.

More links:

The Masdar City website offers an extensive overview of the project, along with videos and an image gallery.

Watch a video “fly through” of Masdar City as rendered by the firm Foster & Partners:

From iRobot.com

In 1973, the now nearly-sainted Michael Jackson first popularized the dance “The Robot” with the Jackson Five’s hit “Dancing Machine.” In 1984, the first Terminator movie hit theaters, with humans pitted against robots from the future.

In 2009 — right now — robots are, in fact, moving into more and more facets of life, from cleaning gutters to making war.

My guest today, iRobot CEO Colin Angle, says robots won’t take over the world, but they will merge with us. In fact, he says, they already are.

This hour, On Point: iRobot’s co-founder, and the future of the robotic world.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

We’re joined in our studio by Colin Angle, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of iRobot. iRobot produces – among other products – the popular floor-vacuuming “Roomba” robot, and the military “PackBot” robot, in wide use by the U.S. Armed Forces. Colin is one of the world’s leading experts on mobile robots, and formerly worked at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

More:

You can watch a number of videos of iRobot products on the company’s YouTube channel. Here are a couple we liked: a prototype of the iRobot Warrior and a “flying” iRobot PackBot.

(Image from Facebook.com)

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Facebook just keeps growing. The online social network where people connect and reconnect, post their thoughts, their snapshots, their Facebook friends and latest fancies, had 100 million users last August. 150 million in January.

And yesterday, Facebook confirmed that it had signed up its 200 millionth user.

Broad swaths of young Americans now simply assume they can catch up with anyone, anytime on Facebook. Now older users are pouring in, too. And users around the world.

But as Facebook grows and evolves, so do the questions about where it’s going, where it’s taking us.

This hour, On Point: The age of Facebook, and where the online social network goes next.

You can join the conversation. Is half your life on Facebook? All your life? None of it? Where does Facebook take us?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Vanessa Grigoriadis, contributing editor at New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Her new article, on the cover of New York this week, is “Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?”

BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. His forthcoming book is “The Psychology of Facebook.”

More links:

You can now find On Point on Facebook.

And keep up-to-date with Facebook news at insidefacebook.com.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has been writing enthusiastically about Facebook and social networking. In January he wrote “Everyone else is on Facebook. Why aren’t you?”

Less enthusiastic — in fact, downright hostile – is The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash in his hilarious rant last month, “Down With Facebook!”

Final editions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at First & Pike News in downtown Seattle on Tuesday, March 17, 2009. The Tuesday edition ended a heritage stretching back nearly 146 years, when the Seattle Gazette, the P-I's predecessor, began publishing in December 1863. (AP)

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American newspapers are going down fast now. Denver and Seattle are just the latest cities to lose a paper. More presses, almost everyone says, are sure to be shuttered. Maybe many more.

At this week’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, tech thinker Steven Johnson made the “don’t worry, be happy” case. The transition may be rough, he says, but a new “news ecosystem” will emerge on the web, richer than what we’ve known.

Will it? This hour, On Point: Steven Johnson, and New York Times media maven David Carr, on the “news ecosystem” beyond newspapers.

You can join the conversation. If your newspaper goes, how will you get your news? Will a new ecosystem thick with bloggers fill the breach? Could it be better? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Steven Johnson joins us from New York. A tech entrepreneur and best-selling author, he co-founded the pioneering online magazine FEED in 1995 and the community site Plastic in 2001. His latest venture is the hyperlocal news site outside.in. In Austin on Friday, at the big South by Southwest Interactive Festival, his speech “Old Growth Media and the Future of News” got a lot of attention. His latest book is “The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.”

Joining us from Austin is David Carr, columnist for The New York Times covering media, business, and pop culture. He’s currently reporting from the South by Southwest Festival. You can keep up with him at the Times’ ArtsBeat blog.

And from Seattle, we’re joined by Monica Guzman, a reporter at SeattlePI.com covering the culture of technology and the main writer of The Big Blog. She was the first online reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which published its last print edition this week.

The world loves its iPods, iPhones, TiVo, OnStar, XBox and Blackberries. They all run off the Internet. But the Internet was built — and built out — in the age of the personal computer, when anyone could climb on and tinker from their keyboard.

That openness — almost anarchy — made the Net a wide-open realm for innovation. Its dream was liberating everything from data to democracy.

Now, web guru Jonathan Zittrain worries that hyper-convenient but closed products like the iPhone are shutting down the party.

This hour, On Point: The gadgets we love, and the future of the Internet.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jonathan Zittrain, author of “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It,” professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Adam Thierer, Director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom.

Jay Greene, Seattle bureau chief for BusinessWeek magazine and author of this week’s cover story, “Inside Microsoft’s War Against Google.”

Grand Theft Auto IV, out this week in its millions of red hot copies, is a vast sensation in the video gaming world. It’s a blockbuster — bigger than movies or music and way bigger than books.

It is – as usual – bloody, brutal, grim, dark, wild — a no-holds-barred video crime spree set in Liberty City, a huge digital approximation of New York. But is it art?

Some say that the richest video games are growing a new narrative richness. Moral dilemmas. Nuance. Truth and consequences.

This hour, On Point: Grand Theft Auto IV, and the evolution of the video game.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Chris Baker, senior editor at Wired, his review of GTA IV, “It’s Not Just About Killing Hookers Anymore,” appeared this week on Slate.com.

Steven Johnson, co-founder and CEO of outside.in, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, he’s the author of several books, including “Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.”

Stuart Andrews, self-professed game nut and videogame reviewer for the online journal Trusted Reviews and the London Sunday Times.

For a long time in life, Alzheimer’s seems like somebody else’s problem. An issue for the unfortunate old. A misty, separate continent of life.

And then, it can hit you. Your own parents, needing help. Losing their grip. Your own odds of following them into Alzheimer’s — higher than you’d ever wish.

One in 10 people get Alzheimer’s. New research suggests that if both your parents had it, your odds may be one in five. Now the Baby Boom generation and its children are lining up to learn their fate. And science is racing to intervene.

This hour, On Point: going after Alzheimer’s.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Reisa Sperling, neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston

Thomas Bird, Professor of Neurology, Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Washington

Pierre Tariot, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix