jason buck on 2009-10-28
This is one of the scariest thoughts in the entire article. When the system become first and foremost people will loose the ability to think and reason for themselves. They will look to the system to think for them.
This link has been bookmarked by 540 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Jun 2008, by Takuya Homma.
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04 Nov 09
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01 Nov 09
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
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29 Oct 09
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28 Oct 09
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged
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“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
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It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
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17 Oct 09
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I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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But that boon comes at a price
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And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
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His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality
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suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
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They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.
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But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking
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We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace
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When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
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We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
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One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing
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says that even the adult mind “is very plastic
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But it also took something away.
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we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
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The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
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the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.
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Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.
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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.”
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In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
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Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.
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Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.
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should
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The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
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But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
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The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds
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In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
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pancake people
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07 Oct 09
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06 Oct 09
David ChenThis is an old article, but I thought quite appropriate given the discussion in class yesterday. This topic continues to fascinate me and I'd love to hear what you guys think about it.
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05 Oct 09
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01 Oct 09
Gary Ritzenthalerhttp://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
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28 Sep 09
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In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing
proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a
theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other
information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet,
an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other
intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing
press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and
TV. -
Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get
fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if
I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that
used to come naturally has become a struggle. - 14 more annotations...
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Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries
can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on
hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. -
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just
passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also
shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping
away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to
take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream
of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the
surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. -
Bruce Friedman, who
blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described
how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost
the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he
wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the
University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a
telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato”
quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many
sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve
lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four
paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” -
But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from
University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea
change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program,
the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two
popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K.
educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and
other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites
exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and
rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no
more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out
to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence
that they ever went back and actually read it. -
“‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
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The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and
the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer
scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer
Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the
world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains
an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those
direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old
reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped
listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. -
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It
injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital
gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it
has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as
we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to
scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. -
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As
people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional
media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add
text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles,
introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse
info-snippets. -
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s
information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop
“the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands
exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s
view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be
mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information
we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we
become as thinkers. -
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while
pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of
their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a
HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate
search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech
a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial
intelligence.” -
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were
supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It
suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a
series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In
Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for
the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a
bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a
faster processor and a bigger hard drive. -
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable
not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the
intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet
spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any
other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw
our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as
Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. -
we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with
that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” -
as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it
is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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27 Sep 09
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25 Sep 09
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24 Sep 09
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Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,
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In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
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The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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for how each worker should work
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industrial choreography
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one best method
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perfect efficiency
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k lozaNicholas Carr
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22 Sep 09
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I was a lit major in college
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20 Sep 09
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19 Sep 09
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argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious
authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and
debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky
notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even
prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad
blessings t
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17 Sep 09
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Taylor’s system is still very much with us
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14 Sep 09
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Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.
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13 Sep 09
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concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages
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Net is becoming a universal medium
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The perfect recall of silicon memory,”
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“can be an enormous boon to thinking
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They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
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My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a
swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of
words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. -
we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that
will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. -
we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when
television was our medium of choice. -
different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form
when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. -
We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into
the language we understand -
important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains
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His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic
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noticed a change in the style of his writing
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“our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
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human brain is almost infinitely malleable.
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“The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the
fly, altering the way it functions.” -
the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we
inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. -
Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological
level. -
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.
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content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws
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As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media,
traditional media have to adapt -
Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers
shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with
easy-to-browse info-snippets -
By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then
testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise
instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. -
productivity soared.
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Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his
followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of
society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been
first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.” -
Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection,
transmission, and manipulation of information -
“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.” -
“understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
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information is a kind of commodity
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“Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your
brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better
off.” -
It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a
series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. -
The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the
more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about
us and to feed us advertisements. -
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow,
concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to
distraction. -
Socrates bemoaned the development of writing.
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couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread
information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom). -
Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century
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easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less
studious” and weakening their minds. -
undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and
spread sedition and debauchery -
Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
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final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence
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as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is
our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence
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09 Sep 09
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We are not only what we read
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We are not only what we read
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media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of
thought, but they also shape the process of thought.-
yunju wang on 2009-09-09
um..I think that leads to the question---who owns the media.
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J.T. Katavich on 2009-09-14
No one owns the media, the media has become a channel for any person to make what they want of it.
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IsabelleP on 2009-10-10
Print, TV, and digital media do shape our collective thinking process (think elections!). What the Internet does to a much greater extent is connect people with the opinion they want to hear. THe shades of what truth is are very much gray: it's in the eye of the beholder. On the flip side, the Internet also connects people with information and experts about what they are motivated to learn. It's the ultimate personnalized learning for kids! Good or bad...
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02 Sep 09
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The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our
mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so
neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.
But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a
professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study
at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.”
Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,”
according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the
way it functions.”
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changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style
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01 Sep 09
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Ian ChildsI agree with this article whole heartedly. The internet is making it harder to concentrate on and absorb material that we come across in our day tio day lives. I found myself skimming this article halfway through it. Which is one of the problems I had with the article. I would shorten it up because I feel that once the point is made, its just continuous support that is really quite redundant.
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31 Aug 09
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The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle
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The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to
stay focused on long
pieces of
writing. -
A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its
arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The
result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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27 Aug 09
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“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.
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The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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universal medium
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literary types, most of them
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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
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But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
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till, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
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Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minute
- 7 more annotations...
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nd what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles
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“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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ut it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
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It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
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y. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
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he human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
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He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.
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I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
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Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
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The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer.
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(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
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media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
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the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation
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I skim it.”
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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
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But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
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We are how we read.”
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“mere decoders of information.”
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Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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“‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
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our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
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26 Aug 09
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the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds
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ne, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the m
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I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
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Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
- 11 more annotations...
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
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“I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
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As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites,
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They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
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they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” -
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.”
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It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
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“Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”
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Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.
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25 Aug 09
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Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.
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Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
- 25 more annotations...
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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s likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlin
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“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
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Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the
long-term neurological and -
“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence
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That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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17 Aug 09
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07 Aug 09
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Is Google
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deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting
the memory
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05 Aug 09
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Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.
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I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and
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I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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pathologist who has lon
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They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site
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we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking
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The Italian humanist Hieronimo
Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to
intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine
religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery. -
Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
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04 Aug 09
Spiro Bolos- The Atlantic (July/August 2008)
education psychology technology google writing learning culture brain
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The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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31 Jul 09
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30 Jul 09
kim orourkems of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick cli
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I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer.
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28 Jul 09
Natalie MunroeWhat the Internet is doing to our brains
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27 Jul 09
Seth BowersAlan Turing doesn't get the respect he deserves for his role in winning WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing
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British mathematician Alan
Turing-
Seth Bowers on 2009-07-28
Turing had a huge role in winning WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing
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21 Jul 09
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That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.
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I think I know what’s going on
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A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote
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one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.
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It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
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to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
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In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”
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The Italian humanist Hieronimo
Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to
intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine
religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery.
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18 Jul 09
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14 Jul 09
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13 Jul 09
Tom KrieglsteinInteresting read with good stories about how our usage of the internet is rewiring our brains in ways we can't be sure to know yet.
google reading technology HistoryOfTechnology printingpress brain books
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The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
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And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
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Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in
medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” -
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
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we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading,
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Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand.
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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” -
Joseph
Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments -
In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
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When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.”
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A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists
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Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency
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“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
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Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,”
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What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
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“Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
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It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
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The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
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The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.
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The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
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In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
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The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th
century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo
Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to
intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine
religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery -
In a recent essay, the playwright Richard
Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
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08 Jul 09
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07 Jul 09
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30 Jun 09
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My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think
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Web has been a godsend to me as a writer
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universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
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media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought
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Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
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not the only one
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a recently
published study -
They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another sit
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Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged
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And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains
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The human brain is almost infinitely malleable
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intellectual technologies
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impoverished
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becoming
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When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image
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reprogramming
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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.”
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It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
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a HAL-like machine
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or even replaced
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The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
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human knowledge (if not wisdom)
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Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.
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The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds
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content
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under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available
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19 Jun 09
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Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or
something, has been tinkering with my brain-
Honor Moorman on 2009-10-24
I agree with this sentiment
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I can feel it, too
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I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that
someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural
circuitry, reprogramming the memory.
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But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
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But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the
machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich
A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
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I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
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pop-up ads
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12 Jun 09
Marlene G. ForneySometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”google new.media web2.0 digital.culture teaching.and.learning
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08 Jun 09
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They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site
-
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
- 3 more annotations...
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a different kind of reading
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and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self
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deep reading
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07 Jun 09
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Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.
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06 Jun 09
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And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
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29 May 09
Sam BachertNicholas Carr’s most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google
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27 May 09
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25 May 09
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If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will
sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard
Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my
ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly
educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves
a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
[But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner
density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information
overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,”
Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch
of a button.”-
RIck Stiles-Oldring on 2009-05-25
Also see:
Dan Colman's "In Bed With the Word" - improtance of reading
James Harken - "Lost in Cyburbia" - history and description of "Network"
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19 May 09
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. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and s
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29 Apr 09
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27 Apr 09
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21 Apr 09
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20 Apr 09
Catherine Lambertby Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
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"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web -
19 Apr 09
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14 Apr 09
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07 Apr 09
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And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
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. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing
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the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”
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reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.
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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
-
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
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“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
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The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
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When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
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In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
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25 Mar 09
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21 Mar 09
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As the media theorist Marshall
McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. -
The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
- 11 more annotations...
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He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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I’ve lost the ability to do that
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“power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
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“We are how we read.
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mere decoders of information
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Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
-
our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts. -
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
-
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
-
The Italian humanist Hieronimo
Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to
intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. -
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.
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19 Mar 09
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Is Google Making Us Stupid?
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Josh HoganNicholas Carr's article arguing that Google and its ilk are making us "stupid" by encouraging us to skim and "bounce" without ever fully maturing our ideas.
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It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
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In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”
- 3 more annotations...
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The Italian humanist Hieronimo
Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to
intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine
religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient -
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
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As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
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18 Mar 09
jnajarroWhat the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr from the Atlantic
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17 Mar 09
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16 Mar 09
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In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads
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they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
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Public Stiky Notes
if we read well we learn well...
Dan Colman's "In Bed With the Word" - improtance of reading
James Harken - "Lost in Cyburbia" - history and description of "Network"
"Obscenity begins when there's no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparant, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication."
Page Comments
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book5-2008jul05,0,3980465.story
The question is: how many people ever willingly "read deeply" and how many read "serious literature." Carr's anecdotal victims of internet dumbing down are not convincing. In fact, I read this whole (very long) article online. And as other respondents say, skimming predates the internet, and being able to access more raw information, rather than waiting for the media moguls to decide for us (I'm a journalist myself, btw),has the potential to make us collectivelysmarter, not the other way around. Not to mention more empowered, in an assortment of ways, viz. Denis Diderot's original encyclopedia.
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