Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008) - The Diigo Meta page

• 07 Jan 10
  

  Donghyup Ryu

  internet book read

• 06 Jan 10
  

  Marlene Assselin

  google reading technology newliteracies lled481 lled310 lled580 delta media culture

• 

  Brian Housand

  Google

  • Living With a Computer

    (July 1982)
    "The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
• 

  Tim Evans

  Technology Reading Ebooks

• 02 Jan 10
  

  Jed Porter

  Technology Education culture neuroscience

  • 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.
  • 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’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
  • 18 more annotations...
  • • The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.
    • But that boon comes at a price. 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.
    • “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”
    • “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.”
    • Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And 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.
    • 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.
    • Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
    • “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing
      equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
    • 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. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • , “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.”
    • . Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. 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.
    • Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. 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.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He 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).
    • 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. 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 that the printed word would deliver.
    • o, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism.
    • 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.”
    • 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.
• 30 Dec 09
  

  cynthia wiseman

  reading technology media brain google

• 08 Dec 09
  

  Jack Bathke
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • 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.
    • 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.”
• 28 Nov 09
  

  JOSEPH SAVIRIMUTHU
  • 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.”
• 26 Nov 09
  

  david derouen

  culture reading technology

• 22 Nov 09
  

  Tammy Mitchell

  What the Internet is doing to our brains

  diigo

• 18 Nov 09
  

  Stephen Demetri

  google reading technology internet culture

• 16 Nov 09
  

  Johnny S

  google reading technology media culture article

  • Stanley Kubrick’s
    2001: A Space Odyssey.
• 12 Nov 09
  

  bkbriankelly
  • he crazy quilt of Internet media
  • heir 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
  • 4 more annotations...
  • • The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as w
    • e 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. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we
    • he 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.
    • 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. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter
• 04 Nov 09
  

  Monica Kunkel
• 01 Nov 09
  

  Sam Worden

  • Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

    
    
    

• 30 Oct 09
  

  Paul Casty

  web2.0 research media technology psychology society culture google brain cognition trends science lesenswert

• 29 Oct 09
  

  mpohorilak

  google the atlantic media culture brain

• 28 Oct 09
  

  jason buck
  • Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged
  • “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

    • 

      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.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
• 17 Oct 09
  

  Rick Filipkowski

  ci5475_5330 CI_5475

  • 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.
  • But that boon comes at a price
  • 26 more annotations...
  • • And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
    • His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality
    • suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
    • They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.
    • But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing
    • says that even the adult mind “is very plastic
    • But it also took something away.
    • we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
    • The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
    • Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
    • the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.
    • Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.
    • The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.
    • should
    • 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.
    • But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
    • 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.
    • pancake people
• 06 Oct 09
  

  David Chen

  This 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.

  google neuroscience web 2.0

• 05 Oct 09
  

  Alisha Maxson

  google reading technology internet culture

• 01 Oct 09
  

  Gary Ritzenthaler

  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

  2008 essay atlantic culture technology mcluhan google

• 28 Sep 09
  

  Ivari Horm

  What the Internet is doing to our brains

  internet essay media vorgurakendused

  • 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...
  • • 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.”
    • 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.
• 27 Sep 09
  

  Samar Ahsan

  nickcarr atlantic internet google media newmedia MediaJournalismList

• 25 Sep 09
  

  Shabbi Luthra

  reading technology

• 24 Sep 09
  

  dilpreet minhas

  google reading technology internet culture

• 

  k loza

  Nicholas Carr

• 22 Sep 09
  

  Jason Kern
  • Stanley Kubrick’s
    
  • I was a lit major in college
• 20 Sep 09
  

  Cheryl van Tilburg

  google reading technology 21st Century Skills you can always look it up critical thinking

• 19 Sep 09
  

  Lisa Caldera
  • 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
• 17 Sep 09
  

  Allison Rossett
  • Taylor’s system is still very much with us
• 

  Marcel Knust
• 14 Sep 09
  

  J.T. Katavich
  • 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.
• 13 Sep 09
  

  Michael Clark

  Humanities 011 Readings

  • concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages
  • Net is becoming a universal medium
  • 40 more annotations...
  • • The perfect recall of silicon memory,”
    • “can be an enormous boon to thinking
    • They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
    • 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
    • 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
    • His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic
    • noticed a change in the style of his writing
    • “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
    • human brain is almost infinitely malleable.
    • “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.
    • content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws
    • 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.
    • 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.”
    • information is a kind of commodity
    • “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.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence
    • as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is
      our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence
• 09 Sep 09
  

  mat Wall-Smith

  arts1091 week9 week10

• 

  yunju wang
  • We are not only what we read
  • We are not only what we read
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • 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.
      • 

        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.
      • 1 more sticky notes...
      • • 

          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...
• 02 Sep 09
  

  Jesse Fox
  • 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.”
• 

  J Arturo Blanco García
  • changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style
• 01 Sep 09
  

  Mark -

  r read google web

• 

  Ian Childs

  I 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.

• 31 Aug 09
  

  Jordan Gumm
  • The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle
• 

  Beth Wise
  • 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.
• 27 Aug 09
  

  David Parry
  • “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.
  • The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • universal medium
    • literary types, most of them
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
• 

  Caitlin Kalchthaler
  • 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.
  • Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minute
  • 7 more annotations...
  • • 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
    • “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?”
    • 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.
    • It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

    • y. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

      
      
      

    • he human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
    • 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.
• 

  marian pineda
  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
  • Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
  • 13 more annotations...
  • • The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer.
    • (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
    • media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
    • the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation
    • I skim it.”
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • We are how we read.”
    • “mere decoders of information.”
    • 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.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche
    • “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
    • our writing
      equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
• 26 Aug 09
  

  Brian Rusnak
  • 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
• 

  joseph denton
  • ne, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the m
• 

  daisy pena
  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
  • 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...
  • • 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.
    • “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.”
    • As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites,
    • 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:
    • they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
    • Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
    • “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.”
    • 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.”
    • “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.”
    • 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.
• 25 Aug 09
  

  Anika Forsyth-Smith
  • 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.
  • Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.
• 

  joe pt
  • 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
  • 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...
  • • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • “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?”
    • 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
    • “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?”
    • 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?”
    • 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?”
    • 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?”
    • 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?”
    • “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?”
    • 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?”
    • 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?”
    • 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?”
    • s likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlin
    • “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?”
    • “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?”
    • “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?”
    • 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?”
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
• 

  Jocelyn Nadeau

  google reading technology media culture article brain stupid

• 17 Aug 09
  

  Johann Bauer
• 

  Dawn Nelson
• 16 Aug 09
  

  Mayank Kamthan
• 12 Aug 09
  

  Craig Betts

  This is the reading I will Present this Thursday 5-7 Even though the reading is in the reader. The links are available from this page

  Is google Making us Stupid? Thought

• 09 Aug 09
  

  mailforlen yahoo
• 07 Aug 09
  

  Seta Ghazarian
  • Is Google
  • deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting
    the memory
• 05 Aug 09
  

  Jim Wenzloff

  lesson ionia11

  • Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.
  • 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
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
    • pathologist who has lon
    • They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site
    • 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
    • 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.
• 04 Aug 09
  

  Spiro Bolos

  - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

  education psychology technology google writing learning culture brain

• 01 Aug 09
  

  Christine Knoper
  • The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
• 31 Jul 09
  

  arickard arickard

  Is Google Making Us Stupid?

  google reading technology media article

• 30 Jul 09
  

  kim orourke

  ms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick cli

  google reading technology culture

  • 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.
• 28 Jul 09
  

  Natalie Munroe

  What the Internet is doing to our brains

• 

  rick Dustin-Eichler
• 27 Jul 09
  

  Seth Bowers

  Alan Turing doesn't get the respect he deserves for his role in winning WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing

  google technology media culture article atlantic stupid

  • 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
• 21 Jul 09
  

  Jim wenzloff

  google reading readitwriteitsayit

  • 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 think I know what’s going on
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote
    • 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.
    • It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
    • to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
    • 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.”
    • 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.
• 18 Jul 09
  

  Cheryl H

  What the Internet is doing to our brains.

  google reading technology media brain culture

• 14 Jul 09
  

  kfive9

  PLN web2.0 Edu_Policy_Resources

• 13 Jul 09
  

  Tom Krieglstein

  Interesting 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

  • The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
  • 23 more annotations...
  • • 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,”
    • 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.
    • 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,
    • 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.
    • “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.
    • 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.”
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.”
    • Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,”
    • What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
    • “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.”
    • 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 human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
    • 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.
    • 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 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.”

• 08 Jul 09
  

  Robin Cicchetti

  What the Internet is doing to our brains
  

  21st Century Skills

• 07 Jul 09
  

  Ann Steckel

  google reading technology media brain culture article stupid

• 

  Anand Thakker

  google reading technology media brain culture technology everyday digital literacy

• 30 Jun 09
  

  Alain Antone

  google reading technology media article brain culture stupid

• 25 Jun 09
  

  Lauren Panton

  google reading technology media education generation information_literacy EDU618

• 20 Jun 09
  

  Jerrid Kruse

  web2.0 society google not carr

• 

  Chris Andrews

  technology reading web2.0 education culture 13xx google

  • 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
  • Web has been a godsend to me as a writer
  • 25 more annotations...
  • • universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
    • media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought
    • Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
    • not the only one
    • 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
    • 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
    • Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged
    • 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
    • The human brain is almost infinitely malleable
    • intellectual technologies
    • impoverished
    • becoming
    • When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image
    • reprogramming
    • 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.”
    • 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.”
    • a HAL-like machine
    • or even replaced
    • 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.
    • human knowledge (if not wisdom)
    • 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.
    • 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
    • content
    • under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available
• 19 Jun 09
  

  Honor Moorman

  QuickD

  • 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
  • I can feel it, too
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • 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.
• 

  Megan Poore

  Carr, Nicholas

  technology google reading society and culture

  • 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.”
  • 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.”
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • “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.”
• 18 Jun 09
  

  fnu lnu
  • I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
  • pop-up ads
• 16 Jun 09
  

  Kathleen Capps
• 12 Jun 09
  

  Marlene G. Forney

  Sometime 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

• 

  Matt Schrader
• 08 Jun 09
  

  Hope May

  technology brain attention

  • 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...
  • • and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self
    • a different kind of reading
    • deep reading
• 07 Jun 09
  

  Susan Powelson
  • 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.
• 06 Jun 09
  

  Randall Bass
  • And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
• 04 Jun 09
  

  Brett Boessen

  google reading newmedia atlantic

• 02 Jun 09
  

  George Haines
  • 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.

    • 

      George Haines on 2009-11-18

      We are only going to find more of this thanks to twitter.
• 29 May 09
  

  Sam Bachert

  Nicholas Carr’s most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google

  cloud computing Nicholas Carr internship

• 27 May 09
  

  Christian Baldia

  What the Internet is doing to our brains

  google technology media

• 25 May 09
  

  RIck Stiles-Oldring

  • 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"
• 22 May 09
  

  Charles Nelson

  google internet web2.0 psychology learning

• 19 May 09
  

  Predrag Ristic

  google reading technology brain stupid toread post

• 

  Jessica Meliosky
  • . For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and s
• 16 May 09
  

  bugaku
• 01 May 09
  

  Tim Jacob

  google search web culture

• 29 Apr 09
  

  Mary Elise Dedicke

  Google; technology; Freedom; internet; Atlantic Monthly; Nicholas Carr

• 27 Apr 09
  

  A K

  google technology

• 21 Apr 09
  

  Al Hammel
• 20 Apr 09
  

  Catherine Lambert

  by Nicholas Carr
  Is Google Making Us Stupid?
  Article Tools
  sponsored by:
  Click here to find out more!
  email E-mail Article
  print Printer Format
  
  Illustration by Guy Billout
  
  "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

  google technology

• 19 Apr 09
  

  Nicola Pallitt

  google reading technology media article brain culture stupid

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  stormagnet on 2009-10-11
  I love it when people blame technology for their bad habits.
• 
  Al Hammel on 2009-04-21
  I am using this page as a discussion topic for my debate students. Google Scholar has helped correct some "easy way out" mentalities in my class, and Diigo, too, is supporting scholarly discussions in class.
• 
  George Haines on 2009-03-05
  re: long article-- how many people had trouble staying focused while they read? anyone stop to check e-mail in the middle? or update facebook? I think that sort of proves his point.
• 
  Dan Myers on 2009-02-04
  Dave beat me to the irony of the long article!
• 
  Raphael Rousseau on 2009-01-12
  @dave He didn't say he read his own article... ;-)
• 
  Dave Yuhas on 2008-08-01
  There's some irony here. The author describes the inability to read books or long articles IN A LONG ARTICLE.
• 
  César E. Concepción-Acevedo on 2008-07-28
  Interesting: Who is our internet patrol online? Google? Facebook? Peers? What do you think?
• 
  march j on 2008-07-18
  nice. first site outside diigo i found a sticky note on :-D
• 
  a77ila on 2008-06-18
  power or lack of it of abstraction
• 
  Honor Moorman on 2009-10-24
  I agree with this sentiment
• 
  George Haines on 2009-11-18
  We are only going to find more of this thanks to twitter.
• 
  Chris Andrews on 2009-10-04
  Likening hyperlinks to footnotes is problematic at best; hyperlinks (hypertext) changes the nature of a text and asks us to change what we believe a text "ought" to be.
• 
  George Haines on 2009-06-02
  So true!
• 
  Jim Kleinhenz on 2008-09-30
  This contention needs more than pointing to. It needs to be established as true.
• 
  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...
• 
  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.
• 
  yunju wang on 2009-09-09
  um..I think that leads to the question---who owns the media.
• 
  Tom Krieglstein on 2009-07-13
  @Allison - thanks for the link to this as I throughly enjoyed his reponse!
• 
  Allison Kipta on 2008-06-21
  Read Scott Karp's comment on Carr's quote: http://publishing2.com/2008/06/17/connecting-the-dots-of-the-web-revolution/#more-1105
• 
  Jordan Gumm on 2009-08-31
  Well, this isn't an argument for or against the webs ability to shape or contribute to the growth of an intellectual. However, I do agree that my focus hasn't been noticeably affected. If anything, I only have just become more aware of the things that truly do and do not intrigue me. I run across passages on the web every day in which I lose focus rather easily. Except, I have also found e-books and other passages online that I tear right through.
• 
  Mark K Curtis on 2009-04-24
  I do not agree with this sentiment one bit. I have become so much MORE focussed on longer pieces of writing since viewing them online. Particularly now that tools such as Diigo and Digg exist. These tools make a long (and sometimes unsubstantiated, as we can see here) piece of writing a lot easier to consume. And so what if I graze through the information meadow? At least then I take it on - I'm just not the type of person that can read reams and reams in one go. But I can bet anyone that I'm more intelligent since the advent of Google and the like than I would have been without - having to rely on my lacking library services.
• 
  Allison Kipta on 2008-06-21
  The more I read Nicholas Carr, the more I have to fight to stay focused on Nicholas Carr.
• 
  Demetri Orlando on 2008-06-20
  Is this true for you? I don't think I've lost the ability to focus in depth, I think I've gained the ability to access a whole lot more information.
• 
  Maxime Lagacé on 2009-12-11
  I think most of us scan articles.  We want conclusions, answers, concrete stuff that we can use to our advantages.  We don't want the details.  We are lazy.  We want value, which is normal, the human nature.
  
  Today, if somebody is able to read long articles without interruptions, he's there because he loves what he reads, not because he absolutely wants to get something out of it.  That's a big difference.  
  
  What's your purpose when you read ?  
  1.  Do you read because you like the subject, because you are interested ? 
  2.  Or do you read because you want to accumulate knowledge and get something out of it ?
  
  In 1, most people read slowly, appreciate.
  In 2, most people scans, don't really care.
• 
  Jack Bathke on 2009-12-09
  You really think it's an important point. Not to be snarky, but I would say so. I mean, it is discussing how we read and what we read.
• 
  Jennifer Arceo on 2009-02-11
  yes.
  if we read well we learn well...
• 
  Jim Kleinhenz on 2008-09-30
  This seems an important point.
• 
  Jim Kleinhenz on 2008-09-30
  Reading on the Internet is not as different as reading Chinese--and I'd like to see those experiments. My thought is that one might find that individual differences in 'wiring' inside a culture might be greater than the differences across two cultures. And 'wiring' is a metaphor, is it not?
• 
  César E. Concepción-Acevedo on 2008-07-28
  A good reference is: Penskys article on Digital Natives and Digital Inmigrants, look it up in any schorlarly database.
• 
  Rafael Ribas on 2008-06-14
  How does this affect the way we teach?
• 
  Cheryl van Tilburg on 2009-09-29
  Very interesting insight. It reminds me that a lot of what we're talking about is cultural. Thanks, Asako.
• 
  Asako Yoshida on 2008-06-25
  In Japan, clock time did not belong to individuals, so how the sense of clock time is adapted in a society very much depends on the existing social relations, etc. For example, in an office situation, even it's 6 pm which signals the end of working time, you have to read the environment who is leaving and who is still there to judge your timing for leaving the office. Re: Present and Past article "Japan Time."
• 
  Dave Yuhas on 2008-08-01
  In the approx 2 years that I've been using diigo, this is the first annotated article I've encountered. Unless there's a tidal wave of new diigo users (highly unlikely) diigo will be just another failed experiment.
• 
  Michelle N on 2008-07-19
  Still trying to figure out the sticky note thing. I agree it was nice to find Diigo annotations outside of Diigo.
• 
  Seth Bowers on 2009-07-28
  Turing had a huge role in winning WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing
• 
  Patrick Higgins on 2008-06-21
  This shows me that new skills are necessary, or in the least, old ones need to be reconstituted. What jobs or tasks become prioritized? Can we not turn off all of our notifiers and our distractors while we indeed focus on what needs to be done? These are skills, not just simple behaviors.
• 
  Rafael Ribas on 2008-06-14
  Great discussion topic...
• 
  Lisa Stornes on 2009-02-25
  Such as traditional encyclopedias trying to compete with wikipedia by letting user contribute to content
• 
  Michelle N on 2008-07-19
  Is this what we've all become? Is this our future as we skim and scan for information and move along before reaching the end of an article or book?
• 
  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.
• 
  Asako Yoshida on 2008-06-25
  It also freed us from taylorism thinking at where we are???
• 
  Jon 5475 on 2009-10-14
  It's ironic that people shred their private data, guard their ss#, but don't think twice about their browsing history. And it doesn't matter if google know it's *you* (and they usually do). You're giving away the secrets they want. They can commidify your actions, and you can't collect directly. But they'll digitize the entire print world for you.
• 
  Joseph Guyer on 2009-09-19
  Facebook has been very successful combating this. Google can't get into Facebook accounts, so everyone's comments, pictures, etc. are not being used for commerce.
• 
  Margolis Margolis on 2008-08-08
  This might be the really substential argument here. The economic incentive for making our attention span shorter.
• 
  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"
• 
  Cheryl van Tilburg on 2009-09-28
  I think it's the concept that "something's gotta give." It's tough to be expert in both the Canon AND the information that's available on the internet. There are only so many hours in a day...
• 
  Jim Kleinhenz on 2008-10-01
  Yes, this is the ideal--but is there really anything about the Internet that hinders this?
• 
  Ruben Van Havermaet on 2008-07-21
  For those who still read books, this reminds me somewhat of Jean Baudrillard's 'The Ecstasy of Communication':
  "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

• 
  Michelle N on 2008-07-19
  Very true I think. Americans especially have turned to the clock for everything. We eat according to time of day not our bodies need for nourishment.
• 
  Gina Maranto on 2008-07-23
  Carr isn't alone in making this argument. Bauerlein has a whole book about the subject:
  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.
• 
  kiberens on 2008-09-18
  Isn't this a gross overstatement? Alarmist b/c not even taking into account readers of his own thoughtful blog and the hundreds of others like it.
• 
  max senges on 2008-09-20
  there is some interesting thinking going on the context of a Rights based approach to internet governance - http://www.internet-bill-of-rights.org/
• 
  connor plaga on 2008-10-13
  I think it depends how the web is used. If somone surfs and hops through sites, link after link, then they are hurting their literacy. But the internet is a tool that can be utilized to find bountiful information quickly, and I believe that it can be focused on.
• 
  J Arturo Blanco García on 2009-09-02
  This is a really good reason to avoid texting all you do in the day... how come all keep doing it... is it interesting to text everything?

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