Nicholas Carr

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Yet, it’s worth noting that it always seems to be “those other folks” who are being made stupid by the Net. Most of us feel, as we’re Googling around, that the Net is making us smarter—better informed (with more answers at our literal fingertips), better able to explore a topic, better able to find the points of view that explain and contextualize that which we don’t yet understand. Not Nicholas Carr. He thinks the Net is making all of us stupider, including himself, but more or less for the opposite reason that Sunstein worries about. Carr notes at the beginning of his wonderfully titled book The Shallows that he realized in 2007 that his own cognitive processes were changing because of the Net, and not for the better.

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Whether or not the Web tends to make us more insular, we know that human beings have a tendency toward homophily; we prefer to be with people who are like us. All the participants in this debate agree that excessive homophily is a bad thing. All the participants agree that we should be bending our efforts to work against our homophilitic tendencies. And no participants—not Cass Sunstein, not Nicholas Carr—are suggesting that we roll the Net back up and throw it away as a bad idea. So, why so many years of debate and with such passion? Because something else is at stake. Unsettled Discourses Al Gore published The Assault on Reason39 in 2007 in the middle of George Bush’s second term,40 so it’s understandable that he felt some despair.

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(Thank you blogosphere! Thank you commenters!) Still, not only is the irony/hypocrisy of this book inescapable, it is so familiar in this time of transition that I wish someone would write a boilerplate paragraph that all authors of nonpessimistic books about the Internet could just insert and be done with. Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows escapes the irony because it maintains that long-form books are the crucial and distinctive way civilization develops ideas. If there’s any irony at all, it’s that Carr’s long-form book aims to convince us that the Internet is reshaping our brains so that we can no longer follow long-form arguments—since The Shallows is indeed a coherent, 220-page argument.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

Economist, January 18 , 2014. 20 Martin Wolf, “If Robots Divide Us, They Will Conquer,” Financial Times, February 4, 2014. 21 Tim Harford, “The Robots Are Coming and Will Terminate Your Jobs,” Financial Times, December 28–29, 2013. 22 Ibid. 23 Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 113. 24 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), p. 198. 25 Carole Cadwallader, “Are the Robots About to Rise? Google’s New Director of Engineering Thinks So . . .” Guardian, February 22, 2014. 26 Samuel Gibbs, “What Is Boston Dynamics and Why Does Google Want Robots?

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See, for example, his latest book: Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (New York: Riverhead, 2012). 36 Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 37 Ibid., epilogue, pp. 240–51. 38 Williams, “The Agony of Instagram.” 39 Rhiannon Lucy Coslett and Holly Baxter, “Smug Shots and Selfies: The Rise of Internet Self-Obsession,” Guardian, December 6, 2013. 40 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic, July/August 2008. Also see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York; Norton, 2011). 41 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You (Penguin, 2011). See also my June 2011 TechCrunchTV interview with Eli Pariser: Andrew Keen, “Keen On . . .

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Harford suspects 2014 might be the year that computers finally become self-aware, a prospect that he understandably finds “sobering” because of its “negative impact of . . . on the job market.”22 He is particularly concerned with how increasingly intelligent technology is hollowing out middle-income jobs such as typists, clerks, travel agents, and bank tellers. Equally sobering is the involvement of dominant Internet companies like Google and Amazon in a robot-controlled society that the technology writer Nicholas Carr foresees in his 2014 book about “automation and us,” The Glass Cage. Carr’s earlier 2008 work, The Big Switch, made the important argument that, with the increasingly ubiquity of cloud computing, the network has indeed become a giant computer, with the World Wide Web thus being “The World Wide Computer.”23 And with automation, Carr warns in The Glass Cage, the World Wide Computer is now designing a society that threatens to discard human beings.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

Tom Rosenstiel, “Five Myths About the Future of Journalism,” Washington Post, April 7, 2011. 6. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 49. 7. Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, 92–93. 8. The term “digital sharecropping” was coined by Nicholas Carr. Nicholas Carr, “Sharecropping the Long Tail,” Rough Type (blog), December 19, 2006, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=634. 9. Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ ” NYTimes.com, February 5, 2012, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/disruptions-facebook-users-ask-wheres-our-cut/. 10.

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Art and culture are the stuff that ads are sold around, the bait that causes users to divulge their preferences by clicking so their data can be mined. The profits made by many online ventures, from social networks to search engines to news sites, are “tied directly to the velocity of people’s information intake,” as Nicholas Carr explained in The Shallows in an analysis of Google’s business model, though his insights can be broadly applied. The faster we surf across the surface of the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google gains to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

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For more on the false division of real and virtual life see Nathan Jurgenson, “The IRL Fetish,” New Inquiry, June 28, 2012. 2. Since I began working on this book, a number of interesting books critical of techno-utopianism were published, including but not limited to Douglas Rushkoff’s (New York: Or Books, 2011); Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010) and Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); Kate Losse’s The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network (New York: Free Press, 2012); Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011) and To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013); Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Robert McChesney’s Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2013); and Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 3.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains, immersed in a dozen hours of screen time a day, may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy reality reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, often quiet, material world. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the Internet fundamentally works on our plastic minds to make them more capable of “shallow” thinking and less capable of “deep” thinking. After enough time in front of our screens, we learn to absorb more information less effectively, skip the bottom half of paragraphs, shift focus constantly; “the brighter the software, the dimmer the user,” he suggests at one point.

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When Google delivers your search results, its algorithm (mimicking an academic tradition) assumes that work that receives more citations has a greater authority. Google, then, privileges search results that are linked to more Web pages and shuttles more popular (that is, relevant) results to page one of the 142 million results for “Glee,” for example. Nicholas Carr tells a fascinating story in The Shallows that illustrates where this approach can go drastically wrong: James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, compiled a database of thirty-four million scholarly articles published in journals from 1945 to 2005, in order to assess the number and variety of citations that were used.

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Now, haltingly, I place other things in that void. A book. A walk through Shaughnessy to monitor the construction of various McMansions I have my eye on. But, of course, nothing—nothing—is as enthralling as the lovely, comforting, absence-destroying Internet. You can’t really revert to a prior state of mind because (as Nicholas Carr points out) our brains may be changeable and plastic, but they aren’t necessarily elastic. My online mind waits angrily for its food. August 23 My tolerance toward interruption has plummeted. (Good sign? Bad sign?) During a chat at the pub, or on the seawall, my interlocutor will raise a finger (pressing an invisible hold button in the air between us) and answer an incoming text message with a sort of blithe assumption that my own attention will immediately flit somewhere else in the meantime.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

Reagle, “Do as I Do: Authorial Leadership in Wikipedia,” Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis (Montreal: ACM, 2007), 143–56. NOT ES TO PAGES 63–69 231 31. Andrew Famiglietti, “Wikipedia and Search: Some Quick Numbers,” Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians, blog, March 4, 2009, http://blogs.bgsu .edu/afamigl. 32. Nicholas Carr, “All Hail the Information Triumvirate!” Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog, January 23, 2009, www.roughtype.com. 33. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, “The Digital Wisdom of Richard Sennett,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2008. If you skim the past ten years or so of Wired magazine in search of the names of the intellectuals who have influenced digital culture, you would encounter many notables: Sherry Turkle, Mark Granovetter, Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky, Pamela Samuelson, and, of course, the patron saint of digital media theory, Marshall McLuhan.

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To deal with these changes, Internet scholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger suggests we engage in a significant reengineering or reimagining of the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible. Because we have for centuries struggled against the inertia of forgetting, we can’t easily comprehend the momentum and risks of remembering.6 MAYBE ME MORY I S NOT T H E P RO B LEM In the summer of 2007, the technology writer Nicholas Carr contributed a provocative cover article to the Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In it, Carr made the case that persistent dependence on the Web for intellectual resources and activity is fundamentally rewiring the minds of many people—his own included. “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr wrote.

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Such historical and anthropological taxonomy has about as much validity as astrology. The plasticity of the human mind, a welldocumented phenomenon, means that human brains not only alter over time and with experience but can keep on changing. So if you worry, THE GOOGL I ZAT I ON OF ME MORY 181 with Nicholas Carr, that the Web is short-circuiting your capacities to think, you can just retrain your mind to think better. Training, though, is different from Lamarckian adaptation. Overusing or abusing any tool or technique can leave you numb or foggy. So it’s not surprising that people report increased distraction in their lives after adopting technologies that have raised our cultural metabolism.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Airways, 154 Utah, University of, 130 venture capitalism, 116 Veterans Administration, 103 video games, 177–80, 219 virtualization, 118 visual cortex, 82 vocabulary, generation effect and, 72–73 vocations, computers and, 12 Voltaire, 160 Volvo, 8 Vonnegut, Kurt, 39 Voss, Bill, 53 wages and income, 26, 31, 33 increase in, 22, 24, 30, 37 of pilots, 59–60 Wall Street, 77, 115, 156, 171 Wall Street Journal, 60, 153 warfare, 19, 35–36, 41, 48, 49 killer robots and, 187–93, 198, 204 Washington, University of, 102 Watson (supercomputer), 118–20 Watt, James, 36 wayfinding performance, 130 wayfinding skills, automation of, 122–37 wealth, 22, 26, 29, 32, 33, 117, 226–27 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 22–23, 106–7 weaving, weavers, 23, 36, 66 Weed, Lawrence, 123, 248n Weiser, Mark, 194–95 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 194 well-being, 15, 17, 137, 208 Wells, Thomas J., 49 Westinghouse, 175 Whitehead, Alfred North, 65–67, 83, 84 Wiener, Norbert, 37–40, 117, 158, 161 WifiSlam, 136 Wilde, Oscar, 25, 66, 224, 225 Williams, Serena, 82 Williams, William Carlos, xi Wilson, Timothy, 15 Winner, Langdon, 209, 224 Wired, 136, 153, 225 Woods, David, 162 word-processing programs, 101 Wordsworth, William, 137 work, 14–27, 213–14 paradox of, 14–16 standardization of, 107–8, 114 transfer of, 17–18, 66 see also jobs; labor world, 121, 123–24, 133, 216–20, 232 World War I, 58 World War II, 35–36, 41, 49, 157, 158, 174 Wright, Orville, 61, 168, 215 Wright, Wilbur, 60, 61, 168, 215 Xerox, 117 Xerox PARC, 194, 195, 202 x-rays, 70, 99 Yerkes, Robert M., 87–88 Yerkes-Dodson law and curve, 89–91, 165 Young, Mark, 90–91 Zaha Hadid, 141 Ziegler, Bernard, 170 Zuckerberg, Mark, 181, 203, 206 ALSO BY NICHOLAS CARR THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS THE BIG SWITCH: REWIRING THE WORLD, FROM EDISON TO GOOGLE DOES IT MATTER? INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE CORROSION OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE THE DIGITAL ENTERPRISE (editor) Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Carr All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W.

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Freeman, 1976), 20. 11.Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific American, September 1991. 12.Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, “The Coming Age of Calm Technology,” in P. J. Denning and R. M. Metcalfe, eds., Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (New York: Springer, 1997), 75–86. 13.M. Weiser et al., “The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing Research at PARC in the Late 1980s,” IBM Systems Journal 38, no. 4 (1999): 693–696. 14.See Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 15.Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 140. 16.W. Brian Arthur, “The Second Economy,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2011. 17.Ibid. 18.Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (New York: Warner Books, 1999), 37. 19.Arthur C.

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Dreyfus’s commentary “The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment,” Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 4 (Spring 1996), ejap.louisiana.edu/ejap/1996.spring/dreyfus.1996.spring.html. 10.Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (London: Penguin, 1996), 44. 11.John Edward Huth, “Losing Our Way in the World,” New York Times, July 21, 2013. See also Huth’s enlightening book The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). 12.Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 148. 13.Ibid., 261. 14.See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 15.Pascal Ravassard et al., “Multisensory Control of Hippocampal Spatiotemporal Selectivity,” Science 340, no. 6138 (2013): 1342–1346. 16.Anonymous, “Living in The Matrix Requires Less Brain Power,” Science Now, May 2, 2013, news.sciencemag.org/physics/2013/05/living-matrix-requires-less-brain-power. 17.Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 5th ed.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

When I describe my college years in the early 1970s, they have trouble grasping how people managed to communicate, how anything could get done, how limited the options seemed to be, how life could even be led. It would be akin to my great-grandparents from 1860 Nova Scotia or eastern Kentucky returning to describe their youth to me when I was growing up in suburban Cleveland in the 1960s. “For society as a whole the Net has become the communication and information medium of choice,” Nicholas Carr writes. “The scope of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twentieth century. The scope of its influence is equally broad.”8 Consider this: in 1995 the Internet had 10 million users, still disproportionately at U.S. universities, and it was all the rage. By 2011 the Internet had 2 billion users and was growing by leaps and bounds.

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“Many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, ‘she’ will be more and more like a best friend—one who will listen when others won’t.” Turkle concludes, “Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.”45 The idea that the Internet is transforming people unwittingly in ways that may be less than desirable is best developed in The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. While acknowledging all the benefits of the Internet, and his own addiction to it, Carr argues that the advantages “come at a price,” specifically by reshaping the way our brains work. Carr draws from the recent surge in brain science research demonstrating that brains are “massively plastic” and can be changed dramatically by their environment and how they are used and not used.

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The dominant media technology defines a society, he said, changing the very way we think and the way that human societies operate.11 His work was very influential on innumerable thinkers, including Neil Postman, who argued that television had an innate bias toward superficiality.12 “Every intellectual technology,” as Nicholas Carr puts it, “embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.” These technologies “have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think.”13 Without a political economic context, this approach can smack of media technological determinism, but with the PEC this approach highlights that media technologies have significant impact, an extra-large helping of what sociologists term “relative autonomy.”14 Innis did not only focus upon the importance of communication technologies; he was also a sharp critic of corporate media and media commercialization.15 The same was true of Postman, who termed the United States a technopoly, “a system in which technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life, and becomes self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent.”

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

Flu database row escalates. The Great Beyond (blog), September 14, 2009. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/09/flu_database_row_ escalates.html. [33] Robert H. Carlson. Biology Is Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. [34] Nicholas Carr. Is Google making us stupid? Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2008. [35] Nicholas Carr. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. [36] Henry William Chesbrough. Opennovation: The new Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2006. [37] Chess Base.

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Our main interest will be in scientific problem-solving, and of course it’s problems at the limit of human problem-solving ability that scientists most dearly want to solve, and whose solution will bring the greatestnefit. Superficially, the idea that online tools can make us collectively smarter contradicts the idea, currently fashionable in some circles, that the internet is reducing our intelligence. For example, in 2010 the author Nicholas Carr published a book entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, arguing that the internet is reducing our ability to concentrate and contemplate. Carr’s book and other similar works make many good points, and have been widely discussed. But new technologies seldom have just a single impact, and there’s no contradiction in believing that online tools can both enhance and reduce intelligence.

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Other influential works on related subjects include Hutchins’s detailed anthropological analysis of collective intelligence in the navigation of a ship [95], Lévy’s book on collective intelligence [124], and the stimulating collection of essays on collective intelligence recently assembled by Mark Tovey [224]. Writing from a very different point of view, David Easley and Jon Kleinberg have written a great textbook, Networks, Crowds, and Markets [59], which summarizes much of the mathematical and quantitative research on networks. Finally, I recommend Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows [35]. It asks the fundamental question, how are online tools changing the way we (individually) think? I believe Carr’s answer is incomplete, but it’s a stimulating exploration of this important question. Open source: The best way to get informed about open source is to participate in some open source projects.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

Even though we have upscale users and it’s a new study testing new sites, most of the findings are the same as we’ve seen year after year after year. Usability guidelines remain remarkably constant over time, because basic human characteristics stay the same. < Nicholas Carr > is google making us stupid? Originally published in The Atlantic (July/August 2008). NICHOLAS CARR is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010) and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008). He has been a columnist for The Guardian and executive editor of Harvard Business Review, and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Times (London), and The New Republic.

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Even accepting that these new behaviors are happening and that new kinds of media are providing the means for them, we still have to explain why. New tools get used only if they help people do things they want to do; what is motivating The People Formerly Known as the Audience to start participating? credits Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Nicholas Carr. Reproduced by permission of the author. Cathy Davidson, “We Can’t Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 23, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Cathy Davidson. Reproduced by permission from the author.

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Tim O’Reilly’s “What Is Web 2.0” (2005), for instance, helped solidify a fundamental recognition of the Web as a dynamic, collaborative application, not just a source of information and a desktop tool. Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” published 2001, coined terms that have had a tactical and widespread use among educators. Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008) was one of the most discussed essays of the year. Taken together, the selections form a far-reaching body of opinion about a rushing cataclysm that has upset centuries of social and intellectual practice. We do well to retain it. One of the dangers of the Digital Age is that technology changes so rapidly that it clouds our memory of things as they existed but a few years past.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

“It’s important to figure that out because this blended world of machines and humans is already upon us and it’s going to accelerate.”16 So what, exactly, are humans good for? Especially when compared with the smart machines that, according to Pew’s Lee Rainie, are “eating humans’ jobs.”17 I pose this question to Nicholas Carr, among America’s most respected writers on the human costs of the digital revolution, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Shallows and several other powerful books about technology. Over a dinner of Central Asian food at a funky Tajikistani teahouse in Boulder, Colorado, where Carr now lives, he talks metaphysics to me.

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Carr’s focus is on what Matthew Crawford, another popular American writer, describes as “shop class as soulcraft.”18 Carr is suggesting, like Thomas More, that the uniquely human value of a trade lies in its practice. Education, then, Carr argues, sounding not unlike Maria Montessori, shouldn’t just be about knowing; it’s also about doing. So that, according to Nicholas Carr, is what humans are good for in an age of increasingly smart machines. The challenge (and opportunity) for educators, then, is to teach everything that can’t be replicated by a robot or an algorithm. For Carr, with his vision of the profound limitations of computers, that includes the nurturing of intuition, ambiguity, and self-awareness.

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The development of the “will”—meaning nurturing the determination, self-control, and commitment of the individual child—is central in Waldorf pedagogy. To say that Waldorf schools are teaching More’s Law might be a slight exaggeration. But certainly the kind of duty-bound humanism that Thomas More preached in Utopia wouldn’t be out of place in a Waldorf school. At my dinner with Nicholas Carr in Colorado, I ask him if he thinks alternative educational traditions like Waldorf can help kids manage their online behavior more responsibly. Although digital media isn’t the technological version of fat or sugar, he answers, echoing the arguments of the New York University psychologist Adam Alter in Irresistible, kids are finding it increasingly difficult to control their internet consumption.

Why Liberalism Failed
by Patrick J. Deneen
Published 9 Jan 2018

A paramount example today may be found in anxious descriptions of how the internet and social media are inescapably changing us, mainly for the worse. Several recent books and studies describing the measurable baleful effects of these technologies have found a ready audience well beyond the usual academic circles. For instance, in his widely discussed book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the internet is literally changing us, transforming our brains into different organs from those of the preinternet world. Appealing to developments in studies of brain plasticity, Carr describes how persistent occupation with the internet is leading to physiological changes to our brains, and hence to the ways we think, learn, and act.

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From a response essay to David Brooks “Organization Kid,” by a member of Notre Dame class of 2018, in my course Political Philosophy and Education, August 29, 2016. Paper in author’s possession. 4. Wendell Berry, “Agriculture from the Roots Up,” in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005), 107–8. 5. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010). 6. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011). 7. Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the Family (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998); Mark Shiffman, “Humanity 4.5,” First Things, November 2015.

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“No Longer the Heart of the Home, the Piano Industry Quietly Declines,” New York Public Radio, January 6, 2015, http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/despite-gradual-decline-piano-industry-stays-alive/. CHAPTER 4. TECHNOLOGY AND THE LOSS OF LIBERTY 1. Brett T. Robinson, Appletopia (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013). 2. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010). 3. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011). 4. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993). 5.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 52 “the Protestant Reformation makes for good allegory”: ibid., 65. 52 “explain a political, technical, legal situation”: ibid., 72. 52 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 52 Nicholas Carr draws on Eisenstein’s work in The Shallows: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 70, 75. 53 “from her sources those facts and statements”: Anthony T. Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 2 (October 1, 1980): 265–286. 53 “the extent to which any text could circulate”: ibid., 273. 53 “No hard fact of technology dictates”: Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 53 “we know what we mean”: ibid., 7. 54 “Politics and human agency disappear”: ibid., 6. 54 “[Eisenstein’s] press is something ‘sui generis’”: Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 19. 54 “identifies as significant only the clearest instances of fixity”: ibid., 19. 55 “there is no intellectually coherent conservative position”: Shirky, “Tools and Transformations.” 56 “How to Acknowledge a Revolution”: Adrian Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 106–125. 56 “[Johns] accuses. . .

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Their theory stands in stark contrast to their practice—a common modern dissonance that they prefer not to dwell on. “The Internet” is also a way to shift the debate away from more concrete and specific issues, essentially burying it in obscure and unproductive McLuhanism that seeks to discover some nonexistent inner truths about each and every medium under the sun. Consider how Nicholas Carr, one of today’s most vocal Internet skeptics, frames the discussion about the impact that digital technologies have on our ability to think deep thoughts and concentrate. In his best-selling book The Shallows, Carr worries that “the Internet” is making his brain demand “to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.”

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Without understanding the limitations of Eisenstein’s highly disputed account of the “revolution” that followed the invention of the printing press, it’s impossible to make sense of contemporary claims for the significance of “the Internet,” not least because the stability that her account lends to “the Internet” makes her a favorite source of Internet optimists and pessimists alike (Nicholas Carr draws on Eisenstein’s work in The Shallows). Much like with rational-choice theory, what many fellow scholars believe to be rather problematic scholarship is presented as universally admired and entirely uncontroversial. To use Eisenstein as our guide to “the Internet” is to commit to a very particular way of thinking about digital matters.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

They presented some calculations to describe how they approximated “a page’s importance or quality.” Page and Brin’s paper was attempting to advance a belief that both their fathers had passed on to them: artificial intelligence (AI) was the next scientific frontier. The search engine would supplement the limited human brain. “Brin and Page,” Nicholas Carr would write years later, “are expressing a desire that has long been a hallmark of the mathematicians and computer scientists who have devoted themselves to the creation of artificial intelligence.” They were following the lead of René Descartes, the French philosopher/mathematician who four centuries ago argued that “the body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking,” and mathematical formulas were the preferred route to “pure understanding.”

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Craig Silverstein, Google employee number 1, said a thinking machine is probably “hundreds of years away” Marc Andreessen suggests that it is a pipe dream. “We are no closer to a computer that thinks like a person than we were fifty years ago,” he said. Sometimes lost in the excitement over the wonders of ever more relevant search is the potential social cost. In his provocative book The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr notes that Google’s goal is to store 100 percent of each individual’s data, what Google calls “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to “choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr wrote.

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Bressler, September 26, 2008. 3 Short and pugnacious: Ken Auletta, “The Invisible Manager,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1998. 4 Google’s private books revealed: from August 2004 Google IPO registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 4 Karmazin’s destination: description of 2400 Bayshore Parkway offices from visit by author, April 18, 2008; author interviews with David Krane, April 18, 2008, and with Marissa Mayer, September 18, 2008; and from Google video of headquarters, provided by Google. 6 25.2 billion Web pages: WorldWideWebSize.com, February 2, 2009. 7 It was Google’s ambition: Schmidt and Page speech at Stanford on May 1, 2002, as seen on YouTube. 7 several hundred million daily searches: Schmidt and Page speech at Stanford on May 1, 2002, as seen on YouTube. 7 the number of daily searches is now 3 billion: internal Google documents. 7 “our business is highly measurable”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 15, 2008. 8 $3 million spent: Advertising Age, September 11, 2008. 8 $172 billion spent in the United States on advertising, and the additional $227 billion spent on marketing: Zenith OptimediaReport, April 2009. 9 Mayer ... remembered the meeting vividly: author interview with Marissa Mayer, September 18, 2008. 9 “If Google makes”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 16, 2008. 9 “the long tail”: Chris Anderson, the Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Hyperion, 2006. 10 “aggregate content”: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 10 from a peak daily newspaper circulation: Nicholas Carr, Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, Norton; and The Project for Excellence in Journalism, “State of the News Media Report,” March 2007. 10 those networks... attract about 46 percent of viewers: Nielsen data on the 2008-9 season, May 2009. 12. “The innovator’s dilemma”: Clayton M.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
Published 9 Jun 2010

The comment thread is also extraordinary (accessed January 8, 2010). 50 Whether this revolution in the reading habits of the American public: Quoted in Kenneth Davis and Joann Giusto-Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (New York and Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984): 68. 57 The writer Nicholas Carr has dubbed this pattern digital sharecropping: Nicholas Carr writes at his blog, Rough Type. “Sharecropping the Long Tail” is from December 19, 2006, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/sharecropping_t.php (accessed January 8, 2010). 59 sued AOL on behalf of the ten thousand or so other volunteers: Lisa Napoli covered the AOL lawsuit for The New York Times: “Former Volunteers Sue AOL, Seeking Back Pay for Work,” The New York Times, March 26, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/26/nyregion/former-volunteers-sue-aolseeking-back-pay-for-work.html?

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At least traditional media outlets pay their contributors; with the new services, which enable amateurs to share work, the revenue goes not to the content creators but to the owners of the platform that enables the sharing, leading to the obvious question: why are all these people working for free? The writer Nicholas Carr has dubbed this pattern digital sharecropping, after the post- Civil War sharecroppers who worked the land but didn’t own it or the food they grew on it. With digital sharecropping, the platform owners get the money and the creators of the content don’t, a situation Carr regards as manifestly unfair.

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
by Nick Bilton
Published 13 Sep 2010

WWW 2010 (2010); Gilad Lotan, “ReTweet Revolution,” ReTweet Revolution, June 2009, http://giladlotan.org/viz/iranelection/index.html; Personal interview with Gilad Lotan, Microsoft Research Labs. 7 Young people tended to share political news: Brian Stelter, “Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On,” New York Times, March 27, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/americas/27iht-27voters.11460487.html. Chapter 5: when surgeons play video games 1 “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”: Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic July–August, 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/. Also Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. 2 A number of books: Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone under 30), New York: Jeremy P.

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Instead, trusted anchoring communities will help you filter and navigate a bigger world in an eye-opening way that has never been possible before. You just have to get your brain around the possibilities. 5 when surgeons play video games our changing brains Men were twice as likely [as women] to tweet or post status updates after sex. This Time, We’re Really Going to Hell In the summer of 2008, Nicholas Carr, an author and writer for The Atlantic magazine, felt his brain slipping ever so slightly from its moorings. In the past, he wrote, “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy.” Not 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,” he said.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

The sheer volume of data on the web allows people to cherry-pick facts or factoids or nonfacts that support their own point of view, encouraging academics and amateurs alike to find material to support their theories rather than examining empirical evidence to come to rational conclusions. As Nicholas Carr, the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, wrote in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, “We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.” On the web, where clicks are everything, and entertainment and news are increasingly blurred, material that is sensational, bizarre, or outrageous rises to the top, along with posts that cynically appeal to the reptilian part of our brains—to primitive emotions like fear and hate and anger.

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ATTENTION DEFICIT “When you want to know”: William Gibson, Zero History (New York: Putnam, 2010), 212. Tim Berners-Lee: “History of the Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee,” World Wide Web Foundation. “The rise of the web”: Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), loc. 332–33, Kindle. “We don’t see the forest”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 91. “urge to share was activated”: Wu, Attention Merchants, 320. “a commons that fostered”: Ibid., 322. two-thirds of Americans: “ ‘Who Shared It?’ How Americans Decide What News to Trust on Social Media,” American Press Institute, Mar. 20, 2017; Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017,” Pew Research Center, Sept. 7, 2017.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

Some people panic that our brains are being deformed on a physiological level by today’s technology: spend too much time flipping between windows and skimming text instead of reading a book, or interrupting your conversations to read text messages, and pretty soon you won’t be able to concentrate on anything—and if you can’t concentrate on it, you can’t understand it either. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr eloquently raised this alarm, arguing that the quality of our thought, as a species, rose in tandem with the ascendance of slow-moving, linear print and began declining with the arrival of the zingy, flighty Internet. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” he worried. I’m certain that many of these fears are warranted.

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When informatics professor Gloria Mark studied office employees for one thousand hours, she found that they could concentrate for only eleven minutes at a time on a project before being interrupted or switching to another task—and once they’d been interrupted, it took an average of twenty-five minutes to return to their original work. Other research has confirmed that rapid task switching makes it harder to manage our attention and to retain what we read. In one experiment, students who watched lectures while sending text messages did roughly 19 percent worse on a test than nontexting students. We develop what Nicholas Carr dubbed the “juggler’s brain,” a mind that can’t learn things because it doesn’t stand still long enough. Of course, task switching isn’t always bad. Certain kinds of work actually require and reward it. One survey of 197 businesses found that those with top management who were heavy multitaskers got 130 percent better financial results than companies that worked in a more “monochronic” fashion.

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That includes Tricia Wang, An Xiao Mina, Debbie Chachra, Liz Lawley, Zeynep Tufekci, Clay Shirky, Brooke Gladstone, Tom Igoe, Max Whitney, Terri Senft, Misha Tepper, Fred Kaplan, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Liz Lawley, Nick Bilton, Gary Marcus, Heidi Siwak, Ann Blair, Eli Pariser, Ethan Zuckerman, Ian Bogost, Fred Benenson, Heather Gold, Douglas Rushkoff, Rebecca MacKinnon, Cory Menscher, Mark Belinsky, Quinn Norton, Anil Dash, Cathy Marshall, Elizabeth Stock, Philip Howard, Denise Hand, Robin Sloan, Tim Carmody, Don Tapscott, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Nina Khosla, Laura Fitton, Jillian York, Hilary Mason, Craig Mod, Bre Pettis, Glenn Kelman, Susan Cain, Noah Schachtman, Irin Carmon, Matthew Battles, Cathy Davidson, Linda Stone, Jess Kimball, Phil Libin, Kati London, Jim Marggraff, Dan Zalewski, Sasha Nemecek, Laura Miller, Brian McNely, Duncan Watts, Kenyatta Cheese, Nora Abousteit, Deanna Zandt, David Wallis, Nick Denton, Alissa Quart, Stan James, Andrew Hearst, Gary Stager, Evan Selinger, Steven Demmler, and Vint Cerf. I’m grateful to Nicholas Carr for pushing forward my thinking about memory and creativity in The Shallows. More than a decade ago, Carl Goodman and Rochelle Slovin from the American Museum of the Moving Image first inspired me to think about the role of moving image in our thought. My apologies to the many colleagues I’ve inadvertently left out here; human memory being, as I’ve written, rather fragile, this is a necessarily incomplete list.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

ENDNOTES (1) The term economic singularity was first used (as far as I can tell) by the economist Robin Hanson: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/fastgrow.html (2) http://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.3329v1.pdf (3) http://skyview.vansd.org/lschmidt/Projects/The%20Nine%20Types%20of%20Intelligence.html (4) The term AGI has been popularised by AI researcher Ben Goertzel, although he gives credit for its invention to Shane Legg and others: http://wp.goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/ (5) The Shape of Automation for Men and Management by Herbert Simon, 1965 (6) Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines by Marvin Minsky, 1967 (7) http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ (8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading (9) The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (p 212) (10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Third_Department (11) The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (p 212) (12) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skfw282fJak (13) The Economist, December 4, 2003 (14) Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (15) http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/ (16) http://lazooz.org/ (17) https://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity (18) http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ (19) “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf (20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

Turkle refers to studies showing that, when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in their peripheral vision changes both what they talk about and their degree of connectedness.65 This does not mean we give up our phones but rather that we use them “with greater intention”. Other experts express related concerns. Technology and culture writer Nicholas Carr states that the more time we spend immersed in digital waters, the shallower our cognitive capabilities become due to the fact that we cease exercising control over our attention: “The Net is by design an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. Frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious.

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Personality and Social Psychology Review (2010). 64 Quoted in: Simon Kuper, “Log out, switch off, join in”, FT Magazine, 2 October 2015. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fc76fce2-67b3-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html 65 Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin, 2015. 66 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Atlantic Books, 2010. 67 Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, Simon and Schuster, 2014. 68 Quoted in: Elizabeth Segran, “The Ethical Quandaries You Should Think About the Next Time You Look at Your Phone”, Fast Company, 5 October 2015.

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry
by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler
Published 19 Nov 2009

This model made software similar to a utility, akin to paying a monthly electric bill. Why couldn’t customers pay a monthly bill for a service that would run business applications whenever and wherever? This delivery model seems so obvious now. Today we call it on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), multitenant (shared infrastructure), or cloud computing. In fact, Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and one of the most influential thinkers in the IT industry, has since written two best-selling books validating this idea. Carr has even suggested that ‘‘utility-supplied’’ computing will have economic and social impacts as profound as the ones that took place one hundred years ago, when companies ‘‘stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid.’’1 The industry has come a long way, but consider that when we started, we didn’t have these industry supporters, or even these words, to describe the computing revolution we believed was beginning.

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If something happens that I can leverage, I immediately send a journalist an e-mail with my comments or ‘‘leak’’ an internal memo. I also like to forward related articles and other people’s ideas that help establish our point. For instance, we often referenced Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch, two thought-provoking books that validated our crusade. It is essential to spend time learning about what is happening in your industry to leverage these opportunities as well as to prevent being caught off guard. Using industry news to our advantage has served us very well. For example, when Microsoft made an announcement that it was planning to buy Great Plains, a competitor of salesforce.com, I sent a memo to our staff and forwarded my comments to journalists.

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Life grows relative to one’s 259 BEHIND THE CLOUD investment in it. I promise you that by considering everyone’s success, you will see the return. I wish you great success. I look forward to hearing about the future you predict—and living in the one you create. Aloha, Marc 260 Notes Part 1 1. Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, New York: Norton, 2008, http://www .nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/. 2. The Yankee Group. ‘‘Mid-Market CRM Total Cost of Ownership: Noodling the Numbers,’’ Customer Relationship Strategies, Vol. 3, No. 6, June 2001. 3. Gartner, Inc., ‘‘SaaS at the Forefront of the Consumerization of IT,’’ May 8, 2007, http://www.gartner.com/Display Document?

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
by Kevin Dutton
Published 15 Oct 2012

News, “Today’s College Students More Likely to Lack Empathy.” 17 “People haven’t had the same exposure to traditional values …” See Thomas Harding, “Army Should Provide Moral Education for Troops to Stop Outrages,” The Telegraph, February 22, 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8341030/Army-should-provide-moral-education-for-troops-to-stop-outrages.html. 18 But the beginnings of an even more fundamental answer may lie … See Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Perceptual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science 20, no, 8 (2009): 989–99. 19 Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay … Nicholas Carr’s “The Dreams of Readers” appears in Mark Haddon (ed.), Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (London: Vintage, 2011), a collection of essays about the transformative power of reading. 20 The quicksilver virtual world … Christina Clark, Jane Woodley, and Fiona Lewis, The Gift of Reading in 2011: Children and Young People’s Access to Books and Attitudes Towards Reading—see www.literacytrust.org.uk/assets/0001/1303/The_Gift_of_Reading_in_2011.pdf. 21 … we’ve been talking about the emergence of neurolaw … For an excellent introduction to the emerging subdiscipline of neurolaw, see David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” The Atlantic., July/August 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/07/the-brain-on-trial/8520/. 22 The watershed study was published in 2002 … See Avshalom Caspi, Joseph McClay, Terrie E.

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Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives, to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses. Reading a book carves brand new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world. Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay “The Dreams of Readers,” “more alert to the inner lives of others.” We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn’t.2 Guilty, But Not to Blame Back in Montreal, Bob Hare and I down another whiskey.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

And they say that its supposedly free offerings come at the cost of our privacy and vulnerability to the surveillance state. (By the way, since often I am referring to the slightly distant past, most of the time I will use the word “Google” to refer to what is now Google and its parent company Alphabet combined, with Google as a subsidiary of Alphabet since 2015.) Coming from another direction, Nicholas Carr wrote a book arguing that Google is partly responsible for the decline in our memories—why remember facts when you can just search for them? He asserted outright that Google makes us stupider. More recently, social media companies have been blamed for the ascent of Donald Trump, the renaissance of racism, “fake news,” and the collapse of appropriate democratic discourse.

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Overall, I am astonished at just how varied the innovations of the major tech companies have been. It seems they have a core capacity for assembling, motivating, and coordinating human talent above and beyond the particular business lines where they won their earliest victories. DOES TECH MAKE US STUPID? Another criticism of the tech companies comes from thinkers such as Nicholas Carr, who has referred to the internet as “the shallows” and who has argued that Google is making us stupid. This criticism strikes me as a bit outside the focus of this book, as it pinpoints broader social and technological forces rather than the tech companies qua companies. Still, one feature of the current intellectual environment is that if a criticism of companies can be made, it will to some extent stick.

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Scott did find that nine other of the supported companies might count as “silly,” and of course not all of those listed will succeed, but overall is that such a bad record? Keep in mind that as you look forward, it is not always easy to tell which “silly” innovation might, every now and then, prove to be pathbreaking.11 In any case, I wonder how much the internet critics really believe their own words. I recall one time debating Nicholas Carr in a television studio on whether Google makes us stupider. The first question I asked him was whether, in preparing for the debate, he had used Google to research who I am. I thought I had won right then and there. I also suspect that a book as intellectual as his sold a disproportionate share of its copies online rather than in physical stores.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Sam Altman, for example, in a 2016 discussion on the subject, said that it would be affordable in the future because of huge increases in productivity and a reduction in the cost of necessities. I doubt this would be a strong enough basis to persuade most policy-makers in government). ‘It strains credulity,’ writes tech critic Nicholas Carr, ‘to imagine today’s technology moguls, with their libertarian leanings and impatience with government, agreeing to the kind of vast wealth distribution scheme that would be necessary.’13 Certainly their behaviour to date does not bode well. I asked Sam what felt to me like a very simple question: would people really be happy living in a society in which there are a small number of very rich people, and everyone else is given money to keep them occupied.

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‘The World’s 8 Richest Men Are Now as Wealthy as Half the World’s Population’, www.fortune.com, 16 January 2017. 9 David Madland, ‘Growth and the Middle Class’ (Spring 2011), Democracy Journal, 20. 10 Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (Penguin, 2009). 11 Wilkinson & Pickett, The Spirit Level, pp.272-273. 12 Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay. 13 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (Bodley Head, 2015). Chapter 5: The Everything Monopoly 1 Douglas Rushkoff, one of the more self-aware of these people come close to an apology for his previous work in his recent book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Penguin, 2016). 2 Before he become Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian wrote a book called Information Rules (Harvard Business Review Press, 1998), where he summed this all up very well: ‘positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, leading to extreme outcomes.’ 3 This, according to data available through Nielsen SoundScan, cited in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff. 4 Duncan Robinson, ‘Google heads queue to lobby Brussels’, Financial Times, 24 June 2015.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

The Works, The Heights, and The Way to Go by Kate Ascher examine how cities, skyscrapers, and our transportation networks, respectively, actually work. Beautifully rendered and fascinating books. The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee examines the rapid technological change we are experiencing and can come to expect, and how it will affect our economy, as well as how to handle this change. The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr is about the perils of automation and the related technological complexity around us. Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford explores the importance of getting close to our technologies again, as part of the virtue of manual labor. Summa Technologiae by Stanisław Lem (translated by Joanna Zylinska) is a wide-ranging exploration from the 1960s by a science fiction writer of the future of technology, with an emphasis on the limits of humanity’s powers of understanding.

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tools that, in Gingold’s words: Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, and Worlds, master’s thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, 62, http://levitylab.com/cog/writing/Games-Spaces-Worlds.pdf. systems are so completely automated: For further reading, see Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). “concealed electronic complexity”: Winner, Autonomous Technology, 285. component of the telephone system: Eytan Adar et al., “Benevolent Deception in Human Computer Interaction,” CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paris, France, April 27–May 2, 2013 (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2013): 1863–72.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future Edited by John Brockman To KHM Contents Cover Title Page Preface: The Edge Question Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement: W. Daniel Hillis The Bookless Library: Nicholas Carr The Invisible College: Clay Shirky Net Gain: Richard Dawkins Let Us Calculate: Frank Wilczek The Waking Dream: Kevin Kelly To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways: Richard Saul Wurman Tweet Me Nice: Ian Gold and Joel Gold The Dazed State: Richard Foreman What’s Missing Here?

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Now we are attending to a financial crisis caused by the banking system having miscomputed risks, and to a debate on global warming in which experts argue not so much about the data as about what the computers predict from the data. We have linked our destinies not only to one another across the globe but also to our technology. If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, ours is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and machines. Welcome to the dawn of the Entanglement. The Bookless Library Nicholas Carr Author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains As the school year began last September, Cushing Academy, an elite Massachusetts prep school that has been around since Civil War days, announced that it was emptying its library of books. In place of the thousands of volumes that had once crowded the building’s shelves, the school was installing, it said, “state-of-the-art computers with high-definition screens for research and reading,” as well as “monitors that provide students with real-time interactive data and news feeds from around the world.”

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I don’t even especially worry about where I am, either, considering myself not unlike a packet being routed—not from client machine to router to server to backhaul to peer to machine to client machine, but instead from house to car to plane to car to hotel to car to office or conference to car to hotel to car to plane to car to home, with jet lag my only friend and my laptop my source of entertaining books (Neutron Star), movies (Good Bye Lenin!), games (Fallout), or music (Orbital, Meat to Munich), with cellular data, headphones, and circuits. Some would equate this sort of information pruning to a kind of reinforced and embraced ignorance or evidence of an empty life. Nicholas Carr, writing in the Atlantic, enjoyed some attention in 2008 with his article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The author, reacting to (or justifying) his own reduced attention span, accuses Google (my employer) of trying to do away with deep thinking, while indulging in what comes off as an absurd nostalgia for making knowledge difficult to find and obtain.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

Computers, networks, and the Internet are now irretrievably integrated into our economic, social, and financial systems. IT is everywhere, and it’s difficult to even imagine life without it. Many observers have compared information technology to electricity, the other transformative general-purpose technology that came into widespread use in the first half of the twentieth century. Nicholas Carr makes an especially compelling argument for viewing IT as an electricity-like utility in his 2008 book The Big Switch. While many of these comparisons are apt, the truth is that electricity is a tough act to follow. Electrification transformed businesses, the overall economy, social institutions, and individual lives to an astonishing degree—and it did so in ways that were overwhelmingly positive.

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The Anti-Automation View Another often-proffered solution is simply to try to put a stop to this relentless progression toward ever more automation. At its most blunt, this might take the form of a union resisting the installation of new machinery in a factory, warehouse, or supermarket. There is also a more nuanced intellectual argument which says that too much automation is simply bad for us—and quite possibly dangerous. Nicholas Carr is perhaps the best-known proponent of this view. In his 2010 book The Shallows, Carr argues that the Internet may be having a negative impact on our ability to think. In a 2013 article for The Atlantic, entitled “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” he makes a similar argument about the impact of automation.

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Labor Market,” Economic Policy Institute, April 24, 2013, http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/. 6. Steven Brint, “The Educational Lottery,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 15, 2011, http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-educational-lottery. 7. Nicholas Carr, “Transparency Through Opacity” (blog), Rough Type, May 5, 2014, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=4496. 8. Erik Brynjolfsson, “Race Against the Machine,” presentation to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), May 3, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/PCAST_May3_Erik%20Brynjolfsson.pdf, p. 28. 9.

Things That Matter: Overcoming Distraction to Pursue a More Meaningful Life
by Joshua Becker
Published 19 Apr 2022

One study investigating the impact of interruptions at work showed that, on average, study participants took about twenty-three minutes to get back on task after a distraction.[8] So, potentially, that email you diverted your attention to in the middle of other work could mean twenty-three minutes of time lost for pursuing something more meaningful. And then there’s the way that technology is affecting our ability to concentrate and think at length—vital skills at work and in the rest of life. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, said, What we’re trading away for the riches of the Net—and only a curmudgeon would refuse to see the riches—is what [media blogger Scott] Karp calls “our old linear thought process.” Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.[9] Cal Newport echoed this by saying that however valuable our digital connectedness may be, we can’t lose the ability to do what he calls “deep work”—the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.[10] As we saw in the preceding chapter, work is closely related to our purpose and goals in life, and even if our paycheck gig isn’t our dream job, it deserves our best work because it’s a way we love and serve others.

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See also Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” CHI ’08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 6, 2008): 107–10, https://doi.org/​10.1145/​1357054.1357072. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, updated ed. (New York: Norton, 2020), 10. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central, 2016). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Cal Newport, quoted in Eric Barker, “Stay Focused: 5 Ways to Increase Your Attention Span,” Time, June 26, 2014, https://time.com/​2921341/​stay-focused-5-ways-to-increase-your-attention-span.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

Adam Pagnucco, “Why MPW Turned Down the Washington Post,” Maryland Politics Watch (April 20, 2010). 13. Laura M. Holson, “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline,” The New York Times (May 8, 2010). 14. Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (McGraw-Hill, 2008). 15. Ibid. 16. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, The Atlantic (July/August 2008). 17. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Atlantic Books, 2010). 18. James Harkin, Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own (Knopf Doubleday, 2009). 19. Evgeny Morozov, “Think Again: The Internet,” Foreign Policy (May/June 2010). 20.

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In a 2010 study, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their twenties exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves.13 This supports our findings and those of others who have argued that young people who have grown up digital are confronted with the privacy issue at an earlier age and naturally come to grips with it earlier.14 Helen Nissenbaum, an NYU professor of culture, media, and communication, came to the same conclusion in her book Privacy in Context, explaining that teenagers naturally learn to be protective of their privacy as they navigate the path to adulthood.15 Managing the Dark Side The list of concerns goes on and the skeptics are ascendant. Media critic Nicholas Carr posed the question “Is Google making us stupid?” in an Atlantic Monthly cover story16 and followed it up with a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. His conclusion is that the Web is taking us from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, fostering ignorance and changing the very conception of ourselves.17 Writer James Harkin says social networking is killing human relationships: we’ve all ended up in “Cyburbia: a peculiar no man’s land, populated by people who don’t really know each other, gossiping, having illicit encounters and endlessly twitching their curtains.”18 One thing is for sure.

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They design business models, structures, and business processes to ensure that work systems best serve the organization and maximize collaboration and the effectiveness of its people. But on the personal front, most of us muddle through this new networked and open world, stumbling from decision to decision or crisis to crisis without an overarching strategy. There is some truth to Nicholas Carr’s assertion that with the myriad technologies interrupting us, it’s tougher to focus deeply on a task or to read and analyze a long piece of text. Do we rely too much on Google to remember things for us? Sure, our kids are able to perform multiple tasks, including light homework, at once, but do we ensure that they have balance in their lives?

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy
by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale
Published 23 May 2011

Most investors are confident that they do not need the advice offered by neuroeconomists, but Malleret thinks that one of the legacies of the recent crisis could be a greater willingness to listen to them. Mark Roeder analyzes the role of information in the modern economy. Roeder notes that the spread of the Internet has changed how people absorb and use information. He quotes Nicholas Carr, who asserts that the Internet is impeding people’s ability to concentrate and contemplate. He believes that technology is encouraging us to be shallow and never dwell on one subject for long. The Internet can also cause us to become excessively narrow because we can choose to see only the information we want to see, whereas an ordinary newspaper could expose us to many topics.

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This behavior is facilitated by a dazzling array of new gadgets, such as Apple’s iPad, which provide simple and instantaneous access to the Net. How Skimming Is Hurting Our Ability to Think Although it may appear that skimming is simply the Internet version of “speed reading,” this would be to underestimate its influence on the way we process information. Nicholas Carr, writing in the Atlantic, says: 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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In the meantime, until these commercial and quality issues are sorted out, the cumulative effect of the trends outlined in this chapter will be to create a “diminishing law of returns of the Information Age” for both consumers and media companies. Indeed, this is the great paradox of our world today. Never before have we had access to so much information, yet so little understanding of how to manage it. Notes 1. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/. See also Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). See also Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind: Change Your Brain (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007). 2.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

Financial analysts argued that the software industry should be viewed as an area of “discretionary” spending that businesses would seek to minimize if the economy took another southward turn. The title of a 2003 Harvard Business Review article summed up the prevailing mood at the time: “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Its author, Nicholas Carr, basically called the entire sector a bunch of glorified plumbers: “By now, the core functions of IT—data storage, data processing, and data transport—have become available and affordable to all. Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production.

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According to the St. Louis Fed, since the Great Recession ended, jobs in the tech sector have been growing by 20 percent, compared with 11 percent growth in the rest of the private sector. In 2015, tech sector employment exceeded 4.6 million workers, passing its 2000 peak. I don’t think that was a given. I think Nicholas Carr could have easily been right—thanks to rampant commodification, the tech industry could have been relegated to a steady if underwhelming sector of the global economy. Until 1996 most of the jobs in the tech industry were in manufacturing—you went to work at a fabrication plant, not a hip start-up office.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

Like workplace wellness, happiness, resilience, and the positive psychology of flourishing, mindfulness sees the minds and bodies of employees as sources of economic value. Docile Subjects It’s ironic that while Google boasts about its mindful quest to “make the world a better place through the ‘technology’ of meditation,” its managers are, as Nicholas Carr puts it in The Shallows, “quite literally in the business of distraction.”14 In some ways, the two are connected. Corporate mindfulness works very subtly to train good employees to serve their employers — and the broader system that supports them. It’s not an industrial form of brainwashing, as defensive mindfulness teachers think critics are saying.

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. 10 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html 11 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2011. 12 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-your-work-place-might-be-killing-you 13 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. p.97 14 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain. W.W. Norton, 2011. 15 http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/rose-power-subjectivity 16 Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge University Press, 1998. p.114 17 https://rkpayne.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/corporatist-spirituality/ 18 Frederwick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

They provide solutions for problems that beset their industry today but can’t offer much help when the next wave of problems crashes down, which is why each new decade seems to bring a new bundle of methodologies. But there is one set of circumstances under which methodologies really are The Answer. This is the scenario presented by a business thinker named Nicholas Carr in a notorious May 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Carr infuriated legions of Silicon Valley visionaries and technology executives by suggesting that their products—the entire corpus of information technology, or IT—had become irrelevant. Like Francis Fukuyama, the Hegelian philosopher who famously declared “the end of history” when the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded, Carr argued, essentially, that software history is over, done.

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To believe that we already know all the possible uses for software is to assume that the programs we already possess satisfy all our needs and that people are going to stop seeking something better. Irate critics of software flaws like The Software Conspiracy’s Mark Minasi and skeptical analysts of the software business like Nicholas Carr share these end-of-history blinders. If you believe that we already know everything we want from software, then it’s natural to believe that with enough hard work and planning, we can perfect it—and that’s where we should place our energies. Don’t even think about new features and novel ideas; focus everyone’s energies on whittling down every product’s bug list until we can say, for the first time in history, that most software is in great shape.

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The Joel Test: Joel Spolsky posting from August 9, 2000, at http://www.joelon software.com/articles/fog0000000043.htm, and also in Joel on Software, p. 17. 37 Signals presented more on its philosophy in a 2006 PDF book, Getting Real, at https://gettingreal.37signals.com/. Google’s software development methods are outlined in Quentin Hardy, “Google Thinks Small,” Forbes, November 14, 2005, at http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/1114/054A_ print.htm. Nicholas Carr, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” Harvard Business Review, May 2003, at http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.htm. CHAPTER 10 ENGINEERS AND ARTISTS All quotes are from the 1968 NATO software engineering conference report: P. Naur and B. Randell, eds., “Software Engineering: Report of a Conference Sponsored by the NATO Science Committee,” Garmisch, Germany, October 7–11, 1968 (Scientific Affairs Division, NATO, 1969).

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

I went from fighting on the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars, to being an enslaved person in the Deep South, to being an Israeli mother trying to avoid hearing the news that her son has been killed. As I reflected on this, I started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis. He warned that the way we are reading seems to be changing as we migrate to the internet—so I went back to one of the key experts he drew on, to see what they have learned since. Anne Mangen is a professor of literacy at the University of Stavanger in Norway, and she explained to me that in two decades of researching this subject, she has proved something crucial.

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What happens when that deepest layer of thinking becomes available to fewer and fewer people, until it is a small minority interest, like opera, or volleyball? * * * As I wandered the streets of Provincetown contemplating some of these questions, I found myself thinking back over a famous idea that I now realized I had never really understood before—one that was also mulled, in a different way, by Nicholas Carr in his book. In the 1960s, the Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan talked a lot about how the arrival of television was transforming the way we see the world. He said these changes were so deep and so profound that it was hard to really see them. When he tried to distill this down into a phrase, he explained that “the medium is the message.”

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Delgado et al., “Don’t Throw Away Your Printed Books: A Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Reading Media on Reading Comprehension,” Educational Research and Reviews 25 (2018): 23–38. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT in elementary-school children, it’s the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s growth in reading comprehension: Ibid. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT one that was also mulled, in a different way, by Nicholas Carr in his book: N. Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), 6. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the medium is the message”: Gerald Emanuel Stern, ed., McLuhan: Hot & Cool (New York: Dial Press, 1967), 20, 23, 65, 212–13, 215.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

We have another fifty years of change of this kind to come and the scale of the upheavals may be even greater as the technology becomes widely adopted and gains momentum. A third small but vociferous group are people who say the web is already having a big impact on society and it is mainly bad for us. The chief proponents of this view are the polemicist Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur, Nicholas Carr in his thoughtful The Big Switch, Larry Sanger, one of the co-creators of Wikipedia and the brain scientist Susan Greenfield. These critics worry the web is uprooting the authority of experts, professionals and institutions which help us to sort truth from falsehood, knowledge from supposition, fact from gossip.

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This scepticism is echoed by many professions who feel threatened by the web: journalists, teachers, academics and librarians among them. The boulders might have been cumbersome but they filtered the good from the bad before it was published. In web world things get published first and then filtered afterwards, depending on people’s reactions to them. A related worry, articulated by Nicholas Carr and Susan Greenfield, is that our dependence on the web and computers is eroding our ability for independent thought. ‘Google is making us stupid,’ is Carr’s catchphrase. We accept the answers the search engines supply without really analysing what they mean or where they came from. Screens make our thinking dependent on stimulation, according to Greenfield.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

And when we’re upgrading components of our own brains, instead of updating Microsoft Office or buying a few chips of RAM, it’ll be a much more delicate procedure than anything we’ve experienced before, at least at first. Yet Kurzweil claims that in this century we’ll experience 200,000 years of technological progress in a hundred calendar years. Could we tolerate so much progress coming so fast? Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, argues that smart phones and computers are lowering the quality of our thoughts, and changing the shape of our brains. In his book, Virtually You, psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude warns that social networking and role-playing games encourage a swarm of maladies, including narcissism and egocentricity.

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The next step for intelligence augmentation is to put all the enhancement contained in a smart phone inside us—to connect it to our brains. Right now we interface with our computers with our ears and eyes, but in the future imagine implanted devices that permit our brains to connect wirelessly to a cloud, from anywhere. According to Nicholas Carr, author of the Big Switch, that’s what Google’s cofounder Larry Page has in mind for the search engine’s future. “The idea is that you no longer have to sit down at a keyboard to locate information,” said Carr. “It becomes automatic, a sort of machine-mind meld. Larry Page has discussed a scenario where you merely think of a question, and Google whispers the answer into your ear through your cell phone.”

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

Although personal capabilities grow more miraculous by the week, there is mounting evidence that these greater levels of personalization aren’t necessarily making us any more enlightened—about our own self-interest or the interests of the broader society. At the outset of this book, we saw how software designers keep online gamers glued to their screens—and thus evermore detached from the real world. But that dynamic, it turns out, isn’t confined to gaming. As journalist Nicholas Carr demonstrated in his sharp and depressing account The Shallows, everyone who regularly partakes of the digital realm is exposed to the same patterns. The problem, as Carr documents, lies in the very elements of the digital environment that so willingly conform to our preferences. The online environment is naturally organized like a gigantic game, with endless opportunities for what psychologists call positive reinforcement.

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Cited in Tom Murphy, “An Angel and a Brute: Self-Interest and Individualism in Tocqueville’s America,” essay for preceptorial on Democracy in America, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, http://www.brtom.org/sjc/sjc4.html. 6. Michio Kaku, “The Next 20 Years: Interacting with Computers, Telecom, and AI in the Future,” keynote address, RSA Conference 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=Y6kmb16zSOY. 7. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 117. 8. Kent Gibbons, “Advanced Advertising: Obama Campaign Showed Valueof Targeting Viewers,” MultichannelNews, Nov. 13, 2012, http://www.multichannel.com/mcnbc-events/advanced-advertising-obama-campaign-showed-value-targeting-viewers/140262. 9.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

When you give a rat a minuscule dose of sugar, it engenders “a panting appetite,” Berridge says—a powerful and not necessarily pleasant state. See Emily Yoffe, “Seeking How the Brain Hard-Wires Us to Love Google, Twitter, and Texting. And Why That’s Dangerous,” Slate, August 12, 2009, www.slate.com/id/2224932/pagenum/all/#p2 (accessed September 25, 2009). See also Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July-August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google (accessed November 20, 2009), and Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “What Is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?” Brain Research Reviews 28 (1998): 309-369.

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In particular I acknowledge the adolescent psychiatrist John Hamilton and the panels on “Adolescence in Cyberspace” on which we have collaborated at the Annual Meetings of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in October 2004 and October 2008; the participants in the MIT working group, “Whither Psychoanalysis in Digital Culture” Initiative on Technology and Self, 2003-2004; and participants at the Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis’s “New Directions” Conference, April 30, 2010. 31 Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus, 2008). 32 Matt Richtel, “Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price,” New York Times, July 7, 2010, http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?sort=oldest&offset=2 (accessed July 7, 2010). 33 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010). Here, the argument is that online activities—surfing, searching, jumping from e-mail to text—actually change the nature of the brain. The more time we spend online, the more we are incapable of quiet reverie, not because of habits of mind but because of a rewiring of our circuitry.

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Bell and Gemmell admit that despite all problems, “for us the excitement outweighs the fear.” See Bell and Gemmell, “A Digital Life.” 8 Indeed, with far less “remembrance technology,” many of us wonder if Google is “making us stupid” because it is always easier to search than remember. The originator of this memorable phrase is Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ (accessed August 12, 2010). 9 Thompson, “A Head for Detail.” 10 Thompson, “A Head for Detail.” 11 Obama himself fought hard and famously to keep his BlackBerry, arguing that he counts on this digital device to make sure that the “bubble” of his office does not separate him from the “real” world.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

The challenge, according to Vega, was to undo the classic assembly-line mentality most of the workers had grown up with, and make them understand that they were an active and dynamic part of the manufacturing process. The term economists have used for this is reskilling, which is the antidote to the phenomenon of deskilling that has been a natural consequence of automating workflow. In his excellent book on the cost of automation, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr defines deskilling: “As more skills are built into the machine, it assumes more control over the work, and the worker’s opportunity to engage in and develop deeper talents, such as those involved in interpretation and judgment, dwindles. When automation reaches its highest level, when it takes command of the job, the worker, skill wise, has nowhere to go but down.”

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Human input will become more valuable, and analog tools and practices–from note taking on whiteboards to translating digital experiences into the real world (such as retail stores)—will separate the leading businesses from the rest of the pack. That is because analog is a tool of productivity. Often the best tool. “We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally,” Nicholas Carr wrote in The Glass Cage. “But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

Tommy Christopher, “Van Susteren Explains Why Anti-Fox Clip with Occupy Wall St. Protester Got Cut,” MediaIte.com, October 3, 2011, www.mediaite.com/tv/van-susteren-explains-why-anti-fox-interview-with-occupy-wall-st-protester-got-cut. CHAPTER 2: DIGIPHRENIA: BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO 1. See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) and Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 2. Look at Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas for the earliest notions of real time and existence compared with human-defined days and years.

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For more on drones and drone pilots, see my PBS documentary on Frontline, Digital Nation, in particular the section on “War by Remote,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/blog/2009/10/new-video-fighting-from-afar.html. Also see Phil Stewart, “Overstretched Drone Pilots Face Stress Risk.” Reuters, December 18, 2011. 34. See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows; Sherry Turkle, Alone Together; and Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus, 2009). 35. Henry Greely, “Towards Responsible Use of Cognitive-enhancing Drugs by the Healthy,” Nature, December 7, 2008. 36. James G. March, A Primer on Decision Making (New York: Free Press, 1994), 245. 37.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

The Resurgence of Utopianism 231 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 232 See Ben Hammersley, “Audible Revolution,” The Guardian, February 12, 2004, 27; and James Van Orden, “The History of Podcasting,” http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/history-of-podcasting. htm. See Claire Cain Miller, “To Win Over Today’s Users, Gadgets Have to Be Touchable,” New York Times, September 1, 2010, B1. But see the critique of e-books by Nicholas Carr, “Schools, Beware the E-Book,” Portland Press Herald, August 15, 2011, A7. See Joseph Galante, Bloomberg News, “Amazon Says It Sells More EBooks than Hardcovers,” Boston Globe, July 20, 2010, B9. See also Julie Bosman, “Pete Hamill, Patriarch of Print, Goes Direct to Digital,” New York Times, August 12, 2010, C6.

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See also Josh Quittner, “The Future of Reading,” Fortune, 161 (March 1, 2010), 63–67, regarding publishing’s foolish reliance on simple-minded and ignorant consultants rather than on their foremost reporters to try to grasp the ongoing changes in the industry from the mid-1990s onward. The Resurgence of Utopianism 76 All quotations are from Steven Johnson, “Unboxed: Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social,” Sunday New York Times, Week in Review, June 20, 2010, 3. See also Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, 302 (July/August 2008), 56–63. On one couple’s differing preference for conventional versus electronic reading materials, see Matt Richtel and Claire Cain Miller, “Of Two Minds About Books: Print or Pixels?” New York Times, September 2, 2010, B1, B4. See also Nick Bilton, “Personal Tech: Deciding on a Book, and How to Read It,” New York Times, August 11, 2011, B10.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

In the distant days of 2006, when Facebook was just a toddler, Benkler got into an argument that would grow into a big bet about the future (and would also sound a little like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel). It became known as the “Carr-Benkler wager.” It all began with some strong words. Nicholas Carr, the technology writer and commentator, posted a somewhat snarky response to Benkler’s then-recent book, The Wealth of Networks, in which Benkler anticipated a wave of “nonmarket-based cooperation and productive collaboration,” which translates roughly as “people creating things together for reasons other than financial reward.”

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“amateur activity springing up”: Olivier Silvian, “Contingency and the ‘Networked Information Economy’: A Critique of The Wealth of Networks,” International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society 4 (2008): 7. “We could decide to appoint”: Yochai Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited,” Yochai Benkler’s blog, May 7, 2012. www.blogs.harvard.edu. “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler!”: Nicholas Carr, “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler,” Rough Type (blog), May 1, 2012. www.roughtype.com. “For investors, no less than”: Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited.” The early flourish of something like: Couchsurfing International, July 2017. www.couchsurfing.com. “I’m thrilled that you’re writing”: Yochai Benkler, discussion with authors, December 2, 2016.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

(Starr), 218 When We Are No More (Rumsey), 325–27 Whitman, Walt, 20, 183, 184 wicks, 229–30 Wiener, Anthony, 315 wiki, as term, 19 “wikinomics,” 84 Wikipedia, xvi, 21, 192 in fact-mongering, 58 hegemony of, 68 ideological split in, 18–20 slipshod quality of, 5–8 wiki-sects, 18 Wilde, Oscar, 174, 308 Williams, Anthony, 84 Wilson, Fred, 11 Windows Home Server, 32 Winer, Dave, 35 wings, human fascination with, 329–30, 335, 340–42 wingsuits, 341–42 Wired, xvii, xxi, 3, 4, 106, 156, 162, 174, 195, 232 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 215 Wolf, Gary, 163 Wolf, Maryanne, 234 Wolfe, Tom, 170 work: as basis for society, 310–11, 313 in contemplative state, 298–99 efficiency in, 165–66, 237–38 job displacement in, 164–65, 174, 310 trivial alternatives to, 64 World Brain (Wells), 267 World Health Organization, 244 World of Warcraft, 59 Wozniac, Steve “Woz,” 32 Wright brothers, 299 writing: archiving of, 325–27 and invention of paper, 286–87 writing skills, changes in, 231–32, 234–35, 240 Xbox, 64, 93, 260 X-Ray Spex, 63 Yahoo, 67, 279–80 Yahoo People Search, 256 Y Combinator Startup School, 172 Yeats, William Butler, 88 Yelp, 31 Yosemite Valley, 341–42 youth culture, 10–11 as apolitical, 294–95 music and, 125 TV viewing in, 80–81 YouTube, 29, 31, 58, 75, 81, 102, 186, 205, 225, 314 technology marketing on, 108–9 Zittrain, Jonathan, 76–77 zombies, 260, 263 Zuckerberg, Mark, xvii, xxii, 53, 115, 155, 158, 215, 225 Facebook Q & A session of, 210–11, 213, 214 imagined as jackal, xv ALSO BY NICHOLAS CARR The Glass Cage The Shallows The Big Switch Does IT Matter? The Digital Enterprise (editor) Copyright © 2016 by Nicholas Carr All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Inference to the Best Explanation Not all explanations are created equal. Emanuel Derman Pragmamorphism Being pragmamorphic sounds equivalent to taking a scientific attitude toward the world, but it easily evolves into dull scientism. Nicholas Carr Cognitive Load When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit. Hans Ulrich Obrist To Curate In our phase of globalization . . . there is a danger of homogenization but at the same time a countermovement, the retreat into one’s own culture.

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These debates could be sharpened by bringing to bear on them the rationality-steeped notion of inference to the best explanation, its invocation of the sorts of standards that make some explanations objectively better than others, beginning with Peirce’s enjoinder that extraordinary hypotheses be ranked far away from the best. Cognitive Load Nicholas Carr Science and technology journalist; author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains You’re sprawled on the couch in your living room, watching a new episode of Justified on the tube, when you think of something you need to do in the kitchen. You get up, take ten quick steps across the carpet, and then just as you reach the kitchen—poof!

Beautiful security
by Andy Oram and John Viega
Published 15 Dec 2009

This is potentially a major paradigm shift in many of the security technologies we have come to accept, decoupling the content from the delivery mechanism. In the future, thanks to BPM software security, analysts will be able to select the best anti-virus engine and the best analysis feed to fuel it—but they will probably not come from the same vendor. When Nicholas Carr wrote Does IT Matter?,† he argued that technology needs to be realigned to support business instead of driving it. BPM is not rocket science (although it may include rocket science in its future), but it’s doing just that: realigning technology to support the business. In addition to offering radical improvements to information security by opening new markets, BPM can deliver even more powerful changes through its effects on the evolution of the science behind security.

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Model and Automate Process Security effect: Improve efficiency and reduce cost 4. Understand Operations and Implement Controls Security effect: Improve efficiency and reduce cost Security effect: Fast and accurate compliance and audit data (visibility) 5. Optimize and Improve † Does IT Matter?, Nicholas Carr, Harvard Business School Press, 2004. TOMORROW’S SECURITY COGS AND LEVERS 157 Security effect: Do more with less Security effect: Reduce cost Put another way: if you understand and document your process, metrics, and objectives; model and automate your process; understand and implement your process; and optimize and improve the process, you will implement a structured and effective information security program, understand the success criteria and track effectiveness, improve efficiency and reduce cost, produce fast and accurate compliance, audit data, and ultimately do more with less and reduce the cost of security.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age
by Robert Wachter
Published 7 Apr 2015

“They eliminated the step of the pharmacist checking on the robot, because the idea is you’re paying so much money because it’s so accurate.” Chapter 18 The Nurse Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our eyes and ears. —Nicholas Carr, writing in the Atlantic, 2013 Brooke Levitt had been on the nursing staff at UCSF for about 10 months when Pablo Garcia was admitted for his colonoscopy. Levitt is in her mid-twenties, with an open face, a ready smile, and an upbeat Southern California vibe that makes her a favorite of kids and their parents.

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But then there are the tragic stories of crashes (such as the 2009 crashes of Air France 447 off the coast of Brazil and Colgan Air 3407 near Buffalo) in which the machines failed, and, after they did, it became clear that the pilots did not know how to fly the planes. Experts call this phenomenon deskilling, and preventing it is a major focus of today’s aviation safety efforts. In his 2014 book, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr describes the challenge. “How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill?” he asked. “You can’t. Those are the kinds of shadowy, intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they’re gone.” In a perverse way, we’ve been lucky that the current state of health IT is so woeful.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

As our roads and bridges crumble for lack of investment, it seems a little dicey to hand off control to an internal conversation between your car’s computers and previously compiled GPS maps—suppose there is a new and very large crater in the road? If there is a fight for control, we want whoever is right (the computer or the person behind the wheel) to win that battle, but both are fallible. The human being is more fallible than he was previously, due to the cognitive challenges of partial automation. In The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr writes, “We all know about the ill effects of information overload. It turns out that information underload can be equally debilitating.” He cites work in human factors research that shows how making things too easy for people can backfire, because our “attentional capacity . . . shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload.”

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in Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (San Diego, CA, Sept. 30–Oct. 4) (Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2013), pp. 1938–1942, as cited in Casner et al., “The Challenges of Partially Automated Driving.” 25.Thus MacArthur Job, Air Disaster, vol. 3 (Australia: Aerospace Publications, 1998), p. 155. 26.Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), pp. 90-91, citing Mark S. Young and Neville A. Stanton, “Attention and Automation: New Perspectives on Mental Overload and Performance,” Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science 3, no. 2 (2002) and a classic work in psychology by Robert M.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Consider the way in which environmental or gender equality concerns have impacted the business plans of big corporations in recent decades. One of the forces driving change is political pressure from voters who don’t share the interests of the cognitive classes. And there are other trends that suggest the Head will soon face a more even contest with Hand and Heart. A dystopian trend was suggested by American journalist Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in which he argued that we are all being made dumber by the Internet.13 Carr argued that sustained exposure to the Internet is reordering our synapses in ways that make us crave novelty and struggle to focus. This may bring improvements in some fields, but overall it means significant losses in linguistic facility, memory, and concentration.

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Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2019). 11 Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020), 16. 12 Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Questions (Penguin, 2019). 13 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 14 Paul Krugman, “White Collar Workers Turn Blue,” New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1996, https://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/BACKWRD2.html. 15 Economist, June 22, 2019, 65. 16 “Woman and Work: Do Attitudes Reflect Policy Shifts?

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

Among them, the psychologist Sherry Turkle has observed youngsters obsessed with computer games. The sorts of disputes kids have on real playing fields about who plays fair or what should be the rules of play do not occur when they sit down in front of the computer; they are absorbed within the frame of predetermined rules which ensure the game can go forward. Nicholas Carr has argued that multitasking onscreen disables people cognitively, shortening their attention span and so leading them to avoid situations which demand prolonged attention to be understood. Both are saying that certain experiences of technology disable cognition of a sustained and questioning sort.

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Paul Merholz, ‘“Frictionless” as an Alternative to “Simplicity” in Design’, Adaptive Path blog, 22 July 2010; http://adaptivepath.org/ideas/friction-as-an-alternative-to-simplicity-in-design/. 13. Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: Smart Machines, Dumb Humans, and the Myth of Technological Perfectionism (New York: Perseus Books, 2013). 14. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 15. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 16. Norman J. Slamecka and Peter Graf, ‘The Generation Effect: Delineation of a Phenomenon’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 4, no. 6 (1978): 592–604. 17.

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt
Published 14 May 2018

Why couldn’t we simply spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing the things we used to do before computers came along—like burying our noses in novels? Well, it may be that computers are affecting us in a more insidious fashion than we realize. They may be reshaping our brains—and not for the better. That was the drift of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” a 2008 cover story by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic. A couple of years later, Carr, a technology writer and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, elaborated his indictment of digital culture into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr believes that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers.

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STRANGELOVE MAKES A THINKING MACHINE George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon, 2012). Norman MacRae, John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More (Pantheon, 1992). 17. SMARTER, HAPPIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2006). Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). 18.

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield
by Robert H. Latiff
Published 25 Sep 2017

More worrisome from a weapons standpoint, rare earth metals are ubiquitous in high-performance aircraft, missiles, and advanced electronics. Without the powerful magnets they make possible, some weapons simply will not work. Ten times stronger than a typical iron magnet, rare earth magnets enable control of the fins on highly maneuverable and very-high-speed missiles. The technology and culture writer Nicholas Carr has said that “the deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology.” Sometimes technical “advancements” make little practical sense and our dependence on them is not much more than wishful thinking. For example, many consider ballistic missile defense technologies essential, thereby justifying the enormous resources spent on them, notwithstanding their somewhat inconsistent operational performance.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner
Published 15 Mar 2012

There are a variety of reasons for the decline of small-town America. But when all kinds of communications and entertainment are delivered to your home, there are fewer and fewer reasons to go into town and exchange greetings in person. Information brings with it unintended consequences, too. Some technology journalists, notably the writer Nicholas Carr, have asked recently whether an increasing reliance on instant communications and Internet data is eroding our need, or ability, to think deeply. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr writes. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”5 It is the dark side, in many respects, of Kelly’s 1951 prediction, which has proven largely correct, that future networks would be “more like the biological systems of man’s brain and nervous system.”

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The researchers at the new lab focused on microwave and lightwave communications. 3 Press release, Intel Corporation, October 19, 2010. 4 Hendrik Hertzberg,“Open Secrets,” New Yorker, August 2, 2010. Hertzberg’s column summarized many points in the multipart Washington Post story “Top Secret America,” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin; http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america. 5 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, July–August 2008. 6 M. J. Kelly, “Remarks Before Bell System Lecturer’s Conference,” October 2, 1951. 7 Jon Gertner, “Mad Scientist,” Fast Company, February 2008. 8 John Pierce, Testimony, Subcommittee on Communication of the Senate Commerce Committee, March 22, 1977.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

As networks begin to understand how we think and feel, they will prompt us for more information or suggest emotional responses, all of which will be machine-readable. They may also allow companies such as Facebook to help us stop self-censoring by pushing us to reconsider deleted updates or to post something when they detect a change in our mood. The writer Nicholas Carr envisions a system that “automates the feels”: “Whenever you write a message or update, the camera in your smartphone or tablet will ‘read’ your eyes and your facial expression, precisely calculate your mood, and append the appropriate emoji. Not only does this speed up the process immensely, but it removes the requirement for subjective self-examination and possible obfuscation.

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“App Developers.” beyondverbal.com/join-us/app-developers. 41 “measure psychological traits”: Michal Kosinski, David Stilwell, and Thor Graepel. “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. March 11, 2013, 110(15), 5802-5. pnas.org/content/early/2013/03/06/1218772110. 42 “a win-win-win”: Nicholas Carr. “Automating the Feels.” Rough Type. Aug. 20, 2013. roughtype.com/?p=3693. 42 “The more proactive”: Betsy Morais. “Can Humans Fall in Love with Bots?” New Yorker. Nov. 19, 2013. newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/11/her-film-spike-jonze-can-humans-fall-in-love-with-bots.html. 42 Suggest responses: BBC News.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

“But then they were just using a program to basically avoid learning things in the first place,” he says. So Fred got an early exposure to the ethical complexities of software: By making something easy to do, you can change the mental habits of other people. Humans are inherently pretty lazy; as Nicholas Carr notes in The Glass Cage, when someone offers us the ability to take a shortcut, we take it. We only discover later that we may have traded off an ingrained skill—or, in the case of calculus, never learned it in the first place. But it’s incredibly hard to resist because we’re constantly given new tools from programmers who’ve figured out how to remove friction from daily life.

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Greek word for “time”: Kah Seng Tay, “What Is the Etymology of ‘Cron’?,” Quora, December 22, 2015, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-etymology-of-cron. do it over and over: Peter Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (New York: Apress, 2009), 77. we take it: Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). “so many questions about it”: Tom Christiansen, Brian D. Foy, Larry Wall, and Jon Orwant, Programming Perl: Unmatched Power for Text Processing and Scripting (Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2012), 387, 1062. “when are you free?”: “As a programmer, what tasks have you automated to make your everyday life easier?

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

They do, however, provide a place where people trained in a free software project could turn around and monetize their skills even if they were not employed by a company to develop the open-source project.) As many examples from the software world repeatedly show, looser, more indirect forms of payment that are not directly tied to specific actions are far better at motivating participation in collaborative projects. A direct appeal or a pay-for-performance model (what Nicholas Carr called Calacanis’s Wallet) simply deters those who are seeking to pursue their own intrinsic interests. Models of payment, then, to the extent necessary and desirable at all, need to be more removed and distinct from the intrinsically motivated activity. So crowding out does not occur in the open-source software world, because the industry developed practices to keep an unusual degree of autonomy in the hands of the software developers and to make the creation process a rewarding one.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

A world of interoperable self-driving cars would provide an opportunity for current on-demand drivers—or, in a future world of self-driving trucks, independent truckers—to participate in the marketplace as owner-operators; a world in which a company like Tesla is able to limit the ability of its car owners to drive for any competing service reduces the drivers to a real-world version of what author Nicholas Carr has called “digital sharecroppers.” Ensuring interoperability of self-driving cars is as important as was the original interoperability that drove the Internet revolution. Open standards in this area will help ordinary people, not just big companies, to reap the benefits of the next wave of automation.

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The essay is also available online at http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/495. 54 “a remote control for real life”: Kara Swisher, “Man and Uber Man,” Vanity Fair, December 2014, retrieved March 30, 2017, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/12/uber-travis-kalanick-controversy. 54 “That’s what it’s all about”: Brad Stone, The Upstarts (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), 52. 55 they observed in Zimbabwe: As told to me by Logan Green in 2015. 56 the incentives: Stone, The Upstarts, 71. 57 “everyone benefits”: “The Uber Story,” uber.com, retrieved March 30, 2017, https://www.uber.com/our-story/. 57 one customer in Los Angeles: Priya Anand, “People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid of Their Cars,” BuzzFeed, September 2, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/priya/people-in-los-angeles-are-getting-rid-of-their-cars. 59 one of the most difficult exams in the world: Jody Rosen, “The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS,” New York Times Magazine, November 24, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/t-magazine/london-taxi-test-knowledge.html. 59 it does save them money: “Workforce of the Future: Final Report (Slide 12),” Markle, retrieved March 30, 2017, https://www.markle.org/workforce-future-final-report. 63 Tesla seems to have other plans: Dan Gillmor, “Tesla Says Customers Can’t Use Its Self-Driving Cars for Uber,” Slate, October 21, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/10/21/tesla_says_customers_can_t_use_its _self_driving_cars_for_uber.html. 64 “digital sharecroppers”: Nicholas Carr, “The Economics of Digital Sharecropping,” Rough Type, May 4, 2012, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1600. 67 “proximity to the market”: From an unpublished preprint sent to me by Laura Tyson of Laura Tyson and Michael Spence, “Exploring the Effects of Technology on Income and Wealth Inequality,” in After Piketty, ed.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

For more on the origins of AWS, see former Amazonian Steve Yegge’s (since removed) rant on Google+, available at gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611; Jeff Barr, “My First 12 Years at Amazon.com,” August 19, 2014; Andy Jassy’s review of Stone’s The Everything Store on Amazon.com; Benjamin Black, “EC2 Origins,” January 25, 2009; Jack Clark, “How Amazon Exposed Its Guts: The History of AWS’s EC2,” ZDNet, June 7, 2012; Bharath Kumar Gowru et al., “Cloud Computing Using Amazon Web Services,” International Journal for Modern Trends in Science and Technology 3, no 1 (February 2017): 55; Brandon Butler, “The Myth about How Amazon’s Web Service Started Just Won’t Die,” NetworkWorld, March 2, 2015. “Let’s make it …”: Jeff Bezos, interview by Om Malik at the D6 Conference in Carlsbad, California, in May 2008, quoted by Nicholas Carr, “Understanding Amazon Web Services,” Rough Type (blog), May 31, 2008. Not the only ones feeling the pain: Furrier, “Exclusive: The Story of AWS and Andy Jassy’s Trillion Dollar Baby.” 106, The team in Cape Town … Barefoot juggling: Marcin Kowalski’s remarks in “Amazon EC2—10 Year Anniversary Celebration,” YouTube, starts around 2:14.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist Nicholas Carr, in an oft-cited 2008 Atlantic article. “[And] I’m not the only one.” Carr expanded this argument into a book, The Shallows, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. To write The Shallows, appropriately enough, Carr had to move to a cabin and forcibly disconnect. The idea that network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow is not new.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Published 25 May 2010

The stereotypical web activity is not to visit a gardening blog one day, visit a Manolo shoes blog the next day, and never return to either. Most online activity, or at least the kinds that persist, is investment in sustained, long-running narratives. That is where the suspense comes from and that is why the internet so holds our attention. Nicholas Carr, in a 2008 article in The Atlantic, asked, “Is Google making us stupid?” and basically he answered that yes, Google is making us stupid. He argued that internet culture shortens our attention spans and renders us less likely to think deep thoughts. But he missed how people can construct wisdom—and long-term dramatic interest in their own self-education—from accumulating, collecting, and ordering small bits of information.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1996. 263–87; Yaeger-Dror, Malcah, “Lexical Classes in Montreal French: The Case of (E:),” Language and Speech 35 no. 3 (July/September 1992): 251. 195 there is a Web site called Worldometers: http://www.worldometers.info. 197 the Web site MeasuringWorth.com: http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk. 198 a series called Media Diet: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/posts/media-diet. 198 This is already happening: Sparrow, Betsy, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner. “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science 353, no. 6043 (2011): 776–78. 198 While this is certainly a common argument: Nicholas Carr discusses this topic, in a qualified manner, in his article in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” 198 a constantly updated online medical reference: http://www.uptodate.com/home/about/index.xhtml. CHAPTER 10: AT THE EDGE OF WHAT WE KNOW 200 This error-checking methodology: Johnson, Steven Berlin.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Pickersgill says, “We have learned to read the expression of the body while someone is consuming a device and when those signifiers are activated it is as if the device can be seen taking physical form without the object being present.”26 The viewer is left with eerie images of lovers, families, friends, staring down at their empty hands, oblivious to the ones closest to them, in effect alone. Turkle’s and Pickersgill’s critiques are part of a sprawling range of critiques of smartphones that tap into a wide range of concerns. Several studies find a link between smartphones and cancer.27 Nicholas Carr, a well-known writer on technology, is concerned that our hand machines are making us dumb. Smartphones are “an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before,” Carr says, and our brains don’t seem to be up to the task.28 Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, says smartphones—operating like little pocket slot machines, inviting us to swipe, tap, swipe, again and again, rewiring our neurological reward centers in the process—put us into the “machine zone.”29 Fantastic Beasts star Eddie Redmayne recently joined the ranks of smartphone refuseniks, switching to a “dumb phone” that could only be used for voice calls and texting.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

In place of the linear progression of time—implying cause and effect—electronic and digital media foster a sense of what McLuhan called “allatonceness,” the perception that everything is happening simultaneously as we are immersed in a maelstrom of information. Deluged with data, our attention is drawn to the loudest, most sensational material, the most controversial or provocative posts. We’ve become addicted to stimulus—all those news alerts, all those buzzing notifications—and our attention spans have become so attenuated, says the author Nicholas Carr (The Shallows), that we are losing “the ability to engage in deep reading and attentive thought and contemplation.” But social media also meant that people could decline to be the passive audiences Postman described, and politicians slowly realized they could no longer operate solely in broadcast mode.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

(A similar complaint was made after the spread of printing in sixteenth-century Europe.) Nicholas Carr and Andrew Keen deplore the online ‘cult of the amateur’, which inordinately privileges mass participation over authority, openness over expertise, Wikipedia over Britannica.91 And the former, they argue, is eroding the latter. Jaron Lanier writes caustically of colleagues who believe that ‘a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom’.92 As we are tempted into what Nicholas Carr calls ‘the shallows’ of the online world, so we might all succumb to attention deficit disorder.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

Now we’re seeing these early writers for what they were: brilliant precursors straining after some of the most important ideas and techniques of the contemporary world, in this case the art and science of search. Returning to the present, Google is making a lot of the memory arts fall away altogether. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean, as critics such as Nicholas Carr have alleged, that we are becoming stupider. First, we presumably learn something useful through Google, and that information also gives us broader background knowledge for understanding and interpreting other facts about the world, whether they come from Google or not. Second, we have become much better at searching for answers, and that too is a skill.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

To the extent that the medium of online determines the cultural messages it carries, it pressures creators to make things clickable, browsable, capable of holding attention briefly, but always with the understanding that the reader or watcher will swiftly move on to the next hyperlink, the next video, the next tweet or status update or Instagram pic. It is not impossible for genius to flourish under such constraints, but depth becomes a near impossibility; not for nothing did Nicholas Carr title his powerful critique of Internet culture The Shallows. If the hit single has survived Napster and then iTunes, the old-fashioned album emphatically has not, and there’s an argument—infuriating to novelists, but possibly true—that the novel ceased to matter to mass culture on June 29, 2007, the day Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

I would be delighted if education put less emphasis on rote memorization of that which we can easily look up, but I wonder whether Google’s instant access to every imaginable fact will atrophy our memory cells. Or perhaps that’s just my fear of age. In a 2008 article in The Atlantic, internet curmudgeon Nicholas Carr, a sometimes sparring partner of mine in the blogosphere, fretted about these changes in our habits, brains, and society in an article entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He confessed to reading less and differently—as I have. “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,” Carr argued.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

Page 138: Seigenthaler and essjay controversies The Wikipedia articles on the controversy surrounding the John Seigenthaler entry (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy ) and essjay’s faked credentials (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy) are surprisingly good, given that one might expect Wikipedians to pull their punches. Nicholas Carr is also worth reading on this subject; Carr, writing at roughtype.com, is the most insightful and incisive of Wikipedia’s critics. One of his posts worth reading on the essjay controversy is “Wikipedia’s credentialism crisis” (www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/wikipedias_cred.php) and Page 140: Ise Shrine Howard Mansfield first noted the linking of the Ise Shrine’s method of construction with its failure to win historic designation from UNESCO in The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age, University Press of New England (2000).

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

A comprehensive discussion of the genomics revolution is far beyond the scope of this book; we mention it here simply to highlight that it is real, and likely to bring profound changes in the years and decades to come. See Kris Wetterstrand, “DNA Sequencing Costs: Data from the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP),” National Human Genome Research Institute, July 16, 2013, http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/. 5. On gaming, see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011); on cyberbalkanization, see Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Electronic Communities: Global Villages or Cyberbalkanization?” ICIS 1996 Proceedings, December 31, 1996, http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis1996/5; and Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin, 2012); on social isolation see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012); and Robert D.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

In Snow Crash the hackers were most susceptible to the nam-shub because computational thinking had already reordered their minds: “Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells—your bioware self-modifies—the software becomes part of the hardware.”58 The process Stephenson describes here is automatization, the realignment of mental faculties to internalize and homeostatically manage a complex task like driving a car. And, as media journalist Nicholas Carr points out in The Glass Cage, we all experienced automatization first-hand when we learned to read, gradually internalizing the rules of grammar and spelling until the interpretation of written symbols was largely effortless.59 Just as Plato feared, our interaction with the technology of the written word not only changed the medium of thought, extending it to external papers, scrolls and other material stuff, but it also changed the mode of thought.

Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ...
by David Barrie
Published 12 May 2014

Wolfgang Schuster, “Protecting the Future,” Navigation News, The Magazine of the Royal Institute of Navigation (September–October 2013) 22–24. 6 “Ships’ navigators go back to the future as white van man gets them into a jam,” Times, March 30, 2013. 7 New Scientist, December 12, 2012. 8 Matthew Crawford has written very interestingly about this subject—though in a slightly different context. See Crawford esp. 59–61. 9 For an interesting overview of this subject, see Alex Hutchinson’s article “Global Impositioning Systems—Is GPS technology actually harming our sense of direction?” in Walrus, November 2009 (http://thewalrus.ca/global-impositioning-systems/). See also Nicholas Carr, “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” in Atlantic, November 2013 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/). Glossary Azimuth: the bearing of a celestial body’s geographical position measured in degrees either from the north or south pole (whichever is nearer the observer).

Data and the City
by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017

203 people as relatively passive subjects who participate ‘online’. Notably, Sherry Turkle (2011) no longer celebrates but instead critiques the internet for isolating people from more meaningful and ‘real’ face-to-face human interactions such that especially young people are now ‘alone together’. Numerous other popular critiques such as Nicholas Carr’s (2010) The Shallows and Evgeny Morozov’s (2011) Net Delusion also critique digital lives. While such declarations have been a good correction to utopian visions, they have replaced sovereign subjects with obedient ones. In this way, they reflect a reversal of the understanding of power advanced in modern political theory, which posits a divide between modernity and tradition where a subject to power (tradition) was replaced by a subject of power (modernity).

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

Solsman, “Attention, Artists: Streaming Music Is the Inescapable Future. Embrace It,” CNET, November 14, 2014. hours of music required: Personal estimation. new podcasts launch every day: Personal correspondence with Todd Pringle, GM and VP of Product, Stitcher, April 26, 2015. four ways books embody fixity: Nicholas Carr, “Words in Stone and on the Wind,” Rough Type, February 3, 2012. 4: SCREENING 50,000 words in Old English to a million: Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English, third revised ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); and Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 10 (Grolier, 1999).

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

the top 1 percent of bands and solo artists: Thompson, “The Shazam Effect.” the number of transistors that fit on a microchip: Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965), www.monolithic3d.com/uploads/6/0/5/5/6055488/gordon_moore_1965_article.pdf. humans plod along at a leisurely Darwinian pace: Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (New York: Norton, 2014), 41. I’ve seen several writers juxtapose the exponential pace of technology and the methodical evolution of humans, but the first place I recall reading this construction was in Carr’s book: “Where computers sprint forward at the pace of Moore’s law, our own innate abilities creep ahead with the tortoise-like tread of Darwin’s law.”

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

Mind you, the advances of technology are not necessarily all positive for the education and overall mental wellbeing of citizens. There is some evidence of cognitive decay as a result of recent technological developments, notably in video game technology and smartphones. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that the internet is having an adverse effect on our ability to think.30 In an article published in The Atlantic in 2013 called “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” he bemoaned the rise of “technology centered automation that elevates the capabilities of technology above the interests of people.”

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

They have been lauded as the solution to journalism’s greatest woes, and blamed for destroying readers’ already-stunted attention spans. Which is it? The debate shows a press grappling with the opportunities and challenges of an interconnected web. First, the dissent: in 2006, TechCrunch contributor Steve Gillmor swore off hyperlinks and technology writer Nicholas Carr likened them to ‘little textual gnats buzzing around your head’ and ‘violent footnotes’. Carr worried that distracted, superficial reading has become the norm as our brains remain suspended in the constant decision to click or not to click. His suggestion to ‘delinkify’ – to move links to the bottom of an article (SEE: FOOTNOTES) – sparked, well, lots of angry links to his post.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn
Published 12 Sep 2022

CHAPTER 1: WHAT CHILDREN NEED AND WHY CORPORATIONS CAN’T PROVIDE IT Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, quoted in Brain Matters: Putting the First Years First, directed by Carlota Nelson, brainmattersfilm.com, 2019.   1.  Susan Linn, Joan Almon, and Diane Levin, Facing the Screen Dilemma: Young Children, Technology and Early Education (Boston: Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood; New York: Alliance for Childhood, 2012), PDF.   2.  Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010), 34.   3.  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2017).   4.  The NPD Group, Retail Tracking Service, U.S.   5.  

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol
Published 1 Jan 2019

The hacking vulnerability of voice assistants has been shown with such techniques as the so-called dolphin attack, which used ultrasonic frequencies, too high for the human ear to hear, to seize control of voice-activated gadgets.20 There has even been a murder case in which Amazon was forced to provide the Echo recordings obtained when it wasn’t activated but only listening, fulfilling the legal descriptor of a “ticking constitutional time bomb” with respect to the First Amendment.21 Unknowingly, a couple in Portland, Oregon, had their conversation recorded and their audio files sent to their contacts.22 These examples portend the problems of not establishing data protection and privacy. Nicholas Carr, who is known for bringing out the bad side of technology, had this to say: “Even as they spy on us, the devices offer sanctuary from the unruliness of reality, with all its frictions and strains. They place us in a virtual world meticulously arranged to suit our bents and biases, a world that understands us and shapes itself to our desires.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

The Federal Government of Germany, Artificial Intelligence Strategy 25 (2018), https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/publication/germany-artificial-intelligence-strategy_en (“The potential for AI to serve society as a whole lies in its promise of productivity gains going hand in hand with improvements for the workforce, delegating monotonous or dangerous tasks to machines so that human beings can focus on using their creativity to resolve problems.”). 12. Lucas Mearian, “A. I. Guardian-Angel Vehicles Will Dominate Auto Industry, Says Toyota Exec,” Computerworld, June 3, 2016. 13. Some forms of autopilot tend to de-skill pilots. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York: Norton, 2015). However, autopilots can also be designed to maintain or enhance the skills of pilots, preserving essential expertise. David Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (New York: Viking, 2015). 14.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

Ciulla The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, Beth Shulman Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Bruder Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies, Francoise Carre and Chris Tilly “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, Annelise Orleck On Wanda Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir The Panopticon Writings, Jeremy Bentham Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare Karoshi, National Defense Counsel for Victims of Karoshi On tech, automation, and the future of work The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, Nicholas Carr Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, Christopher Steiner Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, Simon Head Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Martin Ford The Robots Are Coming!

Warnings
by Richard A. Clarke
Published 10 Apr 2017

The study looks at jobs at risk from weak AI and robotics. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osbourne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” Sept. 17, 2013, Oxford Martin School, www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 25. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), reviewed in Sean Braswell, “All Rise for Chief Justice Robot!” Ozy.com, www.ozy.com/immodest-proposal/all-rise-for-chief-justice-robot/41131 (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 26. McKinsey Global Institute, referenced in Lakshmi Sandhana, “47% of U.S.

Innovation and Its Enemies
by Calestous Juma
Published 20 Mar 2017

Sharing services such as Uber are acquiring robotics and other engineering capabilities. The implications of exponential growth will continue to elude political leaders if they persist in operating with linear worldviews. These trends have added new elements of uncertainty in human relations in general and in the economy in particular. As Nicholas Carr writes in his book The Glass Cage, “Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing.”8 Such uncertainty may encompass basic societal trends, from the inability to foresee the impact of new technologies to extreme social responses driven by the fear of loss.9 There are also numerous cases where society has underestimated the risks posed by new technologies or adopted them without adequate knowledge about their risks.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

Yet, almost 5 million children in the United States suffer from food insecurity in any given year.8 Indeed, there is enough food to feed the whole world, but hunger persists. About one in eight people is malnourished; that’s 840 million people eating less than they need.9 Evidently, technological plenty doesn’t mean plenty for everyone. Skeptics believe that technology is overhyped and often destructive. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, suggests that the fast-twitch, hyperlinked Internet not only erodes our ability to think deeply, but also traps us like a Siren: “We may be wary of what our devices are doing to us, but we’re using them more than ever.” His book is ominously subtitled What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

On the other hand, however, this means that the revolutionary ideas of a few years ago have now become conventional wisdom. Having convinced the business world of the merits of technology, the industry has lost much of its iconoclastic fervour. The corporate adoption of information technology has become such old hat, indeed, that Nicholas Carr, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, even published an article T vii THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY in 2003 entitled “it doesn’t matter”. Many technologists were livid, but Mr Carr had a point. While there are some areas where technology can still provide competitive advantage, its widespread adoption means that it makes less difference than it used to.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Available at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu /founders/documents /a1_8_8s12 .html. 3 The Hidden Logics of Search 1. David Stark, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1. 2. On the use and abuse of the distinction between “IRL” (in real life) and virtual spaces, see Nicholas Carr, “Digital Dualism Denialism,” Rough Type (blog), February 20, 2013, http://www.roughtype.com /?p=2090. 3. Rotten Tomatoes, http://www.rottentomatoes.com /; “Customer Reviews,” Amazon Help. Available at http://www.amazon.com /gp/help/customer /display.html /?nodeId=12177361. Sam Costello, “Buying Music from the iTunes Store,” About.com.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

Back in the fifteenth century, as Nate Silver summed up, “the amount of information was increasing much more rapidly than our understanding of what to do with it, or our ability to differentiate the useful information from the mistruths.”13 Here in the twenty-first century, we call that “big data,” with more data generated in the past two years than in the history of humankind. And an ever-increasing proportion of that is derived from and is passing through mobile devices. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr recounts the lines from a play in 1612: “so many books—so much confusion! All around us is an ocean of print. And most of it covered in froth.”14 Today we’re at about three quintillion bytes of data generated a day; our digital universe is expected to increase fifty-fold in the current decade (2010–2020) from less than one thousand exabytes to greater than forty thousand.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

Whether for reasons of politics or politesse, the web would suffer a lot of ruin before many critics, who’d fallen in love with its openness, would admit that things had gone awry. Even so, by the mid-2010s, more and more ordinary users had their own impression of the emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps the first sign of elite revolt was the idea best articulated by Nicholas Carr that the web was making us stupider. Maybe it was the growing talk of an “information glut,” or Jaron Lanier’s argument, in his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, that the culture of the web had resulted in a suppression of individual creativity and innovation. Even the incredibly powerful tools of sharing and communication—email, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram—once employed by entities like BuzzFeed, didn’t seem so magical, having collaborated in building an attentional environment with so little to admire.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant
Published 15 Jan 2020

less able to find their way: Steven Tripp, “Cognitive Navigation: Toward a Biological Basis for Instructional Design,” Educational Technology and Society 4 (2001): 41–49; Alex Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems: Is GPS Technology Actually Harming Our Sense of Direction?” The Walrus, November 2009, https://thewalrus.ca/global-impositioning-systems/. overreliance on technologies: Nicholas Carr, “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” The Atlantic, November 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/. CHAPTER 7: POWER argumentative but eloquent: For details of Thomas Paine’s life: R. R. Fennessy, Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man (New York: Springer, 1963), 12–47; Harvey Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005); Peter Linebaugh, Peter Linebaugh Presents: Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man and Common Sense (London: Verso, 2009); Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: His Life, His Time and the Birth of Modern Nations (London: Profile, 2007).

CIOs at Work
by Ed Yourdon
Published 19 Jul 2011

Yourdon: That’s an interesting area that you’ve mentioned, because obviously not only has technology changed that authors, like me, and editors publish and produce a book, but it’s completely transformed the marketplace in terms of the consumers and customers and their expectations of how they’re going to get the content. And even more than that, you probably have seen some of the material that Nicholas Carr has written—he’s got a book called The Shallows3, which basically argues that because of the Internet he would never be able to read War and Peace today because he just can’t maintain that attention span. And I assume that that has got to have an enormous impact on publishers, too. Mooney: Well, we also have a “professional,” basically it’s a type of buyer that borders on—I was going to say “Borders,” but I’m not sure Borders is going to be around.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Fishkin’s technique “combines deliberation in small group discussions with scientific random sampling to provide public consultation for public policy and for electoral issues.”28 We must then be both enthusiastic and wary of digital progress—and for the very same reasons. In his skepticist tract The Shallows, Nicholas Carr focuses on the costs of technological innovation. Written text, he notes, sidelines oral literary traditions; movable type pushes aside illuminated manuscripts; television puts an end to radio plays.29 Carr’s complaint about the web is that its incessant noise makes reading books difficult (though Kindle and Nook readers might disagree).

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Pirenne, Economic and Social History, 83. 31. Pirenne, Economic and Social History, 118–19. 32. Jared Rubin, “Bills of Exchange, Interest Bans, and Impersonal Exchange in Islam and Christianity,” Explorations in Economic History 47, no. 2 (April 2010): 213–27. 33. Goody, Development of Family, 165. 34. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” The Atlantic, July/August 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/. 35. Timothy Egan, “The Phone is Smart, but Where’s the Big Idea?,” The New York Times, July 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/opinion/iphone-apple-printing-press.html?

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

As you grow older and become more mature, you realize that not everything deserves a response. This truth applies to most things in life and almost everything in the news. We’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. —Nicholas Carr The true scarce commodity of the near future will be human attention. —Satya Nadella In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

Apple introduced Album Art to help, but many people feel it’s not the same as holding a physical object. The procedural and cognitive trade-off at stake concerns searchability (with digital files) versus the viscerally and aesthetically satisfying act of employing the kinds of visual and tactile cues our species evolved to use. Technology writer Nicholas Carr writes, “The medium does matter. As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite.” Faster is not always desirable, and going straight to what you want is not always better. There is a peculiar irony in all of this: Small libraries are far more useful than large ones.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to ‘play God,’ the world as we know it wouldn't exist today.” Cited in Singularity, 299. 56. Kurzweil, Singularity, 210; Garreau, Radical Evolution, chap. 4. 57. Kurzweil, Singularity, 325. 58. Minsky quoted in McKibben, Enough, 203–4. Page quoted in Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011), iBook edition, chap. 8. 59. Christof Koch and Gilles Laurent, “Complexity and the Nervous System,” Science 284 (1999): 96–98. 60. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, “Mind out of Body,” Scientific American (February 2011): 81–83. 61.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Danielewski) Boreta, Justin: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks), Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris), This Is Your Brain on Music (Daniel J. Levitin), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) Brach, Tara: The Essential Rumi (Jalal al-Din Rumi, Coleman Barks translation), When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Pema Chödrön), The Shallows (Nicholas Carr), A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (Jack Kornfield) Brewer, Travis: Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda), Be Here Now (Ram Dass), Conversations with God (Neale Donald Walsch) Brown, Brené: The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) Callen, Bryan: Excellent Sheep (William Deresiewicz), Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), The Power of Myth; The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell), The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche), The Art of Learning (Josh Waitzkin), The 4-Hour Body; The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), Bad Science, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (Ben Goldacre), Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 (Thomas Ricks), The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Lawrence Wright), Symposium (Plato) Carl, Shay: The Book of Mormon (Joseph Smith Jr.), As a Man Thinketh (James Allen), How to Win Friends & Influence People (Dale Carnegie), Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill), The Total Money Makeover (Dave Ramsey), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R.