“ The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to vastly overvalue what happens to us right now, as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabr… Nicholas Carr
“ As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And w… Nicholas Carr
“ Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-world evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. James Evans… Nicholas Carr
“ When a printed book—whether a recently published scholarly history or a two-hundred-year-old Victorian novel—is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something v… Nicholas Carr
“ Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an ecosystem of interruption technologies, as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.23 Nicholas Carr
“ Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm… Nicholas Carr
“ In the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how… Nicholas Carr
“ What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: i… Nicholas Carr
“ The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pel… Nicholas Carr
“ As a society, we've become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we've turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a n… Nicholas Carr
“ There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress. Nicholas Carr
“ Technology isn’t what makes us “post-human” or “transhuman,” as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our… Nicholas Carr
“ We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technol… Nicholas Carr
“ Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, [de Forest] grew even gloomier. He believed that 'electron physiologists' would eventually be able to monitor and analyze 'thought or brain waves',… Nicholas Carr
“ When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and action… Nicholas Carr
“ Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this:Hot: ColdOthers used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this:Hot: CThe people wh… Nicholas Carr
“ To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers. Nicholas Carr
“ [Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread a… Nicholas Carr
