# 2026-05-27 - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
I seem to recall finding this referenced in the phlog of a FreeBSD
user on sdf.org. I checked out the book from my local library. I
couldn't put it down! It is extremely relevant to enshittification,
illiteracy, and the future of the Internet. And now i can't
recommend this book highly enough.
One of the most interesting points made was the distinction between
working memory and long-term memory, and how the "brain as a machine"
metaphor has been just as misleading as a lie. Rather than
"freeing up mental resources", outsourcing long-term memory to a
computer diminishes our ability to pay attention and think. It makes
us shallow and erodes culture.
Long-term memory is effectively unlimited and never full. The more
we use our own long-term memory, the more we are able to learn,
think deeply, be creative, and solve problems.
I also found it interesting to read the story Socrates told about
the dialog between Egyptian king Thamus and the god Theuth, who is
advocating for teaching everyone to read using an alphabet. The
king, like Socrates, was skeptical about the value of universal
education and literacy. Luddites of the underworld, unite!
I have always had a strong preference to read linear writing that is
clearly and logically organized. Once in a while, hyperlink cinema
can be highly stimulating and entertaining, but i do not enjoy the
verbal barrage of word salad presented by stream of consciousness and
experimental writing styles. Boo hiss to James Joyce and
Harlan Ellison.
As an experiment, i will try moving away from a hypertext style of
presentation in this log, and using footnotes instead. It's
essentially the same information but presented in a different way.
I know some people find footnotes distracting too, but my hope is
that they will be less distracting than hyperlinks are.
I was interested in the concept of "commonplace books" [1]. It
sounds similar to my own note-taking system. I find that writing
notes forces me to slow down and process the information through
multiple channels, which seems to help retention.
What follows are excerpts from the book, with my comments in square
brackets.
# Prologue: The Watchdog And The Thief
In 1964, just as the Beatles were launching their invasion of
America's airwaves, Marshall McLuhan published /Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man/ and transformed himself from an obscure
academic into a star. Oracular, gnomic, and mind-bending, the book
was a perfect product of the sixties... /Understanding Media/ was at
heart a prophecy, and what it prophesied was the dissolution of the
linear mind. McLuhan declared that the "electric media" of the
twentieth century--telephone, radio, movies, television--were
breaking the tyranny of text over our thoughts and senses. Our
isolated, fragmented selves, locked for centuries in the private
reading of printed pages, were becoming whole again, merging into the
global equivalent of a tribal village.
McLuhan understood that whenever a new medium comes along, people
naturally get caught up in the information--the "content"--it
carries. ... The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may
be, disappears behind whatever flows through it--facts,
entertainment, instruction, conversation. When people start debating
(as they always do) whether the medium's effects are good or bad,
it's the content they wrestle over.
What both the enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that
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
we see it--and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we
are, as individuals and as a society. "The effects of technology do
not occur at the level of opinions or concepts," wrote McLuhan.
Rather, they alter "patterns of perception steadily and without any
resistance."
# Chapter 1: HAL And Me
The Net has become my all-purpose medium, the conduit for most of the
information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich
and easily searched store of data are many, and they've been widely
praised and duly applauded.
The boons are real. But they come at a price. ... 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: in a swiftly
moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of
words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
For some people [actually for most people], the very idea of reading
a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little
silly--like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat.
"Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn't
make sense. It's not a good use of my time, as I can get all the
information I need faster through the Web."
--Joe O'Shea, former student body president,
Florida State University, 2008 recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship
# Chapter 2: The Vital Paths
The conception of the adult brain as an unchanging physical apparatus
grew out of, and was buttressed by, and Industrial Age metaphor that
represented the brain as a mechanical contraption.
As the idea of the unchangeable adult brain hardened into dogma, it
turned into a kind of "neurological nihilism," according to the
research psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Because it created "a sense
that treatment for many brain problems was ineffective or
unwarranted," Doidge explains, it left those with mental illness or
brain injuries little hope of treatment, much less cure. And as the
idea "spread through our culture," it ended up "stunting our overall
view of human nature. Since the brain could not change, human
nature, which emerges from it, seemed necessarily fixed and
unalterable as well."
The adult brain, it turns out, is not just plastic but, as James
Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute
for Advanced Study at George Mason University, puts it,
"very plastic." Or, as Merzenich himself says, "massively plastic."
The plasticity diminishes as we get older--brains to get stuck in
their ways--but it never goes away.
The brain is not the machine we once thought it to be.
"Plasticity," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a top neurology researcher
at Harvard Medical School, is "the normal ongoing state of the
nervous system throughout the life span."
Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its
mind--over and over again.
The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the
mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into
"rigid behaviors."
Plastic does not mean elastic, in other words. Our neural loops
don't snap back to their former state the way a rubber band does;
they hold onto their changed state. ... Bad habits can be ingrained
in our neurons as easily as good ones.
"If we stop exercising our mental skills," writes Doidge, "we do not
just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over
to the skills we practice instead." The mental skills we sacrifice
may be as valuable, or even more valuable, than the ones we gain.
# Chapter 3: Tools of the Mind
The historical advances in cartography didn't simply mirror the
development of the human mind. They helped propel and guide the very
intellectual advances that they documented. The map is a medium that
not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a
particular mode of seeing and thinking.
What the map did for space... the mechanical clock did for time. For
most of human history, people experienced time as a continuous,
cyclical flow. Life was, in the words of the French medievalist
Jacques le Goff, "dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste,
careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity."
That began to change in the latter half of the Middle Ages. The
first people to demand a more precise measurement of time were
Christian monks, whose lives revolved around a rigorous schedule of
prayer. ... By the fourteenth century, the mechanic clock has become
commonplace, a near-universal tool for coordinating the intricate
workings of the new urban society.
The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the
map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined
time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to
stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement. ...
The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle
Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.
Every technology is an expression of human will. Our technologies
can be divided, roughly, into four categories, according to the way
they supplement or amplify our native capacities.
* extends physical strength, dexterity, or resilience
* extends the range or sensitivity of our senses
* enables us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires
* extends our mental powers (intellectual technologies)
Examples of intellectual technologies:
* map
* clock
* typewriter
* abacus
* slide rule
* sextant
* globe
* book
* newspaper
* school
* library
* computer
* Internet
It is our intellectual technologies that have the greatest and most
lasting power over what and how we think. They are our most intimate
tools, the ones we use for self-expression, for shaping personal and
public identity, and for cultivating relationships with others.
Every intellectual technology... embodies an intellectual ethic, a
set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.
The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its
inventors. ... Our ancestors didn't develop or use maps in order to
enhance their capacity for conceptual thinking or to bring the
world's hidden structures to light. Nor did they manufacture
mechanical clocks to spur the adoption of a more scientific mode of
thinking. Those were by-products of the technologies. But what
by-products! Ultimately, it's an invention's intellectual ethnic
that has the most profound effect on us.
Language itself is not a technology. It's native to our species.
Our brains and bodies have evolved to [communicate and understand]
words. Reading and writing [on the other hand] are unnatural acts,
made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many
other technologies.
... around 750 BC ... the Greeks invented the first complete phonetic
alphabet. The Greek alphabet had many forerunners... but linguists
generally agree that it was the first to include characters
representing vowel sounds as well as consonant sounds. The Greeks
analyzed all the sounds, or phonemes, used in spoken language, and
were able to represent them with just twenty-four characters, making
their alphabet a comprehensive and efficient system for writing and
reading. The "economy of characters," writes Wolf, reduced "the time
and attention needed for rapid recognition" of the symbols and hence
required "fewer perceptual and memory resources." Recent brain
studies reveal that considerably less of the brain is activated in
reading words formed from phonetic letters than in interpreting
logograms or other pictorial symbols.
Early in the fourth century BC, when the practice of writing was
still novel and controversial in Greece, Plato wrote /Phaedrus/, his
dialogue about love, beauty, and rhetoric. In the tale, the title
character, a citizen of Athens, takes a walk with the great orator
Socrates into the countryside, where the two friends sit under a tree
beside a stream and have a long and circuitous conversation. ...
"There remains the question," muses Socrates, "of propriety and
impropriety in writing." Phaedrus agrees, and Socrates launches into
a story about a meeting between the multitalented Egyptian god
Theuth, whose many inventions include the alphabet, and one of the
kings of Egypt, Thamus.
Theuth describes the art of writing to Thamus and argues that the
Egyptians should be allowed to share in its blessings. It will, he
says, "make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories,"
for it "provides a recipe for memory and wisdom." Thamus disagrees.
He reminds the god that an inventor is not the most reliable judge of
the value of his invention: "O man full of arts, to one is it given
to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of
harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And
so it is that, you, by reason of the tender regard for the writing
that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true
effect." Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, "it
will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise
memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to
remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
external marks." The written word is "a recipe not for memory, but
for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your
disciples, but only its semblance." Those who rely on reading for
their knowledge will "seem to know much, while for the most part they
know nothing." They will be "filled, not with wisdom, but with the
conceit of wisdom."
Socrates, it's clear, shares Thamus's view. ... By substituting outer
symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower
thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual
depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.
In a purely oral culture, thinking is governed by the capacity of
human memory. Knowledge is what you can recall, and what you recall
is limited to what you can hold in your mind.
The oral world of our distance ancestors may well have had emotional
and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. ... When we
learned to read, [McLuhan] argued, we suffered a "considerable
detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a
nonliterate [person] or society would experience." But
intellectually, our ancestors' oral culture was in many ways
shallower than our own.
# Chapter 4: The Deepening Page
[This chapter describes further advances in written language.
There used to be no spaces between words, and no standard ordering of
words. Adding spaces made reading a less demanding process, freeing
up resources to read more "deeply." Then they began breaking up text
into paragraphs, chapters, and adding tables of contents, etc. It
proceeds to tell the story of Gutenberg.]
The growing availability of books fired the public's desire for
literacy, and the expansion of literacy further stimulated the demand
for books. The printing industry boomed.
After Gutenberg's invention, the bounds of language expanded rapidly...
The vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few
thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books
proliferated. ... Writers experimented with syntax and diction,
opening new pathways of thought and imagination. ... As language
expanded, consciousness deepened.
[This reminds me of Copeland's point that modern music would sound
dissonant to classical listeners. And that future music would sound
dissonant to us. Because we have to learn to appreciate new forms of
music and acquire a taste for their increased complexity.]
# Chapter 5: A Medium of the Most General Nature
It's often assumed that the time we devote to the Net comes out of
the time we would otherwise spend watching TV. But statistics
suggest otherwise.
What does seem to be decreasing as Net use grows is the time we spend
reading print publications--particularly newspapers and magazines,
but also books.
When old technologies are supplanted by new ones, the old
technologies often continue to be used for a long time, sometimes
indefinitely. Decades after the invention of movable type, many
books were still being handwritten by scribes or printed from
woodblocks--and some of the most beautiful books continue to be
produced in those ways today. Quite a few people still listen to
vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs... But the old
technologies lose their economic and cultural force. ... That's why
the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or
newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs.
A particularly striking illustration of how the Net is reshaping our
expectations about media can be seen in any library. Although we
don't tend to think of libraries as media technologies, they are.
The public library is, in fact, one of the most important and
influential informational media ever created--and one that
proliferated only after the arrival of silent reading and
movable-type printing. A community's attitudes and preferences
toward information take concrete shape in its library's design and
services. Until recently, the public library was an oasis of bookish
tranquility where people searched through shelves of neatly arranged
volumes or sat in carrels and read quietly. Today's library is very
different. Internet access is rapidly becoming its most popular
service.
# Chapter 6: The Very Image of a Book
In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an
educational researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that
literacy, as we've traditionally understood it, "is now nothing but a
quaint notion, and aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real
questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry--clearly
not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of
society." The time has come, he said, for teachers and students
alike to abandon the "linear, hierarchical" world of the book and
enter the Web's "world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive
proximity"--a world in which "the greatest skill" involves
"discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in
flux."
[Or in other words, adopting the reasoning of a meth addict.]
Although it may be tempting to ignore those who suggest the value of
the literary mind has always been exaggerated, that would be a
mistake. Their arguments are another important sign of the
fundamental shift taking place in society's attitude toward
intellectual achievement.
[Society can go pound sand.
This brings to mind The Marching Morons [2] and
Anti-Intellectualism In American Life [3].]
# Chapter 7: The Juggler's Brain
What can science tell us about the actual effects that Internet use
is having on the way our minds work? ... Dozens of studies by
psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to
the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that
promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and
superficial learning. It's possible to think deeply while surfing
the Net, just as it's possible to think shallowly while reading a
book, but that's not the type of thinking the technology encourages
and rewards.
With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well
be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever
come into general use. At the very least, it's the most powerful
that has come along since the book.
The Net commands our attention with far greater insistency than our
television or radio or morning newspaper ever did.
Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that
promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think
is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. ... If
the slow progression of words across printed pages dampened our
craving to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Net indulges it.
It returns us to our native state of bottom-up distractedness, while
presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had
to contend with.
Research by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who heads the
Unconscious Lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, indicates that...
breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple
with a problem, bring to bear information and cognitive processes
unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better
decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away
from a difficult mental challenge for a time. But Dijksterhuis's
work also shows that our unconscious thought processes don't engage
with a problem until we've clearly and consciously defined the
problem. If we don't have a particular intellectual goal in mind,
Dijksterhuis writes, "unconscious thought does not occur."
The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and
unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply
or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units,
quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out
again.
One other finding of the study [by Gary Small and two colleagues at
UCLA] sheds light on the differences between reading Web pages and
reading books. The researchers found that when people search the Net
they exhibit a very different pattern of brain activity than they do
when they read book-like text. Book readers have a lot of activity
in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing,
but they don't display much activity in the prefrontal regions
associated with decision making and problem solving. Experienced Net
users, by contrast, display extensive activity across all those brain
regions when they scan and search Web pages.
The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices,
while also processing a multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli,
requires constant mental coordination and decision making,
distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other
information. Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to
pause, at least for a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to
evaluate whether or not we should click on it. The redirection of
our mental resources, from reading works to making judgments, may be
imperceptible to us--our brains are quick--but it's been shown to
impede comprehension and retention, particularly when it's repeated
frequently. As the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex kick
in, our brains become not only exercised but overtaxed. Our ability
to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and
without distraction remains largely disengaged.
The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer
information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into
conceptual schemas. But the passage from working memory to long-term
memory also forms the major bottleneck in our brains. Unlike
long-term memory, which has a vast capacity, working memory is able
to hold only a very small amount of information. ... According to
Sweller, current evidence suggests that "we can process no more than
about two to four elements at any given time with the actual number
probably being at the lower [rather] than the higher end of this
scale." Those elements that we are able to hold in working memory
will, moreover, quickly vanish "unless we are able to refresh them by
rehearsal."
Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that's the challenge
involved in transferring information from working memory into
long-term memory. By regulating the velocity and intensity of
information flow, media exert a strong influence on this process.
When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip,
which we can control by the pace of our reading. Through our
single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most
of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory
and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas.
With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full
blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to
the next. We're able to transfer only a small portion of the
information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble
of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream
from one source.
The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment
is called our "cognitive load." When the load exceeds our mind's
ability to store and process the information--when the water
overflows the thimble--we're unable to retain the information or to
draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term
memory. We can't translate the new information into schemas. Our
ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow.
Because our ability to maintain our attention also depends on our
working memory--a high cognitive load amplifies the distractedness we
experience.
[Or in other words, meth addict styles of reasoning.]
Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the
intellectual environment of the Internet.
# Chapter 9: Search, Memory
Erasmus's recommendation that every reader keep a notebook of
memorable quotations was widely and enthusiastically followed. Such
notebooks, which came to be called "commonplace books," or just
"commonplaces," became fixtures of Renaissance schooling. Every
student kept one. By the seventeenth century, their use had spread
beyond the schoolhouse.
The popularity of commonplace books ebbed as the pace of life
quickened in the nineteenth century, and by the middle of the
twentieth century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor.
What had long been viewed as a stimulus for personal insight and
creativity came to be seen as a barrier to imagination and then
simply a waste of mental energy. ... Today, people routinely talk
about artificial memory as though it's indistinguishable from
biological memory.
The shift in our view of memory is yet another manifestation of our
acceptance of the metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer.
The analogy has a simplicity that makes it compelling... But there's
a problem with our new, post-Internet conception of human memory.
It's wrong.
Subsequent studies confirmed the existence of short-term and
long-term forms of memory and provided further evidence of the
importance of the consolidation phase during which the former are
turned into the latter. In the 1960's, University of Pennsylvania
neurologist Louis Flexner made a particularly intriguing discovery.
... The two types of memory entail different biological processes.
String long-term memories requires the synthesis of new proteins.
Storing short-term memories does not.
The formation of long-term memories, in other words, involves not
only biochemical changes but anatomical ones. That explained, Kandel
realized, why memory consolidation requires new proteins. Proteins
place an essential role in producing structural changes in cells.
The hippocampus provides an ideal holding place for new memories
because its synapses are able to change very quickly. Over the
course of a few days, through a still mysterious signaling process,
the hippocampus helps stabilize the memory in the cortex, beginning
its transformation from a short-term memory into a long-term one.
Neuroscientists also theorize that the hippocampus helps link new
memories with older ones, forming the rich mesh of neuronal
connections that give memory its flexibility and depth. Many of the
connections between memories are likely forged when we're asleep and
the hippocampus is relieved of some of its other cognitive chores.
... When sleep suffers, studies show, so, too, does our memory.
Old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual,
indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In
face, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably
high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with precisely
defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by
computer chips.
Those who celebrate the "outsourcing" of memory to the Web have been
misled by a metaphor.
The proponents of the outsourcing idea also confuse working memory
with long-term memory. When a person fails to consolidate a fact, an
idea, or an experience in long-term memory, [they are] not
"freeing up" space in [their] brain for other functions. In contrast
to working memory, with its constrained capacity, long-term memory
expands and contracts with almost unlimited elasticity, thanks to the
brain's ability to grow and prune synaptic terminals and continually
adjust the strength of synaptic connections. "Unlike a computer,"
writes Nelson Cowan, an expert on memory who teaches at the
University of Missouri, "the normal human brain never reaches a point
at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory; the brain
cannot be full." Evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up
our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper.
We don't constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term
memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory
comes an enlargement of our intelligence.
The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.
Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as
"the world's information." It's more than what can be reduced to
binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must
be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation.
Outsource memory, and culture withers.
# Chapter 10: A Thing Like Me
In an article in the /Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease/, three
prominent research psychiatrists wrote that ELIZA, with a bit of
tweaking, could be "a therapeutic tool which can be made widely
available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering from
a shortage of therapists."
But, as Weizenbaum was astonished to discover, the people who
"talked" with his program had little interest in making rational,
objective judgments about the identity of ELIZA. They /wanted/ to
believe that ELIZA was a thinking machine. They /wanted/ to imbue
ELIZA with human qualities--even when they were well aware that ELIZA
was nothing more than a computer program following simple and rather
obvious instructions. ... In their
/Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease/ article, the three
psychiatrists hadn't just suggested that ELIZA could serve as a
substitute for a real therapist. They went on to argue, in circular
fashion, that a psychotherapist was in essence a kind of computer:
"A human therapist can be viewed as an information processor and
decision maker with a set of decision rules which are closely linked
to short-range and long-range goals." In simulating a human being,
however clumsily, ELIZA encouraged human beings to think of
themselves as simulations of computers.
The reaction to the software unnerved Weizenbaum. It planted in his
mind a question he had never before asked himself but that would
preoccupy him for many years: "What is it about the computer that has
brought the view of man as a machine to a new level of plausibility?"
In 1976, a decade after ELIZA's debut, he provided an answer in his
book /Computer Power and Human Reason/. To understand the effects of
a computer, he argued, you had to see the machine in the context of
mankind's past intellectual technologies, the long succession of
tools that, like the map and the clock, transformed nature and
altered "man's perception of reality." Such technologies become part
of "the very stuff out of which [a person builds their world]."
What makes us most human, Weizenbaum had come to believe, is what is
least computable about us--the connections between our mind and our
body, the experiences that shape our memory and our thinking, our
capacity for emotion and empathy. The great danger we face as we
become more intimately involved with our computers--as symbols
flickering across our screens--is that we'll begin to lose our
humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from
machines. The only way to avoid that fate, Weizenbaum wrote, is to
have the self-awareness and courage to refuse to delegate to
computers the most human of our mental activities and intellectual
pursuits, particularly "tasks that demand wisdom."
Alienation, [McLuhan] understood, is an inevitable by-product of the
use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control
over the outside world, we change our relationship with that world.
Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance.
author: Carr, Nicholas G., 1959-
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/The_Shallows_(book)
tags: book,history,non-fiction,political
title: The Shallows
# Footnotes
TEXT [1] Commonplace book
HTML [2] The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth
DIR [3] Anti-Intellectualism In American Life
# Tags
DIR book
DIR history
DIR non-fiction
DIR political