The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

GOOGLE WAS BORN of an analogy—Larry Page’s analogy. The son of one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, Page was surrounded by computers from an early age—he recalls being “the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document”16—and went on to study engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. His friends remember him as being ambitious, smart, and “nearly obsessed with efficiency.”17 While serving as president of Michigan’s engineering honor society, he spearheaded a brash, if ultimately futile, campaign to convince the school’s administrators to build a monorail through the campus. In the fall of 1995, Page headed to California to take a prized spot in Stanford University’s doctoral program in computer science. Even as a young boy, he had dreamed of creating a momentous invention, something that “would change the world.”18 He knew there was no better place than Stanford, Silicon Valley’s frontal cortex, to make the dream come true.