The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know.

Even the long-promised “picture phone” is finally becoming a reality, as webcams become a regular feature of computers and Net-connected televisions, and popular Internet telephone services like Skype incorporate video transmissions.

Weve come a long way in a decade but we barely even notice

Rarely have we paused to ponder, much less question, the media revolution that has been playing out all around us, in our homes, our workplaces, our schools.

Idk if this was true in 2009 but its def not the case now

You can spill coffee on it.

Spilling coffee on a book... Not great fr th book

The experience of reading tends to be better with a book too. Words stamped on a page in black ink are easier to read than words formed of pixels on a backlit screen. You can read a dozen or a hundred printed pages without suffering the eye fatigue that often results from even a brief stretch of online reading. Navigating a book is simpler and, as software programmers say, more intuitive. You can flip through real pages much more quickly and flexibly than you can through virtual pages. And you can write notes in a book’s margins or highlight passages that move or inspire you. You can even get a book’s author to sign its title page. When you’re finished with a book, you can use it to fill an empty space on your bookshelf—or lend it to a friend.

Ironic as i read this on kindle

Without its search engine, and the other engines that have been built on its model, the Internet would have long ago become a Tower of Digital Babel.

What could this possibly mean

Google Wave, an ambitious social-networking service launched at the end of 2009, allows people to monitor and update various multimedia message threads on a single densely packed page, which refreshes its contents automatically and almost instantaneously. Wave, says one reporter, “turns conversations into fast-moving group streams-of-consciousness.”26

Lolz

Google is neither God nor Satan, and if there are shadows in the Googleplex they’re no more than the delusions of grandeur. What’s disturbing about the company’s founders is not their boyish desire to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators, but the pinched conception of the human mind that gives rise to such a desire.

But the parallel is flawed. The pocket calculator relieved the pressure on our working memory, letting us deploy that critical short-term store for more abstract reasoning. As the experience of math students has shown, the calculator made it easier for the brain to transfer ideas from working memory to long-term memory and encode them in the conceptual schemas that are so important to building knowledge. The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas. The calculator, a powerful but highly specialized tool, turned out to be an aid to memory. The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.

movies from NetFlix,

Lol "NetFlix"