The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”

Language itself is not a technology. It’s native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and to hear words. A child learns to talk without instruction, as a fledgling bird learns to fly.

Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is considerably different from the circuitry found in people whose written language employs a phonetic alphabet.

lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman, argued that Google “has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society.”

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.

physiological difference between the two types of memory: “Short-term memory produces a change in the function of the synapse, strengthening or weakening preexisting connections; long-term memory requires anatomical changes.”

The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies.