The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”

The content of a medium is just “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

Plenty of people—the poor, the illiterate, the isolated, the incurious—never participated, at least not directly, in Gutenberg’s revolution.

Robert Darnton puts it, “the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading.”

We glance at road signs, menus, headlines, shopping lists, the labels of products in stores. “These forms of reading,” he says, “tend to be shallow and of brief duration.”

Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. None of these momentous intellectual achievements would have been possible without the changes in reading and writing—and in perceiving and thinking—spurred by the efficient reproduction of long forms of writing on printed pages.

we started devoting more and more of our time and attention to the cheap, copious, and endlessly entertaining products of the first wave of electric and electronic media: radio, cinema, phonograph, television. But those technologies were always limited by their inability to transmit the written word.

The invention was called the Audion. It was the first electronic audio amplifier, and the man who created it was Lee de Forest.

economist Tyler Cowen says, “When access [to information] is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty.”

teens and other young adults have a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.”

As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory.

Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,”