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257.com Google gives you “the link�, and every time you see a link, you tend to click.

You click too much, read too little, and remember even less.

Magazine for Comments on the Web Featuring "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

by Nicholas Carr theatlantic.com /magazine /archive/2008/07 /is-google-makingus-stupid/6868/

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“Is Google Making U Internet is doing to o azine article by techn las G. Carr highly crit effect on cognition. essay was extensive media and the blog tions to Carr’s argum

Us Stupid?: What the our brains” is a magnology writer Nichotical of the Internet’s The ely discussed in the gosphere, with reacment being polarised.

It was published in the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic magazine as a six-page cover story. Carr’s main argument is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not specifically targeted at Google, but more at the cognitive impact of the whole Internet and World Wide Web.

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Facebook's business model SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

The desire for privacy is strong; vanity is stronger. fool.com/investing/etf/2010/07/02 /it-expert-nicholas-carr-ongoogle-apple-facebook.aspx Facebook: Carr was reluctant to endorse the company given his social views on its effects, but he still rated Facebook a buy.

In the end, Carr believes the critical mass that Facebook has built around its platform is insurmountable, and that the company should see opportunities from its vast user base.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Whole_Earth_Catalog #Organization The Catalog used a broad definition of "tools."

There were informative tools, such as books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes. There were well-designed specialpurpose utensils, including garden tools, carpenters' and masons' tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials, tents, hiking shoes, and potters' wheels. There were even early synthesizers and personal computers.

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press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415_chap4.html He and others at PARC saw the Catalog as an information tool and, hence, as an analogue to the computer; at the same time, they saw it as a hyperlinked information system. In that sense, remembered Kay, "we thought of the Whole Earth Catalog as a print version of what the Internet was going to be."

Useful as a tool, Relevant to independent education, High quality or low cost, Not already common knowledge, Easily available by mail. en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Whole_Internet_ User's_Guide_and_Catalog

en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Whole_Earth_Catalog#Impact

The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog,

by Ed Krol, was published in September 1992 by O'Reilly. The Los Angeles Times notes that the Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog was the "first popular book about the medium" and "was later selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the 20th century."

Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech.

"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."

During the commencement speech, Jobs also quoted the farewell message placed on the back cover of the 1974 edition of the catalog: "Stay hungry, stay foolish.

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Second Thoughts on Reading and Technology by Google’s Eric Schmidt

Nicholas Carr - February 23, 2010 GooglePlus: 0 Tweet: 0 facebookShare: 2 facebookLike

I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I’ve been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net’s effect on reading and cognition.

Here are three quotes from Schmidt on the topic:

defiant children: February 23, 2010 at 11:55 am Very worrying! Not only do we NOT read books anymore, but we cannot even have a proper conversation without being interrupted by a ridiculous ringtone on somebody’s mobile!

July 30, 2008: “I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? The Atlantic: ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ I mean, we’ve got a problem if this is true, right?

In the article, the author [Nick Carr] … points out that deep reading is equal to deep thinking, and since we’re not reading deep anymore, we’re obviously not deep thinking. And what I was realizing in reading this – and I encourage you all to read it – is that this is exactly what people said when color television arrived in my home in Virginia 40 years ago. This is also Bob McHenry: February 23, 2010 what people said 25 years ago when the MTV phenomenon at 1:11 pm occurred, about short attention spans and so forth. And I I wonder if Mr. Schmidt had any actual observe that we’re smarter than ever. So the important point evidence in July 2008 that “we’re smarter here is that [despite] all of these sort of histrionics about the than ever”? Or was that just the minor role of information and other changes, society is enormously premise needed to arrive at a foreorpowerful, enormously capable of adapting to the threats.” dained conclusion?

Website Optimisation: March 3, 2010 at 9:30 am Interesting article. I think that the Internet as a whole is making the general population lazier.

However, many inventions in the past have had the same effect, calculators being a prime example.

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March 6, 2009: “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that.”

January 29, 2010: “The one thing that I do worry about is the question of ‘deep reading.’ As the world looks to these instantaneous devices … you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines and so forth. That probably has an effect on cognition, probably has an effect on reading.”

I’m glad Schmidt has continued to ponder this issue, and I salute him for having the courage to air his concerns publicly. *

*

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Posted in Books, Science & Technology, Technology 15 Responses to “Second Thoughts on Reading and Technology by Google’s Eric Schmidt”

MBA Prep: February 25, 2010 at 3:15 pm Internet including Google is very like fast food: it is convenient and thus popular among the majority. However, if you eat only fast food your health is in great danger.

Ramesh Raghuvanshi: February 24, 2010 at 11:28 am Google is not alternative to book.

When first time I read the Dostoevsky`s crime and punishment I was so absorbed in that book finishing it I loss myself. Google never give us this kind of joy.

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... 1 year ago

2 people liked this.

In general regard to the author's comments on HAL, I think it is interesting how the work of man is intended to express man. That is, the further we work towards expressing and defining our true nature, the farther we will pull away from it ourselves. The result I think is a series of perspectives one must obey and attempt to live humbly by. We are only individuals, despite our vast connectivity, so we must contribute as best we can by committing to our hearts.

Hopefully this ball we've started rolling doesn't run right off the tracks. Even despite that, balance is always maintained, though it may not favor our human perspective.

5 people liked this.

obviously artificial, artifact buried on the moon and, with the intelligent computer HAL, sets off on a quest.

2 people liked this.

FYI: HAL is a murdering bastard, not a humanlike nice guy. Did we watch the same movie?

crowbargreen 1 year ago

Will Blackler 1 year ago

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I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable Director: Stanley Kubrick Lenika Cruz 1 Writers: Stanley Kubrick year ago sense that someone, or some(screenplay), Arthur C. Clarke in reply to (screenplay), and 1 more thing, has been tinkering with Edward Allen credit Thomas Stars: Keir Dullea, Gary my brain, remapping the neuLockwood and William "Kubrick's 4 people liked this.

Sylvester ral circuitry, reprogramming prophecy" is "dark" to me, in spite of my being both a believer in evolutionary the memory. My mind isn’t gotheory and an atheist. While I agree ing—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used with the basic idea that religion is a "quirk of our evolutionary present," I am still a humanist who is to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a strongly attached to the idea that book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the humans transcend the machines that they create. I do not subscribe narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through to any determinism that suggests that the pervasiveness of the Internet (or any medium for that long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration matter) dooms us human beings to "becoming more like it." often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin 9 people liked this. looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward

god, we will also move beyond such archaic value judgments as "Kubrick's dark prophecy..." [2nd to last line, above]. Only those of simple minds who think that "god" gives humans special dignity of some kind would call it "dark"; aren't we, after all, powerful, soulless apes anyway?

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL if you are scared of HAL, check out pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant "The Lawnmower Man" scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having near1 person liked this. ly been sent to a deep-space death by the imdb.com/title/tt0062622 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly 141 min - Adventure | Sci-Fi disconnecting the memory circuits that 6 April 1968 (USA) 8.4/10 from 194,360 users control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind Metascore: 86/100 Reviews: 1,433 user Edward Allen Thomas is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. 1 year ago 195 critic I can feel it.”

Mankind finds a mysterious, Instead, as we move beyond

Articles with "I," "me," "I think," "to me," "I can feel it," "my skepticism," etc, are a warning to the reader. Whining and angst soon follow.

Who wants to read a Woody Allen script?

Give your reader content. Whine to your shrink.

koblog 1 year ago

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brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I read the first four paragraphs and then promptly scrolled down to see how much longer the article was and which paragraphs I thought I could just skim over. I had to keep reminding myself ironically that I cannot skim read this text and I’m glad I didn’t.

I did, however become

Natalia_Nicholson 4 months ago

So you have to forgive me if I have great skepticism towards this new allegation that search engines destroy memory. It seems like another attack by people fearful of change. My own personal view is that search engines train our memory to be moreassociative rather than rote.

That is a good thing.

The internet is making us better people mentally.

We’re running out of memory.

I don’t mean computer memory.

That stuff’s half-price at Costco these days. No, I’m talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we’re remembering fewer... and fewer basic facts these days. ...

Your Outboard Brain Knows All

By Clive Thompson – 09.25.07

I think I know what’s going on. For TheHarvView 1 year ago 4 people liked this. more than a decade now, I’ve been One of my observations here is spending a lot of time online, search- that this essay about reading is too long. Now I'm not really ing and surfing and sometimes adding to the great data- joking when I say that I started scanning after the first several bases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me paragraphs and didn't bother to fidgety read it to completion. as a writer. Research that once required pranav 1 year ago But, Dear Mr. Carr, it is not and restless days in the stacks or periodical rooms of because of the Internet, it is I read the whole article and because the article did not hold after parai am a vivid Google user!!!!. libraries can now be done in minutes. A my attention once I understood the theme. graph seven.

I think it is not the internet that few Google searches, some quick clicks is affecting affecting our deep 41 people liked this. 1 person liked this. reading skills since whenever on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale i go to internet i always complete any article fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to i started!!!.Its just that more people have access to more be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headirrelevant information which is not available before so they lines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping are skimming it. from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, 8 people liked this. hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal 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 store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be wired.com/techbiz/people an enormous boon to thinking.” /magazine/15-10/st_thompson pranav 1 year ago But that boon comes at a price.

It's funny how the author describe the problems reading a long text in this long article. I found myself having problems to finish it.

flix 11 months ago

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Presented bz the Patholoy Education Consortium

labsoftnews.typepad.com

19 people liked this.

The medium is the message... to a large extent..I am coming to believe it. I feel very ambivalent about logging on these days, and wonder if I should give it up entirely for a time. Just losing a sense of myself in the present here and now. It's a little spooky.

Cindi Burkey 1 year ago

5 months ago

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Don't be threatened by change.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles The internet has made so much information available it with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary drives people to try to inhale it all. What a wonderful dilemma. types, most of them—many say they’re having similar Relax and enjoy the new world. experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they 14 people liked this. have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.

Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” publishing2.com he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my readPublishing 2.0 is a blog about how ing on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking technology is transforming media, news, and journalism. convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

deny that the media through which information is communicated, be it speech or television or print, alters it in some way.

Our brains learn to anticipate the kinds of messages we receive depending on the medium used.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Marshall_McLuhan but they also shape the process of thought. And what Lenika Cruz 1 year ago "McLuhan" redirects here. For the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity in reply to Jami Fahad Ali the son of Marshall McLuhan, see Eric McLuhan. for concentration and contemplation. My mind now exThough Postman primarily deals with the dangers Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC pects to take in information the way the Net distributes of television (the book was (July 21, 1911 – December 31, published in 1984), 1980) was a Canadian educator, it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a he spends a good part of philosopher, and scholar—a the book explicating professor of English literature, a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surMcLuhan's idea that "the literary critic, a rhetorician, and medium is the message." a communication theorist. face like a guy on a Jet Ski. I think that it is difficult to Charlie Bruns

“The visual makes for the explicit, the uniform, and the sequential in painting, in poetry, in logic, history. The non-literate modes are implicit, simultaneous, and discontinuous whether in the primitive past or the electronic present…”

-Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

Tim Borrego 10 months ago

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Lina Natuknica 4 months ago

5 people liked this.

Vicjoe, I completely agree with your point about how new knowledge is gained; through deep analysis of the 'grey areas of thought' and have found this to be particularly possible through deep discussion with someone on a very specific subject, going deeper and deeper and off on more and more tangents until you end up finding what you both agree is a satisfying explanation(s) or possible explanation(s) for something on an almost completely different subject to the one you started on.

Nobby_Nobbs 1 year ago in reply to Vicjoe

3 people liked this.

I don't know why my post appears here twice, my error somehow in signing up, my apologies.

Joe Wheeler

Vicjoe 1 year ago in reply to Vicjoe

a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier When I was a child there was no I have three children and each of them has a different approach to this year. A pathologist who internet in my world, and I spent a lot of time in libraries. I opened reading. So very different. I'm has long been on the faculty far more books that I read pretty certain that, if I had more far into, and read sections of far children, I'd discover even more of the University of Michigan more books than I ever finished. different approaches to reading.

I skimmed across the books in The one that uses the Internet the Medical School, Friedman the library the same way people most, also read the most books. today skim across web content.

Anything really worth elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversareading got read, every word, and recommended to others. tion with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a 26 people liked this. “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.

Danyl Strype 1 year ago in reply to johnnier

22 people liked this.

It may well be a vicious cycle, but I think it starts with a more general dumbing down that was underway long before networked computers dominated education. To explain that would be an essay in itself I regret to say. The Internet/ Web and what is has become is not a cause of changes in the depth of thought, rather a result of larger changes in hyper-competitive, community-less, insecure, driven, mass society. The Internet is just a reflection (and also an acceleration of) deeper changes in the way human character is formed by the master trends that have come to dominate our now-dying civilization. We were all set up for this mediocritization (a major concern of Nietzsche's) starting with the mass syndication of newspapers, the one-way dictat of TV, particularly advertising and again concentration of information in corporate hands with an agenda, and the accompanying trend towards oligarchy in nominally democratic societies. We have been conditioned to operate this way, shallowly, and the evolution of the Internet just reflects this larger trend of alienation.

The likely reality is that there are many Internets, just as there are many different kinds of book shops and libraries, representing different depths of thought, levels of specialization, the catering to particular tastes and interests. If more and more Web content is coming to resemble "sound bytes" that is because of people as selectors who drive what is most popular and likely to be listed first in search engine results.

Despite pretentious rhetoric by Google's founders that a sophisticated search is something that approaches "artificial intelligence" (as something more powerful than the mere intelligence of we apes-with-brains), Eric Schmidt nevertheless revealed the true dynamic when he said "[Google] understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want." Right, garbage in, garbage out.

The essence of the growth of intelligence and hence greater knowledge lies in the struggle, the ambiguity, the paradoxes, the impossible-to-shorten deep analyses; it is in wrestling with these challenges that our intellectual capacity grows, by learning to cope with the grey areas of thought that are the essence of critical thinking. Schmidt's rendering suggests an underlying domination of the need for instant gratification, that what you get from the Web is no more than what you started out with if you have the expectation that it should all be quick, easy and succinct.

To the question in the title "Is Google Making Us Stupid" I'd have to reverse that to ask "Are We Making Google Stupid?"

Vicjoe 1 year ago

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"Don't joke; I mean to have a serious The Project Gutenberg EBook of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy talk with you. Do you know I am BOOK ONE: 1805 dissatisfied with your younger son?

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with (and her face asBetween ourselves" almost or expression), CHAPTERno I restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give sumedititsaway melancholy re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included "he was mentioned at Her Majesty's with orand online "Well, this Prince,eBook so Genoa Lucca at are www.gutenberg.org now just family estates of the and you were pitied...."

Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if The prince answered nothing, but you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that she looked at him significantly, Title: War and Antichrist—I really Peace believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more awaiting a reply. He frowned. to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful "What would you have me do?" he Author: Leo slave,' as you callTolstoy yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened said at last. "You know I did all a fayou—sit down and tell me all the news." ther could for their education, and Posting Date: January 10,was 2009 [EBook #2600] It was in July, 1805, and the speaker the well-known Anna Pavlovna they have both turned out fools.

Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya Fedorovna. Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Language: English With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man of high rank Anatole is an active one. That is the and importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pav- only difference between them." He Character set encoding: ASCII lovna had had a cough for some days.

She was, as she said, suffering said this smiling in a way more natufrom la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used ral and animated than usual, so that *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAR AND round PEACE *** very only by the elite. the wrinkles his mouth clearly revealed something unexAll her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered pectedly coarse and unpleasant. by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows: "And why are children born to such "If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect men as you? If you were not a father of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be there would be nothing I could revery charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10—Annette Scherer." proach you with," said Anna Pav"Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the least lovna, looking up pensively. disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an embroi- "I am your faithful slave and to you dered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on his alone I can confess that my children breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that refined are the bane of my life. It is the cross French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and with I have to bear. That is how I explain the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance who it to myself. It can't be helped!" had grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pavlovna, He said no more, but expressed his kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head, resignation to cruel fate by a gesture. and complacently seated himself on the sofa.

Anna Pavlovna meditated.

"First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend's mind at "Have you never thought of marryrest," said he without altering his tone, beneath the politeness and af- ing your prodigal son Anatole?" she fected sympathy of which indifference and even irony could be dis- asked. "They say old maids have a cerned. mania for matchmaking, and "Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like though I don't feel that weakness in these if one has any feeling?" said Anna Pavlovna. "You are staying the myself as yet, I know a little person whole evening, I hope?" who is very unhappy with her father.

"And the fete at the English ambassador's? Today is Wednesday. I must She is a relation of yours, Princess put in an appearance there," said the prince. "My daughter is coming for Mary Bolkonskaya." me to take me there."

Prince Vasili did not reply, though, "I thought today's fete had been canceled. I confess all these festivities with the quickness of memory and and fireworks are becoming wearisome." perception befitting a man of the "If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have world, he indicated by a movement been put off," said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of of the head that he was considering habit said things he did not even wish to be believed. this information.

"Don't tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosiltsev's dis- "Do you know," he said at last, evipatch? You know everything." dently unable to check the sad cur"What can one say about it?" replied the prince in a cold, listless tone. rent of his thoughts, "that Anatole is "What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt costing me forty thousand rubles a his boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours." year? And," he went on after a pause, Prince Vasili always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part. "what will it be in five years, if he Anna Pavlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty years, over- goes on like this?" Presently he addflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had be- ed: "That's what we fathers have to come her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel put up with.... Is this princess of like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expecta- yours rich?" tions of those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it did "Her father is very rich and stingy. not suit her faded features, always played round her lips expressed, as in He lives in the country. He is the a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which well-known Prince Bolkonski who she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct. had to retire from the army under In the midst of a conversation on political matters Anna Pavlovna burst the late Emperor, and was nickout: named 'the King of Prussia.' He is "Oh, don't speak to me of Austria. Perhaps I don't understand things, very clever but eccentric, and a bore. but Austria never has wished, and does not wish, for war. She is betray- The poor girl is very unhappy. She

By Leo Tolstoy/Tolstoi

Home WAR AND Back PEACE Prev http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2600/2600-h/2600-h.htm bump of paternity." observed these greetings with mournful and solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

The young Princess Bolkonskaya had brought some work in a gold-embroidered velvet bag. Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty. Everyone brightened at the sight of this pretty young woman, so soon to become a mother, so full of life and health, and carrying her burden so lightly. Old men and dull dispirited young ones who looked at her, after being in her company and talking to her a little while, felt as if they too were becoming, like her, full of life and health. All who talked to her, and at each word saw her bright smile and the constant gleam of her white teeth, thought that they were in a specially amiable mood that day.

The little princess went round the table with quick, short, swaying steps, her workbag on her arm, and gaily spreading out her dress sat down on a sofa near the silver samovar, as if all she was doing was a pleasure to herself and to all around her. "I have brought my work," said she in French, displaying her bag and addressing all present. "Mind, Annette, I hope you have not played a wicked trick on me," she added, turning to her hostess.

"You wrote that it was to be quite a small reception, and just see how badly I am dressed." And she spread out her arms to show her shortwaisted, lace-trimmed, dainty gray dress, girdled with a broad ribbon just below the breast.

"Soyez tranquille, Lise, you will always be prettier than anyone else," replied Anna Pavlovna.

"You know," said the princess in the same tone of voice and still in French, turning to a general, "my husband is deserting me? He is going to get himself killed. Tell me what this wretched war is for?" she added, addressing Prince Vasili, and without waiting for an answer she turned to speak to his daughter, the beautiful Helene.

"What a delightful woman this little princess is!" said Prince Vasili to Anna Pavlovna.

One of the next arrivals was a stout, heavily built young man with closecropped hair, spectacles, the light-colored breeches fashionable at that time, a very high ruffle, and a brown dress coat. This stout young man was an illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, a well-known grandee of Catherine's time who now lay dying in Moscow. The young man had not yet entered either the military or civil service, as he had only just returned from abroad where he had been educated, and this was his first appearance in society. Anna Pavlovna greeted him with the nod she accorded to the lowest hierarchy in her drawing room. But in spite of this lowestgrade greeting, a look of anxiety and fear, as at the sight of something too large and unsuited to the place, came over her face when she saw Pierre enter. Though he was certainly rather bigger than the other men in the room, her anxiety could only have reference to the clever though shy, but observant and natural, expression which distinguished him from everyone else in that drawing room.

"It is very good of you, Monsieur Pierre, to come and visit a poor invalid," said Anna Pavlovna, exchanging an alarmed glance with her aunt as she conducted him to her.

Pierre murmured something unintelligible, and continued to look round as if in search of something. On his way to the aunt he bowed to the little princess with a pleased smile, as to an intimate acquaintance.

Anna Pavlovna's alarm was justified, for Pierre turned away from the aunt without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty's health. Anna Pavlovna in dismay detained him with the words: "Do you know the Abbe Morio? He is a most interesting man."

"Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very interesting but hardly feasible."

"You think so?" rejoined Anna Pavlovna in order to say something and get away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now committed a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had finished

The vicomte wished to begin his story and gave a subtle smile.

"Come over here, Helene, dear," said Anna Pavlovna to the beautiful young princess who was sitting some way off, the center of another group.

The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile with which she had first entered the room—the smile of a perfectly beautiful woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed with moss and ivy, with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and sparkling diamonds, she passed between the men who made way for her, not looking at any of them but smiling on all, as if graciously allowing each the privilege of admiring her beautiful figure and shapely shoulders, back, and bosom— which in the fashion of those days were very much exposed—and she seemed to bring the glamour of a ballroom with her as she moved toward Anna Pavlovna.

Helene was so lovely that not only did she not show any trace of coquetry, but on the contrary she even appeared shy of her unquestionable and all too victorious beauty.

She seemed to wish, but to be unable, to diminish its effect.

"How lovely!" said everyone who saw her; and the vicomte lifted his shoulders and dropped his eyes as if startled by something extraordinary when she took her seat opposite and beamed upon him also with her unchanging smile.

"Madame, I doubt my ability before such an audience," said he, smilingly inclining his head.

The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and considered a reply unnecessary. She smilingly waited. All the time the story was being told she sat upright, glancing now at her beautiful round arm, altered in shape by its pressure on the table, now at her still more beautiful bosom, on which she readjusted a diamond necklace. From time to time she smoothed the folds of her dress, and whenever the story produced an effect she glanced at Anna Pavlovna, at once adopted just the expression she saw on the maid of honor's face, and again relapsed into her radiant smile.

The little princess had also left the tea table and followed Helene.

"Wait a moment, I'll get my work.... Now then, what are you thinking of?" she went on, turning to Prince Hippolyte. "Fetch me my workbag."

There was a general movement as the princess, smiling and talking merrily to everyone at once, sat down and gaily arranged herself in her seat.

"Now I am all right," she said, and asking the vicomte to begin, she took up her work.

Prince Hippolyte, having brought the workbag, joined the circle and moving a chair close to hers seated himself beside her.

Le charmant Hippolyte was surprising by his extraordinary resemblance to his beautiful sister, but yet more by the fact that in spite of this resemblance he was exceedingly ugly. His features were like his sister's, but while in her case everything was lit up by a joyous, self-satisfied, youthful, and constant smile of animation, and by the wonderful classic beauty of her figure, his face on the contrary was dulled by imbecility and a constant expression of sullen self-confidence, while his body was thin and weak.

His eyes, nose, and mouth all seemed puckered into a vacant, wearied grimace, and his arms and legs always fell into unnatural positions.

"It's not going to be a ghost story?" said he, sitting down beside the princess and hastily adjusting his lorgnette, as if without this instrument he could not begin to speak.

"Why no, my dear fellow," said the astonished narrator, shrugging his shoulders.

"Because I hate ghost stories," said Prince Hippolyte in a

CHAPTER IV Just then another visitor entered the drawing room: Prince Andrew Bolkonski, the little princess' husband. He was a very handsome young man, of medium height, with firm, clearcut features. Everything about him, from his weary, bored expression to his quiet, measured step, offered a most striking contrast to his quiet, little wife. It was evident that he not only knew everyone in the drawing room, but had found them to be so tiresome that it wearied him to look at or listen to them. And among all these faces that he found so tedious, none seemed to bore him so much as that of his pretty wife.

He turned away from her with a grimace that distorted his handsome face, kissed Anna Pavlovna's hand, and screwing up his eyes scanned the whole company.

"You are off to the war, Prince?" said Anna Pavlovna.

"General Kutuzov," said Bolkonski, speaking French and stressing the last syllable of the general's name like a Frenchman, "has been pleased to take me as an aide-de-camp...."

"And Lise, your wife?"

"She will go to the country."

"Are you not ashamed to deprive us of your charming wife?"

"Andre," said his wife, addressing her husband in the same coquettish manner in which she spoke to other men, "the vicomte has been telling us such a tale about Mademoiselle George and Buonaparte!"

Prince Andrew screwed up his eyes and turned away. Pierre, who from the moment Prince Andrew entered the room had watched him with glad, affectionate eyes, now came up and took his arm. Before he looked round Prince Andrew frowned again, expressing his annoyance with whoever was touching his arm, but when he saw Pierre's beaming face he gave him an unexpectedly kind and pleasant smile.

"There now!... So you, too, are in the great world?" said he to Pierre.

"I knew you would be here," replied Pierre. "I will come to supper with you. May I?" he added in a low voice so as not to disturb the vicomte who was continuing his story.

"No, impossible!" said Prince Andrew, laughing and pressing Pierre's hand to show that there was no need to ask the question. He wished to say something more, but at that moment Prince Vasili and his daughter got up to go and the two young men rose to let them pass.

"You must excuse me, dear Vicomte," said Prince Vasili to the Frenchman, holding him down by the sleeve in a friendly way to prevent his rising. "This unfortunate fete at the ambassador's deprives me of a pleasure, and obliges me to interrupt you. I am very sorry to leave your enchanting party," said he, turning to Anna Pavlovna.

His daughter, Princess Helene, passed between the chairs, lightly holding up the folds of her dress, and the smile shone still more radiantly on her beautiful face. Pierre gazed at her with rapturous, almost frightened, eyes as she passed him.

"Very lovely," said Prince Andrew.

"Very," said Pierre.

In passing Prince Vasili seized Pierre's hand and said to Anna Pavlovna: "Educate this bear for me! He has been staying with me a whole month and this is the first time I have seen him in society. Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women."

Anna Pavlovna smiled and promised to take Pierre in hand.

Close ual to him when conversing withMinimize women.

"I am so enchanted by the brilliancy of the wit and culture of the society, more especially of the feminine society, in which I have had the honor of being received, that I have not yet had time to think of the climate," said he Not letting the abbe and Pierre escape, Anna Pavlovna, the more conveniently to keep them under observation, brought them into the larger circle.

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ing us! Russia alone must save Europe. Our gracious sovereign recognizes his high vocation and will be true to it. That is the one thing I have faith in! Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform the noblest role on earth, and he is so virtuous and noble that God will not forsake him. He will fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of revolution, which has become more terrible than ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We alone must avenge the blood of the just one....

Whom, I ask you, can we rely on?... England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot understand the Emperor Alexander's loftiness of soul. She has refused to evacuate Malta. She wanted to find, and still seeks, some secret motive in our actions. What answer did Novosiltsev get? None. The English have not understood and cannot understand the self-abnegation of our Emperor who wants nothing for himself, but only desires the good of mankind. And what have they promised?

Nothing! And what little they have promised they will not perform!

Prussia has always declared that Buonaparte is invincible, and that all Europe is powerless before him.... And I don't believe a word that Hardenburg says, or Haugwitz either. This famous Prussian neutrality is just a trap. I have faith only in God and the lofty destiny of our adored monarch. He will save Europe!"

She suddenly paused, smiling at her own impetuosity.

"I think," said the prince with a smile, "that if you had been sent instead of our dear Wintzingerode you would have captured the King of Prussia's consent by assault. You are so eloquent. Will you give me a cup of tea?"

"In a moment. A propos," she added, becoming calm again, "I am expecting two very interesting men tonight, le Vicomte de Mortemart, who is connected with the Montmorencys through the Rohans, one of the best French families. He is one of the genuine emigres, the good ones. And also the Abbe Morio. Do you know that profound thinker?

He has been received by the Emperor. Had you heard?"

"I shall be delighted to meet them," said the prince. "But tell me," he added with studied carelessness as if it had only just occurred to him, though the question he was about to ask was the chief motive of his visit, "is it true that the Dowager Empress wants Baron Funke to be appointed first secretary at Vienna? The baron by all accounts is a poor creature."

Prince Vasili wished to obtain this post for his son, but others were trying through the Dowager Empress Marya Fedorovna to secure it for the baron.

Anna Pavlovna almost closed her eyes to indicate that neither she nor anyone else had a right to criticize what the Empress desired or was pleased with.

"Baron Funke has been recommended to the Dowager Empress by her sister," was all she said, in a dry and mournful tone.

As she named the Empress, Anna Pavlovna's face suddenly assumed an expression of profound and sincere devotion and respect mingled with sadness, and this occurred every time she mentioned her illustrious patroness. She added that Her Majesty had deigned to show Baron Funke beaucoup d'estime, and again her face clouded over with sadness.

The prince was silent and looked indifferent. But, with the womanly and courtierlike quickness and tact habitual to her, Anna Pavlovna wished both to rebuke him (for daring to speak he had done of a man recommended to the Empress) and at the same time to console him, so she said: "Now about your family. Do you know that since your daughter came out everyone has been enraptured by her? They say she is amazingly beautiful."

The prince bowed to signify his respect and gratitude.

"I often think," she continued after a short pause, drawing nearer to the prince and smiling amiably at him as if to show that political and social topics were ended and the time had come for intimate conversation—"I often think how unfairly sometimes the joys of life are distributed. Why has fate given you two such splendid children? I don't speak of Anatole, your youngest. I don't like him," she added in a tone admitting of no rejoinder and raising her eyebrows. "Two such charming children. And really you appreciate them less than anyone, and so you don't deserve to have them." And she smiled her ecstatic smile.

"I can't help it," said the prince. "Lavater would have said I lack the CHAPTER II Anna Pavlovna's drawing room was gradually filling. The highest Petersburg society was assembled there: people differing widely in age and character but alike in the social circle to which they belonged. Prince Vasili's daughter, the beautiful Helene, came to take her father to the ambassador's entertainment; she wore a ball dress and her badge as maid of honor. The youthful little Princess Bolkonskaya, known as la femme la plus seduisante de Petersbourg, * was also there. She had been married during the previous winter, and being pregnant did not go to any large gatherings, but only to small receptions. Prince Vasili's son, Hippolyte, had come with Mortemart, whom he introduced. The Abbe Morio and many others had also come. * The most fascinating woman in Petersburg.

To each new arrival Anna Pavlovna said, "You have not yet seen my aunt," or "You do not know my aunt?" and very gravely conducted him or her to a little old lady, wearing large bows of ribbon in her cap, who had come sailing in from another room as soon as the guests began to arrive; and slowly turning her eyes from the visitor to her aunt, Anna Pavlovna mentioned each one's name and then left them.

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about; Anna Pavlovna

has a brother; I think you know him, he married Lise Meinen lately. He is an aide-de-camp of Kutuzov's and will be here tonight."

"Listen, dear Annette," said the prince, suddenly taking Anna Pavlovna's hand and for some reason drawing it downwards. "Arrange that affair for me and I shall always be your most devoted slave-slafe with an f, as a village elder of mine writes in his reports. She is rich and of good family and that's all I want."

And with the familiarity and easy grace peculiar to him, he raised the maid of honor's hand to his lips, kissed it, and swung it to and fro as he lay back in his armchair, looking in another direction.

"Attendez," said Anna Pavlovna, reflecting, "I'll speak to Lise, young Bolkonski's wife, this very evening, and perhaps the thing can be arranged. It shall be on your family's behalf that I'll start my apprenticeship as old maid."

tone which showed that he only understood the meaning of his words after he had uttered them.

He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid. He was dressed in a dark-green dress coat, knee breeches of the color of cuisse de nymphe effrayee, as he called it, shoes, and silk stockings.

The vicomte told his tale very neatly. It was an anecdote, then current, to the effect that the Duc d'Enghien had gone secretly to Paris to visit Mademoiselle George; that at her house he came upon Bonaparte, who also enjoyed the famous actress' favors, and that in his presence Napoleon happened to fall into one of the fainting fits to which he was subject, and was thus at the duc's mercy. The latter spared him, and this magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by death.

The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point where the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies looked agitated.

"Charming!" said Anna Pavlovna with an inquiring glance at the little princess.

"Charming!" whispered the little princess, sticking the

CHAPTER III Anna Pavlovna's reception was in full swing. The spindles hummed steadily and ceaselessly on all sides. With the exception of the aunt, beside whom sat only one elderly lady, who with her thin careworn face was rather out of place in this brilliant society, the whole company had settled into three groups. One, chiefly masculine, had formed round the abbe. Another, of young people, was grouped round the beautiful Princess Helene, Prince Vasili's daughter, and the little Princess Bolkonskaya, very pretty and rosy, though rather too plump for her age. The third group was gathered round Mortemart and Anna Pavlovna.

The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and polished manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out of politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in which he found himself. Anna Pavlovna was obviously serving him up as a treat to her guests. As a clever maitre d'hotel serves up as a specially choice delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen it in the kitchen would have cared to eat, so Anna Pavlovna served up to her guests, first the vicomte and then the abbe, as peculiarly choice morsels. The group about Mortemart immediately began discussing the murder of the Duc d'Enghien. The vicomte said that the Duc d'Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte's hatred of him.

"Ah, yes! Do tell us all about it, Vicomte," said Anna Pavlovna, with a pleasant feeling that there was something a la Louis XV in the sound of that sentence: "Contez nous cela, Vicomte."

The vicomte bowed and smiled courteously in token of his willingness to comply. Anna Pavlovna arranged a group round him, inviting everyone to listen to his tale.

"The vicomte knew the duc personally," whispered Anna Pavlovna to of the guests. "The vicomte is a wonderful raconteur," said she to another.

"How evidently he belongs to the best society," said she to a third; and the vicomte was served up to the company in the choicest and most advantageous style, like a well-garnished joint of roast beef on a hot dish.

needle into her work as if to testify that the interest and fascination of the story prevented her from going on with it.

The vicomte appreciated this silent praise and smiling gratefully prepared to continue, but just then Anna Pavlovna, who had kept a watchful eye on the young man who so alarmed her, noticed that he was talking too loudly and vehemently with the abbe, so she hurried to the rescue.

Pierre had managed to start a conversation with the abbe about the balance of power, and the latter, evidently interested by the young man's simple-minded eagerness, was explaining his pet theory. Both were talking and listening too eagerly and too naturally, which was why Anna Pavlovna disapproved.

"The means are... the balance of power in Europe and the rights of the people," the abbe was saying. "It is only necessary for one powerful nation like Russia—barbaric as she is said to be—to place herself disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its object the maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would save the world!"

"But how are you to get that balance?" Pierre was beginning.

At that moment Anna Pavlovna came up and, looking severely at Pierre, asked the Italian how he stood Russian climate. The Italian's face instantly changed and assumed an offensively affected, sugary expression, evidently habit-

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speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbe's plan chimerical.

"We will talk of it later," said Anna Pavlovna with a smile.

And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, she resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, ready to help at any point where the conversation might happen to flag.

As the foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands to work, goes round and notices here a spindle that has stopped or there one that creaks or makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna Pavlovna moved about her drawing room, approaching now a silent, now a too-noisy group, and by a word or slight rearrangement kept the conversational machine in steady, proper, and regular motion. But amid these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident. She kept an anxious watch on him when he approached the group round Mortemart to listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed to another group whose center was the abbe.

Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna Pavlovna's was the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all the intellectual lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like a child in a toyshop, did not know which way to look, afraid of missing any clever conversation that was to be heard. Seeing the self-confident and refined expression on the faces of those present he was always expecting to hear something very profound. At last he came up to Morio. Here the conversation seemed interesting and he stood waiting for an opportunity to express his own views, as young people are fond of doing.

She knew his father to be a connection of Prince Vasili's. The elderly lady who had been sitting with the old aunt rose hurriedly and overtook Prince Vasili in the anteroom. All the affectation of interest she had assumed had left her kindly and tear-worn face and it now expressed only anxiety and fear.

"How about my son Boris, Prince?" said she, hurrying after him into the anteroom. "I can't remain any longer in Petersburg. Tell me what news I may take back to my poor boy."

Although Prince Vasili listened reluctantly and not very politely to the elderly lady, even betraying some impatience, she gave him an ingratiating and appealing smile, and took his hand that he might not go away.

"What would it cost you to say a word to the Emperor, and then he would be transferred to the Guards at once?" said she.

"Believe me, Princess, I am ready to do all I can," answered Prince Vasili, "but it is difficult for me to ask the Emperor. I should advise you to appeal to Rumyantsev through Prince Golitsyn. That would be the best way."

The elderly lady was a Princess Drubetskaya, belonging to one of the best families in Russia, but she was poor, and having long been out of society had lost her former influential connections. She had now come to Petersburg to procure an appointment in the Guards for her only son. It was, in fact, solely to meet Prince Vasili that she had obtained an invitation to Anna Pavlovna's reception and had sat listening to the vicomte's story. Prince Vasili's words frightened her, an embittered look clouded her once handsome face, but only for a moment; then she smiled again and clutched Prince Vasili's arm more tightly.

"Listen to me, Prince," said she. "I have never yet asked you for anything and I never will again, nor have I ever reminded you of my father's friendship for you; but now I entreat you for God's sake to do this for my son—and I shall always regard you as a benefactor," she added hurriedly. "No, don't be angry, but promise! I have asked Golitsyn and he has refused. Be the kindhearted man you always were," she said, trying to smile though tears were in her eyes.

"Papa, we shall be late," said Princess Helene, turning her beautiful head and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she stood waiting by the door.

Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized if it is to last. Prince Vasili knew this, and having once realized that if he asked on behalf of all who begged of him, he would soon be unable to ask for himself, he became chary of using his influence. But in Princess Drubetskaya's case he felt, after her second appeal, something like qualms of conscience. She had reminded him of what was quite true; he had been indebted to her father for the first steps in his career. Moreover, he could see by her manners that she was one of those women—mostly mothers—who, having once made up their minds, will not rest until they have gained their end, and are prepared if necessary to go on insisting day after day and hour after hour, and even to make scenes.

This last consideration moved him.

"My dear Anna Mikhaylovna," said he with his usual familiarity and weariness of tone, "it is almost impossible for me to do what you ask; but to prove my devotion to you and how I respect your father's memory, I will do the impossible— your son shall be transferred to the Guards. Here is my hand on it. Are you satisfied?"

"My dear benefactor! This is what I expected from you—I knew your kindness!" He turned to go.

"Wait—just a word! When he has been transferred to the Guards..." she faltered. "You are on good terms with Michael Ilarionovich Kutuzov... recommend Boris to him as adjutant! Then I shall be at rest, and then..."

Prince Vasili smiled.

« Previous Page — Page 22 That article was so long.... I couldn't finish reading it!!

he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

11 people liked this.

This is pseudoscientific drivel. Some people incidentally say that they "no longer" read Tolstoy.

Apparently, the internet stole the Russian classics.

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I read until i reached this "...we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition..."

Steven Taylor 1 year ago

Too long.

Didn't read.

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet 4 people liked this. use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, consimplulo 1 year ago ducted by scholars pressandpolicy.bl.uk On a friend's from University College London, suggests that we may Find press and policy caterpillar 1 year ago recommendation, I information about the British googled for this article well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read Library, including contacts, Great article. and just read the first I'll give this idea some I skimmed it. press releases and related couple paragraphs. It's and think. As part of the five-year research program, multimedia content. credit when someone has Not because I can't way too long. But in some real data. Not some or don't want to read Make requests, such as general I agree. the scholars examined computer logs documenting the applications for filming. These silly experiment about it in its entirety, but college students doing because reading from pages are updated daily.

3 people liked this. behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one papers for their class. the screen hurts my I'm sure that no one eyes. Don't have a would argue that an printer right now, but operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, experiment limited to a I'd print it and then jonnewbury 1 year ago that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of certain age group, social read it--later. standing, and location is no evidence at all.

8 people liked this. written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a Jeez - who Trevor 1 year ago 4 people liked this. form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to has time Ha ha, I skimmed the another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They because I to read all article have 13 other google typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before windows open at the that! same ti........ they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long 14 people liked this. 4 people liked this. alshaw 1 year ago article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read Well. I skim read it. The authors of the study report: It is clear that users are not reading this, so I reckon I've got the message. online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Will Harvey 1 year ago

Saloni Handa 1 year ago

Right as I was getting to that part my mind was starting to tell me "This article is too long just skim it" but after reading this line, and realizing I was thinking the exact same thing I decided to read the full article. I am very glad I did.

Dunshster 1 year ago

Daniil Leiderman 1 year ago

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Shipping on orders owver $25. You Save: $8.82 (34%) In Stock.

have any idea about computer hardware, he / she can get the solution by typing a few words in GOOGLE. Ok if you don't want to happen this, if you want, no.... A normal person should purchase the service from an IT personal, then GOOGLE done a very very very bad job.

And we should punish GOOGLE. Nicolas should make an apology for the comment regarding Great GOOGLE.

make us ‘worse’ the new learning modes just might make us ‘better,’ and certainly more relevant.

1 person liked this. Me like donuts

Thread Bear 6 months ago

1 person liked this.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an in- BillMCA 1 year ago stinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech What worries me here is that the inference being drawn is that this is a bad thing is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we which will all end in tears. In my view it is too easy to see “different” as “worse.” see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies Maybe, just maybe, we don’t now have time for traditional, shanchya 1 year ago more linear we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an learning and that important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. This is the most idiotic news I have ever the old ways will read in my life!!!!!! Ok let me explain, not equip the new Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the why I tell Nicolas an idiot. A person who generation for didn't have any knowledge about future challenges. computer troubleshooting, and don't So rather than Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very dif-

44 people liked this.

end of this? ;-)

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinkSusie Bright 1 year ago ing—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says I worried that I, too, was Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author losing my book-reading brain cells from overexpoof Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are sure to the Net. amazon.com/exec/ Then I realized, I just hadn't how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promotobidos/ISBN=0060 found a good book lately.

186399/theatlantic When I finally found one to ed by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” monthA/ref=nosim/ my liking, I was completely absorbed, just as I was as a above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of Proust and the Squid: child.

The Story and Science Reading on one's browser deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the of the Reading Brain allows for "better" skimming [Hardcover] and more discrimination, printing press, made long and complex works of prose comMaryanne Wolf (Author) because it's faster to scroll than turn pages. You find monplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become 4.2 out of 5 stars out more quickly what holds 65 customer reviews your interest. That has “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, List Price: $25.95 nothing to do with the mePrice: $17.13 dium and everything to do to make the rich mental connections that form when we read & eligible for with the writer.

FREE Super Saver Did you make it to the deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

« Previous Page — Page 24 One day I took a long hike in nature, then realized on what a crystal clear recollection I had of the "event" later. And how I have spent months, for hoturs and hours each day on the internet.

And have only vague memory on what I did each day, as all the days spent in the virtual world collided together in my memory as one singular event. Which made me stand back and ask myself "What did I DO all year? Its like my brain was shut down on auto pilot the whole year! My brain was turned off. I wasted my whole year!"

Christine Grace 1 year ago

us whose written language employs many regions of the brain, including functions as memory and the intercan expect as well that the circuits from those woven by our reading of

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Marius Amado-Alves Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche 4 months ago bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen One thing puzzles me about this article.

The author states he is loosing ability to concentrate Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was 21 people liked this. on long or sophisticated literature. failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a But clearly the author is a learned person, notably one page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on that reads a lot. Books. (Or is Nietzsche correspondence on Wikipedia now?) Well, such type of person crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, does not loose the aforementioned ability. Sorry, they just don't. Even if they cruise the Web a lot. Let me and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The type- honestly enlist myself as a learned person that cruises the web a lot. I do not experience any lost of the ability writer rescued him, at least for to read long, difficult texts. Then, why should the author?

Also see: Living With a Computer a time. Once he had mastered (July 1982) “The process works this way. When I sit touch-typing, he was able to Thanks. down to write a letter or start the first draft of an write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words could once again flow from his mind to the page. appear on the screen...” By James Fallows But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

ferent from the circuitry found in those of an alphabet. The variations extend across those that govern such essential cognitive pretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We woven by our use of the Net will be different books and other printed works.

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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s Nietzsche is mentioned in the article, specifically about how his resort to prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to en.wikipedia.org a typewriter somehow diluted his /wiki prose "from arguments to aphorisms, puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” /Friedrich_A._Kittler from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style." The opposite is The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to (Redirected from equally possible, namely that the Friedrich A. Kittler) "tyranny of text", that is particularly think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed reinforced by manual writing with pen commonengineer Friedrich A. Kittler and paper, is loosened up a bit with among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was (June 12, 1943 – Octo1 year ago the quicker flow and greater ease of ber 18, 2011) was a correction using a keyboard, so that largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain re- literary scholar and a The example of how aphorisms, puns and pungent Nietzsche writing media theorist. His 'telegraph' conclusions better searchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, works relate to media, style changed with expressed what Nietzsche wanted to technology, and the his introduction to say all along, more spontaneous, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute military. the typewriter made more representative of synthesis of me ask myself; what thought, more immediately evocative. for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even would his writing be like today?

22 people liked this. the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old Would he be a blogger, you-tuber, Mace Ojala 9 months ideasplate connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, or tweeter? ago 2 months ago “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

3 people liked this.

Loved it.

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create VickG the belief in an independent world of mathemati7 months ago cally measurable sequences.” The “abstract frameWhat a work of divided time” became “the point of referthoughtful article. ence for both action and thought.”

Jacques Derrida talks Technology is about the effect of changing all using a typewriter and the time and text processing in his we like or not Paper Machine–Cul- we are part of tural memory in the all that stuff. present, in an interview titled The Word Processor (Stanford Uni. Press, 2005, ISBN 9780804746205, translated to english by Rachel Bowlby, the interview available on Google Books). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford 1 person liked this.

Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes.

Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.

Vicjoe 1 year ago

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in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was stockily built, had a high-pitched voice, and was talkative, witty, and somewhat donnish.

[Received 28 May, 1936.—Read 12 November, 1936.]

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper 1 person liked this. published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital thocp.net /biographies computer, which at the time existed only as a en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing /papers/turing_oncomputablenumtheoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the "Turing" redirects here. For other uses, see Turing bers_1936.pdf (disambiguation). function of any other information-processing device. And Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (tewr-ing; 23 June ON COMPUTABLE NUMBERS, WITH 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeas- logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist.

AN APPLICATION TO THE He was highly influential in the development of urably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of computer science, providing a formalisation of the ENTSCHEIDUNGSPROBLEM concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map the Turing machine, which played a significant role By A. M. TURING

My friend all i can say is that Google has definitely damned you!

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judg- en.wikipedia.org/wiki ment to Calculation, /Joseph_Weizenbaum the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping Joseph Weizenbaum instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older (January 8, 1923, Berlin one, for it rests on - March 5, 2008, a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis Ludwigsfelde-Gröben for, and indeed conJoe Jamsky 6 months ago near Berlin) was a stituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, German-American to work, to sleep, This article is so dumb. Everyone's brain is constantly author and professor to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and emeritus of computer started obeying the working. The only way you can possibly stay stagnant and not learn something is if you practice the same science at MIT. clock. thing that you're already good at over and over again.

Like basic addition. You can solve that with 100% The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected efficiency. Once you do something you've never done before, like google a piece of information you didn't in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. know, you're rewriting your polak10 6 months ago neurons. That is learning. in reply to Joe Jamsky When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating Even if it's stupid pop trivia it's still learning. If anything, Joe, what are you “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operathaving access to an infinite talking about? If i get amount of new experiences, you, learning occurs ing “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metathrough the internet is going when you "'rewrite to improve intelligence. your neurons''??? phor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

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21 people liked this.

This article speaks volumes to me and relation to my life. As someone with Attention Deficit Disorder, being able to concentrate and focus on one task, on one goal is a constant struggle that seems to always, constantly slip away from me and through my grip.

Christine Grace 1 year ago

(Page 2 of 2)

and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

James Dykes 1 year ago

2 people liked this.

Sounds good to me.

What's wrong with that?

I'm finding myself remembering where to find the information and how to find it, rather then remembering the information itself. centfois 1 year ago in reply to James Dykes

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.

It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media and concentrate. ;) it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival Interesting arguments, don't agree with all of them though. as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to 13 people liked this. scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse infosnippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design direc- nytimes.com/2008/04/06/ tor, Tom Bodkin, opinion/06pubed.html explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a ?pagewanted=2%amp%sq quick “taste” of the =Tom%20Bodkin%amp day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of ac- %st=cse%amp%scp=4 tually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice Change Can Be Painful, but but to play by the This One Shouldn’t Hurt new-media rules.

Published: April 6, 2008

capacity to deep read

Well, anyone who made it through that pretty long text obviously hasn't lost the

Charly A. 1 year ago

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121 people liked this.

by Frederick Winslow Taylor, M.E., Sc. D. INTRODUCTION PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, [note A] in his address to the Governors at the White House, prophetically remarked that "The conservation of our national resources is only preliminary to the larger question of national efficiency."

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About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Frederick_Winslow_Taylor aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s mapembquist 1 year ago Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, chinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he 1856 – March 21, 1915) was an Excellent article. The depressing American mechanical engineer who feature of the comments so far is sought to improve industrial efficiency. recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work how many people don't seem to have He is regarded as the father of any appreciation for reading except as scientific management and was one of on various metalworking machines, and recorded and a way to garner the barest facts, the the first management consultants. shallowest of arguments. The words timed their every movement as well Rick Bridges 5 months ago Taylor was one of the intellectual "o.k. o.k.....I get it already" are leaders of the Efficiency Movement probably on more peoples lips today and his ideas, broadly conceived, were as the operations of the machines. By Honest opinion, I think yo9u than ever before. I think there is a highly influential in the Progressive make some persuasive points on sadness in watching the world change breaking down every job into a se- how the internet could affect us Era. that is inevitable when your youth both positively and negatively is behind you. What was exciting for quence of small, discrete steps and However i disagree immensely Taylor was probably miserable for with the frequent overtone of anyone watching their own lives and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created "Efficiency" (and subsequently work being dismissed with contempt the "shortening of information" as out of date. What I notice about the a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today— shall we say?) and "Mechanizainterweb is how much crap there is to tion". wade through in order to get any for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled substance, maybe this is what is Humans are still irrational, making people so impatient. about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little innefficient organisms of silliness.

29 people liked this. more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, eldritchpress.org/fwt/ti.html the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the The Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

Google and internet, together with all media, promote another type of knowledge, which is not a real knowledge, but tries to substitute all knowledge.

It is the illusion of knowledge by information.

I will give you an example: I opened the page about F. W. Taylor on Wikipedia, to see if it is the same Taylor of the series expansion. The first paragraph was stating that Taylor "was an _American_ _mechanical engineer_ who sought to improve _industrial efficiency_. He is regarded as the father of _scientificmanagement_and was one of the first _management consultants_." Words between underscores are links.

kmchatk 1 year ago in reply to belhambone

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1 person liked this.

process, snack, multi-task, skim and power browse; it might just save us all.

la eta 1 year ago

I fully agree with this and with Socrates too. It is my dream and my desire that one day a full scale terrorist attack will completely destroy Googleplex to their latest brick

1 year ago

The article is great, however Google is just incredible, simple said...

gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manu- Jami Fahad Ali 1 year ago facturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and It's a brilliant article. The part where you said how clocks now decides our software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to routine and "In the past the man has been first,” “in the future the system govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the must be first.” makes so much sense to me. I think we are heading into a efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of informa- new direction. Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He emphasition, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best meth- zed how writing will make us forgetful.

I think the direction in which we are od”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve moving will make reading obsolete. We are moving in the direction of come to describe as “knowledge work.”

YouTubes and Dailymotions. For the time it takes to read your article, most BillMCA 1 year ago Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, Califor- of the people will quit as you said after 1st paragraph or 2nd. But the video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt says its nia—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, same length would certainly get mission is “to organize the world’s millions view. Just make sure you put information and make it universally and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. glitz in it. Kudos on this writing. accessible and useful.” Therefore information is a commodity like other Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a 35 people liked this. commodities to be mined and processed efficiently. “The more company that’s founded around the science of measpieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, urement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing the more productive we become as thinkers.” And consider the Wikimedia on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and Foundation’s mission: “Imagine a world in which every single human be- other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the ing can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.”

Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms So rather than hang onto dreams that increasingly control how people find information and extract meanabout the good old days when the summers were hotter and the grass ing from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for greener perhaps we should allow this generation to dip in and out, parallel the work of the mind.

Parent dating blog

« Previous Page — Page 30 jacobenns 1 year ago in reply to kmchatk

Minimize Close kmchatk 1 year ago in reply to belhambone

8 people liked this.

121 people liked this.

Eventually you run out of time and close all tabs. All you accomplish is an impressive page full of bookmarked pages. Other types of media are even worse: they select the links for you. This is the case of the news you watch on television.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly thedailybeast.com/newsattached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, week/2004/03/29/all-eyes-ongoogle.html you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google PAGE NOT FOUND is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

The page you requested cannot be found. You might like to try: Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math Homepage» Today's Cheatsheet» whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of comLatest Articles» Contact Us» puter scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google

tion is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

This phrase, "You click too much, read too little, and remember even less," is very true. When looking at the history of communication and how information and knowledge has been transferred and passed on through the ages, the internet has truly revolutionized everything beyond our ability to control it or ourselves.

Google gives you "THE LINK", and every time you see a link, The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s in- you tend to click. formation and make it universally accessible and You click too useful.”It seeks to develop “the perfect search enmuch, read too gine,” which it defines as something that “underlittle, and rememstands exactly what you mean and gives you back ber even less. exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, informa-

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is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem I relate to this a lot. out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

(I'm a physics major who just graduated Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplesumma cum laude and I'm also, oddly mented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a beenough, a literary/ writer type.) I find the lief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps general trend towards automated intelligence somewhat that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter disturbing and find when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contempla- Natalia_Nicholson myself googling in 4 months ago place of generating tion. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. original thought too I found the statement often for my own The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster that Page made about taste. I first started Google trying to thinking about it when create artificial processor and a bigger hard drive.

I was out at Kitt Peak intelligence on a large Arizona without The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-process- scale very striking. wireless internet for a Many people feign week; I was actually ing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it intelligence with their thinking, freely, again. "facts" that they have is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf read online, but can 20 people liked this. offer no further Katie Geisinger 1 year ago across the Web—the more links we click and pages we insight to these facts as they generally As we move from specialization to view—the more opportunities Google and other com- didn’t read any further to really understand generalizations it becomes necessary to the topic. Is this teach kids to how to deal with the wide panies gain to collect information about us and to feed artificial intelligence range of problems they will have to or just ignorance? address in the "real world". However, us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the comhuman intelligence is limited. The 1 person liked this. creaters of Google have realized this mercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the limitation and they believe that they can create a well-rounded individual by crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to "adding on" to the brain's capacity for knowledge. You learn exactly what it is link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want necessary to learn so that you can move on to the next problem. There is no time is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in for anything more than that. their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

8 people liked this.

Jennifer Nielsen 1 year ago

« Previous Page — Page 32 the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New Media focused graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.

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parasites 11 months ago

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a counI use Google only for what I tertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned really need - and nothing else. tapeworms in humans the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ISBN=0872202208/theatlantic2 people liked this. the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry monthA/ref=nosim/ inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s Phaedrus [Paperback] David 9 months ago Plato (Author), Alexander characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” Nehamas (Author), Paul I wonder how much this is Woodruff (Author) only relevant to people And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information 4.7 out of 5 stars from Generation X (and Price: $9.95 & eligible for FREE earlier). It doesn't feel like without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledge- Super Saver Shipping on Generation Y is affected orders over $25. Details the same way at all (there able when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be Special Offers Available are several examples of In Stock. this, Belhambone being “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates the most recent post following that line). wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He kentatwood 4 months ago couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread 1 person liked this.

Spell checkers will destroy our ability to spell? information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

Typewriters will destroy our ability to write cursive?

Calculators will destroy our ability to do basic math? The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another The funny thing is that for me it has been completely wrong. round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worMy spelling improved after I used spell checking.

My basic math skills improved after I started using calculators. ried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even presci- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky ent.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine Clay Shirky (born 1964) is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He has a joint appointthe myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver. ment at New York University (NYU) as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at

1 person liked this.

How may I submit a short story to the magazine?

alibabi 1 year ago

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22 people liked this.

Let's admit it my friends..

We lost it. Our patience.

I mean think about it. It's one thing if it was only reading but be honest how many of you consider a 10 minutes video on Youtube to be too long? Scary no?

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet Chandrashekhar M Vairale as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, 1 year ago data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and uniAbsolutely engrossing ! I was so happy that I wasn't one of those skeptics versal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may who thought of us digging our graves deeper due to our relying too much on replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The technology and handing over our lies in the hands of 'machines'. kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable Nicholas Carr..... I thank you .. not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the in1 person liked this. tellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently en.wikipedia.org/ Kyle Thain 1 year ago described what’s at stake: I come from a edge.org/3rd_culture/foreman05/ wiki/Richard_Foreforeman05_index.html man In many ways our mind isn't tradition of Western culture, in which the being challenged enough....

But today, I see within us all (myself Richard Foreman because we have a Brain ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense included) the replacement of complex (born in New York tool...the computer. What are inner density with a new kind of on 10 June 1937) tools for.. to make things and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly self-evolving under the pressure of is an American easier....but over time we information overload and the technology playwright and become subconsciously educated and articulate personality—a of the "instantly available". A new self avant-garde theater spoiled...and when you are that needs to contain less and less of an pioneer. He is the using tools for physical man or woman who carried inside them- inner repertory of dense cultural founder of the needs that's one thing. But inheritance—as we all become "pancake Ontological-Hysterwhen you us tools for selves a personally constructed and unique people"—spread wide and thin as we ic Theater. complex mental ability and connect with that vast network of situations that might not be version of the entire heritage of the West. information accessed by the mere touch the best idea in the long run. of a button.

But yet America in many [But now] I see within us all (myself inways is a teenage Country... cluded) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under we tend not to see past Friday night!! forex 1 year ago the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

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I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”— and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence.

HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’— spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

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1 person liked this.

And it happened.

And it also didn't *really* happen.

Sages of the time feared that they would lose the fluid aspects of cultural memory, the oral narratives they depended on to pass information and create knowledge and they would be left with statements set in stone for future reference, forever hampering freedom of thought.

Overheard centuries ago: "as we come to rely on books to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our intelligence that flattens into literal intelligence."

adapar 11 months ago in reply to Kevin Kennedy

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3 people liked this.

Point proven buddy but the sad things its that its to late to look back, your article is to long, and like you just said your article now in days must be shorter in order for others to actually read

Josue Alcaraz 10 months ago

3 people liked this.

Ironically, you may not be able to read such a long article, the internet doesn't seem to have kept you from writing an enormous article! This long of a read was torturous to those of us that have the very condition you write about!

Jeff Ryan 10 months ago

5 people liked this.

This article is ironic.

Kevin Schumacher 10 months ago

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Design Observer Blogs

Posted 11.03.11 PERMALINK PRINT Blog: Rick Poynor

http://observersroom.designobserver.com/media/images/ Links_525.jpg Top Google image search results for “links” (with a tip of the hat to Rob Walker) Design Observer front page picture of “The Links” by Anne at ilike.org.uk

One of the simple satisfactions of writing online is putting in links, though I didn’t always see it that way.

When I started blogging on Design Observer in 2003 I viewed the links as a bit of a chore and my earliest posts don’t contain many. We had yet to semi-automate the process and it was time-consuming and fiddly work.

MBA Prep: February 25, 2010 at 3:15 pm Internet including Google is very like fast food: it is convenient and thus popular among the majority. However, if you eat only fast food your health is in great danger.

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More than this, though, I thought that links would be a distraction from writing I hoped would be interesting enough in its own right to hold the reader’s attention.

But that was a long time ago and I soon came round. Today, when working on a post, I look forward to planting links that will shoot their tendrils outwards from the text. I want the links to be truly useful and I spend time trying to pick good ones. I work on the basis of an idealized image of a super-motivated reader who will be so committed to the subject that she will want to pursue every lead I can offer. In reality, this extra production effort is not such a stretch. I always gained a similar satisfaction from providing endnotes with proper citations in my books. I don’t expect everything I read to be written in an academic manner, but still I hate it when book authors withhold their sources.

I don’t entirely trust this reticence and as a reader I feel cheated; the writers are denying me the chance to check things for myself and pursue new directions.

My most obsessively intensive linkfest came in 2008 in the two-part dia-

logue about film that I con- Ramesh Raghuvanshi: February 24, 2010 at 11:28 am ducted for Design Observer Google is not alternative to book. When with my friend and col- first time I read the Dostoevsky`s crime and punishment I was so absorbed in league Adrian Shaugh- that book finishing it I loss myself.

Google never give us this kind of joy. nessy. That 9,000-word text contains around 175 links and the project amounted to weeks of work.

Of course, digital is not forever, and some of these carefully garnered and inserted links are already dead. If you like cinema, though, give those posts a look — there is still a dense network of information to be found there.

I could have made that task a breeze for you by supplying a couple of links.

I wanted to. But this post, as I gave fair warning in the title, is a link-free zone so if you really want to see that dialogue you will have to search “We Found It at the Movies” Part I and Part II. But stop! Don’t do it now. I’d much prefer you to keep on reading.

You can always look them up later.

The signs are that many of us struggle these days to read in a concerted, attentive and linear fashion. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that we have become incredibly adept at flitting from one thing to another, filtering, selecting and absorbing lit-

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tle bursts of information as we go. with even more scope for distraction: The screen environment, with its simply click on this word in the midmany competing nodes of interest, dle of the paragraph you are reading encourages this kind of scanning and to break off and watch a film. scavenging, and we readily embrace And it isn’t only books that are causevery kind of electronic information ing problems. I’m always amazed by source, priding ourselves on our the number of young people, members of the digital generaquicksilver modern ability to namhenderson 11.07.11 at 09:47 tion, who tell me they can’t multi-task. this is totally me. I can possibly read on a computer But the part of our brain that write on a screen but for reading anything used to be good at concentrat- longer than a few pages screen. Carr talks about the i tend to print out, as ing on a single activity for un-green as that might F-shaped reading pattern be. even an issue for revealed by eye-tracking hours at a time 10 or 20 years others at work, who also do this. studies. The eye sweeps ago, allowing us to follow intriIt is one of the reasons cate arguments in a long book, i decided to subscribe across the top part of the to the Sunday NYT reading material and then it no longer works so well, acedition. that and the new digital wall.. moves down and does the cording to Carr and the sources he cites. (He also has interesting same thing again. After that is just things to say about the brain’s plastic- tails off feebly down the left side. A bit ity.) Today, we feel constantly dis- of scanning is still going on, but readtracted. There are always so many ing has stopped. Any second now the other things we could be looking at or fidgety, reluctant viewer will probachecking. Lengthy, linear texts now bly zip off to an ad, check out a tweet, seem like a very long-winded way of or click on a link. Jakob Nielsen has a absorbing information that could whole web page on this, complete surely be delivered much quicker. An with eye-tracking heat maps, which amusing numbered list would be per- I’m sorry to say I can’t link to here. fect. Just give us the bullet points. The Still with me? Great! Let’s stick it to paradox of the ebook is that it is sold those F-shaped “reading” patterns. I as, and offers, a book-like experience appreciate your unusually dogged

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powers of persistence, but I also don’t want to exhaust your patience, so I’ll cut to the chase, which is actually a dilemma. I love the possibilities of the medium and I want my texts to join hands in friendship with the infinity of other interlinked texts, rather than just floating in isolation. So rest assured that next time I post normal service will be resumed: there will be many salient links. Nevertheless, it seems to be asking a lot of you, the beleaguered online reader, to deal with both a longish essay and an inbuilt link-athon while also monitoring a plethora of other inputs. (Incidentally, you have to admire our sister channel, Places. Everything they publish is uncompromisingly huge.) Maybe providing too many pathways is just self-defeating now.

That’s enough speculation, though.

What’s your own experience of reading on screen?

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Alistair Hall 11.03.11 at 05:18

Rick Poynor Return to Blog >> Rick Poynor is a writer, critic, lecturer and curator, special media and visual culture. He founded Eye, co-founded De and contributes columns to Eye and Print. His latest book Surrealism and Graphic Design.

More Bio >>

If the writing is good enough, I pay attention.

DESIGN OBSERVER JOBS Project Design Assistant Ideattack, Inc. -- South Pasadena, CA Editorial Operations Assistant Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia -- New York, NY Post and find jobs on the Design Observer Job Board

While travelling recently, I readRECENT Bram BLOG POSTS Stoker's Dracula on my iPhone. While missing the joy of having the book 10.28.11 as an object - of having a visual thing On My Shelf: Continuum's 33 1/3 Series which would absorb my memory Theof33the 1/3 books about classic albums are a perfect exam story, a thing which I could then design stickcan help focus an editorial idea. on a shelf at home - I think I enjoyed the narrative just as much on screen 10.22.11as I would have on the page.

On Display: The Kirkland Museum If I had to pick just one Denver museum to revisit, it would As for being distracted by links?

Well, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art. fabulous we're all grown ups, well used to having to focus while other things beg 10.16.11 for our attention. I don't find it Did too We Ever Stop Being Postmodern? much of a chore to open Like it or not, argues the V&A's exhibition about postmod tab to we are all postmodern now.

Tushar Gupte a link in another design, 11.04.11 at 04:45 read later. And actually, I'd say the opposite 09.29.11 is I think the distraction may have true. If an online Should piece We Look at Corrosive Images? less to do with in-line links and of text fails to provide What doa violent photographs of war do to us as viewers? more to do with the design of decent (and intelligent) the website. set of links, I'll feel 09.22.11 News related sites and popular cheated, as if the Janwriter Svankmajer and the Graphic Uncanny blogs, often tend to have exces- is hogging his sources.

Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design opens at the Ku sive contextual promotions for Rotterdam on September 24. 'related content' along with distracting animated banner ESSAYS BY RICK POYNOR ads, tag clouds, pagniation etc.

01.10.11: Out of the Studio: Graphic Design History and Vi 12.16.10: Agency or Studio? The Dutch Design Dilemma 12.01.10: Where Is Art Now? 12.18.08: Barney Bubbles: Optics and Semantics 06.16.08: We Found It at the Movies: Part I 06.16.08: We Found It at the Movies: Part II 06.02.08: A Critical View of Graphic Design History 02.17.08: Lost America: The Flamingo Motor Hotel 04.03.07: Dancing to the Sound in Your Head 11.10.05: Emigre: An Ending More by Rick Poynor >>

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Lisa Rost York University Toronto December 2011 Editorial Design Paul Sych