77 Quotes by Nicholas Carr

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.

We become, neurologically, what we think."(33)

There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.

To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this:Hot: ColdOthers used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this:Hot: CThe people who used the cards with the missing letters performed much better in a subsequent test measuring how well they remembered the word pairs. Simply forcing their minds to fill in a blank, to act rather than observe, led to stronger retention of information.

In the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it-and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.

We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technologizing the word'; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.

When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding s or controlling us. We're behind the wheel, but we can't be sure who's driving.