77 Quotes by Nicholas Carr

Technology isn’t what makes us “post-human” or “transhuman,” as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.

For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg's printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it's been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday's mind.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I Zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski

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.

Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.

Personal memory shapes and sustains the “collective memory” that underpins culture.

The animals’ neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can’t believe what he’s seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he’s been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.

Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.