77 Quotes by Nicholas Carr

Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.

When our brain is overtaxed, we find “distractions more distracting.

Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”51.

The airplane was a complicated system encompassing many components, but to a skilled pilot it still had the intimate quality of a hand tool. The love that lays the swale in rows is also the love that parts the clouds for the stick-and-rudder man.

When we’re online, we’re often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.

The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to “vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,” as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that “the new is more often trivial than essential.

The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.

A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.