Carr’s argument is something I resisted for a long time, but his main assertion — that the tools we use to think shape how we think — is hard to ignore.
While this may be Nicholas Carr's statement, it's actually pre-dated significantly by Marshall McLuhann
Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
This author bio had to have been modified after the publication of this article as The Shallows came out in 2010. I have to suspect that a lot of what appears here was early work and research that heavily influenced his subsequent book.
I remember discussing portions of it with P.M. Forni in preparation of his own book The Thinking Life.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Here it is in July 2008, Nicholas Carr has essentially specified and created a small warning bell about the surveillance capitalism we've been experiencing for the past 13 years. He's also put a bright yellow highlight on the method by which they would do it.
What are other early surveillance capitalism warning sources from this period?
For those who think Google is making us stupid
Namely Nicholas Carr, who wrote an oft-cited Atlantic article entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" to which the author answers "yes," concluding:
...As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.