From the beginning I found myself deeply challenged and stuck — freaked out by the blank page. So I started to use my skills as a filmmaker. I note-carded it. I had the notes above my computer, and I got to do a little “X” when I finished the draft of a chapter; it was this really satisfying moment.

“Don’t buy into your myth.”

Engine-assisted search in itself is not a fragmenting, decontextualizing, shallowing force. Again, I reject the simple deterministic answer that the machine’s affordances inevitably control the way we use the mechanism. Shallow inquiry—the uninformed way in which many people use search engines to find answers—is the deeper problem, and one that can be rem-edied culturally. Just as the ancient arts of rhetoric taught citizens how to construct and weigh arguments, a mindful rhetoric of digital search would concentrate attention on the process of inquiry—the kinds of questions people turn into initial search queries, and the kinds of further questions that can deepen their search.

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.

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.

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.

David could be a terror when you got it wrong, but when you got it right—when you wrote something that made him smile—he’d make you feel like you’d hung the moon. I can remember coming to his office after closing a piece on day laborers and him looking at me and saying, “I was just talking about how fucking great your piece was this week.” I was a kid who had never felt like he’d done anything great for anyone. And it was only when working for David that I came to understand that I might actually be “good” (to say nothing of great) at anything. Part of that realization wasn’t just in what David said about my own work, but where he set the bar. David would bring in writers from Vanity Fair to hold workshops with the staff. He’d introduce me to journalists who were doing incredible work. He’d clip articles from the New Yorker or Esquire and leave them on my desk with a note attached: “This is the level of work I expect of you.”

ace of the mass anti-Japanese hysteria of the day, critics maligned Governor Carr bitterly as a "Jap lover," even within his own state. (9) A loss in his 1942 bid for a U.S. Senate seat rang the death knell for Carr's promising political future on the national stage. Thereafter, even the name of this man of principle has been mostly obliterated from the memory of both the general populace and the political circuit.

"one cannot test the degree of a man's affection for his fellows or his country by the birthplace of his grandfather!" He declared that "I am dedicated to the proposition that the Constitution must operate and function in time of war just as it does in time of peace," and insisted that "if we do not protect and preserve the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for all men today, it will not serve as a protection for any man six months from now." (8)

Carr was elected the governor of Colorado in 1939 and served two terms through 1943.

For those who think Google is making us stupid