In the world of 2001, people havebecome so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, issubsuming most of our other intellectual technologies

We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will bedifferent from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

I feel as if I’m alwaysdragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become astruggle.

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotionalresponse to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlikepleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only becalled a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizesthe human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughtsand actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people havebecome so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence ofKubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it isour own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

f we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only inour selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’sat stake:

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. TheItalian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectuallaziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed booksand broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spreadsedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirkynotes, “Most of the arguments madeagainst the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imaginethe myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

he idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into theworkings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across theWeb—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gainto collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercialInternet 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

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universallyaccessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that“understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view,information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrialefficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the moreproductive we become as thinkers.

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanksto the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’sethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficientand automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmersare intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement ofwhat we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work

AGWinslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historicseries of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval ofMidvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines,and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking downevery job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one,Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker shouldwork. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into littlemore than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attunedto the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles,introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March ofthis year, TheNew York Timesdecided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to articleabstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick“taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and readingthe articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, theBritish mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as atheoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processingdevice. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, issubsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printingpress and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to thinkthat our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside ourskulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’snot the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Studyat George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break oldconnections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly,altering the way it functions.

the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change inthe style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you willthrough this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work,his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the wayspeech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language weunderstand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading playan important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers ofideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitryfound in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regionsof the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretationof visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will bedifferent from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychologicalexperiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recentlypublished study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggeststhat we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-yearresearch program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popularresearch sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provideaccess to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using thesites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to anysource they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book beforethey would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence thatthey ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there aresigns that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontallythrough titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems thatthey go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense

’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types,most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they haveto fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioningthe phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stoppedreading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote.“What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much becausethe way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening topodcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened,hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

9/19/08 8:30 PMThe Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas CarrPage 1 of 7http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/google"DPrint this PageClose WindowJULY/AUGUST 2008 ATLANTIC MONTHLYWhat the Internet is doing to our brainsBY NICHOLAS CARRIs Google Making Us Stupid?Illustration by Guy Billoutave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads withthe implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end ofStanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by themalfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

Socia) scientists call this the "audience effect" -the shift in our performaqce when we know people are watching. It isn't always positive. In live, face-to-face situations, like sports or live music, the audience effect often makes runners or musicians perform better, but it can sometimes-psych them out and make them choke, too. Even among writefs I know, there's a heated divide over whether thinking about your audience is fatal to creativity.

The explosion of online writing has a second aspect that is even more important than the first, though: it's almost always done for an audience. When you write something online-whether it's a one-sentence status update, a comment on someone's photo, or a thousand-word post-you're doing it with the expectation that someone might read it, even if you're doing it anonymously.

hen one day a documentary team showed up to interview Okol-loh for a film they were producing about female bloggers. They'd printed up all her blog posts on paper. When they handed her the stack of posts, it was the size of two telephone books. "It was huge! Hurhongous!" She laughs. "And I was like, oh my. That was the first time I had a sense of the volume of it." Okolloh