Increased freedom to createmeans increased freedom tocreate throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in theexperimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible.

Clay Shirky's latest book is "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a ConnectedAge."

Similarly, open source software, createdwithout managerialcontrol of the workers orownership of the product, has been critical tothe spread of the Web. Searches foreverything from supernovae to primenumbers now happen as giant, distributedefforts. Ushahidi, the Kenyan crisis mappingtool invented in 2008, now aggregatescitizen reports about crises the world over

These claims were, of course, correct. Printfueled the Protestant Reformation, which didindeed destroy the Church's pan-Europeanhold on intellectual life. What the 16th-century foes of print didn't imagine—couldn't imagine—was what followed: Webuilt new norms around newly abundant andcontemporary literature.

. Reading is an unnatural act; weare no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers.

If 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: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was thecomplex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulatepersonality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructedand unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all(myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the“instantly available.”As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turninginto “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed bythe mere touch of a button.”

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet asLuddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring agolden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, andalthough it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deepreading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just

aybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s acountertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socratesbemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as asubstitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of thedialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be ableto “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeablewhen they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead ofreal wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he wasshortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information,spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, byan artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanicalprocess, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the worldwe enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not anopening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a fasterprocessor and a bigger hard drive

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuingdoctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engineinto an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “Theultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back.“For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek,Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s info

oogle’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, andthe religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “acompany that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” itdoes. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, itcarries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses theresults to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaningfrom it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at lastfound its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked tocall it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seekingmaximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studiesto organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one bestmethod” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout themechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it wouldbring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In thepast the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence overour thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been littleconsideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intelle

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’scontent with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with thecontent of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrivalas we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention anddiffuse our concentration

he process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use toexplain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains asoperating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “likecomputers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’splasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend ourmental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. InTechnics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock“disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world ofmathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point ofreference for both action and thought.

You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes partin the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine,writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’sprose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns,from rhetoric to telegram style.

e in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to beprecise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting andpainful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that hewould soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once againflow from his mind to the page

9/19/08 8:30 PMThe Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas CarrPage 3 of 7http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/googleSAlso see:LIVING WITH A COMPUTER(July 1982) "The process works this way. When I sitdown to write a letter or start the firstdraft of an article, I simply type on thekeyboard and the words appear on thescreen..." By James Fallows Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cellphones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was ourmedium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhapseven a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmentalpsychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of theReading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a stylethat puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deepreading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prosecommonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our abilityto interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction,remains largely disengaged

nternet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longisharticle on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of theUniversity of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversationwith me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans shortpassages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitte

or me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information thatflows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such anincredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “Theperfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon tothinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhanpointed out in the 1960s,media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape theprocess of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration andcontemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftlymoving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like aguy on a Jet Ski

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, hasbeen tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’tgoing—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it moststrongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind wouldget caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through longstretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two orthree pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. 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

"audience effect"

We are now a global culture of avid writers.

In 2003, Kenyan-born Ory Okolloh was a young law stud~nt who was studying in the United States but still obsessed with Kenyan politics. There was plenty to obsess over. Kenya was a cesspool of government corruption, ranking near the dismal bottom on the Cor-ruption Perceptions Index. Okolloh spent hours and hours talking to her colleagues about it, until eventually one suggested the obvious: Why don't you start a blog?