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March 27, October 31, The World Wide Cage August 26, January 17, Automation Makes Us Dumb November 21, The Library of Utopia April 25, The Colbert Report Video June 30, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The Weakest Link November 30, Complementary Genius May 30, Social Media. Similar Speakers William Green. Sherry Turkle. Jonathan Zittrain. Debora Spar. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U. The authors of the study report:.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the s or s, when television was our medium of choice. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.

We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.

Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli.

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

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would 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 again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. But it also took something away. The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in , the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. 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.

Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules. Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers.

Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review , and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains.

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ.

It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.