Is Google Making us Stupid?

HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart.

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.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.

And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.

What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it.

In a paper published in 1936, 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.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

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

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”

In a paper published in 1936, 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.

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.

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”

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.

Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones.

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.

The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.

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.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise.

As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.

So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.

When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.”

In a paper published in 1936, 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.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.

Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.

So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.”

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

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.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.

When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , 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 reading the articles.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise.

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.

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.

The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

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.

“The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

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.

“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year.

The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.”

And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.

Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”

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.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher.

“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.

I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer.

The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In Technics 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 of mathematically measurable sequences.”

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world.

Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

In Technics 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 of mathematically measurable sequences.”

Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

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.

Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.”

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

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’s not etched into our genes the way speech is.

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site.

Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.

That’s rarely the case anymore.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year.

HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency.

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency.

Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does.

I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

In a paper published in 1936, 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.

I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.

The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example.

A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer.

His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

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.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

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.

It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”

Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones.

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

The authors of the study report: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”

“Perhaps you will through 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.”

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.

Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.

In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

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.

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.

Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

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.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information.

“The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , 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 reading the articles.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise.

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”

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.

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.

It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing.

What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it.

Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.

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.

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.

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.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

By breaking down every 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 should work.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.

A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

By breaking down every 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 should work.

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

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.

In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”

As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.”

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing.

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.

Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.

In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.”

James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.”

Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers.

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.

Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different.

HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency.

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.

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.

Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.

In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

By James Fallows “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

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.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS By Nicholas Carr Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise.

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.

When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..."

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS By Nicholas Carr Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop.

The authors of the study report: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it.

His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.

His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.

I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

“I can feel it.

The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example.

“Perhaps you will through 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.”

“Perhaps you will through 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.”

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

In a paper published in 1936, 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.

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.

Also see: Living With a Computer (July 1982) "The process works this way.

Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing.

By breaking down every 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 should work.

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 typewriter rescued him, at least for a time.

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing.

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”

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

By breaking down every 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 should work.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

[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.”

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences.

“I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.

Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.

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.

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

The authors of the study report: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.”

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.

This article available online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable.

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001.

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing.

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing.

He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

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.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.

I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits.

(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS By Nicholas Carr Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop.

Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.

They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”

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.

So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

By breaking down every 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 should work.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

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.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

“I can feel it.

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.

“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year.

He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e.

A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site.

As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

By breaking down every 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 should work.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.

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.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

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 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

“I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote.

Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.

In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.”

The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher.

Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.

In Technics 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 of mathematically measurable sequences.”

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..."

Stop, will you?

“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year.

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”

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.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information.

In Technics 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 of mathematically measurable sequences.”

“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.

Where does it end?

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

This article available online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

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.

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences.

(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

In a paper published in 1936, 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.

It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers.

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.

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.

But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

The authors of the study report: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

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.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

By breaking down every 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 should work.

It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , 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 reading the articles.

Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.

“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.”

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

“Perhaps you will through 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.”

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.

They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.

We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand.

He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up.

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.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

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.

In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.

Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

[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.”

In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

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 we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

By breaking down every 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 should work.

Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.

By James Fallows “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher.

A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

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.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.

The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists.

Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world.

[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.”

The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.

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.

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.

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).

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

“Perhaps you will through 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.”

They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.

With the approval of Midvale’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.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year.

“Perhaps you will through 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.”

I’m not the only one.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”

When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , 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 reading the articles.

But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.

“The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart.

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.

When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , 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 reading the articles.

In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.

Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world.

(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

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.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information.

One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing.

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer.

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.

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.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought.

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.

I think I know what’s going on.

James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.”

“Perhaps you will through 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.”

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

But that boon comes at a price.

“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly.

The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

“What happened?”

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.

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.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.

I’m not the only one.

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

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.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information.

The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

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 to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing.

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”