Nicholas Carr Quotes

#1. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

Nicholas Carr

#2. Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK

Nicholas Carr

#3. anti-intellectual

Nicholas Carr

#4. The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

Nicholas Carr

#5. Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.

Nicholas Carr

#6. Concordances. But here, too, the effects are different. As

Nicholas Carr

#7. In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards.

Nicholas Carr

#8. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Nicholas Carr

#9. The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started.

Nicholas Carr

#10. The Net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

Nicholas Carr

#11. What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

Nicholas Carr

#12. What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself - our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts.

Nicholas Carr

#13. Instead of requiring us to puzzle out where we are in an area, a GPS device simply sets us at the center of the map and then makes the world circulate around us.

Nicholas Carr

#14. Insull was a serious and driven young man. Born into a family of temperance crusaders, he spent his boyhood poring over books with titles like Lives of the Great Engineers and Self-Help.

Nicholas Carr

#15. Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.

Nicholas Carr

#16. When our brain is overtaxed, we find distractions more distracting.

Nicholas Carr

#17. There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

Nicholas Carr

#18. He's not seeking some greater truth beyond the work. The work is the truth.

Nicholas Carr

#19. THE TROUBLE with automation is that it often gives us what we don't need at the cost of what we do.

Nicholas Carr

#20. The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

Nicholas Carr

#21. All technological change is generational change.

Nicholas Carr

#22. Culture is sustained in our synapses ... It's more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

Nicholas Carr

#23. The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn't be confused with the libraries we've known up until now. It's not a library of books. It's a library of snippets.

Nicholas Carr

#24. Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." The

Nicholas Carr

#25. The value of a well-made and well-used tool lies not only in what it produces for us but what it produces in us.

Nicholas Carr

#26. The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage.

Nicholas Carr

#27. A drawn line can be many things," he says, whereas a digitized line has to be just one thing.27

Nicholas Carr

#28. A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.

Nicholas Carr

#29. We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.

Nicholas Carr

#30. The animals' neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can't believe what he's seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he's been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.

Nicholas Carr

#31. Donald T. Campbell explained in a renowned 1976 paper, The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Nicholas Carr

#32. In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

Nicholas Carr

#33. The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.

Nicholas Carr

#34. We've reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State's Joe O'Shea - a philosophy major, no less - is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn't read books but that he doesn't see any particular need to read them.

Nicholas Carr

#35. Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an ecosystem of interruption technologies,

Nicholas Carr

#36. Lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman, argued that Google has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society.

Nicholas Carr

#37. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

Nicholas Carr

#38. The ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. With every skill we learn, the world reshapes itself to reveal greater possibilities.

Nicholas Carr

#39. We become, neurologically, what we think."(33)

Nicholas Carr

#40. The experiment suggested a strong correlation "between the number of links and disorientation or cognitive overload," wrote Zhu.

Nicholas Carr

#41. It's the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people's behavior and shape their perceptions.

Nicholas Carr

#42. The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one. When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it's a mistake to assume that more is better.

Nicholas Carr

#43. Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect.

Nicholas Carr

#44. The airplane was a complicated system encompassing many components, but to a skilled pilot it still had the intimate quality of a hand tool. The love that lays the swale in rows is also the love that parts the clouds for the stick-and-rudder man.

Nicholas Carr

#45. Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

Nicholas Carr

#46. Between the intellectual and behavioral guardrails set by our genetic code, the

Nicholas Carr

#47. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

Nicholas Carr

#48. The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.

Nicholas Carr

#49. When we're online, we're often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.

Nicholas Carr

#50. Reducing intelligence to the statistical analysis of large data sets "can lead us," says Levesque, "to systems with very impressive performance that are nonetheless idiot-savants.

Nicholas Carr

#51. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot," he wrote. The content of the medium is just "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." P 4

Nicholas Carr

#52. Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts - the faster, the better.

Nicholas Carr

#53. The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.

Nicholas Carr