Posts tagged “futureproof”

Nicholas Carr realized he could no longer read books. His mind wouldn't settle; it kept craving the pace of the Internet. Then he discovered his friends had the same problem. What was happening to their brains? In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Carr synthesizes the history of intellectual technology with today's burgeoning understanding of brain plasticity, in an attempt to allay his fear that "the tumultuous advance of [the Internet] could...drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection" (222).

The people who built your social network were poor philosophers. They encoded assumptions about friendship, identity, and relationships into rigid systems—and now those assumptions are shaping how you see the world.

In You Are Not a Gadget, Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier argues that today's Internet ethos undervalues the individual, placing emphasis on the "hive mind"—the crowd dynamic that powers Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

I picked up a book of poems by Pablo Neruda—something I used to do easily—and immediately sensed that the part of my mind that memorizes poetry was not as I had left it. It seemed severely impaired. What has happened to my mind? Why didn't I notice this earlier? Who am I now?

Six months earlier, I was working as a user experience designer in London.