The Great Geek Manual

What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.

- “Is Google Making us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr.
First published in The Atlantic, July 2008.

…media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

- “Is Google Making us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr.
First published in The Atlantic, July 2008.

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. 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…. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

- “Is Google Making us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr.
First published in The Atlantic, July 2008.

If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. … Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.

- “St Lawrence of Google,” published in The Economist, January 12, 2006.

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us. …

You could argue that by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely “human” tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming. What’s more, the perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking. …

Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I’m a veritable genius when I’m on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I’m not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?

- “Your Outboard Brain Knows All” by Clive Thompson
Originally published by Wired, September 25, 2007.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge – myth is more potent than history – dreams are more powerful than facts – hope always triumphs over experience – laughter is the cure for grief – love is stronger than death.

- Robert Fulghum

Everything is too long a list to work with. No one knows everything about anything. No one knows something about everything. Everyone knows something about something. Anyone could be the world’s foremost expert on something. Anyone who thinks that just because they didn’t already know a thing, it must not be true or important, is an idiot.

- Hidden Empire by Orson Scott Card, 2006.

Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquest…

- Charles Lindbergh