Best 13 quotes of Nicholas Carr on MyQuotes

Although we don't tend to think of libraries as media technologies, they are. The public library is, in fact, one of the most important and influential informational media ever created—and one that proliferated only after the arrival of silent reading and movable-type printing. A community's attitudes and preferences toward information take concrete shape in its library's design and services. [...] The library provides, as well, a powerful symbol of our new media landscape: at the center stands the screen of the Internet-connected computers; the printed word has been pushed to the margins.

As a society, we've become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we've turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That's the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.

In the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it-and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.

Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, [de Forest] grew even gloomier. He believed that 'electron physiologists' would eventually be able to monitor and analyze 'thought or brain waves', allowing 'joy and grief to be measured in define, quantitative unit.' Ultimately, he concluded, 'a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us.

Social networks like Facebook seem impelled by a similar aspiration. Through the statistical "discovery" of potential friends, the provision of "Like" buttons and other clickable tokens of affection, and the automated management of many of the time-consuming aspects of personal relations, they seek to streamline the messy process of affiliation. Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates all of this as "frictionless sharing"--the removal of conscious effort from socializing. But there's something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren't forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data. People aren't notes on a network grid. The bonds require trust and courtesy and sacrifice, all of which, at least to a technocrat's mind, are sources of inefficiency and inconvenience. Removing the friction from social attachments doesn't strengthen them; it weakens them. It makes them more like the attachments between consumers and products--easily formed and just as easily broken. Like meddlesome parents who never let their kids do anything on their own, Google, Facebook, and other makers of personal software end up demeaning and diminishing qualities of character that, at least in the past, have been seen as essential to a full and vigorous life: ingenuity, curiosity, independence, perseverance, daring. It may be that in the future we'll only experience such virtues vicariously, though the exploits of action figures like John Marston in the fantasy worlds we enter through screens.

Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this: Hot: Cold Others used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this: Hot: C The people who used the cards with the missing letters performed much better in a subsequent test measuring how well they remembered the word pairs. Simply forcing their minds to fill in a blank, to act rather than observe, led to stronger retention of information.

Technology isn’t what makes us “post-human” or “transhuman,” as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.

The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. They are usually so intent on solving a particular problem or untangling some thorny scientific or engineering dilemma that they don't see the broader implications of their work. The users of the technology are also usually oblivious to its ethic. They, too, are concerned with the practical benefits they gain from employing the tool. Our ancestors didn't develop or use maps in order to enhance their capacity for conceptual thinking or to bring the world's hidden structures to light. Nor did they manufacture mechanical clocks to spur the adoption of a more scientific mode of thinking. These were by-products of the technologies. But what by-products! Ultimately, it's an invention's intellectual work ethic that has the most profound effect on us.

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.

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

To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

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

When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding s or controlling us. We're behind the wheel, but we can't be sure who's driving.