Quotes About Information

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.

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.

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.

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

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.

Google filters out serendipity in favor of insularity. It douses the infectious messiness of a city with an algorithmic antiseptic.

As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before.

when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18% of it.

How do users read on the web?" he asked then. His succinct answer: "They don't."38

Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn't make sense," he says. "It's not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web." As soon as you learn to be "a skilled hunter" online, he argues, books become superfluous.

The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.

Google, as the supplier of the Web's principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.

Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an "ecosystem of interruption technologies,

for Google, the real value of a book is not as a self-contained literary work but as another pile of data to be mined.

When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium's physical form; it injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.

Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web's information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we're forced to rely more and more on the Net's capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart.

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

the Web transformed the Internet from an intellectual meeting-house into a commercial enterprise.

The Web had turned out to be less the new home of Mind than the new home of Business. The

Bruce Friedman,

In a renowned 1956 paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," Princeton psychologist George Miller observed that working memory could typically hold just seven pieces, or "elements," of information.

These include all the tools we use to extend or support our mental powers—to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory.