Quotes About Technology

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

Automation weakens the bond between tool and user not because computer-controlled systems are complex but because they ask so little of us.

the computer is never a neutral tool. It influences, for better or worse, the way a person works and thinks.

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54

But as the web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more mall than commune. And when the new millennium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed.

Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an "ecosystem of interruption technologies," as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.23

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.

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.

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.

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.

The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

I felt lost without the Delete key, the scrollbar, the cut and paste functions, the Undo command. I had to do all my editing on-screen. In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself.

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.

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.

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

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart.

As long as algorithms determine the distribution of profits, they will also determine what gets published. The

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

Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.

The generation effect requires precisely the kind of struggle that automation seeks to alleviate.

To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly

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

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That's not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It's also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.