Group items tagged

Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason

Mumford’s later two-volume study The Myth of the Machine.

Lewis Mumford discusses the impact of the mechanical clock in his 1934 Technics and Civilization.

I found the story of Friedrich Nietzsche’s typewriter in J. C. Nyíri's essay Thinking with a Word Processor as well as Friedrich A. Kittler’s winningly idiosyncratic Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Darren Wershler-Henry’s history of the typewriter, The Iron Whim.

Maryanne Wolf’s fascinating Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

study of the behavior of online researchers is here.

Scott Karp’s blog post about how he’s lost his capacity to read books can be found here, and Bruce Friedman’s post can be found here. Both Karp and Friedman believe that what they’ve gained from the Internet outweighs what they’ve lost.

The essay builds on my book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, particularly the final chapter, “iGod.”

Since the publication of my essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic, I’ve received several requests for pointers to sources and related readings. I’ve tried to round them up below.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?": sources and notes