Quote of the Day: Nick Carr on the Internet's Destruction of Attention

Benjamin F. Carlson 349 Views May 28, 2010
"And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us in ever more varied ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive.  ... What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting."

--Nicholas Carr, author of Is Google Making Us Stupid? and forthcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, from an essay adapted for Wired

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