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Nicholas Carr Biography

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“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.”

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Book:The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
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“Once he had that insight, Flynn recalled in a 2007 interview, “I began to feel that I was bridging the gulf between our minds. We weren’t more intelligent than they, but we had learnt to apply our intelligence to a new set of problems. We had detached logic from the concrete, we were willing to deal with the hypothetical, and we thought the world was a place to be classified and understood scientifically rather than to be manipulated.”

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Book:The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
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“Noting that the rise in IQ scores “is concentrated in nonverbal IQ performance,” which is “mainly tested through visual tests,” she attributed the Flynn effect to an array of factors, from urbanization to the growth in “societal complexity,” all of which “are part and parcel of the worldwide movement from smaller-scale, low-tech communities with subsistence economies toward large-scale, high-tech societies with commercial economies.” We’re not smarter than our parents or our parents’ parents. We’re just smart in different ways.”

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Book:The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
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“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.”

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Book:The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
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