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.But it also took something away.As the late MIT com-puter scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Powerand Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the worldthat emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments remains animpoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those directexperiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality. In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to oursenses and started obeying the clock.The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the12changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.When the me-chanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating likeclockwork. Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them asoperating like computers. But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go muchdeeper than metaphor.Thanks to our brain s plasticity, the adaptation occursalso at a biological level.The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cog- 13nition.In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing 98 2 / SUMMARIZING SOURCESproved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoreti-cal machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any otherinformation-processing device.And that s what we re seeing today.The Inter-net, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of ourother intellectual technologies.It s becoming our map and our clock, our print-ing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radioand TV.When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net s 14image.It injects the medium s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and otherdigital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the othermedia it has absorbed.A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce itsarrival as we re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper s site.The re-sult is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.The Net s influence doesn t end at the edges of a computer screen, either.15As people s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, tradi-tional media have to adapt to the audience s new expectations.Television pro-grams add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shortentheir articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets.When, in March of this year, the New York Times decidedto devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, itsdesign director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the shortcuts would give harriedreaders a quick taste of the day s news, sparing them the less efficient method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles.Old media havelittle choice but to play by the new-media rules.[Google] has declared that its mission is to organize the world s informa-tion and make it universally accessible and useful. It seeks to develop the per- 16fect search engine, which it defines as something that understands exactlywhat you mean and gives you back exactly what you want. In Google s view, in-formation is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined andprocessed with industrial efficiency.The more pieces of information we can access and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we be-come as thinkers.Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men whofounded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stan- 17ford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificialintelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people or smarter, Page said in a speech a few years back. For us, working on search is a way towork on artificial intelligence. In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, Certainly if you had all the world s information directly attached to your brain, SUMMARIZING A COMPLEX ESSAY 99or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you d be better off. Lastyear, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is really trying to build ar-tificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale. Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair ofmath whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army 18of computer scientists in their employ.A fundamentally scientific enterprise,Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt s words, tosolve problems that have never been solved before, and artificial intelligence isthe hardest problem out there.Why wouldn t Brin and Page want to be the onesto crack it?Still, their easy assumption that we d all be better off if our brains weresupplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.It sug- 19gests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series ofdiscrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.In Google s world,the world we enter when we go online, there s little place for the fuzziness ofcontemplation.Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processorand a bigger hard drive.The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processingmachines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network s 20reigning business model as well.The faster we surf across the Web the morelinks we click and pages we view the more opportunities Google and othercompanies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in col-lecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link themore crumbs, the better.The last thing these companies want is to encourageleisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought.It s in their economic interest todrive us to distraction.Maybe I m just a worrywart.Just as there s a tendency to glorify techno-logical progress, there s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new 21tool or machine.In Plato s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development ofwriting.He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a sub-stitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would,in the words of one of the dialogue s characters, cease to exercise their mem-ory and become forgetful. And because they would be able to receive aquantity of information without proper instruction, they would be thoughtvery knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant
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