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Sales of Music CDs fell 20%.
Sales of Movie DVDs fell 14%.
On Christmas Day 2010, customers purchased more e-Books on
amazon.com than physical books for the first time ever.
Newspaper circulation dropped 7%, while visits to newspaper web
sites grew by more than 10%.
Sales of Greeting Cards & Postcards Dropped Considerably.
Volume of Mail Sent by USPS declined at fastest pace ever.
Half of U.S. Universities Dropped Printed Editions of Journals in favor
of Strictly Electronic Distribution.
As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles
than they had before.
Scholars cited more recent articles with increased frequency.
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The use of the World Wide
Web, and its highly
distracting way of
presenting information in
small chunks with
hypertext, embedded
video, and surrounding
advertising, is making
changes to our brains that
are not altogether
desirable.
Carr felt his capacity for
what he calls "deep
reading" was fading.
“The very way my brain worked
seemed to be changing….It was
demanding to be fed the way the
Net fed it — and the more it was
fed, the hungrier it became.”
1) Short-term memory must be loaded with material to be learned.
2) This short-term content must be allowed to slowly transfer to long-term
memory.
3) Step 2 cannot take place if short-term memory is overloaded by
distractions.
4) The design of the Net actually prevents Step 2 from ever taking place. “It
seizes our attention only to scatter it” (p. 118).
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Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that's the challenge involved
in transferring information from working memory into long-term
memory.
When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip.
Through our concentration on the text, we can transfer most of the
information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory.
With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast.
Our little thimble overflows, and we’re able to transfer only a small
portion of the information to long-term memory.
In short, we see plenty of evidence
that the brain can reorganize
itself, and is certainly not fixed in
one state for all of its adult life.
 London taxi drivers whose
posterior hippocampuses were
much larger than normal.
The brains of London cab drivers
even "grew on the job" as they built
up detailed information needed to
find their way around London's
labyrinth of streets - information
famously referred to as "The
Knowledge".
Maps trained
us to think
abstractly.
•
Mechanical
clocks gave us
scientific way
of thinking.
Printing press
gave us an
attentive way
of thinking.
Ranks Net as greatest invention since printing
press & even alphabet. The Greek alphabet was
the first effective alphabetic script in the history
of humankind.
“An invention staggering in its
implication.”
“A piece of explosive technology,
revolutionary in its effects on human
culture, in a way not precisely shared by
any other invention.”
• A total of 24 symbols as opposed to
the hundreds of symbols in
hieroglyphics. This provided a
simple, flexible system for storage &
transmission of info.
• A large percentage of the ancient
Greece population achieved high
levels of literacy & so many
achievements in art, literature,
mathematics, philosophy, & science.
In 400 AD when St. Augustine finds St. Ambrose
(bishop of Milan) actually reading without moving
his lips. At time, no spaces between words &
writings were transcribed speech.
Nietzsche was going blind later in life
& ordered a typewriter so he could
continue writing with his eyes closed.
Words now could continue to pass from
his mind to page. He later noticed (as
did others) that his style had becomes
“tighter, more telegraphic.”
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Changes in reading style
are bringing changes in
writing style.
In Japan, cell phone novels
continue to grow in
popularity.
Top selling Japanese novels
last year were originally
written on mobile phones.
These are made up of short
sentences characteristic of
text messages.
Homepage of Japanese portal
site Maho no iRando.
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A web design study with 232 people. He
attached a small camera that tracked their
eye movements as they read pages of text &
browsed content.
The vast majority skimmed the text quickly,
their eyes skipping down the page in a
pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter
F.
They’d start by glancing all the way across
the first two or three lines of text. Then
their eyes would drop down a bit, and
they’d scan about halfway across a few
more lines.
Finally, they’d let their eyes drift further
down the left-hand side of the page.
“F” stands for fast. That’s how users read
your precious content.
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For every 100 words added to a
web page, the average viewer will
spend just 4.4 more seconds
perusing the page.
Most accomplished readers can
read only about 18 words in 4.4
seconds.
“When you add verbiage to a
page, you can assume that
customers will read 18% of it.”
That’s unlikely, because they are
probably glancing at pictures,
videos, & ads.
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In 2001, the thoughts &
actions of humans
seemed scripted, like
they were following an
algorithm.
We don’t want to begin
to lose our humanness,
to sacrifice the very
qualities that separate
us from machines.
“It is our own
intelligence that can
flatten into artificial
intelligence.”
“Dave, stop. Stop,
will you? My mind
is going. I can feel
it. I can feel it.”
-Hal 9000