Nicholas Carr

How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

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Stuart Romanek

“People are not in general influenced by long books or discourses,” the American poet John Jay Chapman wrote in an 1897 essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson, “but by odd fragments of observation which they overhear, sentences or headlines which they read while turning over a book at random or while waiting for dinner to be announced. These are the oracles and orphic words that get lodged in the mind and bend a man’s most stubborn will.”

Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires. It’s successful because it gives us what we want. As a machine for harvesting attention, its productivity is unmatched. As a machine for bending the will, it is a triumph of efficiency. In engineering what we pay attention to, it also engineers much else about us—how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world.

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