{ The Shallows - What the Internet is doing to our brains

Author: & Nicholas Carr
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p54

In 4th century BC, & Plato wrote { Phaedrus, his dialogue about love, beauty, and rhetoric.

Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks"
The written word is "a recipe for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance."

• Those who rely on reading for their knowledge will "seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing." They will be "filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom."

p57

• The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation.

The achievements of the Western World, it is obvious, are testimony to the tremendous values of literacy. & Marshall McLuhan { Understanding Media

• The ability to write is "utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials," & Walter J. Ong concluded. "Writing heightens consciousness." { Oral and Literacy
  • In Plato's time, and for centuries afterward, that heightened consciousness was reserved for an elite.
  • #comment So if the elite were hoarding all the knowledge, does this mean that the layman lacked the resources to have an imagination to make decisions for himself? { The Effective Executive - The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done#^eb7939

Dissent from consensus sparks the evolution of culture

p169

20220708 - Memex
& David Levy: "The development of personal digital information systems and global hypertext seems not to have solved the problem & Vennevar Bush identified but exacerbated it"

p170

• The reason for failure: dramatically reducing the cost of creating, storing, and sharing information.
  • 20220708 - Google ensures that we are forever inundated by information of immediate interest to us - and in quantities well beyond what our brains can handle
    • #comment: { Building a Second Brain is a response to the thesis that aims to resolve the internet's effect on the brain
• 202205022046 - Information Exhaustion or overload has become a permanent afflicion, and our attempts to cure it just make it worse. The only way to cope is to increase our scanning and out skimming, to rely even more heavily on the machines at the source of the problem.
• "More infortion is available to use that ever before, but there is less time to make sure of it - and specifically to make use of it with any depth of freletion."
  • Direct call-to-action for having a 202207081946 - Second Brain