“The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought.“Google … has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “under stands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency.” (60).The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.” (59) Yet, for all that ‘s been written about the Net, there ‘s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives-or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts-as the Internet does today.It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. “The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies.And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” (57) They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. “As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.
“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.” (57).
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