What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.

What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.

What I had thought were signs of a broken educational system - the seemingly random placement of commas, the spastic syntax, the obnoxious overuse of quotation marks, the goofy misspelling of 'Jouralism' - were actually signs of the New Instantaneousness. 'Instant Jouralists' cannot be concerned with punctuation and grammar and spelling. That stuff just 'slows you down.' To be an 'Instant Jouralist,' you have to write as if you were being pursued by a cheetah across the Serengeti.

One of the fascinating things about early writing on slates, on papyrus, even on early handwritten books, is for instance, there were no space between the words. People just wrote in continuous script.

The brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you're exercising, it's pulling - it's weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you're not exercising so much.

The Internet, like all intellectual technologies has a trade off. As we train our brains to use it, as we adapt to the environment of the internet, which is an environment of kind of constant immersion and information and constant distractions, interruptions, juggling lots of messages, lots of bits of information.

A wise and clear-eyed book, Future Hype challenges the conventional wisdom about technological change and provides a fresh perspective on our so-called computer age.