I think if you look back through the intellectual history of human beings you can trace the way that intellectual technologies influence the way we think.

It's interesting to think about how the book changed us.

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.

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.

I think that the book in some ways is the most interesting from our own present standpoint, particularly when we want to think about the way the internet is changing us.

As soon as you introduce the mechanical clock, you get a radically different view of time. Suddenly, it's not a flow; it's a series of discreet, precisely measurable units, seconds, minutes, hours, and so forth.

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.