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.

The book, I think, like the map before it, like the clock, created or help create a revolution in the human mind in the way our habits of mind and ultimately the way we use our brains.

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.

By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few.

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.

There are a whole lot of reasons to be very happy that our brains are able to adapt and adapt so readily because we do strengthen and become more efficient at things we do a lot of in changed ways of thinking that we might need.

When somebody's talking to us, they're not putting pauses - carefully putting pauses between words. It all flows together. The problem with that though, it's very hard to read.