Carr
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I've got a review of The Shallows, a new book by Nicholas Carr on the internet and the brain, in the NY Times: Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the "Phaedrus," he lamented the invention of books, which "create forgetfulness" in the soul.
The Shallows : The Frontal Cortex
Pundits have been trying to bury the book for a long time. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning popularity of newspapers — well over a hundred were being published in London alone — led many observers to assume that books were on the verge of obsolescence. How could they compete with the immediacy of the daily broadsheet? "Before this century shall end, journalism will be the whole press — the whole human thought," declared the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine in 1831. "Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other — sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth.
