Cognitive Surplus
Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a description of London in the 1720s, when the city was in the midst of a gin binge. A flood of new arrivals from the countryside meant the metropolis was crowded, filthy, and violent. As a [...]
Humanity’s greatest invention
Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species’s past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us “to listen to the dead with our eyes.”
But how, in such a short time, did the human species evolve this unique skill, one that requires the [...]
THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL
The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox
By John Freeman
On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven google alerts on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants [...]
book summary - Google News