Earlier this week I mailed this letter to The New York Times. Now it can safely appear here.
To the Editor:
Re: “Web Browsing Takes Social Turn” by Miguel Helft (news article, Nov.8)
To paraphrase a main idea in Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows (Norton, 2010), the internet is increasingly doing our thinking for us. This momentum is causing important parts of our brain to atrophy. For example, we learn largely through our capacity to associate new information with prior knowledge. If you ever wondered “what the internet is doing to our brains” (Carr’s subtitle), look no further than Miguel Helft’s article about the new web browser being launched today. RockMelt not only searches the web for you, “but also fetches the pages associated with these results, so a user can preview those pages quickly and decide which to click to.” Beautiful—now the internet browser makes associations for you. You don’t have to exercise that part of your brain anymore. You, the “user,” are now being used, while becoming less able to think for yourself.
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