The Social Network Effect

Nicholas Carr with Thomas Goetz


Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. Is it possible that the popular social networks of the modern day net are having profound impacts on the neural networks of our brains and on our psychological functioning? How are our virtual, social worlds changing our capacity to relate and communicate with one another in the physical world? Is Google making us stupid? When bestselling author and 2011 Pulitzer Prize… Show more finalist Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic essay, he tapped into a popular question of how the Internet is changing us. Carr expands his thoughts into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences as he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind” from the alphabet, to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer. Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic — a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. Nicholas Carr will be in Conversation with Thomas Goetz who is the executive editor of WIRED magazine and author of The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. A journalist for more than 15 years, Goetz has reported on media and business for the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, and The Industry Standard. He holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

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