Top 70 Nicholas Carr Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.”

— Nicholas Carr

2. “We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. ‘Writing and print and the computer,’ writes Walter Ong, ‘are all ways of technologizing the word’; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.”

— Nicholas Carr

3. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

— Nicholas Carr

4. “There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.”

— Nicholas Carr

5. “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

— Nicholas Carr

6. “We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.”

— Nicholas Carr

7. “When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology’s assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding s or controlling us. We’re behind the wheel, but we can’t be sure who’s driving.”

— Nicholas Carr

8. “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”

— Nicholas Carr

9. “When our brain is overtaxed, we find “distractions more distracting.”

— Nicholas Carr

10. “When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking,” he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it’s well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.”

— Nicholas Carr

11. “When we’re online, we’re often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.”

— Nicholas Carr

12. “The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.”

— Nicholas Carr

13. “Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”51.”

— Nicholas Carr

14. “Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know.”

— Nicholas Carr

15. “Google is neither God nor Satan, and if there are shadows in the Googleplex they’re no more than the delusions of grandeur. What’s disturbing about the company’s founders is not their boyish desire to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators, but the pinched conception of the human mind that gives rise to such a desire.”

— Nicholas Carr

16. “The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.”

— Nicholas Carr

17. “Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect.”

— Nicholas Carr

18. “To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.”

— Nicholas Carr

19. “The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.”

— Nicholas Carr

20. “The brain’s plasticity is not limited to the somatosensory cortex, the area that governs our sense of touch. It’s universal. Virtually all of our neural circuits – whether they’re involved in feeling, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking, learning, perceiving, or remembering – are subject to change. The received wisdom is cast aside.”

— Nicholas Carr

21. “The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.”

— Nicholas Carr

22. “The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.”

— Nicholas Carr

23. “Technology isn’t what makes us “post-human” or “transhuman,” as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.”

— Nicholas Carr

24. “Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections – a new context. As Joseph LeDoux explains, “The brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated.”30 Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal.”

— Nicholas Carr

25. “Automation weakens the bond between tool and user not because computer-controlled systems are complex but because they ask so little of us.”

— Nicholas Carr

26. “What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself – our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts.”

— Nicholas Carr

27. “A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.”

— Nicholas Carr

28. “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started.”

— Nicholas Carr

29. “Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.23.”

— Nicholas Carr

30. “The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to “vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,” as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that “the new is more often trivial than essential.”

— Nicholas Carr

31. “But there is one thing that determinists and instrumentalists can agree on: technological advances often mark turning points in history. New tools for hunting and farming brought changes in patterns of population growth, settlement, and labor.”

— Nicholas Carr

32. “A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.”

— Nicholas Carr

33. “In the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it-and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.”

— Nicholas Carr

34. “The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into “rigid behaviors.”

— Nicholas Carr

35. “As we multitask online, he says, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.” The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove “deadly.”54.”

— Nicholas Carr

36. “Instead of requiring us to puzzle out where we are in an area, a GPS device simply sets us at the center of the map and then makes the world circulate around us.”

— Nicholas Carr

37. “Reducing intelligence to the statistical analysis of large data sets “can lead us,” says Levesque, “to systems with very impressive performance that are nonetheless idiot-savants.”

— Nicholas Carr

38. “It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions.”

— Nicholas Carr

39. “The value of a well-made and well-used tool lies not only in what it produces for us but what it produces in us.”

— Nicholas Carr

40. “When we speak with emoji, we’re speaking a language that machines can understand.”

— Nicholas Carr

41. “The experiment suggested a strong correlation “between the number of links and disorientation or cognitive overload,” wrote Zhu.”

— Nicholas Carr

42. “Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.”

— Nicholas Carr

43. “The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one. When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it’s a mistake to assume that more is better.”

— Nicholas Carr

44. “The ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. With every skill we learn, the world reshapes itself to reveal greater possibilities.”

— Nicholas Carr

45. “But except in rare circumstances, you can train until you’re blue in the face and you’d never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time.” What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.” The Roman philosopher Seneca May have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

— Nicholas Carr

46. “The animals’ neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can’t believe what he’s seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he’s been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.”

— Nicholas Carr

47. “There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.”

— Nicholas Carr

48. “When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.”

— Nicholas Carr

49. “As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.”

— Nicholas Carr

50. “Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift – to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.”

— Nicholas Carr