Markus Strasser

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Information Technologies have Strong Second Order Effects on Cognition

This is probably obvious now, but I remember people saying FB/Twitter/Google are just “a tool”

From The Shallows (which isn’t that rigorous of an account imo)

“Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work. The map and the clock shared a similar ethic. Both placed a new stress on measurement and abstraction, on perceiving and defining forms and processes beyond the senses”

Socrates on The Alphabet (he’s pretty far off):

Socrates grants that there are practical benefits to capturing one’s thoughts in writing—“as memorials against the forgetfulness of old age”—but he argues that a dependence on the technology of the alphabet will alter a person’s mind, and not for the better.

By substituting outer symbol for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.

Socrates would have loved ClubHouse

Information Technologies have Strong Second Order Effects on Cognition