All photos by Erik Anderson
This morning, I wrote this blog post about last night's Commonwealth Club double feature on the authors of the book The Facebook Effect and the Atlantic Monthy article “Is Google Making Us Stupid." I Googled the Commonwealth Club, Peter Norvig, and authors David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Carr. I Googled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” (which I felt weird about) in which Carr got some of today's genuises to admit that they can no longer sit and read an entire book. Every once in awhile, my inbox tab would inform me that I had a new email waiting for me, and compelled by a small spur of urgency, I'd spend around 15 seconds reading about the upcoming pie bake-off or exhortation from my editor. Or, you know, Facebook would draw me in like that mean popular girl whose requests you can't quite ignore. Oh yay, Allen posted the photos from Harmony Festival! My ex-boyfriend has changed his relationship status to “married”? What an idiot... and so on, until the irony of the fact I was writing about what social networking and search engines are doing to our brains threatened to explode my cerebellum in a glorious rocket blast of irony. Read more »
