Excerpt from a timely Robert Wright essay
But frivolity isn’t a recent invention. On balance, technology is letting people link up with more and more people who share a vocational or avocational interest. And it’s at this level, the social level, that the new efficiencies reside. The fact that we don’t feel efficient — that we feel, as Carr puts it, like “chronic scatterbrains” — is in a sense the source of the new efficiencies; the scattering of attention among lots of tasks is what allows us to add value to lots of social endeavors. The incoherence of the individual mind lends coherence to group minds.
No wonder Carr finds technology oppressive. Its needs trump ours! We’re just cells, and the organism’s the main thing.
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