Creating Santiago and the online proof of his existence took two hours on the afternoon of April 14 and cost $68. He was conjured out of keystrokes in a matter of minutes.

Of course, as in all forms of speech, more is being communicated than just what is said. However inconsequential the things spoken, we’re also sizing each other up in the act of speaking.

Although we call the activity by the same name, the deep reading of books and the information-driven reading we do on the web are very different, both in the experience they produce and in the capacities they develop.

[L]ooking at my bookshelves, I am aware of another kind of forgetting—the spines look familiar; the names and titles bring to mind perhaps a character name, a turn of plot, often just a mood or feeling—but for the most part, the assembled books, and the hundreds of others that I’ve read and discarded, given away, or returned to libraries, represent a vast catalogue of forgetting.

If they were used to smuggle drugs without his knowledge, he figured that wasn’t his problem. He was wrong.

[W]hite tigers are not a subspecies at all but rather the result of a mutant gene that has been artificially selected through massive inbreeding to produce oddball animals for human entertainment.

I doubt that I would have found that pivotal Kahneman without my blogging and journalistic training. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to me to conduct a literature search in that same fashion. More often than not, academic disciplines do not talk to one another.

Lanier can be lauded for his concerns that giant computer companies may harm people, or that we may lose our humanity by merging man and machine. Too often, however, Lanier seems to be repelled by the thought of these grand technologies flowing to the very people he claims to care about.