by Al Gore
12 “a very complex organism that often follows its own urges”
Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010).
13 we are spending more and more time “alone together”
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Robert Kraut et al., “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?,” American Psychologist 53, no. 9 (September 1998): 1017–31; Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Atlantic, May 2012.
14 “Internet Use Disorder” in its appendix for the first time
Tony Dokupil, “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?,” Daily Beast, July 8, 2012.
15 estimated 500 million people
Jane McGonigal, “Video Games: An Hour a Day Is Key to Success in Life,” Huffington Post, February 15, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html.
16 as much time playing online games as they spend in classrooms
Ibid.
17 the average online social games player
Mathew Ingram, “Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman,” GigaOM, February 17, 2010, http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/.
18 55 percent of those playing social games
Ibid.
19 generate 60 percent of the comments and post 70 percent of the pictures on Facebook
Robert Lane Greene, “Facebook: Like?,” Intelligent Life, May/June 2012, http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/robert-lane-greene/facebook?page=full.
20 to the amount of time we are spending online
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
21 control group not informed that the facts could be found online
John Bohannon, “Searching for the Google Effect on People’s Memory,” Science, July 15, 2011.
22 began to lose some of their innate sense of direction
Alex Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems,” Walrus, November 2009.
23 studies indicate that it is a literal reallocation of mental energy
Carr, The Shallows.
24 “Never memorize what you can look up in books”
Library of Congress, World Treasures of the Library of Congress, July 29, 2010, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/world/world-record.html.
25 the disuse of neuron “trees” leads to their shrinkage
Walter J. Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 37–43, 81–82; Society for Neuroscience, “Brain Plasticity and Alzheimer’s Disease,” 2010, http://web.archive.org/web/20101225174414/ http://sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=publications_rd_alzheimers.j.
26 connecting our brains seamlessly to the enhanced capacity
McLuhan, Understanding Media.
27 “calling things to remembrance”
Plato, Plato’s Phaedrus, translated by Reginald Hackforth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 157.
28 TCP/IP protocol
Kleinrock Internet History Center at UCLA, “The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970,” September 21, 2011, http://internethistory.ucla.edu/2011/09/imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970.html; Jim Horne, “What Hath God Wrought,” New York Times, Wordplay blog, September 8, 2009, http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/wrought/; George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), pp. 2, 219.
29 and the less one relies on memories stored in the brain itself
Carr, The Shallows, pp. 191–97.
30 life-forms on Earth is our capacity for complex and abstract thought
Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 199.
31 neocortex in roughly its modern form around 200,000 years ago
R.I.M. Dunbar, “Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no. 4 (1993): 681–735.
32 with a genetic mutation or whether it developed more gradually
Constance Holden, “The Origin of Speech,” Science 303, no. 5662 (February 27, 2004): 1316–19.
33 to communicate more intricate thoughts from one person to others
John Noble Wilford, “Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers,” New York Times, April 6, 1999.
34 hunter-gatherer period is associated with oral communication
Nicholas Wade, “Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born,” New York Times, April 14, 2011.
35 language is associated with the early stages of the Agricultural Revolution
Wilford, “Who Began Writing?”
36 Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, the Mediterranean, and Central America
William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel, World History, 6th ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 43.
37 the emergence of sophisticated concepts like democracy
Carr, The Shallows, pp. 50–57.
38 Their relative powerlessness was driven by their ignorance
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
39 written in a language that for the most part only the monks could understand
Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
40 eleven print editions of the account of his journey captivated Europe
“The Diffusion of Columbus’s Letter through Europe, 1493–1497,” University of Southern Maine, Osher Map Library, http://usm.maine.edu/maps/web-document/1/5/sub-/5-the-diffusion-of-columbuss-letter-through-europe-1493-1497.
41 bringing artifacts and knowledge
Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (New York: William Morrow, 2004).
42 including the exciting new derivatives product: indulgences
Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Protestant Reformation, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. ix–xiii, 66–67.
43 but thousands of copies distributed to the public were printed in German
“How Luther Went Viral,” Economist, December 17, 2011.
44 more than a quarter of them written by Luther himself
Ibid.
45 beginning a wave of literacy that began in Northern Europe and moved southward
Tom Head, It’s Your World, So Change It: Using the Power of the Internet to Create Social Change (Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2010), p. 115.
46 the printing press was denounced as “the work of the Devil”
Charles Coffin, The Story of Liberty (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879), p. 77.
47 with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s Revolution of the Spheres
William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (New York: Norton, 2006).
48 At the beginning of January 1776
“Jan 9, 1776: Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense,” History.com, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/thomas-paine-publishes-common-sense.
49 ignite the American War of Independence that July
David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 112.
50 codified by Adam Smith in the same year
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776).
51 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was also published in the same year
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776).
52 a counterpoint to the prevailing exhilaration about the future
T. H. Breen, “Making History,” New York Times Book Review, May 7, 2000.
53 quantum computing
Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Doubleday, 2011), Ch
apter 1.
54 digital data by companies and individuals
McKinsey Global Institute, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, May 2011.
55 grown by a factor of nine in just five years
“The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos,” IDC, June 2011, http://idcdocserv.com/1142.
56 telephone call grew shorter by almost half
Tom Vanderbilt, “The Call of the Future,” Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2012.
57 double between 2005 and 2010
International Telecommunications Union, “The World in 2010: ICT Facts and Figures,” http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/material/FactsFigures2010.pdf.
58 in 2012 reached 2.4 billion users globally
Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update),” December 3, 2012, http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends-update.
59 as many mobile devices as there are people
Cisco Systems, Inc., Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015, February 1, 2011, http://newsroom.cisco.com/ekits/Cisco_VNI_Global_Mobile_Data_Traffic_Forecast_2010_2015.pdf.
60 Internet users is expected to increase 56-fold over the next five years
Ibid.
61 smartphones is projected to increase 47-fold over the same period
Ibid.
62 half of the mobile phone market in the United States
Aaron Smith, Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Nearly Half of American Adults Are Smartphone Owners,” March 1, 2012, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-2012.aspx.
63 More than 5 billion of the 7 billion
International Telecommunications Union, “ICT Facts and Figures: The World in 2011.”
64 1.1 billion active smartphone users worldwide
Meeker and Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update).”
65 3.2 billion people have their own devices
“SIM Earth,” Economist, October 19, 2012, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/10/global-mobile-usage.
66 low-end smartphones that will soon be nearly ubiquitous
Christina Bonnington, Wired Gadget Lab, “Global Smartphone Adoption Approaches 30 Percent,” November 28, 2011, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/smartphones-feature-phones/; Juro Osawa and Paul Mozur, “The Battle for China’s Low-End Smartphone Market,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2012.
67 Internet access as a new “human right” in a United Nations report
David Kravets, “U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right,” Wired, June 3, 2011.
68 computer or tablet to every child in the world who does not have one
“Nicholas Negroponte and One Laptop Per Child,” Public Radio International, April 29, 2009, http://www.pri.org/stories/business/social-entrepreneurs/one-laptop-per-child.html.
69 subsidized the connection of every school and library to the Internet
Austan Goolsbee and Jonathan Guryan, “World Wide Wonder?,” Education Next 6, no. 1 (Winter 2006).
70 immediately upon awakening—even before they get out of bed
Kevin J. O’Brien, “Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing,” New York Times, January 5, 2012.
71 simultaneously trying to operate their cars and trucks
Matt Richtel, “U.S. Safety Board Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers,” New York Times, December 13, 2011.
72 before the distracted pilots finally disengaged from their computers
Micheline Maynard and Matthew L. Wald, “Off-Course Pilots Cite Computer Distraction,” New York Times, October 27, 2009.
73 “ ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect”
Jason Gilbert, “FaceTime Facelift: The Plastic Surgery Procedure for iPhone Users Who Don’t Like How They Look on FaceTime,” Huffington Post, February 27, 2012.
74 “Internet of Everything.”
Dave Evans, “How the Internet of Everything Will Change the World … for the Better,” Cisco Blog, November 7, 2012, http://blogs.cisco.com/news/how-the-internet-of-everything-will-change-the-worldfor-the-better-infographic/.
75 voluminous new quantities of data
McKinsey Institute, “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” May 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation.
76 without being processed by computers for patterns and meaning
Al Gore, “The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in the 21st Century,” speech at the California Science Center, January 31, 1998, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=6210&version=1&format=doc.
77 actuators has been disposed of soon after it is collected
Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2010.
78 promote efficiency in industry and business
McKinsey Institute, “Big data.”
79 information collected during the seconds prior to and during
“In-Car Camera Records Accidents,” BBC News, October 14, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/4341342.stm.
80 airplanes and most security cameras in buildings
Kevin Bonsor, “How Black Boxes Work,” HowStuffWorks, http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box3.htm.
81 twice the amount of information presently generated
Tony Hoffman, “IBM Preps Hyper-Fast Computing System for World’s Largest Radiotelescope,” PC Magazine, April 2, 2012.
82 billions of messages posted each day on social networks
Chui, Löffler, and Roberts, “The Internet of Things”; McKinsey Institute, “Big Data.”
83 Twitter Earthquake Detector
Tim Lohman, “Twitter to Detect Earthquakes, Tsunamis,” Computer World, June 1, 2011.
84 the Global Pulse program Ban Ki-moon launched
Steve Lohr, “The Internet Gets Physical,” New York Times, December 17, 2011.
85 predict social unrest in countries and regions of particular interest
John Markoff, “Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky,’ ” New York Times, October 10, 2011.
86 predict how well Hollywood—and Bollywood—movies will perform
Ibid.
87 dominant content on the Internet is printed words
Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” December 2009, http://hmi.ucsd.edu/pdf/HMI_2009_ConsumerReport_Dec9_2009.pdf.
88 massive crowds of election protesters in Moscow
Alissa de Carbonnel, “Social Media Makes Anti-Putin Protests ‘Snowball,’ ” Reuters, December 7, 2011.
89 spotlighting the excesses of elites
Thomas Friedman, “This Is Just the Start,” New York Times, March 1, 2011.
90 used by rebels in Misrata to guide their mortars
Tom Coghlan, “Google and a Notebook: The Weapons Helping to Beat Gaddafi in Libya,” Times (London), June 16, 2011.
91 across the border to collaborators in the diaspora living in Thailand
Mridul Chowdhury, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, “The Role of the Internet in Burma’s Saffron Revolution,” September 2008, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Chowdhury_Role_of_the_Internet_in_Burmas_Saffron_Revolution.pdf_0.pdf.
92 completely blacking out the Internet inside the country’s borders
Ibid.
93 Aung San Suu Kyi, from her long house arrest
Tim Johnson, “Aung San Suu Kyi Freed,” Financial Times, November 13, 2010.
94 destined to take control of the government
Dean Nelson, “Aung San Suu Kyi ‘Wins Landslide Landmark Election’ as Burma Rejoices,” Telegraph, April 1, 2012.
95 protest against the fraudulent presidential election
Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey, “Political Change in the Digi
tal Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing,” SAIS Review 30, no. 2 (2010).
96 controlling Internet use by the protesters
Ibid.
97 the tragic death of Neda Agha-Soltan
Ibid.
98 protest movement were almost completely shut down
Ibid.
99 the government simply blacked it out
Ibid.
100 stifle any effective resistance to the dictatorship’s authority
Will Heaven, “Iran and Twitter: The Fatal Folly of the Online Revolutionaries,” Telegraph, December 29, 2009; Christopher Williams, “Iran Cracks Down on Web Dissident Technology,” Telegraph, March 18, 2011.
101 Iran and the retro-Stalinist dictatorship of Belarus
Larry Diamond, “Liberation Technology,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 3 (July 2010).
102 turn the Internet within China into a national intranet
Ibid.
103 was censored and made unavailable to the people of China
Josh Chin, “Netizens React: Premier’s Interview Censored,” China Real Time Report blog, Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2010.
104 open values of the world’s largest search engine, Google
Clive Thompson, “Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem),” New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2006.
105 “in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle”
Tim Carmody, “Google Co-Founder: China, Apple, Facebook Threaten the ‘Open Web,’ ” Wired, April 16, 2012.
106 “It’s hopeless to try to control the Internet”
Ian Katz, “Web Freedom Faces Greatest Threat Ever, Warns Google’s Sergey Brin,” Guardian, April 15, 2012.
107 more than 500 million people, 40 percent of its total population
Matt Silverman, “China: The World’s Largest Online Population,” Mashable, April 10, 2012; Jon Russell, “Internet Usage in China Surges 11%,” USA Today, July 19, 2012.
108 to take to the Internet themselves in order to respond to public controversies
Lye Liang Fook and Yang Yi, EAI Background Brief No. 467, “The Chinese Leadership and the Internet,” July 27, 2009, http://www.eai.nus.edu.sg/BB467.pdf.
109 Dmitri Medvedev also felt the pressure to engage personally on the Internet
“Medvedev Believes Internet Best Guarantee Against Totalitarianism,” Itar-Tass News Agency, July 30, 2012, http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c154/484098.html.
