The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (27 page)

“We bend to the inanimate”
:
Sherry
Turkle,
Alone Together
: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic Books, 2012), xii.

“There are things, which you cannot tell your friends”
:
Ibid.
,
51.

“Extremely short exposures”
:
Joseph Weizenbaum,
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation
(New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976), 7.

BMW was forced to recall
:
Clifford Nass, “Sweet Talking Your Computer,”
Wall Street Journal
, August 28, 2010, accessed January 12, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703959704575453411132636080.

“One day ladies will take their computers”
:
Tom Siegfried, “A Mind from Math,”
Science News
,
vol. 181, issue 13 (2012): 26.

According to Brian Christian’s account
:
Brian Christian,
The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
(New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 20.

Infants at two or three months
:
Maria Konnikova, “Infants Possess Intermingled Senses,”
Scientific American
, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=infant-kandinskys.

“This person thinks, ‘I am damaged’”
:
CNN has posted a transcript of that
Anderson Cooper 360°
segment here: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1009/30/acd.01.html. A video of the segment can be found on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=bgxNItGmiC4.

One Carnegie Mellon researcher
:
Chloe Albanesius, “Social Security Numbers Revealed . . . with Facial-Recognition Software?,”
PCMag.com
, August 1, 2011, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389540,00.asp.

“the male gaze gone viral”
:
Meghan Murphy, “Putting Selfies Under a Feminist Lens,”
Georgia Straight
, accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.straight.com/life/368086/putting-selfies-under-feminist-lens.

“Self-tracking is
 . . . revelatory”:
Nora Young,
The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012), 45.

“Community feeling” had been a dominant theme
:
Yalta T. Uhls and Patricia M. Greenfield, “The Rise of Fame: An Historical Content Analysis,”
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace
5, no. 1 (2011): article 1, http://www.cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2011061601.

British parents confirmed this position
:
“Children Would Rather Become Popstars Than Teachers or Lawyers,”
The Telegraph
, October 1, 2009, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6250626/Children-would-rather-become-popstars-than-teachers-or-lawyers.html.

“that which cannot be articulated”
:
Young,
Virtual Self,
203.

Chapter 4: Public Opinion

“We all do no end of feeling”
:
Mark Twain,
Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 286–87.

The world’s arbiter of truth
:
“Wikipedia: List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia,” accessed January 13, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia.

Four years later, I asked
:
“Who is Erica Feldman . . . ?,” snapshot from January 6, 2014, via Google’s cache, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Q77Wj1JfErsJ:wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_is_erica_feldman_the_one_that_invented_the_hair_straightnener+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a.

There are even hoaxes about hoaxes
:
“List of Fictitious People,” Wikipedia.com, accessed January 15, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_fictitious_people&diff=211003619&oldid=205705808.

I see there are currently
:
“Wikipedia:Statistics,” Wikipedia, accessed January 17, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics.

Printing Wikipedia in a book
:
“Wikipedia:Size in Volumes,” Wikipedia, accessed January 17, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes.

“I guess we will just have to accept”
:
Roger C. Schank,
Making Minds Less Educated Than Our Own
(Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008)
,
vii.

In 2013, only 12 cases
:
Dave Craven, e-mail messages to author, June 26, 2013, and January 22, 2014.

a stunning 91 percent of Wikipedia editors
:
“Editor Survey 2011,” Wikipedia: Meta-Wiki, accessed January 15, 2014, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Survey_2011.

“the actual inventor” of the hair iron
:
“Hoaxes, or Why Wikipedia Needs Flagged Revisions,” accessed January 15, 2014, http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=647&p=12233.

She died in New York
:
“Madame C. J. Walker,” MIT Inventor of the Week Archive, accessed January 15, 2014, http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/cjwalker.html.

Sadly, and perhaps inevitably
:
Ibid.

“Live the questions now”
:
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters to a Young Poet
(New York: Vintage, 1986), 34.

“credentialed to uncredentialed”
:
David Weinberger,
Too Big to Know:
Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
(New York: Basic Books, 2011), 67.

“Let the wise instruct the wise”
:
Jonathan Rose,
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
(New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 223.

“the duplication of the hermetic writings”
: Elizabeth L.
Eisenstein,
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe,
2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51.

By the late 1800s
:
Walter Benjamin,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(London: Penguin, 2008), 22–23.

“the dominant mood of contemporary American culture”
:
William A. Henry,
In Defense of Elitism
(New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 177.

“If market pricing is the only legitimate test”
:
Jaron Lanier,
Who Owns the Future?
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 360.

“As more journals moved online”
: Nicholas
Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011),
217.

the number hit 65.8 million
:
“Yelp Reviewed,” Statista, accessed January 16, 2014, http://socialtimes.com/files/2012/02/yelp-by-the-numbers-972.jpg.

In 2013, Yelp enticed 117 million unique users per month
:
“10 Things You Should Know About Yelp,” Yelp: About Us, accessed January 17, 2014, http://www.yelp.ca/about.

“Yelpers” have written 47 million reviews
:
Ibid.

A restaurateur in Ottawa’s famous ByWard Market
:
“Marisol Simoes Jailed: Co-owner of Kinki and Mambo in Ottawa Gets 90 Days for Defamation,”
Huffington Post
, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/11/16/marisol-simoes-jailed_n_2146205.html.

“Today’s internet is killing our culture”
:
Andrew Keen,
The Cult of the Amateur
(New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007).

“the filter bubble”
:
Eli Pariser,
The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011).

Google announced that Google Maps
:
Evegny Morozov, “My Map or Yours?,” Slate, accessed September 4, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/05/google_maps_personalization_will_hurt_public_space_and_engagement.html.

“Bullshit is unavoidable”
:
Harry G. Frankfurt,
On Bullshit
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 63.

“There I’ve gone and given away the plot”
:
Dorothy Parker, “Far from Well,”
The New Yorker
, October 20, 1928.

Chapter 5: Authenticity

“But isn’t everything here green?”
:
L. Frank Baum,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(New York: Knopf, 1992), 151–52.

Over the next few years
:
Author interview with Andrew Ng, July 11, 2013.

Latest numbers show Coursera hosts
:
“A Triple Milestone,” Coursera Blog for October 23, 2013, accessed January 17, 2014, http://blog.coursera.org/post/64907189712/a-triple-milestone-107-partners-532-courses-5-2.

“We don’t educate people as others wished”
:
Max Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course,”
Fast Company
, accessed December 2, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb.

“school was an invention of the printing press”
:
Neil Postman,
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
(New York: Vintage, 1993), 10.

Marshall McLuhan argues that whenever we amplify
: Marshall
McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Berkeley, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 2003),
63–70.

“Welcome to a world through glass”
:
“What It Does—Google Glass,” accessed September 5, 2013, http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/.

“the brightness and glory of the Emerald City”
:
Baum,
Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
88.

“No more than in any other city”
:
Ibid., 151–52.

“a cathedral quits its site”
: Walter
Benjamin,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Penguin, 2008),
6.

“The genuineness of a thing”
:
Ibid., 7.

“for the first time
 . . . a person is placed”:
Ibid., 19.

A prime example is the Google Books project
:
Robert Darnton, “The National Digital Public Library Is Launched!,”
New York Review of Books
, accessed February 17, 2014.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/national-digital-public-library-launched/.

“precious old book”
:
Stephan Füssel,
Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing
(Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 198.

His Bible’s 1,282 pages
:
John Man,
The Gutenberg Revolution: The Story of a Genius and an Invention That Changed the World
(New York: Random House, 2010), 146.

The old “authentic” artifact
:
Curt F. Bühler,
The Fifteenth-Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 16.

our culture of electronic simulation
: Sherry
Turkle,
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012),
4.

“because they’re too busy”
:
Geoffrey Miller, “Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens,”
Seed,
accessed January 16, 2014, http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/.