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In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day.
Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes
for an average person on an average day. [100,000 words is equivalent to a 300-page novel.]
Global Industry Center at University of California, San Diego, study in December 2009
Never before in human history have our brains had to process as much information as they do today. We have a
generation of people who are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to
think and feel. And much of what they are exposed to is superficial. People are sacrificing depth and feeling and
becoming cut off and disconnected from other people.
Dr. Edward Hallowell, psychitrist and ADD researcher, quoted in GIC study, 2009
My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind without selective
interest, experience is utter chaos.
William James, Pschology (1905)
We are relegating more and more of our mental operations to various technologies, with digital devices
increasingly acting as prostheses for our faculties. We entrust our sense of spatial orientation to satellite
navigation systems; we give mathematical calculations over to the appropriate gadgets. Indeed, the temptation is
to let the computer do much of the thinking for us. We can cut and paste fragments from the Internet and hope
that the collage adds up to something coherent, or interestingly disjunctive. Certainly, we have less need to
remember information ourselves when so much can be stored in our computers memory. The feats of memory
recorded in oral cultures, or performed by Soviet poets and writers under censorship, seem hardly credible
within our zeitgeist. Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized all of her husbands poetry because it was too hazardous
to write it down. Solzhenitsyn committed to memory each page he wrote when he was imprisoned in the Gulag,
and then destroyed the evidence. Such powers of retention are unimaginable to us and they may become even
more so, as we transfer memory to the many storage places available to us there to be filed away, for instant
and effortless retrieval.
By transposing aspects of thought and memory to technology we are externalizing our mental
operations. But both the mind and the psyche require internality.
Eva Hoffman, Time, 2010