Testimonies of the disconnected
July 31, 2010
"Not too long ago I was on it all day long," writes Juan Rodriguez in an essay in the Montreal Gazette, "it" being the Internet. "I felt buzzed and strangely empty." But when Rodriguez, a freelance writer, moved into a new apartment last year, he didn't bring the Net with him:
Unhooking myself from the Net started as an experiment, after depending on it for work and recreation for nearly 20 years. If humans are basically creatures of habit, I wanted to know whether I could survive without being addicted to the World Wide Web. According to some friends and colleagues, this draconian act has transformed me into something akin to an antisocial psychopath. And stupid, too, as I am in the newspaper business, which places a premium on being up-to-date.
Rodriguez hasn't gone entirely off-line. He spends an hour or two a day at an Internet cafe, catching up on email and doing research. But he's finding that being disconnected most of the time is opening doors that the Net had closed:
Once I eliminated the Internet from my apartment, I rediscovered the joys of reading books (not blogs). It's a feeling I haven't experienced this intensely since my adolescence, when I devoured books, like a human sponge with a lust for everything ... Not having the Internet at home has done wonders for my self-image - and also played havoc with it. I imagine myself as a teenage rebel again, a non-conformist, Bucking the System ... And, somehow, the less I sense my life being "tracked" online, the more secure and independent - free? - I feel, at least for a little while.
Vice city
July 29, 2010
The New Republic is today running my review of Tom Bissell's latest book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It begins:
Tom Bissell is a Renaissance Man for our out-of-joint time. In addition to being a versatile and exuberant writer, a restless if ennui-ridden globetrotter, and a dedicated chewer of tobacco and smoker of pot, he is a prodigiously gifted slayer of zombies and other digitized demons ...
More, please, and faster
July 28, 2010
Paul Graham has a perceptive post on what he terms "the acceleration of addiction," describing how technological progress, by giving us more of what we want, will naturally tend to amplify compulsive behavior:
Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.
I hadn't thought about it in those terms before, but of course he's right - and his observation explains a lot (though he overlooks how commercial interests will tend to amplify the amplification process, as companies compete to profit from our compulsions). The recent evolution of the web, as a consumer technology, can to a considerable degree be seen as the product of the competition among technology companies - Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. - to feed our native and not necessarily rational craving for new information.
Tradeoffs
July 26, 2010
I had the pleasure last month of talking about The Shallows with Christopher Lydon, a superb interviewer, in his offices near Charles Street in Boston. Lydon has a very different view of the Web than I do, which, combined with his sympathetic reading of the book, made for, I think, a particularly good conversation. You can listen to it, via Lydon's Brown University-based Radio Open Source program, here.
Maps and minds
July 23, 2010
The National Geographic Assignment Blog is featuring a short excerpt from my book The Shallows, illustrated with some photographs from National Geographic photographers. In the excerpt, I look at the map as an early example of an intellectual technology that both reflects and disseminates a new way of thinking. Read it.
Forgotten characters
July 22, 2010
As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories. Barbara Demick recently reported on this "long descent into forgetfulness" in the Los Angeles Times:
This is a strange new form of illiteracy — or, more exactly, dysgraphia, the inability to write — that is peculiar to China ... The more gadgets people own — cellphones, smart phones, computers — the less often they go through the elaborate sequence of strokes that make up Chinese characters. Whether on their computers or texting on phones, most Chinese use a system where they type out the sound of the word in Pinyin, the most commonly used Romanization system — and presto, they are given a choice of characters to use.
Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at Penn, calls it an epidemic of "character amnesia":
Because of their complexity and multiplicity, writing Chinese characters correctly is a highly neuromuscular task. One simply has to practice them hundreds and hundreds of times to master them. And, as with playing a musical instrument like a violin or a piano, one must practice writing them regularly or one's control over them will simply evaporate ... Unlike aphasia, a type of language disorder that usually occurs suddenly because of physical injury, the impairment brought about by frequent cellphone checking is gradual. Nonetheless, the attrition that results is just as real as that brought about by dysphasia (limited aphasia).
Some of the many commenters on Mair's post suggest that the complex, character-based system of writing is cumbersome and ill-suited to our efficiency-hungry world. Its eventual replacement by a simpler system of Roman letters, they argue, would be an example of progress. Others worry about a loss of one of the foundations of Chinese culture: "Is it worth throwing out 3,000 years of knowledge and literature for some amount of greater efficiency?"
The shift in Chinese writing practices, and the cognitive skills that underpin them, may be particularly dramatic, but it is just the latest instance of a recurring pattern in human history: the arrival of a new tool for reading or writing changes language, which in turn (as Walter J. Ong, among others, pointed out) changes thought. We adopt the new tools for various good reasons - efficiency and convenience being prominent ones - and the changes in language and thinking come as side effects, unplanned and usually unanticipated.
Colbert Report redux
June 28, 2010
I am scheduled to be on the Colbert Report this Wednesday, chatting with Stephen Colbert about The Shallows. Tune in, or program your Tivo appropriately. (I was on the show once before, about two years ago, and you can watch that interview, during which Stephen multitasked with his iPhone, here.)
In the meantime, I will be talking about the book at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., this evening [details], and at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., tomorrow evening [details].
The pleasure of waiting
June 23, 2010
James Sturm, the cartoonist who has taken a four-month sabbatical from the Internet, continues to write (and draw) about his experience as one of The Disconnected. Here's a bit from the "halftime report" he recently issued, after having been offline for two months:
Whether it's a sports score, a book I want to get my hands on, or tuning into Fresh Air anytime of day, I can no longer search online and find immediate satisfaction. I wait for the morning paper, a trip to the library, or, when I can't be at my radio at 3 p.m., just do without. I thought this would drive me crazy, but it hasn't. Anticipation itself is enjoyable and perhaps even mitigates disappointing results. I don't seem to mind as much when the Mets don't win (often) or Dave Davies is subbing for Terry Gross and is interviewing an obscure jazz producer.
In the two months since I've been unplugged, I have been experiencing more and more moments of synchronicity—coincidental events that seem to be meaningfully related. ... I know this type of magical thinking is easily dismissed, but I keep having moments like this. So how do I explain it? Are meaningful connections easier to recognize when the fog of the Internet is lifted? Does it have to do with the difference between searching and waiting? Searching (which is what you do a lot of online) seems like an act of individual will. When things come to you while you're waiting it feels more like fate. Instant gratification feels unearned. That random song, perfectly attuned to your mood, seems more profound when heard on a car radio than if you had called up the same tune via YouTube.
Sturm is onto something deep here. The Net - and it's not just search - does seem to encourage the willful arrangement of experience, moment by moment. As he has rediscovered, sometimes it's best to let the world have its way with you.
Speaking in Seattle
June 21, 2010
I will be giving a talk this evening on The Shallows at Town Hall Seattle, at 7:30 pm. Please stop by if you're in the vicinity.
Also, a few more book reviews of note:
And, at Open Culture, an interview.
Kids, computers, books
June 19, 2010
The National Bureau of Economic Research has begun circulating a report on what seems to be the largest study yet of what happens when you give a kid a computer. The news is not good, as has been reported in the last few days by David Wessel at the Wall Street Journal and by the Freakonomics crew at the New York Times.
The study, conducted by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, examined extensive data on all public school students in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 (the data include students' end-of-year exam scores in math and reading as well as information on how the students spend their time at home). Those years, as the authors note, were a time when home computer use and broadband access were both expanding rapidly. The focus of the research was on students in Grade 5 through Grade 8. The authors write:
The larger sample size available with administrative data – over half a million student/year observations – addresses one common concern with existing studies of the impact of home computer use: low power associated with small sample sizes. The longitudinal nature of the data also permit us to address concerns that students with computer access are a non-random sample of the population by comparing the test scores of students before and after they report gaining access to a home computer, or before and after their local area receives high-speed internet service.
The analysis reveals that home computers have "modest but statistically significant negative impacts" on academic performance as measured by math and reading test scores. In addition: "The introduction of high-speed internet service is similarly associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades." Worse yet, "the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps." Attempts to close the "digital divide" by, for example, subsidizing PC purchases may actually end up widening the divide between rich and poor in academic performance.
The authors are careful to note that there may be gains in other skills related to internet access in the home:
While we find no evidence that this access improves math and reading scores, it is possible that computer and internet access improves important skills that are not directly measured by standardized tests in math or reading. These skills, ranging from the ability to use basic office software to advanced programming or hardware maintenance skills, may be of considerable value in the labor market. While subsidies for home computer or internet access could still be advocated on the grounds that they improve these vocational skills, our results suggest that an additional consequence would be lower math and reading test scores, and wider test score gaps.
Previous studies have shown that students with home computers on average do better academically than students without computers. But that, according to the Vigdor/Ladd study, appears to reflect correlation rather than causation. A home computer is an indicator of general socio-economic advantages, many of which can contribute to relatively strong academic performance. When you look specifically at changes in the performance of individual students over time, Vigdor and Ladd write, "there is no evidence that home computer access improves test scores." In fact:
Students who obtain access to a home computer sometime between 5th and 8th grade tend to score between 1% and 1.3% of a standard deviation lower on their subsequent math and reading tests. The positive cross-sectional association between home computer ownership and test scores thus reflects the digital divide: those who own computers are in general a positively selected group ... Students in ZIP codes that transition from no broadband service to limited service from three or fewer providers post a statistically significant decline in math test scores. The estimated decline is a relatively strong 2.6% of a standard deviation. The impact on reading test scores is more modest and statistically insignificant. Students in ZIP codes that move beyond the four ISP threshold also exhibit modest declines in test scores. The effects are statistically significant, equivalent to 1.4% of a standard deviation in math and 1.6% of a standard deviation in reading.
Comments Vigdor on his blog: "It turns out that access to computers and broadband is, on balance, not good for kids. This is not a super-surprise for those who have followed earlier careful studies on the subject." In the paper, he and Ladd conclude, "For school administrators interested in maximizing achievement test scores, or reducing racial and socioeconomic disparities in test scores, all evidence suggests that a program of broadening home computer access would be counterproductive."
As the Freakonomics writers point out, the study is consistent with an earlier study that examined the effects of giving Romanian students access to computers. That study found that "having a computer at home helps kids develop computer skills ... But it seems to lower their grades in math and reading."
Vigdor and Hamm note that the negative consequences of computer use could be tempered if students began to use computers more for homework and less for goofing off. Unfortunately, there's no evidence that that's happening. Indeed, as Vigdor points out, “We cut off the study in 2005, so we weren’t getting into the Facebook and Twitter generation.” The opportunities to goof off with computers have expanded rapidly in recent years (and that doesn't even take into account the explosion of texting on phones). There's nothing wrong with kids goofing off, of course; what seems to be happening, though, is that the growing amount of time dedicated to goofing off on computers and the net is crowding out time that might otherwise go to studying (or requiring more multitasking while studying).
It is interesting to compare the computer and internet research with new studies which indicate that having books in a home may strengthen children's academic achievement. One of the studies, published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, reveals a strong connection between the number of books in a student's home and the number of years of education the student completes - and the relationship seems to be more than just a matter of general socio-economic advantages. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported:
What's surprising ... is just how strong the correlation is between a child's academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. It's even more important than whether the parents went to college or hold white-collar jobs. Books matter. A lot.The study was conducted over 20 years, in 27 countries, and surveyed more than 70,000 people. Researchers found that children who grew up in a home with more than 500 books spent 3 years longer in school than children whose parents had only a few books. Also, a child whose parents have lots of books is nearly 20-percent more likely to finish college. For comparison purposes, the children of educated parents (defined as people with at least 15 years of schooling) were 16-percent more likely than the children of less-educated parents to get their college degrees. Formal education matters, but not as much as books.
The authors of the study conclude:
Thus it seems that scholarly culture, and the taste for books that it brings, flows from generation to generation largely of its own accord, little affected by education, occupational status, or other aspects of class ... Parents give their infants toy books to play with in the bath; read stories to little children at bed-time; give books as presents to older children; talk, explain, imagine, fantasize, and play with words unceasingly. Their children get a taste for all this, learn the words, master the skills, buy the books. And that pays off handsomely in schools.
The other study, to be published later this year, also indicates a strong connection between having books at home and performing well in school, particularly for low-income students. As Salon's Laura Miller reported, the study "found that simply giving low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation 'may be as effective as summer school' in preventing 'summer slide' - the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year."
We need to be concerned about the digital divide, to be sure. But perhaps we should also be thinking about the Gutenberg divide.
News now
June 15, 2010
The new issue of Nieman Reports, the journal of Harvard's Nieman Foundation of Journalism, offers a wide array of perspectives on the future of news in our age of instant information. I've just dipped into the contents, but it looks like there's a lot of interesting stuff here:
Ear full
June 14, 2010
Running in the New Republic today is my review of In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik's thoughtful examination of our complicated relationship with noise:
In 1906, Julia Barnett Rice, a wealthy New York physician and philanthropist, founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. Rice, who lived with her husband and six children in a Manhattan mansion overlooking the Hudson River, had become enraged at the way tugboats would blow their horns incessantly while steaming up and down the busy waterway. During a typical night, the tugs would emit two or three thousand toots, most of which seemed to serve merely as sonic greetings between friendly captains.
Armed with research documenting the health problems caused by the sleep-shattering blasts, Rice launched a relentless lobbying campaign that took her to police stations, health departments, the offices of shipping regulators, and ultimately the halls of Congress ...
Software that loves too much
June 13, 2010
We all like friendly, helpful software, but at what point does user-friendliness go too far? Some fascinating studies are beginning to appear that show how software applications can, by usurping personal agency, subvert learning and narrow our field of view. I have a short essay on the topic, focusing on that most solicitous of software companies, Google, in the new issue of the Atlantic:
I type the letter p into Google’s search box, and a list of 10 suggested keywords, starting with pandora and concluding with people magazine, appears just beneath my cursor. I type an r after the p, and the list refreshes itself. Now it begins with priceline and ends with pregnancy calculator. I add an o. The list updates again, going from prom dresses to proxy sites.
Google is reading my mind — or trying to.
Steven Pinker and the Internet
June 12, 2010
As someone who has enjoyed and learned a lot from Steven Pinker's books about language and cognition, I was disappointed to see the Harvard psychologist write, in Friday's New York Times, a cursory op-ed column about people's very real concerns over the Internet's influence on their minds and their intellectual lives. Pinker seems to dismiss out of hand the evidence indicating that our intensifying use of the Net and related digital media may be reducing the depth and rigor of our thoughts. He goes so far as to assert that such media “are the only things that will keep us smart.” And yet the evidence he offers to support his sweeping claim consists largely of opinions and anecdotes, along with one very good Woody Allen joke.
One thing that didn't surprise me was Pinker's attempt to downplay the importance of neuroplasticity. While he acknowledges that our brains adapt to shifts in the environment, including (one infers) our use of media and other tools, he implies that we need not concern ourselves with the effects of those adaptations. Because all sorts of things influence the brain, he oddly argues, we don't have to care about how any one thing influences the brain. Pinker, it’s important to point out, has an axe to grind here. The growing body of research on the adult brain's remarkable ability to adapt, even at the cellular level, to changing circumstances and new experiences poses a challenge to Pinker's faith in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. The more adaptable the brain is, the less we're merely playing out ancient patterns of behavior imposed on us by our genetic heritage.
In Adapting Minds, his epic critique of the popular brand of evolutionary psychology espoused by Pinker and others, David J. Buller argues that evolution “has not designed a brain that consists of numerous prefabricated adaptations,” as Pinker has suggested, but rather one that is able “to adapt to local environmental demands throughout the lifetime of an individual, and sometimes within a period of days, by forming specialized structures to deal with those demands.” To understand the development of human thought, and the influence of outside influences on that thought, we need to take into account both the fundamental genetic wiring of the brain - what Pinker calls its "basic information-processing capacities" - and the way our genetic makeup allows for ongoing changes in that wiring.
On the topic of neuroplasticity, Pinker claims to speak for all brain scientists. When confronted with suggestions that "experience can change the brain," he writes, "cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes." I'm wary when any scientist suggests that his view of a controversial matter is shared by all his colleagues. I also wonder if Pinker read the reports on the Net's cognitive effects published in the Times last week, in which several leading brain researchers offer views that conflict with his own. A few examples:
“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists ...
The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences” ...
{Stanford professor Clifford] Nass says the Stanford studies [of media multitasking] are important because they show multitasking’s lingering [cognitive] effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”
In a brief essay published last week on the Times website, Russell A. Poldrack, the director of the Imaging Research Center and professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote: "Our research has shown that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, changing the brain systems that are involved so that even if one can learn while multitasking, the nature of that learning is altered to be less flexible. This effect is of particular concern given the increasing use of devices by children during studying."
Other scholars of the mind also believe, or at least worry, that our use of digital media is having a deep, and not necessarily beneficial, influence on our ways of thinking. The distinguished neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who has been studying the adaptability of primate brains since the late 1960s, believes that human brains are being significantly "remodeled" by our use of the Net and other modern media. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts, fears that the shift from immersive page-based reading to distracted screen-based reading may impede the development of the specialized neural circuits that make deep, richly interpretive reading possible. We may turn into mere “decoders” of text.
Pinker may well disagree with all these views, but to pretend they don't exist is misleading.
Pinker also pokes at straw men. Instead of grappling with the arguments of others, he reduces them to caricatures in order to dismiss them. He writes, for example, that "the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience." Who exactly does Pinker believe is proposing such an idea - John Locke? I haven't seen anyone suggest that the brain is a shapeless blob of clay. What they are saying is that the brain, while obviously as much a product of evolution as any other part of the body, is not genetically locked into rigid modes of thought and behavior. Changes in our habits of thought echo through our neural pathways, for better and for worse.
In other cases, Pinker uses overstatement to gloss over subtleties. He writes at one point, "If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting." Human intelligence takes many forms. Electronic media may enhance some aspects of our intelligence (the ability to spot patterns in arrays of visual data, for example, or to discover pertinent facts or to collaborate at a distance) while at the same time eroding others (the ability to reflect on our experiences, say, or to express ourselves in subtle language or to read complex narratives critically). To claim that "intelligence" can be gauged by a single measure is to obfuscate rather than illuminate.
Pinker notes that "the decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously." Actually, as the political scientist James Flynn first documented, general IQ scores have been rising at a steady clip since the beginning of the 1900s, so we should be wary about linking this long-term trend to the recent popularity of any particular technology or medium. Moreover, as Flynn himself has been careful to point out, the improvements in IQ scores are largely attributable to increases in measures of visual acuity and abstract problem-solving, such as the mental rotation of geometric forms, the identification of similarities between disparate objects, and the arrangement of shapes into logical sequences. These skills are certainly very important, but measures of other components of intelligence, including verbal skill, vocabulary, basic arithmetic, memorization, critical reading, and general knowledge, have been stagnant or declining. In warning against drawing overly broad conclusions about our intelligence from the rise in IQ scores, Flynn wrote, in his book What Is Intelligence?, "How can people get more intelligent and have no larger vocabularies, no larger stores of general information, no greater ability to solve arithmetical problems?”
Drifting briefly from science to the humanities, Pinker implies that our cultural life is richer than ever, a consequence, apparently, of the bounties of digital media. As evidence, he points to the number of stories appearing on the website Arts & Letters Daily. Suffice it to say that other indicators of the depth and richness of cultural life point in different directions.
Pinker also makes several observations that, while accurate, undercut the main thrust of his argument. He writes, for example, that "the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else." Well, yes, and that's why some of us are deeply concerned about society's ever-increasing devotion to the Net and other screen-based media. (The average American now spends more than eight hours a day peering into screens, while devoting only about 20 minutes to reading books and other printed works.) It's hard not to conclude, or at least suspect, that we are narrowing the scope of our intellectual experiences. We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors - important skills, to be sure - but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.
And there's this: "Genuine multitasking, too, has been exposed as a myth, not just by laboratory studies but by the familiar sight of an S.U.V. undulating between lanes as the driver cuts deals on his cellphone." Precisely so. Which is one of the reasons that many experts on multitasking are concerned about its increasing prevalence. People may think, as they juggle emails, texts, tweets, updates, Google searches, glances at web pages, and various other media tasks, that they're adeptly doing a lot of stuff all at once, but what they're really doing is switching constantly between different tasks, and suffering the cognitive costs that accompany such switching. As Steven Yantis, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins, told the Times:
In addition to the switch cost, each time you switch away from a task and back again, you have to recall where you were in that task, what you were thinking about. If the tasks are complex, you may well forget some aspect of what you were thinking about before you switched away, which may require you to revisit some aspect of the task you had already solved (for example, you may have to re-read the last paragraph you’d been reading). Deep thinking about a complex topic can become nearly impossible.
The fact that people who fiddle with cell phones drive poorly shouldn't make us less concerned about the cognitive effects of media distractions; it should make us more concerned.
And then there's this: "It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people." Exactly. And that’s another cause for concern. Our most valuable mental habits - the habits of deep and focused thought - must be learned, and the way we learn them is by practicing them, regularly and attentively. And that's what our continuously connected, constantly distracted lives are stealing from us: the encouragement and the opportunity to practice reflection, introspection, and other contemplative modes of thought. Even formal research is increasingly taking the form of “power browsing,” according to a 2008 University College London study, rather than attentive and thorough study. Patricia Greenfield, a professor of developmental psychology at UCLA, warned in a Science article last year that our growing use of screen-based media appears to be weakening our "higher-order cognitive processes," including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination."
We should all celebrate, along with Pinker, the many benefits that the Net and related media have brought us. I have certainly enjoyed those benefits myself over the last two decades. And we should heed his advice to look for “strategies of self-control” to ameliorate the distracting and addictive qualities of those media. But we should not share Pinker's complacency when it comes to the Net's ill effects, and we should certainly not ignore the mounting evidence of those effects.
I have little doubt that Steven Pinker will one day write a cogent, thoughtful, and balanced critique of Internet skepticism. I look forward to reading it.
BONUS LINK: In case it wasn't clear, I confess to finding the more aggressive claims of evolutionary psychology to be reductive, unconvincing, and even offensive. For an incisive, and sometimes brutal, consideration of the limits of Pinker's point of view, particularly its cultural aspects, I recommend Louis Menand's 2002 New Yorker review of The Blank Slate. I'm something of a connoisseur of eviscerating sentences, and Menand unsheathes one of the great ones: "The insistence on deprecating the efficacy of socialization leads Pinker into absurdities that he handles with a blitheness that would be charming if his self-assurance were not so overdeveloped."
Just released:
"Eloquent" -Chicago Tribune
"A measured manifesto" -New York Times Book Review
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"Revelatory" -Booklist
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"Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company
"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews
"Riveting stuff" -New York Post
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