{"id":1333,"date":"2010-01-30T22:58:52","date_gmt":"2010-01-31T05:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1333"},"modified":"2010-01-30T22:58:52","modified_gmt":"2010-01-31T05:58:52","slug":"eric_schmidts_s_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1333","title":{"rendered":"Eric Schmidt&#8217;s second thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I&#8217;ve been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google&#8217;s CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net&#8217;s effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which came yesterday:<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"ericatlantic.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.roughtype.com\/images\/ericatlantic.jpg?resize=181%2C185&#038;ssl=1\" width=\"181\" height=\"185\" align=\"left\" vspace=\"2\" hspace=\"8\"\/><a href=\"http:\/\/adage.com\/brightcove\/single.php?bcpid=1370868150&#038;bctid=1699238280\">July 30, 2008<\/a>: &#8220;I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? <i>The Atlantic<\/i>: \u2018Is Google Making Us Stupid?\u2019 I mean, we\u2019ve got a problem if this is true, right? In the article, the author &#8230; points out that deep reading is equal to deep thinking, and since we\u2019re not reading deep anymore, we\u2019re obviously not deep thinking. And what I was realizing in reading this \u2013 and I encourage you all to read it \u2013 is that this is exactly what people said when color television arrived in my home in Virginia 40 years ago. This is also what people said 25 years ago when the MTV phenomenon occurred, about short attention spans and so forth. And I observe that we\u2019re smarter than ever. So the important point here is that [despite] all of these sort of histrionics about the role of information and other changes, society is enormously powerful, enormously capable of adapting to the threats.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.charlierose.com\/view\/interview\/10131\">March 6, 2009<\/a>: \u201cI worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information \u2014 and especially of stressful information \u2014 is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.\u2028 And I worry that we\u2019re losing that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/hostednews\/afp\/article\/ALeqM5gFttfceJLXoy8XEGtUAegZTta_Zg\">January 29, 2010<\/a>: \u201cThe one thing that I do worry about is the question of &#8216;deep reading.&#8217; As the world looks to these instantaneous devices &#8230; you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines and so forth. That probably has an effect on cognition, probably has an effect on reading.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m glad Schmidt has continued to ponder this issue, and I salute him for having the courage to air his concerns publicly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I&#8217;ve been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google&#8217;s CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net&#8217;s effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}