HOW TO UNDERMINE A FRIENDSHIP

'The way to make friends quarrel is to pit them in disputation under the public eye...'
Thomas Jefferson in Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson, p.173.

FORGIVENESS IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET

'...is our age able to forgive? Since everybody errs in the course of their life there must be - in any healthy person or society - some capacity to be forgiven. Part of forgiveness is the ability to forget. And yet the internet will never forget. Everything can always be summoned up afresh by new people.' 

Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p.176. 

THE POWER OF THE INTERNET

'One thing is clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the internet.' 

Nicholas Carr in Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option, p.225. 

THE ROMANTICISM OF THE INTERNET

'A romantic, says Nietzsche, is someone who always wants to be elsewhere. If that's so, then the children of the Internet are romantics, for they perpetually wish to be someplace else and the laptop reliably takes them there. The e-mailer, the instant messanger, the Web browser are all dispersing their energies and interests outward, away from the present, the here and now. The Internet user is constantly connecting with people and institutions far away, creating surrogate communities that displace the potential community at hand.'

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? p.36.

A DESIRING MACHINE

'Internet-linked computers are desiring-machines - machines for the stimulation of desire. But so is a TV; so in a certain sense is a movie screen. What makes the Internet singular is its power to expand desire, expand possibility beyond the confines of prior media.'

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, p.31. 

THE INTERNET

'...can have an insidious, corrosive effect. Too much internet usage fragments the brain and disipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted. Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready-meals and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition...

Rationing it strictly gave me back more than time. Within a few days, my attention span increased again, my butterfly-brain settled down and I was able to spend longer periods concentrating on single topics, difficult long books, subjects requiring my full focus. It was like diving into a deep, cool ocean after flitting about in the shallows. Slow reading as against Gobbling-up.'
Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing: A year reading from home, p.3.