Summary

In Prologue, called “The Watchdog and the Thief,” the author Nicholas Carr recounts the year 1964, in which Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, an iconic book about media and the human mind. In this book, McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” meaning that the medium of media content can impact that way people perceive it (2). Carr relates this concept to the Internet. McLuhan rejects the notion of David Sarnoff, a media mogul from NBC, who blamed any negative consequences of media on consumers. Carr claims that while the computer is a convenient medium, it also can make users subservient to the technology.

In Chapter 1, called “Hal and Me,” Carr quotes HAL, a supercomputer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as an example of the feeling of technology overtaking people’s lives and minds. Carr observes...