The idea of our brains being rewired to acclimate to the internet probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who can’t go a few minutes without checking their e-mail or Twitter or Facebook or forum of choice. We (I say “we” since I’m one of these people) want everything as quickly as possible and without that constant flow of information we feel disconnected from the world. Even while reading this book, I probably checked my iPod Touch at an average rate of two times a chapter. (Yes, I carry around my iPod Touch because I’m too poor to want to pay $90/mo for an iPhone and I live in the city now and there’s always a hotspot nearby even if I’m not on campus.)

I had already read about a study cited in this book that revealed students did better on a reading comprehension quiz of a short essay when they were given a plain text version (or a paper version, I forget) as opposed to a version filled with hyperlinks. Clicking on a hyperlink has the effect of breaking your concentration and not allowing your brain to absorb the information in its entirety, even if it seems like you’re learning more by reading the content of the hyperlinks. The reason posited for this phenomenon is the limit of the brain for working memory. Possible long-term memory is practically infinite, but such retention is only attained after memories are allowed to be stored in the hippocampus for the required amount of time, which can apparently range from an a few minutes to years.

I was probably most intrigued when Carr went through history and talked about the effects of other technological advances on the workings of the mind. He writes about the invention of the book, the printing press, the clock, the phonograph, etc., citing reactions from prominent scientists and thinkers, and detailing where they were right and where they were wrong. It’s almost strange to think that a transition from handwriting to typewriters could have an effect on the content, tone, and structure of someone’s writing, but there are a few anecdotes mentioned that seem to suggest otherwise; one being that the flow of cursive lends itself to more meandering sentences compared to the staccato of a typewriter.

A theme running through all this discussion of technology and its effects on humanity as a whole and on an individual level is that there’s never any turning back (unless we bomb ourselves to hell, I guess). The internet is only becoming increasingly prominent in our lives and the trend in all likelihood will not reverse. When new forms of media were created, others were never done away with entirely. Newspapers didn’t kill books. Television didn’t kill the radio. The internet hasn’t killed anything yet, but it is the first technology that has been able to absorb and provide practically every form of communication the human race has created. And it has greatly affected every other form of media. Many magazines are now laid out more like webpages and there are television shows like Tosh.0 that live off YouTube clips.

But maybe it’s bullshit to worry about the internet-ization of our brains. It’s not like reading is an activity the human brain is particularly evolved for; a person needs to develop a love of reading, which in turn leads the brain to crave more of a similar stimulus. I feel as if I’ve had to work to get back into reading at length, or even watching full movies at home, but I like to think I’m almost there. And it does feel more satisfying to finish a book or watch a great film than it does to jump around reading blogs or watching 20 minute television show episodes. But is it efficient? When Carr posed this question to some very intelligent people, a number of them said they don’t even read books anymore because it’s just not worth the time and effort when the internet is so easily searchable — just Wikipedia it! Well, you probably indirectly Wikipedia it by googling it first.

I mean Google because there’s an entire chapter of this book dedicated to the search giant. The search giant that has attempted to get its fingers into every inch of the internet and subsequently our lives. They want to know everything and they want everything to be searchable. The ideas of Sergey Brin mentioned in The Shallows point to the idea of a massive internet cloud singularity in the future of humanity. Perhaps this is inevitable, considering the march of technological progress and the willingness of people to upload as much as possible. Just thinking about such a possibility reminds me of “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov, one of the favorite short stories. Try to read it without being distracted by the rest of the internet.

As written about by Carr, a move toward such a future would be scarier than the idea of our brains just being overloaded with too much data and not developing enough deep knowledge, as it would basically end all individuality. Although the two are linked — if you’re not forming individual thoughts through personal reading and writing, then it’s all external, which basically means the internet going forward. Already, people on the internet group together around similar interests, e.g., politics or sabermetrics, developing thoughts and worldviews alongside each other virtually. Sure, have a predilection for such behavior, but the internet only exacerbates the narrowing of experience. Imagine such an echo chamber effect across the entire human race. Or maybe just watch episode 2 of the British television series Black Mirror.

- The slow animated GIF problem will always be there. And in addition to that, I had heard some Mac users complain about how GIFs need to load completely before they animated at all, but I hadn’t come across it until a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, it only lasted for a day or two. I have no idea what happened.

- When I was recently looking for info on golf handicaps, I was directed to About.com and when I got there, the correct formatting flashed for about 0.3 seconds before reverting back to a 1995-style webpage with no formatting whatsoever. I try reloading numerous times and the same thing happened everytime. And it happened with a bunch of About.com pages. But hey, it seems to be working now!

- Highlighting text can be extremely wonky sometimes. I have no way to expand on this — it’s just very annoying.

- Almost every time I click on the “Publish” button after finishing up a blog post, it ends up loading forever and I need to highlight my entire post and copy it and then refresh the page and paste it back in the editing box and hit “Publish” again. I even tried hitting “Save Draft” before attempting to publish, and while it worked the first time around, that was not indicative of future attempts.

- As someone commented in my last Chrome-related post, the search bar (apparently called the OmniBox?) is not nearly as quick as the Firefox AwesomeBar. It is also much less reliable.

- In preparation for my Song of the Week post yesterday, I attempted to listen to the direct link of “Sorrow” only to greeted with a second of painful corruption noise before the song actually started. I thought the song got corrupted during its upload to my webspace, but when I tested it in Firefox, it was totally fine. And when I tested it within its Flash player in the actual blog post, it was also fine. Bizarre.

These complaints aren’t enough to push me back to Firefox because it’s much easier to stick with the status quo, and that is now Chrome for me, minor frustrating issues aside. It just sheds some light on why Chrome hasn’t eaten much into Firefox’s marketshare; IE has been the browser hurt most by Chrome since the latter’s release.

via AutoComplete Me

This Tweet in Baseball: Your Weekly Update on the Sport’s Twits – Walkoff Walk puts together a collection of amusing and inane tweets from people in the sporting world.

Does it matter that the Yankees keep buying pennants? – A long post ruminating on the Yankees’ massive payroll and what it means for baseball. The comments make the discussion pretty interesting.

Viva El WAR (Part 1: Hitters) – A fantastic rundown of the hottest baseball stat in the land from the #1 Cardinals blog on the internet. No doubt Cardinals fans love WAR due to it being just another way to quantify Albert Pujols’ greatness.

Super Bowl XLIV Ads – Not even sure why I’m linking this, since every American already saw how much they sucked. I expect spoofs of Google’s ad shortly. May I suggest one that ends with a search for “divorce lawyers in paris”?

Best (And Worst) Cities to Find Love – Hey, Valentine’s Day is in a week! This list sucks though. The three biggest cities in the US — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles — get Ds for ‘Social Life’ due to their formula depending on a ratio, not total number. I can maybe understand the singles ratio part, but restaurants and bars? Come the fuck on.

Sarah Palin’s Keynote Speech: Now With Tea Party Illustrations! – I really wish this post looked how it did in my Google Reader with no need to click on each individual picture. Nonetheless, I think the stupidity is still worth a look. And no, I do not subscribe to Jezebel, someone shared it with me, I swear!

The Secret History of the Birthers – How the movement associated with insane right-wingers actually started on the left. This is why I hate politics.

It’s pretty amazing that I haven’t mentioned AVATAR on here yet. I could have sworn I posted thoughts at some point, whether on the hype, the leaked trailers, or James Cameron being a bit too ambitious. Needless to say, I’m not exactly hyped. I’m not sure I ever was, but I trusted in James Cameron enough to not join the hater camp. Once I saw the trailers, though, I couldn’t help but bash the living hell out of the embarrassing footage. Perhaps I can’t get by the models of the blue aliens. Only James Cameron would get a $300 million budget to make this movie.

I’ll let you judge for yourself, but keep in mind this is definitely better than the teaser trailer and the first official trailer. I’m also curious to see just how well-done the 3-D effects are, something you obviously can’t tell from watching an internet trailer without those annoying glasses.

There’s not even many impressions for me to relate, as most of my activity in Wave has been similar to a forum in real-time. It’s kinda cool to see someone else replying to you before you’re even done typing, but it’s not really much different than a forum — and right now it’s infinitely wonkier. The little things — like being able to drag-and-drop pictures and watching an embedded YouTube video while replying — are cool, but in terms of functionality, I’m not sure if it saves much time or is worth the effort. People for the most part will stick to plain emails, or IM, or Facebook, or Twitter.

Where Wave will be useful is in collaboration in school and work. I wish it was around when I was in college. Students could post their lecture notes and classmates could edit them or add their own comments. Peer editing on papers could be done in real-time over the internet; you’d watch the person fixing or commenting on certain parts of your essay, and be able to converse and ask why they think your paper sucks. Group projects would no doubt benefit even more, in ways I can’t even think of, due to not actually participating in many of them.

I really thought I could write long blog posts consistently, but I usually run out of gas after three paragraphs. How do I get more writing stamina? What’s the equivalent of masturbation in writing? Joe Posnanski’s blog?

Getting back to our eventual overlords at Google, their new browser doesn’t exactly set the world on fire. But it is pretty fast. But I can’t really notice it much on my sub-par Verizon DSL connection. So should I even use it instead of Firefox Beta 3? What are the advantages? I do like the homepage with a bunch of windows of your most visited sites, but I wish you could add more. On my 1920×1200 screen, the 9 windows take up maybe 1/4 of the screen. I could have 36 windows to choose from! I’m not even sure if I visit 36 websites, but Google help with marketing, similar to using an email list for this, which you can do with resources online, and Verify 550 has this great resource showing how to do it as well.

I have no doubt this is only one of the many options Google has planned for this browser. If they really want to cut into Microsoft’s — and Mozilla’s — market share, they’re going to have to add some killer features. Features that anyone can utilize easily. For now, they’ve gone the simple route, making sure the browser actually works, and works quickly. Should’ve seen that coming from the company whose search engine distanced itself from the competition with its simplicity.

People who have a ton of Firefox extensions probably already know by now that Chrome is not for them — at least not yet. There’s no Adblock, no Greasemonkey, no Ubiquity. Me, I don’t even notice that Adblock is gone, and I have yet the chance to get accustomed to Ubiquity. And those were the only two I used at all. Maybe if I had some porn-fetching extension, I’d be more concerned.

So as it is, I think I’ll try out Chrome for the week. I guess I’ll just invest in the future of the browser. The interface is slick enough — what with its minimalist style — and I could get used to the incognito mode. That way I can watch One Tree Hill on Hulu without anyone knowing. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what Google was thinking of when they added such a feature. Yep.

And right as I reach the end of this post, I realize you can add a desktop shortcut, start menu shortcut, or quick-launch icon for any web application (like Facebook or WordPress) — not just Google applications. That’s pretty cool. Maybe I know how I feel about Google Chrome now.

And I bet it’s pretty much the complete opposite of how Microsoft feels.

Find out for yourself if you haven’t already. Download Google Chrome here.

P.S. I know a few posts down I said that Ubiquity was the future of the internet. Man, I am such an IDIOT.