The Future: six drivers of global change

Chapter 32

7 "The round globe is a vast brain, instinct with intelligence"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851), p. 283.

8 "where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted"

H. G. Wells, World Brain (London: Ayer, 1938).

9 World Wide Web on Google for some of the estimated one trillion web pages

Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, "We Knew the Web Was Big...," Google Official Blog, July 25, 2008, network of human thoughts that he termed the "Global Mind"

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (1964), chap. 7, "The Planetisation of Man."

11 "We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us"

McLuhan, Understanding Media.

12 "a very complex organism that often follows its own urges"

Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010).

13 we are spending more and more time "alone together"

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Robert Kraut et al., "Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?," American Psychologist 53, no. 9 (September 1998): 101731; Stephen Marche, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?," Atlantic, May 2012.

14 "Internet Use Disorder" in its appendix for the first time

Tony Dokupil, "Is the Web Driving Us Mad?," Daily Beast, July 8, 2012.

15 estimated 500 million people

Jane McGonigal, "Video Games: An Hour a Day Is Key to Success in Life," Huffington Post, February 15, 2012, as much time playing online games as they spend in cla.s.srooms

Ibid.

17 the average online social games player

Mathew Ingram, "Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman," GigaOM, February 17, 2010, 55 percent of those playing social games

Ibid.

19 generate 60 percent of the comments and post 70 percent of the pictures on Facebook

Robert Lane Greene, "Facebook: Like?," Intelligent Life, May/June 2012, to the amount of time we are spending online

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).

21 control group not informed that the facts could be found online

John Bohannon, "Searching for the Google Effect on People"s Memory," Science, July 15, 2011.

22 began to lose some of their innate sense of direction

Alex Hutchinson, "Global Impositioning Systems," Walrus, November 2009.

23 studies indicate that it is a literal reallocation of mental energy

Carr, The Shallows.