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The big news this week is the launch of a National Science Foundation-funded study aimed at “developing the NeuroPhone system, the first Brain-Mobile phone Interface (BMI) that enables neural signals from consumer-level wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headsets worn by people as they go about their everyday lives to be interfaced to mobile phones and combined with existing sensor streams on the phone (e.g., accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS) to enable new forms of interaction, communications and human behavior modeling.” More precisely, the research, being conducted at Dartmouth College, is intended to accomplish several goals, including developing “new energy-efficient techniques and algorithms for low-cost…

Wired magazine cover story, August 2005: “We Are the Web” Wired magazine cover story, September 2010: “The Web Is Dead” Unavoidable conclusion: “We Are Dead”…

A couple of weeks ago, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child initiative, foretold the death of the printed book. Today, he foretells the death of book-reading: I love the iPad, but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check e-mail, look up words or click through.…

Five neuroscientists get into a raft. That might be the start of a mildly funny joke, but in this case it’s the premise of an article by Matt Richtel in today’s New York Times, the latest installment in the paper’s series on “computers and the brain.” Richtel accompanies the scientists as they float down a remote stretch of the San Juan River in Utah, beyond the reach of cell towers and wi-fi signals. The impetus for the trip was, Richtel reports, “to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how…

In an interview published today in the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt lays out the next stage in his company’s ambitious plan to replace human agency with automated data processing, freeing us all from the nuisance of thinking: “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.” “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their…

The Wall Street Journal has been running an important series about the collection and exploitation of personal information on the Net. As part of that series, it is featuring a debate today between me and the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper about online privacy – more particularly, the tradeoff between privacy and personalization. My essay begins like this: In a 1963 Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren observed that the fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual. The advances have only accelerated since then, along with the dangers. Today,…

“You can say this for the technological revolution; it’s cut way down on television.” So writes Rebecca Christian in a column for the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque. She’s not alone in assuming that the increasing amount of time we devote to the web is reducing the time we spend watching TV. It’s a common assumption. And, like many common assumptions, it’s wrong. Despite the rise of digital media – or perhaps because of it – Americans are watching more TV than ever. The Nielsen Company has been tracking media use for decades, and it reported last year that in the…

“Not too long ago I was on it all day long,” writes Juan Rodriguez in an essay in the Montreal Gazette, “it” being the Internet. “I felt buzzed and strangely empty.” But when Rodriguez, a freelance writer, moved into a new apartment last year, he didn’t bring the Net with him: Unhooking myself from the Net started as an experiment, after depending on it for work and recreation for nearly 20 years. If humans are basically creatures of habit, I wanted to know whether I could survive without being addicted to the World Wide Web. According to some friends and…

The New Republic is today running my review of Tom Bissell’s latest book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It begins: Tom Bissell is a Renaissance Man for our out-of-joint time. In addition to being a versatile and exuberant writer, a restless if ennui-ridden globetrotter, and a dedicated chewer of tobacco and smoker of pot, he is a prodigiously gifted slayer of zombies and other digitized demons … Read on….

I had the pleasure last month of talking about The Shallows with Christopher Lydon, a superb interviewer, in his offices near Charles Street in Boston. Lydon has a very different view of the Web than I do, which, combined with his sympathetic reading of the book, made for, I think, a particularly good conversation. You can listen to it, via Lydon’s Brown University-based Radio Open Source program, here….