Survival Of The Smartest: Will Geeks Inherit The Earth?

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Media Coverage of Rapture For The Geeks:

• Sunday New York Times Op-Ed, “The Rise of the Machines,” by Richard Dooling.
• Jeremy Lott reviews Rapture For The Geeks at Ars Technica.
• The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.
• The New York Observer, Digital Doomsday, by Gillian Reagan.
• Thomas Edsall discusses Man Versus Machine and Richard Dooling’s “New York Times Op-Ed, The Rise of the Machines,” at The Huffington Post.
• Ferris Jabr puts Rapture For The Geeks on Pyschology Today’s bookshelf.
• Daniel Kennelly discusses Rapture For The Geeks, Richard Dawkins, and atheist-baiting at Doublethink Online.
• David Takami reviews Rapture For The Geeks in the Seattle Times.
• The Independent, Keen On New Media: The New Master of the Universe, by Andrew Keen.
• Bibliolicious.com.
• Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal interviews Richard Dooling on American Public Media’s Marketplace program.
• Listen to Richard Dooling discuss Rapture For The Geeks on Coast To Coast Radio with George Noory, Monday, September 29th, from 11pm-2am Pacific.
• Publisher’s Weekly review of Rapture For The Geeks.

Your User Profile

(Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling.)

User, noun. The word computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.” –Dave Barry

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as “users.” –Edward Tufte

It’s time to launch the web browser of your imagination and surf the undiscovered future of technology, but first a few questions to assist you in formulating your user profile.

Are you addicted to your computer? To the Internet? To e-mail? To your Treo, iPhone, or CrackBerry? To computer gaming? Or maybe to computer programming? Perhaps you’re not addicted (and you don’t overeat or drink too much or take drugs), maybe you just like to configure and personalize your favorite software, until it does just what you want it to do, just the way you want it done. Do you tweak the options and widgets and custom codes on your Blogspot or your WordPress weblog for hours on end, until your little corner of the Internet is “clean” and well-designed? Have you logged onto the MySpace at 2 A.M. asking, “Help! I can’t get my marquee scroll generator to work! How can I make my table backgrounds transparent, the border invisible, my photos appear to hover, and my hyperlinks underlined and 12-point Garamond?” Are you the type who customizes menus, macros, and toolbars for hours at a time, sometimes for more hours than you’ll ever spend actually doing the task you had in mind when you started the program?

Here’s the big question: Do you ever feel that you once used computers and computer programs as tools to get a specific job done, but lately you wonder if Dave Barry was onto something when he wrote: “I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.”
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Writing in his Everybody’s Business column for the New York Times, Ben Stein wonders whether “connectedness” is even worse than just overrated:

WHAT would we do if cellphones and P.D.A.’s disappeared? We would be forced to think again. We would have to confront reality. My own life is spent mostly with men and women of business. I have been at this for a long time now, and what I have seen of the loss of solitude and dignity is terrifying among those who travel and work, or even who stay still and work. They are slaves to connectedness. Their work has become their indentured servitude. Their children and families are bound to the same devices, too . . . [more]

More of Ben Stein’s Everybody’s Business columns.

‘The Dumbest Generation’ by Mark Bauerlein – Los Angeles Times
The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid? “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle . . . [more]