Summary

In Chapter 5, called “A Medium of the Most General Nature,” Carr reflects on the year 1954, in which people began to mass produce digital computers and the British mathematician Alan Turing, who created the blueprint for the modern computer, had killed himself. The Turing machine could do any information-processing task, but it would take a long time to do extremely complicated ones. Carr follows the development of the Web as it began to be able to process multimedia from sound to videos. He points out that a distinguishing factor of the Internet is that users can both send and receive messages through the medium. Even as computers have become faster, the time people spend on them increased because of all the functionalities the computers allow. He notes studies that have found that people often use the Internet while simultaneously engaging in other media, like...