The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. W. W. Norton, 2010.

Brains are plastic, and make and erase connections based on need and use.

Reading has changed from puzzlingoutwordsandmeaningwithoutbenefitofspacingandpunctuation at the dawn of writing to consuming headlines on the Internet. This has changed the way our brains work to the point where we can no longer concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time.  Reading a longer work from beginning to end is now a difficult task, because our brains expect to be interrupted often. In other words, we are now consuming a long tail of disparate information pieces, but unable to explore it in enough depth to engage our brains in real thought about any of it.

Do you believe this? I better go online and check it out. BRB.

So as software gets smarter and returns results related to what we're looking for, two things happen: 1. We stop thinking, because the software does that for us (think: point-of-need help, tailored internet search engine results,) and
2. we never see the other results, so therefore they don't exist - or, at any rate, are lost to us. The software filters what we see, based on prior searches, and our field of view gets narrower and narrower.

Carr's work is rife with references to research, and there are more than 30 pages of citations at the end of the book. Whether you agree with him or not, the evidence is compelling for his description of a major change in the way people interact with technology and the Internet: "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." Scary.

Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations, by Clay Shirky. Penguin Press, 2008.

This book should be required reading for all adults. Kids already know this stuff.

Beginning with an elaborate re-telling of a saga involving a lost cell phone, Shirky illustrates how people connected by cell phone, twitter, and other social networking tools form ad hoc groups that can have an influence far beyond the power of even well-organized and estblished groups.

On-the-scene reporting of news events (like the recent plane crash in the Hudson river) puts a new face on journalism. Invitations to be part of a flash mob give people a way to organize meetings in touchy circumstances below the news and police radars.

I believe one of the strong messages we should bring from this book is that, in order to maintain dignity and power, organizations NEED to know about these on-the-fly ways of organizing and devise ways to use them, too, in pursuit of their own goals.