The Information: How the Internet gets inside us by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker is one of the best and most sensible things I've read about that crazy force/source called the Internet. He reviews all the major writers on the subject and boils them all down into an amazingly clear essay. You may have read one or two of these and made a handful of observations about our relationship with the digital world, but Adam Gopnik, one of our best essayists, writers and thinkers, sums it all up so well that you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't read his thoughts on the subject before engaging in any further ruminations of your own.
Below are all the authors and books he mentions in the article. It's practically a syllabus for an amazing and contentious media studies class, no? Best of all, the article is bookended by an image of Hermione Granger in the stacks of the library at Hogwarts. Enjoy and let me know your thoughts.
Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? edited by John Brockman
The Book In the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree
Supersizing the Mind by Andrew Clark
The Sixth Language by Robert K. Logan
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powers
Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
Too Much to Know by Ann Blair
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander
Within the Context of No Context by George Trow
The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben
