The world wide web really did transform the world in a way that can be compared to the impact of the printing press, or the mass media of the 20th century. Google’s original advantage was that it understood and worked with the central innovation of the web, which was the link. There had been multimedia forms of computing before the web, and for some years they provided a much better experience, too. The linking at the heart of the web has fundamentally changed the way that we understand the construction of knowledge. By shortening the loop between urge and action, the web has had a particularly infantilising effect on its users.

Source: The Guardian March 11, 2019 21:01 UTC