One of the big Hollywood blockbusters to hit the silver screen this year has been Mad Max: Fury Road, which has gotten rave reviews, with many praising the insane and complex visual design of the film.

Films are made with two key variables: time and money. Filmmakers also employ editors. We’ll be kind and say this Turkish TV show ran out of money and couldn’t afford to pay editors to remove the final scene in this (unintentionally hilarious) video, which was broadcast widely.

The Phantom Zone overspilleth!

Quite the opposite, so long as we grasp the fresh routes to knowledge, and connection, that technological change brings, says Nick Harkaway.

These are old, old fears in a new form. In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down. To an extent, he was right. We do indeed take on and regurgitate information, sometimes without sufficient analysis, and we do use notes as an aide memoire - though even now, when our brains have begun to assume the ability to Google information, studies show we can still memorise facts perfectly well if we know we will need to. But Socrates was also wrong: literacy isn't a catastrophe for knowledge, but a huge boon. It allows us to gain an understanding of the work of lifetimes in short order, preparing the way for research into topics we might

The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he "became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read". He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. 

While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on the technological, social, behavioural, and neuroscientific impacts that the Internet is having on the practice of reading. A particular focus is given to the reading behaviour of emerging university students, especially within Canada and the United States. A brief overview is provided of the recent transformation of academic libraries into providers of online digital text in addition to printed books and other materials, before looking at research on college students’ preferences for print and digital text, and the cognitive neuroscience of reading on screen.

Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the US (and will be published in Britain by Atlantic in September). It is an expanded version of an essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” printed in the Atlantic magazine in 2008, which struck a chord with several groups. Those worrying about Google’s growing hold on our culture felt Carr was justified in going after it (though there was little about the search giant in the article). Those concerned with the accelerating rhythm of modern life, the dispersion of attention, and information overload—all arguably made worse by the internet—found a new ally. Those concerned with the trivialisation of intellectual life by blogs, tweets, and YouTube videos of cats also warmed to Carr’s message. Online magazine Slate has already compared The Shallows to Silent Spring, the 1962 book by Rachel Carson that helped launch

The internet: Everything you ever need to know

In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us.

The internet is the tracks, the web is the traffic… The net and the web are not the same: the internet resembles the tracks and infrastructure of a railway, while the web is just one part of the traffic that runs on it.

A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we

Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed the course of culture.

For the first couple of thousand years after people began writing, they didn't bother separating one word from the next. Long lines of letters ran together across the length of the scroll or the page. Reading in those days was a trial. Your brain cranked away as you tried to decipher where one word ended and the next began. No one read silently. To decipher a word, you had to say it out loud.

When an anonymous scribe started putting spaces between words, around the year 800, everything changed. Reading became much easier, and you could do it silently. No longer taxed, your brain could devote itself to the interpretation of text. Deep, solitary reading was born, and with it, media historians like Walter Ong have argued, came a richer consciousness.

The revolution culminated with t

A Polyptychal Discursion: This text, designed with its own concerns in mind, diverges on many trajectories, crossing over itself, intersecting its arguments and statements with images and forms which question the traditional logic of the essay. This text will become enabled not through a writer's statements, but through a reader's response. A spiral of concepts ruptures the words, burrowing underneath the palimpsest, pulling you, the reader, into the written phrase.

Response is required of any reading. The internet is a form capable of allowing a reader's response to influence the writer's trajectory; to send the written back into itself, melding its writer and its reader as one critical engagement.

This text requires your writing.