But that interaction is fundamentally different from reading a blog post or watching a YouTube video. For instance he talks about the immediacy and interactivity of the net at one point and gives examples of a teen texting a friend. Their pressure to achieve perfection will diminish as well as the artistic rigor that it imposed… One only need to glance at the history of correspondence…the cost will be a further severing of the intellectual attachment between the lone reader and the lone writer…” My biggest complaint is that Carr uses a very broad definition of the net and alternates between examples to fit his need. “An ebook is no more related to a book than an online newspaper is related to a print newspaper.” (By which, he means that they are not hardly related at all in the context of the quote.) “Electronic text is impermanent…it seems likely that that removing the sense of closure from book writing will in time will alter writer’s attitudes toward their work. Because in that study a novel is counted as reading a novel no matter what format you read it in. But even if it had come out I think he would have disputed it. The NEA study came out after the book, so I don’t blame him for not using it.
Right off the bat, this severely undercuts his argument. But the National Endowment for the Arts study shows the largest increase in reading in decades (in all types of reading except poetry). And he has some statistics from the Bureau of Labor to show this. At the center of this argument is that people are reading books less. My short review, Carr has lots of good points, which tend to be lost amidst his hyperbole and cherry picked stats. It has been out for about two years and many people, much smarter than I have had their take at it. It is not consistant, so it is frustrating. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration yet published of the internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the internet’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the internet is changing us. The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind.
0 kommentar(er)
