I haven’t read the book yet, but I plan to, so I went to Nicholas Carr’s reading of “The Shallows” at the Harvard Book Store last night. The subtitle of the work is “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” a topic in which I have much invested; I have a brain and I use the Internet.
Mr. Carr’s assertions were certainly interesting. He started by pointing out how the innovation of information technology dates back well before the web, perhaps even before Gutenberg’s printing press to when the written word became just as valuable as the spoken. But a book, he argues, requires (allows for?) a single stream of consciousness, providing our long term memory the opportunity to absorb knowledge as the short term consumes it.
The Internet (and as an audience member rightly pointed out, Mr. Carr refers to much of today’s current technological advancements as “The Internet” – so much of what we do is connected, it’s excusable), on the other hand, allows for (requires?) so much going on at once: to the point that in just a few short years blogging has gone from long form prose to 140 characters. In turn, our long and short term memory struggles, our attention spans suffer, our ability to multitask deteriorates.
Irony: all of those books behind Mr. Carr made it extremely difficult to focus.
Questions from the rather large group of people who came to hear Mr. Carr speak were broad. There were those who wanted to know if this was an individual problem or could be solved by institutions (he figures both), those who wanted to know if the benefits of collaboration via connectivity outweighed the negatives (he’s not so sure that’s the case), and those who were curious how long it would take for the anti-Net counter culture to become prevalent (could take some time, probably won’t be significant enough to effect immediate change).
I, being the practical applications and commercial implications type, asked if the iPad – with its emphasis on reading books, browsing magazines, and watching movies – could be a glimmer of hope on the horizon: technology saving us from its own perils. Alas, no. And he’s right: devices such as the iPad and Kindle (and yes, I realize they are not the same device) have only inspired publishers to make their books more “connected,” distracting readers along the way.
Deep. Sigh.
So is this really legit? Are we destined to a life without the capacity for knowledge or memory to which our parents’ generation was privy? Do those of you who, like me, think you’re an excellent multitasker actually struggle to juggle all that’s going on?
As someone who just returned from two weeks [mostly] off the grid, I will say this: it’s refreshing. But by now you’ve gotten bored with this blog post (if you’ve made it this far). And I have about 20 new emails to read.
i actually believe i’ve become a better multi-tasker. i can cook breakfast, feed an infant, pat the dog, line up dinosaurs make coffee, listen to music and check my email on my phone all simultaneously. this i could not have done ten years ago.
another side to the discussion:
our exposure to knowledge is vastly superior to our parents generation. surely this counts for something, if nothing more than knowing what we like and what we don’t like. we’re no longer limited to certain kinds of exposure or influenced as much by one persons opinion or act. do you think orson wells’ reading of war of the worlds would have had ANY impact if he did it today? someone would hear it and tweet it, someone else would pick up on it, five minutes later it’s up on snopes.com and sanity prevails. i’ll take that over reading a book any day.
culture, just as everything else, should progress and change. remaining static does nothing for anyone. embrace your limited attention span… it’s evolution
I think Carr might argue that the attention you pay to lining up dinosaurs (as they make coffee?) and feeding that infant is actually not as focused as it would be if you didn’t have the opportunity to be checking your email on your phone the whole time.
I agree that culture needs to progress, but I also think there’s validity in his point that we’ve never had such a “distracting” technology before to give us as much access to that knowledge you reference. This leads to an uncertainty which Carr used as a hypothesis to explore the topic for his book. We’ve only had this thing in earnest for a couple decades, after all.
As for Orson Wells, a prank is a prank (which I’m sure the guys at zug.com would agree with). Wells used the medium available to him at the time. People are fooling us all the time using the Internet. Just ask that Nigerian prince who has all my money.