Do you ever wonder whether our computer technology and the Internet are making us better as people? Or do they make us worse off? Are we becoming smarter or more dumb? What happens to our brains when we use the Internet? Carr explores these questions and more in this Pulitzer-Prize-finalist book.
Carr borrows heavily from Marshall McLuhan, the scholar whose foresight in the 1960s defined the philosophy of electronic media. He also borrows from modern neuroscience.
However, he views technology rather one-dimensionally. He routinely and lazily uses subjective words like “exhausting” to describe the experience of using a computer. (I find computers very enlivening.) He describes using a computer as an act of “juggling” instead of “linear thought” as we have in books. Again, maybe I’m too much of a computer programmer, but I experience my best linear thinking in front of screens.
The main weakness in his argument is that good software enshrines play and is not “exhausting.” Technology is not merely a way to off-load humanity’s tasks; it is a way to have fun and to use it to create. Working with computers gives me energy and insight into human elements; it does not “outmode” them as Carr alleges. Technology (done right) can equip us to play much as books do. That’s why I use a Mac and the UNIX operating system. That’s how in programming, I create worlds for people to solve complex problems.
Even with technology, we are in charge. I didn’t use a calculator until the eleventh grade trigonometry because I wanted to learn to do math in my head better. When we spend an entire book blaming technology instead of owning up to our responsibilities, we waste our time. As programmers often say, computers only do what you tell them to do.
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr
Copyright (c) 2011
ISBN13 9780393339758
Audiobook
Genre: Non-Fiction, journalism
www.amazon.com