Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. Problems with Internet from a subjective point of view I shalln’t say so much about it right now, but let the book speak itself from some selected quotes. It highlights important issues and Carr is a talented writer. Even though it is not rigorous science, I’d say that it is a good read.
Rather it is a kind of “popular science” intended for a larger audience. The book is not typically academical, it is not what I would classify as rigorous science. Nicholas Carr strikes me as someone from a literary community. This book is of natural interest on this blog as here it’s written several articles (and probably more is to come) on how the Internet is changing our society and ways to deal with it (for example here and here). It was a finalist for the Pulitzer-prize in 2011. The Shallows written by Nicholas Carr, is a book exploring the effects of what the Internet has upon our lives.
0 kommentar(er)
