Month: August 2010

The Shallows 6: Try to Remember

Something’s gained: Everything is on the web. It’s an external hard drive for the brain, relieving us of the responsibility to remember mindless lists of facts or extended passages of literature. We free up our brain power so we can do other, more important things.

Something’s lost: Because of the way the brain works, when we cease exercising our memory, we don’t merely lose isolated bits of information. We actually lose the ability to gain insight and understanding.
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The Shallows 5: Google’s Narrow Vision

Over a hundred years ago [Frederick Winslow Taylor](http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/fwt/taylor.html) took a stopwatch to a steel plant in Philadelphia and changed the industrial world. By timing every step and movement in the process he came up with the one, most efficient way each worker should work. Productivity exploded, and manufacturers across the country eagerly adopted his methods. Taylor saw humans as extensions of the machine.

In [*The Shallows*](http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393072223/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1282160698&sr=1-1), Nicholas Carr contends that “Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters—the Googleplex—is the internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism” (p. 150). But at Google humans are extensions of a very particular kind of machine—the computer.
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The Shallows 4: The Net Effect

The Net distracts. But not all distractions are bad. As I’ve written here before, taking a break from a problem and letting your brain do something totally different can provide an opportunity for fresh ideas to emerge. The problem is that the constantly distracting state of the Net, contends Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, changes the way we read and think. (You can find the first in my series on this book here.)
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The Shallows 3: Driven to Distraction

When the Net first hit big in the mid-1990s, I would tell others, “This is a good thing. People are doing a lot more reading now. Teens are not just playing video games on their computers. Anything that encourages reading is for the good.” Now, especially having read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (see here and here), I’m not so sure.
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The Shallows 2: A Brief History of Reading

In Phaedrus, Socrates muses on the merits of writing. Surprisingly to our minds, he is skeptical. Why? It is a recipe for forgetfulness. We won’t have to exercise our memories anymore. Knowledge of a subject, after all, is much more valuable than a written account of the same thing. The only virtue of writing was as a guard against the forgetfulness of old age.

So Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows, introduces us to the first Luddite in his book on how the Internet changes our brains. (See part one of my review [here](http://andyunedited.ivpress.com/2010/08/the_shallows_1.php#more).) In chapter four he offers a fascinating overview of the history of the written word and how each change created changes in us and in society.
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The Shallows 1: A Change of Mind

Nicholas Carr made a splash with his Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which I discussed here. Now in The Shallows he brings a full-length book to bear on the question, and it’s a dandy.

The subtitle, “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” is very descriptive. In this serial review, I’ll touch on some of the evidence he offers, a mix of anecdotal and scientific.
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I Get Mail

Recently, readers of Andy Unedited have let me know about a number of pieces of interest related to stuff I’ve posted. I’m happy to pass them along to you as well.

IVP Fan Mark Denning read “Will Digital Outstrip Print by 2015?” and suggested two articles to me. The first is a Smithsonian magazine piece, “Reading in a Whole New Way” by tech-guru Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine. There he mirrors some ideas found in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (which I’ll be reviewing here shortly) and goes beyond, suggesting how the very meaning of reading is changing.

The second, “Quick Change in Strategy for a Bookseller,” is from the New York Times. This piece looks at how e-books are making huge changes not just for publishers but in the retail book business as well.

In a different vein, Dietrich Gruen alerted me to “Reading May Save Your Life” by Bill Ellis, following up my blog “Who Do Books Make Us?” There’s still a human side to reading, not just technology and fads. Here’s a good reminder of that.

History with Attitude

Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the funnest, most informative rants I’ve read in quite a while. James Loewen is ticked at the stupidity of American history high school textbooks, and he has reason to be.

One 1990-era textbook offered this whopper: “President Truman easily settled the Korean War by dropping the atomic bomb” (p. 320), which has so many errors in it I hardly know where to begin.

But there’s more. Lots more. The textbooks are wrong when they say that . . .
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What’s My Motivation Here?

Many years ago I was talking to a freelance proofreader who was several weeks late getting a project back to me. She chronicled the various issues in her life that were keeping her from completing the job. She concluded by saying, “I really want to get this done. I feel extremely guilty I am so late.”

I replied, “Well, that just proves what a poor motivator guilt is.”

There was a very long, very silent pause at the other end.
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